Intent Confusion

What to post about tonight? I could do another "In My Campaign" type post. I have another one brewing about Kusseth. Hell, I have another thirty or forty about Kusseth. Its the country with the most work done on it, everything else is sort of half-finished. I have the core ideas and main cities and whatnot, the form of government, etc. The main points are done, but everything else is left vague. So much is done on Kusseth because my Traith character is a warden of that city (37th District) and because I anticipate it to be the place the PCs set up. Josh wants to become a pirate, but you quite literally have to cross the entire continent (which is about the size of the United States) to get to the pirate nation of Haven. Or you could sail, but to be honest that wouldn't work. You wander into the ocean near Haven without flying the proper flags, you get sunk real quick. If Josh gets his way and the group does go to Haven the only way I can envision them getting in is as slaves and maybe doing a whole pit fighter fight for your freedom type thing.

Plus, their only options are to walk through a few hundred miles of stumpie (Kusseth slang for dwarves) infested mountains or to cross a desert. Although, if they do cross the mountains I have the intention of somehow getting them near a ventilation shaft for the dwarven kingdoms and possibly some heavy explosives and letting them decide whether to suffocate a city or not. It wouldn't be the first city of dwarves they committed genocide upon. If they make it through the mountains they run smack dab into Volungsheim on the eastern edge of Whurent (the dwarven kingdom). Volung was a berserk from my Norse serialized story. He had magic axes and was crazy. After the events of my Norse story he wandered over to Alfheim (which will eventually be retconned into being less Norse Myth and more Clint Myth) and grabbed up the rest of the Ljosalves and Maggot (another character from the same story, but he's a Dvergar which is a dwarf) and they wandered south in boats for many days and nights and found my little continent and started killing whatever they could lay hands on. Anyway, they're black-eyed elves and they are angry and love a good fight. So in closing, getting to Haven will be no easy task. Josh, if you are reading this: Haha!

Hmm. Actually it could be really fucking easy, I'm just an idiot and didn't think of it till now. So here is a hint Josh. The race of elves living in Volungsheim are called the Children of Volung and they are allied with the dwarves. But there is only one elf of that race who is actually a trueblooded son of Volung. His mom "knew" Volung in the Biblical sense. He also calls Cenn the Reaver uncle, but that is not a blood relation because Cenn is not an elf. Well, ok, he's closer to being an elf than anything else, but he's not. Anyway, find him (the actual child of Volung), befriend him, don't piss him off, and he is your ticket to a trip through Whurent and Volungsheim that does not include the normal amount of bodily fluid spillage associated with such a trek through hostile territory.

I just really wish people would tell me what they want out of the campaign. Its pretty open ended, I've basically created a large scale sandbox with plenty to do in it and I'd like them to make a conscious decision on what they want to do. In sixth grade a piece of paper with bare bones monster stats and no room numbers or map was enough, but not anymore. Its boring. I like there to be descriptions that help me see them creeping through musty hallways tentatively raising swords as they open doorways and whatnot. I'm really optimistic about this campaign and people's interest in it. Apparently Josh and Jeff have discussed it on multiple occasions, which is kind of neat. Seriously. To know my campaign world is a topic of discussion at a non-gaming gathering that I am not present at is kind of awesome. As I said, I'd like it if people would tell me what they want to do. They haven't seen the map yet so they don't know much about the shape of the world, but even saying stuff like "I want to kill monsters." would give me an idea. I can keep making scenarios in the world but really without their input it is basically me railroading them and going "hehe, look what I put here" and as much as I like to hear myself talk, that gets old pretty quick.

I dunno. I guess I don't want to be in the midst of a scenario and have them go off on a tangent and have to either A) say fuck no to their choices or B) sacrifice the rest of the scenario to the random chance that they would do something I haven't planned for. Part of it is also that I cannot think well on my feet for creative things like this, and I want everyone to have a good experience when we game. I am a creative guy, but it takes work. I don't just sit down and let the creativity spew forth. For every thousand words I type or write I do a fair bit of hmmm-ing and key poking and cursor staring.

