Game 5 Prep

[John]

***hello friends, if you are a player in ironblood dwarves please do not read this! Multiple layers of spoilers for both the immediately upcoming game and end-game revelations!***

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Well, Game 4 went pretty well. They got what the came for in Ulm and nobody wound up dead or in jail. A broad peek into my brain before going into specific concerns:

CHARACTERS:
1. I haven't made much hay out of Ed's demon blood yet. I'll create an opportunity in the depths of the dungeon. I like the RP we had around his shadow spider. Ed had me pick the familiar which I really like. There's music when the player and the DM trust each other to make cool decisions and riff away. It is a tiny tiiiiiiiny hit about the true nature of the demon that's under Iron Mountain right now (it's a shadowlord...that TPK'ed another party George and Miranda were in. I used the bad-bad-ending Undertale laugh and a spooky shadow sprite for it, I will introduce it with both of these things if/when they fight it and it will make them crap their pants just watch).
2. Dan's decision to steal from a guard was alarmingly and uncharacteristically durr-hurr-I-throw-a-fireball-at-the-mayor, for him. My doctrine in these situations is warn them extensively, and make them live with the results, but allow it. This time the NPC managed to roll low but if Dan declares another action that approaches gratuitous suicide (or at least constructive suicide by capture) I'll probably freeze the frame and ask why OOC.
3. I'm satisfied with how Miranda got to be the weirdo elf on both sides of the coin. She's doing what she does. Grass grows, birds fly, and Miranda plays characters than are quiet most of the time, loudly sigh at the antics of the other characters, and make attack rolls when necessary. None of that needs much cultivation from the GM.
4. I'm satisfied with how George got a new follower and made a lot of hay out of the dwarf church connection. George was sort of the star of this go around so I'm not going to deliberately put big decisions and scenes on him for a little while but hey, he's the cleric in an against-the-demons game and the last really genuinely unbroken line of authority-wielding social institutions back from Iron Mountain so he's gonna be important whether I go out of my way to make it The George Game or not.
5. I'm satisfied with how Chad got to be a brash yet traditional-lawful-good dwarfy dwarf. To use a now-FTB-archaic comparison, Chad is the Phil. Every group needs a Phil. So far Chad has been the skull-cracking fighter dwarf in a game that hasn't really had that much in the way of skull-cracking-fights, though. The next adventure should fix that.

GLOBAL CONCERNS:
1. Tie it back to the demons. Delving this mountain should give them solid clues as to what happened to their own.
2. Decide what tensions may exist between new dwarves from Ulm (who outnumber the old Ironbloods significantly) and the old Ironbloods. The most obvious tension, and a trope I wanted to make use of from the beginning anyway, is between the dwarves who want to fight to retake Iron Mountain (with the potential buckets of dwarf-death that this fight would cost) and the dwarves who just want to hole up in their new home. Do I want to force a recapture of Iron Mountain with demon-plot-stuff or do I want to make hunkering in at the second mountain a legitimate long-term strategy (even if it's a long-term strategy that lots of the NPCs don't like)? My instinct is the second because choices are better than railroads but they're still not done with the demons even if they chose that. The demons will pursue, although probably not with the investment that they would fight to defend what they've now captured.
3. Deciding how much the new semi-fake king wants to take orders from the PCs and how much he wants to give orders...and what those orders would be.

NEXT GAME:
Probably going to be a dungeon delve into the lost colony. I have broad strokes for this thought up but I'll post finer details soon.

[Young_0ne2]

I think your doing well so far John and i agree you should do more with Ed's background. I would also like to see you do something with every one else's backgrounds too. I think that they all have a good nugget of story hidden in them if you pick at it in the right ways.

[Young_0ne2]

John do you have a map for the AP? I ask because a map of where the characters are or maybe the world they're in as the background for the video's might be more interesting for the AP and well, im curious... and might want to make a map for you... for fun

[John]

I do not, but I'd certainly slap one up if you felt like making it!

What information do you need?

[Young_0ne2]

Just some idea of what the geography is like. Where mountains are, rivers, forest, settlement locations, stuff like that.
I might also be able to map the mines / caves the Iron Bloods are now calling home.

I can do up a map and if you want some things changed or switched around you can always mark it up and send it back to me for revision.

I'm using Campaign Cartographer 3+ so its got a fairly nice set of tools to do the job.

[Young_0ne2]

John, a quick job, but none-the-less a gift for you

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2dqH ... nFmZ3VESFk

[John]

ehrmagerd this is fantastic thank you! sending to players

[Young_0ne2]

i spent most of yesterday afternoon listening to the AP at 1.5X's speed to find all the details. (Ya'll are a different experience at 1.5x's speed btw.)

and Thank you.

[Young_0ne2]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2dqH ... HR4ZmhkWkk

[Dan]