Gwent Varjarikilta
Feb. 15th, 2023 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressI did something tonight that I have never done before: I played the final session of a tabletop roleplaying campaign. We defeated the big bad, we saved the world, we talked about what happily ever after looks like. And soon we will embark on a new adventure with new characters which will be another first --I've never had the same group of people for more than one game!
Anyways, I want to talk about it, and it's my journal, so I'm gonna.
***
Despite coming from a family that is quite literally geek royalty1, I haven't actually played _that_ many tabletop rpgs. There was of course the amazing game my da would run on occasional weekends for me and my sisters when we were wee ones. Bernie and Joe and Fish dragged me through five or six sessions of some DnD like in high school. Through late middle and early high school, I played Runequest DM'd by family friend Paul for me and Veronica and his nieces. I've played maybe half a dozen one-shots at this con or that (and another half-dozen midnight massacres: ALL HAIL KING TORG!)
But I've not played anything longer than a one-shot with strangers since graduating high school in 2007. And of the stuff I played then, none of it ever really formally ended, we just...kept going on until we didn't anymore. This is the first time I've ever played a character through her full adventure and gotten to say goodbye.
Gwent Varjarikilta is a shepherd and dyer who runs a big ol' farm full of misfits caring for sheep. She's got a buddy in the big city where she sells her dyes, and her buddy has asked her to go on a brief adventure to investigate some stuff. Accompanying her is a nervous peasant witch, a stoic archer from faraway lands, a snooty over-educated elf mage, and a hyperactive dwarf obsessed with swearing and ale.
Kat is a math teacher who is weathering the incredibly stressful summer of 2020, having way too many meetings to try and figure out what the next school year will be like, and not getting to actually recover from the lasting trauma that is taking hold of our country. Accompanying them is their buddy JoshZed, who is in a similar boat but knows how to DM games, a clever computer programmer from California, a quiet librarian who would rather knit something but likes joining in the combats, the DM's incredibly intelligent lawyer brother enjoying getting to be obnoxious, and the DM's hyperactive 11 year old nephew obsessed with swearingand ale.
Six weeks after we start, the 11 year old's mother says he needs to concentrate on remote school and can't play the game anymore. The lawyer needs to do some big name cases involving people in DC you've probably heard of. The librarian is gonna fade to the background of being married to our DM and just appearing occasionally on zoom. And Satvik and Kat are going to say "actually, we've been having fun, would you mind continuing this in a few weeks once the school year is underway and we can find more time?"
The elf mage turns out to be evil. Like, stab a nice old lady NPC, drink some of the dwarf's blood, do some hinky magic, turn into a demon. We start a Grand Tradition by slapping both a web spell and a sleep hex on him, and run the fuck away. We say goodbye to our weird little drunk dwarf friend, let the stoic archer fade into classic background npc form to come out when useful, and start in on actually having an adventure. Pretty soon, Gwent and Cass (the witch) are on a ship across the sea, with a kind monk with their own world-ending threat in the background (Mara, played by Ari who joined us). The ship also gives us our two most important NPC companions.
The intentional NPC was a cleric named Iago, a worshipper of the Cartographer of Scars. He's got cool religious background stuff, is generally kind and interesting, and when we have an unexpected simple one-off combat encounter on the boat (specifically to distract us from other boat drama), he proves to be quite useful.
The simple one-off combat encounter was a mystical plant that eats magic, ooo, aah. Colonizers love finding shit like that and bringing it home to show off. We do manage to have an exciting combat session that week, what a great one-off combat encounter!
...
Our witch takes cuttings, and there we get our second, *un*intentional NPC, the terrifying magic-eating science experiment. Well, okay, technically that one was CappyBo, and was around for about twelve sessions before we gifted it to the magic university to study. And took another cutting. This cutting was named PuppyBo, and stayed with us from session 26, a wee tiny magic cutting with a plan for very intentional magic feeding structures, to session 71, a veritable Audrey II who runs around in our combats to help heal long-lost friends and eat the magic of the big bad but not ours. PuppyBo was, essentially, what happens when a pile of disorganized heroes decide to raise a terrifyingly powerful baby who genuinely might be able to destroy the world someday. We love it so much, and it may well love us in return, or as close as its alien intelligence can love.