Ah yes, cursor staring, my old friend, how I loathe you. Go fuck yourself.

I am now officially talking to blinking cursors in Word documents. Goodnight.

In My Campaign: New Empire Edition, Part 1

The fearful denizens of the New Empire are known for two things above all others: bigotry and fear. These two tenets of their society are most idealized among the sadistic members of that cruel society called the witch hunters. For centuries these misguided fanatics have pursued an agenda of hatred and murder not only among enemies of the state but against the very citizens their order supposedly exists to protect. The witch hunters are almost as feared by the populace of the New Empire as the fiendish wielders of arcane power they supposedly hunter. When the men of the not yet Fallen Empire were cursed with undeath and were re-discovered by a new exploratory force from the Old Empire relations between the two nations were strained but there was peace and cooperation. That is until those men and women who would eventually form the infant witch hunter organization launched a series of bloody pogroms against the unsuspecting people of the Fallen Empire. Once spurned, the nation embraced their separation from the Old Empire and launched their own raids against the New Empire and the unending hatred and legacy of violence between the two nations was assured.

The witch hunters believe that the ideals of the Old Empire, those of a reliance on the mind and body and not external forces such as magic, are the only way for humanity to prosper. For the human race to prosper the unnatural forces of magic should be eradicated from the world, and this includes races such as the Fallen, Fell-Humans, and the elves who possess innate powers and abilities that in some way rely upon arcane forces built into their very souls. Though whether undead and demonically altered humans truly possess souls is a matter of debate among the more scholarly spects of the witch hunter organization.

The witch hunters are so powerful that the masters of that shadowed organization have been known to go directly against the will of King Rudolph II. In fact, the organization has been known to dispense propaganda denigrating the king and his practice of enslaving those who can channel arcane forces and binding them to his will. This practice allows him to control them and feed the power of his mind, which has been enhanced by his Elduman bloodline, through them while they do his bidding in the far corners of his empire.

Current gossip in the New Empire is that the witch hunters are on a collision course with King Rudolph II and that someday one will be forced to drag the other down. Should this occur and Rudolph be ousted from his throne the power of the witch hunters would be unstoppable within the New Empire. They would quickly seize power and lock down the nation, their control likely spreading into the Plains of Dust. With an entire nation under their stewardship and another as a staunch ally the witch hunters would have little trouble pitting the full weight of the armed forces under their control against the Fallen Empire of Man and re-opening the fresly scabbed over wound that is the Fallen Empire/New Empire border. Which nation would best the other in such a conflict is a topic of much speculation and such a war would further tear apart the eastern edge of the Known World.

A Good Day

Such a thing does not necessarily necessitate the crushing of foes, hearing the lamentation of their women, or the driving of them before oneself.

Eric and I were talking today and he was kind of venting about a player we have who he is having an issue with in his campaign. Eric's intent is that all priestly types (Clerics and Paladins specifically, but likely Invokers and Avengers as well) be Good Guys and act as Beacons of Hope and Kindness. Not blundering buffoons bent on setting off traps and breaking items that could be pocketed. (Just a note, my dude is made of metal and has even more metal welded to his body for the purposes of armor, and he did less blundering than John's Cleric named John. Not really a criticism, I just like to say my dude is metal...he is also robust due to how much metal he is made of.) Anyway, he was basically just going to tell us that Cleric and Pallies = Good and John better shape up. My suggestion was that since his world had achieved a Golden Age of Peace and Prosperity before it was struck by meteors, he should say that part of the reason for the aforementioned Age was that the good gods had defeated the evil ones and the primordials, thus there are no evil or wishy washy aligned deities to pray to, so by definition there are only Good Guy Clerics. Now John has to comply, and there is solid logic behind that, not just an arbitrary "Do it and shut up." Plus, this opens up the idea of evil, lurking, cultists of the vanquished primordials and deities in the world for us to do our own vanquishing on. Anyway, I came up with that whole bit quite literally in less time than it takes to type it and I kind of impressed myself with it and told Eric that it is times like this that remind me that I am indeed a bit skilled at DMing and world building and whatnot and can usually produce halfway decent product. He agreed. Normally I kind of choke on my own fear and insecurity that I'm just shovelling horseshit and no one is entertained and I kind of revert to half-assing it and not caring. It was nice to feel a warm glowy moment and bask in the meager success of my meager skills, and it was fun to help Eric stick it to John a bit.

