cranky because you haven’t had any prophetic dreams to aid you on your quest aren’t you
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@mlmducknewton
cranky because you haven’t had any prophetic dreams to aid you on your quest aren’t you
I like the idea that Lucretia started a family, she just chose not to tell the THB or introduce them to each other because it was hard for her to get close to people who don’t remember her
After they get their memories back it’s no longer an issue but Lucretia just fucking forgot
And so she assumes they all met at some point and the gang just thinks Lucretia prefers being a bachelorette so they don’t say anything, and Lucretia’s still a little reclusive so this goes on longer than you’d reasonably expect it to
But one day they’re all at dinner together and she says “I won’t be coming next Thursday, my wife will be furious if I miss one of our daughters’ recitals”
Pandemonium. Pandemonium at that table.
Magnus: “Your WHAT???”
Lucretia: “Oh, pardon me” *clears throat*
Lucretia in a Borat impression: “MY WIFE”
Magnus: “Very impressive, but WHAT????”
hollis dani jake
we’ll take it from here.
Out of curiosity, how do my fellow DMs prepare their campaigns?
Do you open up a word doc at type out your story hook and make little bullet points from there?
Do you wing it completely?
What’s your notes system like?
I’m simply looking for new ways to plan for my d&d games!
The Over-Prepared GM
I can’t help myself. I love all the work that goes into prepping for a campaign, and I keep all of my crazy notes and papers, so today I’m gonna try and share with you my process for the latest DnD session I prepped for/ran!
Rough Notes
I always start by hand writing a full page or two of just random thoughts/story bits. I’m gonna give examples from the latest session I ran (BACKSTORY - this setting has frequent time travel moments and so every location I make also needs a past version and present version)
Writing Stonevale began with me rambling on about any vague ideas I had for the scene setting. I also find it’s useful to get the secrets and mysteries all clear and laid out straight away, and work backwards from them to slot in clues for players. “Stonevale Past” begins with me deciding that the ancestors of an important NPC live here - maybe the players never get far enough to discover that, but having the secrets and info at the heart of my process helps me keep things focussed, and it’s easy/fun to build walls around the secrets this way :)
I also generally get a feel for any creatures/NPCs that populate the area, and give them vague roles. And I try to note down key details/props/locations/events that will help the players navigate and investigate.
Session Summary
Now’s the time to check what happened last session just to make sure you know how the party characters will likely be feeling/acting at the start of the session, and to remind yourself of any items they picked up, or active statuses going on. Also a good moment to check what the party planned to do next, what their expectations could be and so on.
It’s hard to make myself fill this in at the end of every session, but the session summary page in this kit really helps me note down what’s most important.
Maps
Making a map is always an exciting prospect for me! I thought this time I wanted to give a more illustrative style of map, as I’ve been super inspired by the very cool maps made by @anywhichwayatlas ! I got onto pinterest and collected some ideas of the type of map style I was going for:
Above are the images I used to inspire me, and below is the finished Stonevale map! It’s come out a bit rough/childlike but was definitely a fun way to explore more ways of making maps!
Later on, I realised I’d got too into making this and forgotten about some sort of depiction of the INSIDE of the manor… Since I didn’t have any time to make more maps by this point, I went to where I always go when I need a DnD map in a pinch - @2minutetabletop ! I picked up Castle Keep, which is free (like so many of his maps are!) and faffed with some colours and levels in photoshop until I was happy. Printed them out on A3 card and they were good to go! I can’t recommend this resource enough, it’s saved my GM butt a lot when I run out of time to make a map of my own!
Adding in Detail
So next I need to flesh out those vague ideas to make sure I’ve covered what’s likely to be important for the party. I love using the town builder here as it gives me a bit of mental breathing room and asks the questions for me. I find having questions ready means the answers come a lot easier than if I was trying to pluck this out of my head, if that makes sense?
It was at this point I realised I’d likely need a family tree, even just so I could keep track of the time travel/ancestral stuff. I roughed one out, then made a slightly bigger, still very rough, version that I thought might be a handy clue for players. If they make it inside the castle, they’ll notice a framed family tree on the wall, and this will be it!
NPCS
Our story involved one of the players having worked at Stonevale before the adventure, so I made a staff list for that player’s reference. This way they had some basic information on their old co-workers and the residents of the manor. I also filled in an NPC list from the people & society kit to make sure I had enough NPCs to generate about the property.
Then I used the map to mark some likely locations of the important NPCs. I made sure to spread them out so that no matter how the party approached the grounds, they’d likely hit a plot hook somehow.
Quest Hooks
Time to shove as many clues as possible in here! My experience has been that players need a lot more help picking up clues and reaching conclusions than you expect (myself included!) so I make a point of writing a bunch of quest hooks to inspire both the players and myself during play. I use the quest hooks page from the session kit to note down basically little story bites and clues that I can drop in as and when I need to. It’s a useful sheet to glance at real quick during the game!
Loot
Gotta make sure there’s some loot somewhere! There’s always at least one player who ransacks every location they visit :) I hadn’t set up Stonevale to be a particularly loot-filled place but knew the manor in the centre could do with holding some of the resident’s belongings that could be steal-able. Again, I realised this quite late in my planning, and so dashed off to the @rpgtoons Patreon to grab all the free item cards I could find! Then I picked out which ones could be appropriate for certain family members and residents, and stashed ‘em in the pile ready to hand out.