We're continuing to adventure. There's a powerful god-like force tied to the demon our former teammate became. Plot plot plot, clues, foreshadowing, nonsense. We lost about half a session to arguing about how heavy and expensive a lead box of a certain size would be, and four college-educated STEM majors (two of them explicitly mathematics teachers) would collectively forget everything they ever knew about surface area. A few weeks later, we kidnapped a kid. Somewhere in there, I destroyed the support pillars of a big temple by hitting them with my stick, without realizing I was also destroying the limitations of aforementioned god-like force. Oopsie!
Gwent hits _many_ things with her stick. Well, she hits some things. Other things we decide to have useful conversations with! Early on, Cass persuades a golem to be friends with us instead of killing us, which nets us the eternal gratitude of its long lost family and a pile of gems as reward. Later there's an octopus attacking a ship, and in a rare moment of "oh right I'm a ranger", Gwent pets it until it chills out. But fucking up architecture? It's amazing how many support pillars and statues you can hit with a stick if you're into that kind of thing.
While adventuring with Mara, we find a tower of a one-shot baddie, a wizard who was denied tenure, and is bitter about it. He's pretty good at dream magic, but we manage to punt him straight into The Dreaming and take his stuff. Well, his cool stuff. His boring stuff like his bedroll, we just short-sheet, or otherwise prank. We're sure he'll find his way out of The Dreaming and back someday. This paragraph is foreshadowing.
Things are heating up, we've got some powerful allies, we've attended at least one really swank party where the DM was excited to update us on the state of horse-drawn rail. And unfortunately, Ari's real world adventures in "having a wedding" and "complicated family stuff" are about to take over and he won't be able to play anymore. Obviously our last session with him needs to be good. It is time for a HEIST!
Tonight in our post-mortum, we learned that part of the excellence of the heist --the rival team of heisters, after the same artifacts during the same party who we join forces with and then gamble for final ownership of the objects-- was a last minute decision by JoshZed. Great NPCs, who got nicknamed Team Rocket and were chaotic con-artists for hire. Reasonably good sports about us winning at cards, even though the cheated just fucking _constantly_. We'll see them again once or twice before the end!
We've finished the heist, we've gotten the artifacts, time for more plot and a new person in our party, the muscley dude Kayin who has a ~dark past~ and works for one of our hyper-powerful mage allies. He's gonna accompany us on this "save the world" plan. Hi Scoop! Glad you're playing with me and Satvik!
Traveling across countries and continents and towards the land where our demon-enhanced former buddy resides. Along the way, we have to make a quick pit-stop in The Dreaming. They can affect time, it'll be like no time actually passed at all! There will be no consequences for going in and performing a little favor for the Dream Lords. Yeah, they're unhappy that a shitty un-tenured professor has been hanging around and causing problems. Someone needs to deal with him, and it is technically our fault he was in there in the first place.
During the fight, he gets off a fireball and it absolutely incinerates Gwent. She goes straight through the negative health options and into fully real-times dead. PC death is a hell of a thing, when our NPC cleric activates a spell he's been saving, and sacrifices his own ass to bring back to life mine. It's feels time! Thank you Iago. From now on, my character has a traumatic fear of fire. Burning to death will do that to you.
But when you die in the dream you die in real life, and when we return to the real world it is with heavier hearts and a smaller party. Iago was with us for 41 sessions, more than half the campaign. Now we are accelerating towards the end.
The last sixteen sessions are sortof more focused. More travel overland and by sea, Gwent fucks a mermaid, we meet Iago's family and his cousin becomes our new NPC buddy (she's a necromancer and pretty awesome). We use a flying machine to get around, and it's pretty nifty, although we do have to carefully explain to our magic-eating plant that NO NOT THIS MAGIC. As we track down a trail of corpses to find our big bad enemy, we find a pretty good last-minute sidequest in terms of a family potions business. What is this very well hidden potion? Are you cool with us taking the mage's bane? Thanks dude, we'll avenge your dad for you, his murderer's got a score to settle with us as well.
The final sidequest was all character driven all the time, as we meet a mummy oracle and play a game of question swap, answering truthfully and thoughtfully. Would've been an amazing early session, but was also an *incredible* near the end adventure. Wrapping up with bonding.
...and then we are standing in Harflour's tower. Our magic-eating plant keeps eating the illusions he's sending to bloviate at us while we wander on up. It's _really_ funny that he can't actually finish his pompous speech. Until he points out that he has a friend of ours and they're not doing well. A certain monk we haven't seen in a while? Shit.
