What's your current game doing?

[Leoff]

This is like Random RPG thoughts, but from the perspective of what you and your group are up to just now. What's your current campaign? What system are you using, and how have you tweaked it? What milestones and epic moments camy your way?

[Leoff]

We're playing a generational campaign based of The Keep On The Borderlands. We started with a prequel, orchestrated by me: The Creep on the Borderlands is set fifty years before, as the Keep was being built. There weren't (many) monsters in the caverns, or fears of orc incursions. The Keep was seen as a bold political statement, and good for the local economy, but hardly a necessity. The corrupt Castellan and our bold party of adventurers changed all that.

Now, with descendants of the original cast of adventurers, we're running TKOTB itself. We're using Beyond the Wall, which has much of the feel of earlier editions of D & D with some of the bumps smoothed off. I'm limiting myself to the cast of characters and (for the most part) creatures listed on the original module, and even following the oddly rectilinear map of the caverns.

[Lord Foul]

I'm running the first off-world adventure for the recurring cast in my AD&D 1st Ed. campaign. It is a holy quest for the fabled Lonsdale Belt, an Asgardian artifact made by the dwarves of Nidavellir, stolen by a Type V Demoness and taken back to her stronghold on the 4th plane of Tarterus.

The party, led by a priest of Odin, have to travel across the Astral Plane to Tarterus, then find their way through the first three layers, going via portals between the levels, to the fourth plane, where the demon's fortress lies within the realm of Grolantor, god of the hill giants.

This adventure is quite a departure for the party, who are around 10th level. My rule tweaks for adventures on other planes have been quite a shock to the system, as I've changed things so that the PCs remain unchanged while everything around them changes. Basically, anything native to the outer planes has its hit dice and damage doubled. The effect is to make these powerful characters rather more nervous than they started out. Complacency is a dangerous thing in this setting!

They are currently 9 sessions in and are still on the first plane of Tarterus, having suffered an accidental petrification requiring them to do a deal with a local magical guild called The Cabal to perform a task in return for a cure. That task turned out to be dealing with a local protection racket run by a malebranche with a squad of barbed devil enforcers. They have just succeeded in defeating the devils following a climactic confrontation in the bad guys' base. I believe they have learned some valuable lessons about the scale of things in Tarterus, that should serve them well for the rest of the adventure.

Most awesome moment so far was last session, during the climax, when things were going decidedly badly for the party. The head priest let rip with his Sunray (1/day effect of a magic item) which damaged and blinded the malebranche and two of his remaining heavies (and blew up his imp familiar), but also produced enough natural sunlight to allow the party witch to cast her Laser Beam spell (only castable in natural sunlight), which did double damage on undead and fiends and in this case did 66 HP damage to the malebranche and was the turning point in the fight.

[Azhrei Vep]

We've got a cursed game of Dresden Files Accelerated going out here.

Cursed, in that it's been nigh impossible to get a game to happen on two consecutive weeks, and even when we did miraculously pull it off, someone was missing because his grandmother (with whom he lives, along with a lot of family in some kind of weird awful-sounding arrangement) had a head-on collision and broke a couple vertebrae and needed looked after.

When the game actually happens it's a touch weird to me. Somehow, in a group consisting of a millenia-old Einherjar-turned-valkyrie, a supernatural contract lawyer that was literally created as an adult by a greek goddess in case she feels like riding it around to operate in the mortal world, a knight of the cross car owner, a white court virgin computer hacker, and a dragon that is also the leader of a street gang with (very) long-term plans of world domination .... my Dragon, who is the slave-owning head of a street gang that takes part in drug sales, prostitution, extortion, murder, and corpse-disposal-via-dragon-gullet has emerged as the moral leader. Over the holy Knight.

And my ex-wife's Lawyer is shaping up to be one hell of a villain. And the way things are going, I think the literal man-eating monster will be the only one to care if he ever finds out she tried to feed a ten-year-old cancer patient to the white court virgin.

I love this frickin' game.

[clintmemo]

I just ended my Hook Island mini series. It was supposed to be a 4 week game so that the GM at the time could take a break and prepare for his new job ( he got promoted at work). Circumstances conspired to make the game run for 12 weeks instead, but everyone loved it when it was over. So much so, that it has spilled over into our regular game. The other GM is back but wants to wrap up this section of his game in a week or two (when he had to step down, we were literally in the middle of a dungeon) and then start a new game in the same world with new characters - essentially what I did in my mini-series. Everyone is totally on board. To take it step further, I tossed the group template into our email chain and the GM liked the idea. After the group discussed, we are making our PC's together with a purpose for the first time in...essentially ever.
Last night, he called me to talk about the template for the second mini-series he wants to run with a different group.

