The Quest For Memory at Year's End

Last night we had out final session of "The Quest for Memory" for the year. It was perhaps our best session to date, with a nice, tense fight against a dragon to end things off. After a hard-fought battle the PCs emerged victorious.

At the end of this session our heroes are now mid-way through 5th level, and so just about ready to enter the first crucible. Fortunately, and despite their best efforts, they have engaged with the plot sufficiently that they're probably just about to go in search of the key that will take them into that crucible. At least, that is my hope.

I'm very happy with this campaign, both in the way that it has started and the way that it's playing out. There are several lessons from "The Mists of Lamordia" that I have been able to take and apply here, which has improved the flow. My only real issue is that I just haven't had time to put together the campaign map, which is a fairly key weakness in this type of campaign. But that's just the way it is going to be.

(Actually, one more thing - it is increasingly apparent just how poor 5e's treasure 'system' is, with the PCs accumulating huge amounts of monetary with absolutely no use. Basically, the only treasures that are actually worth bothering with are magic items, but only giving magic items just feels wrong. But that's an issue with the game, rather than the campaign.)

Anyway, so far, so good.

Classes in the Setting

For the most part, I am of the view that most characters in the fictional world that is a D&D setting would be largely unaware of the mechanics of the game, and the terminology that goes with them. For that reason, the old "level titles" never really made much sense to me (because most knights and lords wouldn't have any class at all, never mind a specific class at a specific level), and asking someone their alignment should always have been met by blank looks. (That said, there was always a certain amount of convenience to this - in much the same way as nobody in the Star Wars galaxy would actually speak English, but the characters in the movies do. So the DM translate a few things from in-world speak to mechanical speak just for convenience.)

The upshot of this is that I tend to avoid tying character classes into the structure of my setting - a character described as a "wizard" in the setting may in fact be a Wizard (class), Sorcerer, Warlock... or even a Bard, a Rogue playing a part, or something else entirely. And that is a decision that has served me well over the years as the mechanics of the game have changed - whereas the 2nd Edition version of Terafa had no Sorcerer class, it might well have had sorcerers that may or may not have then become Sorcerers when 3e was released. And, likewise, although 5e has things like named Bardic colleges and Monastic traditions, the exact set available in 5e is unlikely to be the same in 6e, or indeed in 5e once all the rulebooks have been published. Consequently, although you'll find Bards of the College of Valour in the current version of Terafa, you won't actually find a "College of Valour" in the setting - the player chooses how they want to mechanically express their character in the game, we'll work together to determine how the character fits within the setting, and we'll then massage any rough edges to suit.

And that's true... mostly.

Despite this, there are a few places where the mechanics of the game do tie up pretty neatly with some aspects of the setting. For instance, there is an order of rangers within the setting, and the title Paladin does mean something to characters in the setting. And, of course, there are monks, and clerics, and wizards, and sorcerers, and so on. Where most, and in some cases perhaps all, members of the in-setting organisation are also members of the in-game class. Basically, it's all a little fuzzy.

The reason I mention this now is that in the next couple of weeks I'll have something to say about Monasteries and Nunneries in Terafa, and it's worth noting that in that case a character being a 'monk' in the setting doesn't mean that they're a Monk in the game, or vice versa... though there is significant overlap...

Gaming in 2020

2020 started with one game in the works: the Work game was in the midst of "The Mists of Lamordia". Fairly early in the year this game was shifted to an online approach, which worked surprisingly well. That campaign is still running. I had hoped we might be able to bring it to an end by the end of March next year, but that's looking unlikely. Still, it's reasonably enjoyable, so there's no great hardship that it looks to run later into the year.

Due to the success of online gaming, I was able to set up a second campaign, "The Quest For Memory". This is also going well, and is rapidly heading towards the first crucible event of the campaign. It will be interesting to see how that compares with the same event in the other campaign.

There has been no opportunity to play, nor to run anything other than D&D, in 2020. I suspect that will also be the case in 2021. And lest there be any doubt, there is no Christmas Game this year, nor any likelihood of one in future years.