And now it is this week. We're up the last few stairs, and indeed, we have Our Demon-Connected Elf Asshole standing next to a contraption holding the barely-still-alive body of Mara. Good to see you! Sorry the circumstances are not better. Remember that part where Gwent likes hitting things with her stick?
I hit the everliving _hell_ out of him with my stick. Our witch casts an incredibly effective Misfortune hex. There are two more fighters in our party and they have bladed weapons, coated with mage's bane. The combat lasts about two and a half rounds, and then he explodes in a dramatic display of fire, lightning, and blood.
And everything after that is epilogue. We made it. We destroyed the demon and saved the world.
And now we slow down for a week or two, and then soon Kat and Scoop and Satvik and JoshZed will meet again for a new campaign. This one will be set in Victorian London and the magic is starting to come back! I'm excited for it.
I hope the stories you tell, by yourself or with your friends, are bringing you joy. For two and a half years, and 71 sessions, Gwent has brought such to me.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: My parents helped invent LARPing, no big.
PostScript: This is the first game I've ever played in where I kept a reasonable adventure diary, to note down what's been going on. It is 225 pages long and full of silly asides where I call us all nerds or say hi to the DM since I know he reads sometimes. So if you read this entry and thought "wow that's a lot" there're 220 pages or so I cut out.
Anyways, I want to talk about it, and it's my journal, so I'm gonna.
***
Despite coming from a family that is quite literally geek royalty1, I haven't actually played _that_ many tabletop rpgs. There was of course the amazing game my da would run on occasional weekends for me and my sisters when we were wee ones. Bernie and Joe and Fish dragged me through five or six sessions of some DnD like in high school. Through late middle and early high school, I played Runequest DM'd by family friend Paul for me and Veronica and his nieces. I've played maybe half a dozen one-shots at this con or that (and another half-dozen midnight massacres: ALL HAIL KING TORG!)
But I've not played anything longer than a one-shot with strangers since graduating high school in 2007. And of the stuff I played then, none of it ever really formally ended, we just...kept going on until we didn't anymore. This is the first time I've ever played a character through her full adventure and gotten to say goodbye.
Gwent Varjarikilta is a shepherd and dyer who runs a big ol' farm full of misfits caring for sheep. She's got a buddy in the big city where she sells her dyes, and her buddy has asked her to go on a brief adventure to investigate some stuff. Accompanying her is a nervous peasant witch, a stoic archer from faraway lands, a snooty over-educated elf mage, and a hyperactive dwarf obsessed with swearing and ale.
Kat is a math teacher who is weathering the incredibly stressful summer of 2020, having way too many meetings to try and figure out what the next school year will be like, and not getting to actually recover from the lasting trauma that is taking hold of our country. Accompanying them is their buddy JoshZed, who is in a similar boat but knows how to DM games, a clever computer programmer from California, a quiet librarian who would rather knit something but likes joining in the combats, the DM's incredibly intelligent lawyer brother enjoying getting to be obnoxious, and the DM's hyperactive 11 year old nephew obsessed with swearing
Six weeks after we start, the 11 year old's mother says he needs to concentrate on remote school and can't play the game anymore. The lawyer needs to do some big name cases involving people in DC you've probably heard of. The librarian is gonna fade to the background of being married to our DM and just appearing occasionally on zoom. And Satvik and Kat are going to say "actually, we've been having fun, would you mind continuing this in a few weeks once the school year is underway and we can find more time?"
The elf mage turns out to be evil. Like, stab a nice old lady NPC, drink some of the dwarf's blood, do some hinky magic, turn into a demon. We start a Grand Tradition by slapping both a web spell and a sleep hex on him, and run the fuck away. We say goodbye to our weird little drunk dwarf friend, let the stoic archer fade into classic background npc form to come out when useful, and start in on actually having an adventure. Pretty soon, Gwent and Cass (the witch) are on a ship across the sea, with a kind monk with their own world-ending threat in the background (Mara, played by Ari who joined us). The ship also gives us our two most important NPC companions.
The intentional NPC was a cleric named Iago, a worshipper of the Cartographer of Scars. He's got cool religious background stuff, is generally kind and interesting, and when we have an unexpected simple one-off combat encounter on the boat (specifically to distract us from other boat drama), he proves to be quite useful.
The simple one-off combat encounter was a mystical plant that eats magic, ooo, aah. Colonizers love finding shit like that and bringing it home to show off. We do manage to have an exciting combat session that week, what a great one-off combat encounter!