I think I've kind of decided my warforged fighter (Junkpile) will be an agent of chaos. He's not intentionally evil or anything, but he is mostly concerned with self-repair, money, and staving off ennui. He's also curious. He doesn't understand "meatbags" (thus the intentionally low Charisma, and if you place the reference and you get an XP) and if he sees something interesting he is going to investigate. Which is the whole reason we got the "go to the mine" quest anyways. He didn't want to help the guy getting the shit beat out of him, he assumed the guy earned it, but was curious as to why five dudes would forcibly drag another man out of a drinking hole in broad daylight and impart violent kinetic force upon his body. He also eats gems.

Steampunk Device of Post: Short-Range Hard Illuminator. Its a flashbang grenade.

Music: Hatredcopter - Dethklok

A Change of Pace

Whoa. This will not be DnD or writing related. I seem to be going on at great length about those two topics lately, which makes sense as they are my Big Thing(s) right now. Anyway, I decided I wanted to ramble about Planescape: Torment. Well, I guess this post will have to be DnD related because Torment is a DnD game. Anyway, we'll see where this takes us and work on the labels when we're done. Torment is hands down my favorite computer game in the whole wide world. It tops Fallout and Oblivion and Disgaea. Heck. If Fallout fucked Disgaea and their gay child had a civil union with Oblivion and they adopted an at risk Chinese girl, she would not hold a candle to the gloriousness that is Torment. (This bit functions under the assumption that your environment and role models play a big part in the quality of person you become). Torment is an older PC game, can't remember specific year it came out but it was around the time of the original Fallouts and Baldur's Gates and Icewind Dale. Granted, I enjoy all of those games and they are all in some way connected to Interplay and/or Black Isle, but Torment is King.

In Torment you play an undying amnesiac with skin about the thickness of a concrete block due to the mass of scars you've become in your time wandering the planes. You wake up in a mortuary, or rather THE Mortuary of Sigil (center of the effing Multiverse). You're Clueless, and your only companions (so far) are the cryptic messages etched into your flesh and a floating skull with a mouth fouler than Satan's asshole after playing the catcher in his own civil union.

Hmm, in retrospect that may have crossed a line. Lets move along.

My love of the game comes from the fact that like the setting it is based in, your actions, your very thoughts and words, can reshape the planes to your liking. If you give yourself a name for people to call you by, a man by that name (created by your will and the speaking of the name by others) becomes real and you find him and can unmake him with your will, or you can allow him to forge his own path in the Multiverse.

The entire point of the game is to define who you are, to figure out what determines the nature of a man. And also to track down your errant soul and possibly figure out who the fuck is trying to kill you and why. Granted, killing you is a minimal impediment to the quest at best, but the story goes that the more often you die the more fragile your memories become, thus your current state of being a clueless sod.

Don't worry though, you can eventually become a cutter whose very steps shake the planes.

Part of the appeal of the game is that a large portion of it can be completed just by talking. You can gain thousands of valuable XPs just by discussing shit with your companions (the talking skull, a puritan succubus, a man who has become a living portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, a planar robot on a quest to find individuality, a suit of armor animated by the ideals of justice and vengeance, a half-fiend that hates you as much as she loves you, and Dak'kon who is hard to break down into half a sentence). In fact, the final boss of the game can be defeated through a combination of will (i.e. high Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma scores) and astute dialogue choices. I have never seen that in any game I've played. There are modern games that allow you to "talk" your way out of shit, but I've always had to put a round between the eyes of the Big Fucking Evil Dude in the last room.