In terms of purchases, this has been a light year. I've purchased three physical books: "Rime of the Frostmaiden", which I thoroughly enjoyed, "Tasha's Cauldron of Everything", which is technically a Christmas present - but, alas, the more I hear about it the less I'm looking forward to it - and "Tome of Beasts 2". That last is another Christmas present, and although I really don't need any more monsters, the previous offerings in that series have been excellent, so I doubt I'll regret the purchase.

There have been a significant number of electronic products. I bought into a Humble Bundle of "Star Trek" products, none of which I've actually looked at in detail, but it was a hell of an offering so I couldn't resist. (And I've been enjoying Trek recently, and enjoyed playing that game, so if opportunity allows...) I also bought a small number of products from the DM's Guild, with the two "Monster Manual Expanded" volumes being noteworthy for their quality and usefulness.

I did a little reading of old D&D novels - the two "I, Strahd" novels. The first of these was okay, the second poor, but neither was revelatory.

My expectation for 2021 is more of the same, hopefully with a reversion to some face-to-face gaming later in the year. I hope both campaigns will continue well, with at least one coming to a successful conclusion. I expect "Rime of the Frostmaiden" to be the successor to the Work Game.

The Mists of Lamordia at Year's End

On Thursday we ha our final session of "The Mists of Lamordia" for the year. We brought one of our subplots to its end, which puts us in a good position to stop for a while.

I had hoped to bring the campaign as a whole of a conclusion by the end of March, but I think that is massively over-ambitious - my gut feeling is that we're closer to halfway through the campaign than nearing the end. That's not terrible, but not ideal.

As a whole the campaign has been going reasonably well so far, but like many of my campaigns it hasn't quite been what I had hoped. That's largely my own fault - I just don't have the time to prepare as well as I might help. In particular, the campaign could do with more encounters, and particularly 'fixed' encounters. For a long time the PCs were just not gaining XP and so dragging themselves through the levels. That has improved somewhat, but could still do with some acceleration.

With a bit of luck, I hope to find some time over the next month to put some more material together, in order to bring the campaign to a better conclusion. I'm also going to address one logistical weakness - one of the players is available only sporadically, so I'm going to introduce a mechanism by which the character can likewise be written in or out as needed.

So far, so good.

Review: Icewind Dale - Rime of the Frostmaiden

After swearing off WotC's adventures for a few years, I found myself in the market for a new adventure, provided it grabbed my attention and, crucially, started at 1st level. "Rime of the Frostmaiden" fit the bill, and so I picked up a copy. I'm glad that I did.

This is a fairly standard WotC adventure - it starts with a sandboxy section with a number of small quests to give the PCs XP, then gradually switches to a more linear big-quest approach. I do like this format for adventures. The adventures themselves seem to be pretty well put together, and the general makeup of the book is pretty good.

There were two particular highlights for me: one is the artwork throughout the book, which is outstanding. The other is that this book reveals a secret that they've been building up to through the last several adventures - I really like that sort of seeding of details and world-building (even if I hadn't seen the other adventures that started the mystery). It really shows an attention to a larger world that is nice.

There's not too much that I don't like about the adventure - the big weakness (the overly linear nature of the latter chapters) was something that I had priced in from the outset, so was happy to accept. There are two things, but one is another thing I've come to accept, while the other is something I can work around.

Specifically, this adventure has another case of the 'cheat' BBEG - the PCs are expected to face off against the enemy at 11th level, but that enemy should be far out of their league. So the adventure posits a 'cheat' to allow the match-up to work (this time that the BBEG is massively weakened). I'm not keen on that, but it seems to just be the way they do things now.

The other is the handling of XP. I've really come to dislike milestone XP, and the version as presented in this adventure is worse even than the norm. My strong suspicion is that this is done because the adventure just doesn't include enough 'real' XP for all the levels intended, so again they 'cheat' to speed things up without the players feeling that they haven't earned those levels. (Of course, my view on how XP should be awarded is very different from standard too, but never mind.)

There's not too much more I can say without giving spoilers. Suffice to say that this one almost certainly will be my next campaign, once "The Mist of Lamordia" have parted... and indeed that I may well buy in to the next storyling that WotC choose to present. I'm very impressed with this one.