...
Our witch takes cuttings, and there we get our second, *un*intentional NPC, the terrifying magic-eating science experiment. Well, okay, technically that one was CappyBo, and was around for about twelve sessions before we gifted it to the magic university to study. And took another cutting. This cutting was named PuppyBo, and stayed with us from session 26, a wee tiny magic cutting with a plan for very intentional magic feeding structures, to session 71, a veritable Audrey II who runs around in our combats to help heal long-lost friends and eat the magic of the big bad but not ours. PuppyBo was, essentially, what happens when a pile of disorganized heroes decide to raise a terrifyingly powerful baby who genuinely might be able to destroy the world someday. We love it so much, and it may well love us in return, or as close as its alien intelligence can love.
We're continuing to adventure. There's a powerful god-like force tied to the demon our former teammate became. Plot plot plot, clues, foreshadowing, nonsense. We lost about half a session to arguing about how heavy and expensive a lead box of a certain size would be, and four college-educated STEM majors (two of them explicitly mathematics teachers) would collectively forget everything they ever knew about surface area. A few weeks later, we kidnapped a kid. Somewhere in there, I destroyed the support pillars of a big temple by hitting them with my stick, without realizing I was also destroying the limitations of aforementioned god-like force. Oopsie!
Gwent hits _many_ things with her stick. Well, she hits some things. Other things we decide to have useful conversations with! Early on, Cass persuades a golem to be friends with us instead of killing us, which nets us the eternal gratitude of its long lost family and a pile of gems as reward. Later there's an octopus attacking a ship, and in a rare moment of "oh right I'm a ranger", Gwent pets it until it chills out. But fucking up architecture? It's amazing how many support pillars and statues you can hit with a stick if you're into that kind of thing.
While adventuring with Mara, we find a tower of a one-shot baddie, a wizard who was denied tenure, and is bitter about it. He's pretty good at dream magic, but we manage to punt him straight into The Dreaming and take his stuff. Well, his cool stuff. His boring stuff like his bedroll, we just short-sheet, or otherwise prank. We're sure he'll find his way out of The Dreaming and back someday. This paragraph is foreshadowing.
Things are heating up, we've got some powerful allies, we've attended at least one really swank party where the DM was excited to update us on the state of horse-drawn rail. And unfortunately, Ari's real world adventures in "having a wedding" and "complicated family stuff" are about to take over and he won't be able to play anymore. Obviously our last session with him needs to be good. It is time for a HEIST!
Tonight in our post-mortum, we learned that part of the excellence of the heist --the rival team of heisters, after the same artifacts during the same party who we join forces with and then gamble for final ownership of the objects-- was a last minute decision by JoshZed. Great NPCs, who got nicknamed Team Rocket and were chaotic con-artists for hire. Reasonably good sports about us winning at cards, even though the cheated just fucking _constantly_. We'll see them again once or twice before the end!
We've finished the heist, we've gotten the artifacts, time for more plot and a new person in our party, the muscley dude Kayin who has a ~dark past~ and works for one of our hyper-powerful mage allies. He's gonna accompany us on this "save the world" plan. Hi Scoop! Glad you're playing with me and Satvik!
Traveling across countries and continents and towards the land where our demon-enhanced former buddy resides. Along the way, we have to make a quick pit-stop in The Dreaming. They can affect time, it'll be like no time actually passed at all! There will be no consequences for going in and performing a little favor for the Dream Lords. Yeah, they're unhappy that a shitty un-tenured professor has been hanging around and causing problems. Someone needs to deal with him, and it is technically our fault he was in there in the first place.
During the fight, he gets off a fireball and it absolutely incinerates Gwent. She goes straight through the negative health options and into fully real-times dead. PC death is a hell of a thing, when our NPC cleric activates a spell he's been saving, and sacrifices his own ass to bring back to life mine. It's feels time! Thank you Iago. From now on, my character has a traumatic fear of fire. Burning to death will do that to you.
But when you die in the dream you die in real life, and when we return to the real world it is with heavier hearts and a smaller party. Iago was with us for 41 sessions, more than half the campaign. Now we are accelerating towards the end.