Along the way to the story's multi-ending conclusion you encounter a variety of insane locations and the denizens therein. You find a rat king so large and so powerful its very thoughts can assault you with violence. You help a living city give birth. You can ensure the eternal survival of a city long destroyed. You parley with a golem the size of a building trapped in a war machine of entropy bent on breaking the bonds of the Multiverse. On and on and on.

So yeah, that is a bit about Torment. To be clear, it is the barest tip of the iceberg.

Hmm...cue installation process.

Music: Nictotine Stains - Siouxsie and the Banshees

Confused

You ever listen to 2112 by Rush? Its one of my favorite Rush songs. A man in the far flung future finds a guitar and falls in love with the music it produces while learning to play it. He brings it to the rulers of the galaxy/universe (the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx) who determine what art and music is allowed to exist. They scorn the guitar as a stupid relic of "the Elder Race of Man" and tell him the guitar will not be allowed to exist. So he flees the priests and finds his way to a cave and has a dream of beauty and wonder and upon waking he kills himself because he cannot bear to exist in a universe that denies the beauty of the music wrung from the strings of a guitar and wishes to move onto the world in his dreams.

At least I think that is what it is about, regardless: Good fuck song.

Anyway, there is a line in the song about the Elder Race of Man. This line inspired me to write, and always makes me think of, a story I was working on a long time ago called The Elder War. I always think I should go back to that one because it ties a bunch of random elements from some of my other stories together so that as a whole they make sense. I can just never really get into writing it. I like it, and it is actually something of a twist on the first story I ever wrote. A POS called Cernunnos' Story that was a godawful story and a worse DnD campaign, or maybe vice versa. If you're reading this and remember the time where it was like ten players and two DMs and we were all in my parent's garage and Jason Julian was all like "Kinouis the Vengeful does not care for this!" and slammed his fist into the table, it was set in that campaign world. Kardia if I remember correctly. Anyway, Cernunnos' Story was truly atrocious, every name and character in it was named after and ripped off of something I had read and liked at one time. There was a lightning god named Raiden, a sorcerer named Thorn Drumheller (if you've read the follow up books to Willow), a city named Rome, magic fields called mythals (if you know anything about Forgotten Realms elves), and so on and so forth in that vein for some time. I tried to rewrite the story later and quit because I realized I was copying Robert Jordan's magic system. Anyway, the Elder War was in part a spiritual re-telling of Cernunnos' Story (and the main character of the Elder War was one Kern Yew'nos, har har).

Hmm. I seem to have lost track of the point of this particular post, but it is a quarter to four in the morning so I think that is forgivible.

Anyway. I think I'm going to start posting my Norse Story up to this site. I'm not saying it was super awesome, but I had fun writing it and I think taking another crack at it might be a hoot. Originally it was written as a Norse story but I was working on my current DnD campaign when I was working on it and I decided a main character from it migrated to the continent it the campaign was taking place on so I've been kind of wanting to go back and violently retcon it so it sits better with my campaign world and doesn't have so many overtly Earth/Norse references and this might be an opportunity to do so.

To sleep, and dreams of the Dolphinian-Sharkasian War! In this episode Porposian mercenaries go rogue and Admirals Ack and Barr must use all the tools at their disposal to track the mercenaries through the rings of Saturn and bring them to task before they can provide the Sharkasians with information regarding the secret moonbase on Titan.