Ambience
This is one of the last things I come to, as it’s fairly easy to set up, but so important if you want your players to be focussed and engaged. Every time I use music or scents its palpable how much more invested in events players are. For ambient backgrounds, youtube is a gold mine. I like to have two playing simultaneously - one for music and one for background noise. For example:
Fantasy Adventure Music + Forest Sounds Peaceful Travelling Music + Winter Storm Horror Music + Swamp Sounds
Check out Sword Coast Soundscapes or Guild of Ambience for some very cool RPG ambient soundtracks too!
As for scents, I use these a little more sparingly, but @cantripcandles does some exceptionally convincing aromas that really work for setting the mood, and taking your prep that lil extra step. My favourite is Goldwheat Bakery - the only way to get a more accurate smell would be to visit a bakery!
Finishing Up
At this point I’m almost good to go. I take one last look over everything I’ve prepped to see if there are any gaping plot holes or parts I’ve missed. For this particular session, it occurred to me there could be an opportunity for eavesdropping on an important conversation, so I wrote out a one page script for what the players might overhear should they choose to snoop.
Play!
I guess you wanna know how the session went down after all this prep? Did the players enjoy it, did they find what I’d laid out for them?
OF COURSE NOT! They made their very best effort to skirt the entire property, clinging to the edges of the map and hiding any time an NPC interaction looked likely. Predictably, I didn’t anticipate that they would attempt to avoid everything, but the Quest Hooks page kept things flexible. That, and the fact that one player’s rat companion decided to jump down a hole and became “irretrievable until further notice”…. ahem.
Hope you find this useful, I’ve tried to link to as many resources as possible because there are just so many good ones out there right now! Thanks to all DnD creators! I think it’s really cool everyone’s helping each others’ games become even more fun to play! :)
Beautiful world maps by @anywhichwayatlas
Location maps by @2minutetabletop
Item cards from @rpgtoons Patreon
Background Music - Sword Coast Soundscapes
Background Music - Guild of Ambience
Ambient scented candles by @cantripcandles
Session Kit (includes session summary page, campaign brief, encounter manager, quest hooks, world overview page)
World Building Packs (npc makers/lists, land builders, society/org creators, history packs, etc)
Game Master Kits (fillable rolling tables, cheat sheets, loot makers, paper minis, etc)
oh hey it them
unarguably the funniest moment in the entire podcast so far
summary (because this audio isn’t edited and has irrelevant filler)
-Taako purchases The Slicer of Tapeer-Wheer Isles: “A stone which, on a successful Persuasion check, can be traded to anyone for the most valuable thing they have in their possession” for 900 gold.
-He also purchases a book that increases his persuasion skill, and uses it.
-Taako convinces Garfield the Deals Warlock to give him the Flaming Poisoning Raging Sword Of Doom (an extremely overpowered weapon worth 60,000 gold that Griffin placed in the game as a joke.) for The Slicer of Tapeer-Wheer Isles.
-The trade succeeds, and Taako (a wizard who has no use for a weapon like this) immediately straps it to his back, revealing that he purchased it as a fashion accessory.
You don’t need to know DnD or even this podcast to understand how great this is. Because you can hear the moment that Griffin realizes the shit his brother is about to pull, and simultaneously that he can not only do nothing to stop it, but that he gave him the tools to pull it off so *perfectly*
This is just gold.
WELCOME TO THE MONSTER FACTORY
TURBOVICKI
these are nice, can i keep these? oh dammit. OH THERE’S DICK CHENEY! he’s watching me, he’s studying my techniques.
The Director
What she says: I’m fine
What she means: Merle is one of the most forgiving and unashamed characters to exist ever. He makes friends with the enity that is chasing him throughout 100 lives in 100 universes and had killed him many times. He faces the hunger and humbles himself by bringing his enemy into the parley space. He dies over 50 times making friends with a nihilistic monster who kills him at the end of every interaction. He had the chance to get his arm back with the chalice but he bared his mistakes and learned from them. He said ‘I like that guy’ about the grim reaper who tricked him into loosing his hand in the first place. He stayed with the people he gave faith to on the mushroom planet where he gave an honest speech about his own insecurities about life and death but still gave hope to the people. He gave 40 of his hit points to heal Taako for 20 in Wonderland. Merle didn’t rush in but he always followed his friends into danger anyway. He asks the leader of the hunger if he’s his friend and waits 30 years for John to realise they were friends all along.
im so emotional rn
First episode - last episode
my quest to draw as many taz characters as possible in mom jeans has only just begun….
buy me a coffee
[image description: a drawing of Lup, a thin dark-complexioned elf with long blond hair that’s shaved on the side. She’s wearing a loose white tank that says “its free real estate” and high-waisted mom jeans. Her hands are in her pockets and she has a neutral expression on her face.]
i was going to save this for a photoset once i was finished with all the episode 59 art i wanna do but people on twitter seemed to like it so … here’s an ango mcfuckin dango, greatest boy detective and now a badass also
PROVIDENCE.
I spent 4 hours on this
I love these crazy Kepler kids!