The last sixteen sessions are sortof more focused. More travel overland and by sea, Gwent fucks a mermaid, we meet Iago's family and his cousin becomes our new NPC buddy (she's a necromancer and pretty awesome). We use a flying machine to get around, and it's pretty nifty, although we do have to carefully explain to our magic-eating plant that NO NOT THIS MAGIC. As we track down a trail of corpses to find our big bad enemy, we find a pretty good last-minute sidequest in terms of a family potions business. What is this very well hidden potion? Are you cool with us taking the mage's bane? Thanks dude, we'll avenge your dad for you, his murderer's got a score to settle with us as well.
The final sidequest was all character driven all the time, as we meet a mummy oracle and play a game of question swap, answering truthfully and thoughtfully. Would've been an amazing early session, but was also an *incredible* near the end adventure. Wrapping up with bonding.
...and then we are standing in Harflour's tower. Our magic-eating plant keeps eating the illusions he's sending to bloviate at us while we wander on up. It's _really_ funny that he can't actually finish his pompous speech. Until he points out that he has a friend of ours and they're not doing well. A certain monk we haven't seen in a while? Shit.
And now it is this week. We're up the last few stairs, and indeed, we have Our Demon-Connected Elf Asshole standing next to a contraption holding the barely-still-alive body of Mara. Good to see you! Sorry the circumstances are not better. Remember that part where Gwent likes hitting things with her stick?
I hit the everliving _hell_ out of him with my stick. Our witch casts an incredibly effective Misfortune hex. There are two more fighters in our party and they have bladed weapons, coated with mage's bane. The combat lasts about two and a half rounds, and then he explodes in a dramatic display of fire, lightning, and blood.
And everything after that is epilogue. We made it. We destroyed the demon and saved the world.
And now we slow down for a week or two, and then soon Kat and Scoop and Satvik and JoshZed will meet again for a new campaign. This one will be set in Victorian London and the magic is starting to come back! I'm excited for it.
I hope the stories you tell, by yourself or with your friends, are bringing you joy. For two and a half years, and 71 sessions, Gwent has brought such to me.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: My parents helped invent LARPing, no big.
PostScript: This is the first game I've ever played in where I kept a reasonable adventure diary, to note down what's been going on. It is 225 pages long and full of silly asides where I call us all nerds or say hi to the DM since I know he reads sometimes. So if you read this entry and thought "wow that's a lot" there're 220 pages or so I cut out.
no subject
on 2023-02-17 01:00 am (UTC)My experience with long games is similar to yours prior to this one. I have been playing *D&D since 1983. OMG, 40 years! In that time the only games I've played to a meaningful, planned conclusion have been deliberately shorts ones: single session one-shots (and even many of those failed to complete in time!) up through 4-session adventures.
Everything else we played until it fizzled. Often that was because life interfered. Players got busy or moved, or a school year came to a close and people left or lost interest 3 months later. Other times a game just lost steam and the last few players still engaged agreed it was time to quit.
I should add a small caveat to that "never".... There were games I quit first because they weren't right for me. I think those games imploded shortly after as the problems that drove me to quit were major. But it's possible one or two of those games continued on just fine with the remaining players who were content with them.
no subject
on 2023-02-20 07:39 pm (UTC)Paul D.? If so, I'm envisioning him GM'ing a bunch of high schoolers, and that sounds really entertaining.
Oooh, this sounds delightful. "Unintentional" in the sense that the players moved things in this direction and JoshZed found that he had to start running it as an NPC?
no subject
on 2023-02-20 09:13 pm (UTC)This did end up working with a few other things even if the PCs had trouble picking up on them. For example, they found out that the plant was now able to go to the Dreaming, but magical plants shouldn't be able to dream. Necromancer NPC mentioned by Kat above had to finally put together that since they had a powerful dream magic object with them, the plant had likely been eating a lot of dream magic.
They also figured out very early on that the plant could sense magic but was not able to "see" in a conventional sense. Then it was eventually able to see, but the PCs did not figure out why. They still did not figure it out when they found out that the plant was repeatedly eating scrying spells from the BBEG. Essentially the plant had learned to see by scrying on its own location. I did tell them after the campaign was over that that had happened.
A lot of what I did with the plant was rule-of-cool or rule-of-making-the-players-worry and then had to come up with mechanics afterwards to be consistent.
no subject
on 2023-02-20 09:21 pm (UTC)LOL -- okay, that's marvelous.
In general, this sounds like the sort of roll-with-the-complications serendipity that always makes RPGs especially fun for me. (AKA "no plan survives contact with your players".)