[Ikoma]

My group is running Storm King's Thunder. They've finally gotten the map to the keys that will get them access to Maelstrom, the heart of giant governance and the last known sighting of Hekaton, the titular Storm King, who is missing. Problem is, they have royally pissed off Countess Sansuri, leader of the cloud giants, and she is hunting the party down. The party is on the run and knows they need to sooner or later take the battle to her but they are terrified. This is the first time they have faced a magic user of a higher level than themselves and all those tricks they use on orcs and cultists and such are now getting used on them.

The party does not like it.

I'm sure they'll come up with some plan to take the Countess down, get access to the conch she has is her possession and get to Maelstrom. We'll see how they deal with giant court politics at that point.

[Mikel]

My Unknown Armies game has tricked the Agent of a Room of Renunciation in order to gain the key to it so they can find its opposite and return one character's husband, who went through the Room and became someone else entirely.

They have to go up against the Ordo Corpulentis, a group of billionaires who eat people and turn them into ghost servants, and who now have his husband as hired muscle.

The Avatar of the Star is heading on a course to try to become the Godwalker. This will put her on a collision course with Beyonce, the current Godwalker.

My IRL Wield game has just started and I'm getting the players used to the game. I have a feeling I have a few players who aren't going to click with it---it requires a lot of player motivation due to the power levels involved. We may be changing games but we have to start getting together more regularly. Shows have made this tough.

And I've run some one-shots online, here and there.

[ad1066]

Our group just started playing The Sprawl. PBTA cyberpunk game, and our campaign is set in a giant floating arcology in the South Pacific with a bunch of megacorps struggling for control of it. We're playing a group of criminals (sorry, freelance operatives) based there, and for our first job we've been hired to steal a blood sample from a particular famous professional athlete while he's in town for a tournament, presumably in the hopes of cloning him. Our plan is to get at him with a couple of tiny autonomous drones equipped with topical anesthetics and hypodermics whilst he is on board a bullet train taking a semi-private tour of the arcology. In true Shadowrun fashion, we have no idea who actually hired us, we only know our go-between. Complications to the plan so far have included one PC's corporate handlers coming to him and offering him a bonus if he diverts the sample to them, or finds a way to get a second sample (he ended up coming clean to the team right away, hence two drones instead of one), and my PC needing to make a very messy example of some punks that decided to rough up one of my contacts.

We're still not sold on the system. The book is not well organized, and some things are just a little too abstracted, while others are not explained in nearly enough detail. We're considering dumping most of the mechanics for actual Apocalypse World 2nd Ed, or failing that, good old Cyberpunk 2020. That being said, one thing it does have going for it are the matrix rules, which work a hell of a lot better than netrunning in 2020.

-- Ben

[JediSoth]

We were playing D&D 5E Tomb of Annihilation. The party is mostly dwarves with a lizardfolk guide and they've killed the hag they wrongly assumed was responsible for the increase in undead activity (fortunately, not before finding out she's NOT responsible... though TBH killing her at that point was a dick move on their parts since she was being creepy and gross, but not actively threatening them).

Then, I had to finish packing my game room for the move. So, that game is on hiatus.

Tomorrow, we're going to play Blades in the Dark, run by another GM in my group. It's possible it'll be the last game until sometime in June when we're settled in the new house. We may be able to do another game before then; I just can't plan ahead with things happening the way they are.

I did finally figure out that running WotC's hardcover adventures expecting them to be ready to go out of the book (as one might expect from a published adventure) is an exercise in frustration since they really don't give you any sort of plot outline or guide. There are 3PPs who sell such things, but I'm a little resentful that stuff you kind of need to make a pre-published adventure less prep work than an all original campaign isn't included in the book itself. Silly me for assuming that I could run a pre-published adventure with less prep work than my own material. Their baffling lack of PDFs doesn't help.

Once we resume Tomb of Annihilation, I expect they'll head toward the location they learned about (Omu), though they're not ready for it. That'll give me plenty of time to come up with a bunch of jungle stuff to distract them during their journey and give them opportunities for XP.

[[red]]

We are starting a new adventure in D&D 5e. All the players have been playing stuff for less than a year and do not want to leave the system yet (I have some dungeon world-esque sci-fi stuff that I would like to try out).

We just finished session zero - but, for them, session zero is mostly about creating the characters that they already decided to play. They are all in the same physical location, and I am GMing via skype - so I realized about half-way through that they were doing this while talking about what to expect and stuff.

Luckily, they laid their characters directly in the path of the story, used backstory elements that I was discussing and asking if they would like to use, and fully integrated their characters in the lore AND culture. I've never had a group so interested to be a part of the setting.