Music: 2112 - Rush

In My Campaign: Kusseth Edition, Part 1

The country of Kusseth is known for many things, but there is one thing that truly defines it, its system of marking the population. No other nation in the Known World possesses such an in-depth way of keeping track of its population. Every man, women, and child, regardless of race, living legally within the borders of Kusseth bears a ten digit sequence of numbers behind their ear or somewhere upon their head (should they be lacking an ear) that indicates who they are as defined by the authorities of Kusseth. This ten digit number breaks down whether or not they are native or an immigrant, details the identity of the doctor that birthed them or the warden that granted them citizenry, and a few other important details. This ingenious system of tracking their population makes officials and lawmen quite effective in keeping track of the individual citizens of the country. Any walled town or city will ask for the number of each person entering the walls, wardens ask anyone they speak to to display their serial number, and when passing into the different areas of Kusseth City itself one is asked to display one's number by guards. In any situation that warrants it a warden or official can input the ten digit number into a slide card and feed it to one of the mighty analytical engines of the government which will signal most governmental offices to produce files and papers dealing with the serial number in question, within ten to fifteen hours the warden or official will have a stack or box of files in hand detailing all the recorded information regarding the individual who bears the serial number in question. In instances where the lawman or official is seeking the whereabouts of such individuals they can find a list of where their travels have taken them in the past six months. On such occasions an additional signal is tapped out on the wires indicating that the inquiring warden or official is to be kept updated on the travels of the serial number in question and will often find fresh dispatches in hand by the end of the week updating him on the movements of his quarry. Various specialized organizations in Kusseth use their own serial numbers as well. Wardens are not given an additional tattoo but are issued a badge with a unique number upon completion of their schooling. Military recruits are tattooed with information regarding their term of service and its completion or lack thereof, as are members of the guild of bounty hunters and those graduates of the colleges of the physician. Any citizen seeking to may obviously obscure their tattoo, but that often leads to more trouble than it is worth because it effectively erases them from Kusseth society preventing the procuring of loans, aid from law enforcement, and can often lead to slavery or conscription into the armed forces when one is unable to prove one's citizenry.

The Robust Five Strike Ag...For The First Time

So, gaming was had today. You should probably know that I am metal. Apparently that, or a variation on it is my character's (Junkpile, the somewhat rusted and welded together Warforged that eats gemstones apparently) catchphrase. Kind of cool, not only do I have a character, but he has a catchphrase. It makes me happy. Anway, the rundown.

Everyone had books = GOOD.
Everyone had fun = GOOD.
Everyone got into in-game shenanigans = GOOD.
No one cracked books beforehand = EPIC BAD.

Every single little thing had to be looked up every time, which is ok. I understand we're beginners to 4th Edition and two guys have no experience with DnD. I anticipated this scenario taking a long, long time and am ok with it, because at the end of the day we all had fun. We were tired and hot but we had all had a good time, which is the important part. But man it would have been funner to get further than the first encounter in the span of seven and a half hours. I did have a bit of fun playing leader. At one point we broke into a shop in the dead of night and John's character John the Cleric tripped a trap which exploded and caused the sleeping shopkeeper upstairs to wake up. I ran upstairs yelling about how I heard an explosion and was a bouncer working at the tavern up the street (which was true) meanwhile gesturing for the rest of the party to run out the front door (which they did). Then as the shopkeeper woke up and sort of believed me I waited a bit to see if anyone else responded to the explosion (which wasn't that big of an explosion) like city guards or something, then hacked the shopkeeper's spine in two with my axe. Our goal was to put the guy out of business "one way or another" so I figured we could kill him, eliminate the body, and then run back to the quest giver and Bluff him into believing that he was dead when we got there. I was going for covering our asses in the event that the guards came around and found a dead body in a busy store and the quest giver felt like extorting us or something shady like that. I dunno, I was probably over-thinking stuff, but fuck it, I had fun and it was pretty damn close to what I see as role-playing. I knew Eric had no plan for guards finding a corpse or the quest giver betraying us, but I did it anyway because it seemed like the smart thing to do

Apparently I could do a History Channel-esque series on the facets of life in The Known World (my campaign world). I did little bits about my world all night, it got so bad towards the end that I could not do it and keep a straight face, it was too funny. I guess Jeremy wants to record our sessions, which would be fun to listen to I think. I dunno if they're worthy of a podcast, but we were laughing a lot and there was some good shit that I cannot remember for the life of me.

Steampunk Device of the Post: Cybernetic arm (because the names of some things don't change, even if they are steampunk).
Music: Criminal Minds Theme - Guys Who Do That Sort of Thing (Heather and I are watching TV)