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wearykatie · 5 months

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Journey Into the Wild Beyond

Chapter 2: Hither (Part 2)

There’s a thing that happens sometimes when running tabletop games: railroading. In a plot-driven game, Game Masters/Dungeon Masters need to get the party to follow the plot somehow. Unlike in video games, tabletop games don’t have quest logs and map markers telling you where to go and what to do. I know I previously talked about “I want to go there”, and I wholeheartedly believe in and support that idea, but for the sake of keeping games from being endless wandering, you need to have a clear goal with reminders for the party.

On the other hand, if you do this too often or present only a single way forward, the players can feel like they’re being railroaded down a non-branching path where their choices don’t matter. This is a tricky balance to maintain. So how do we do it?

Spider-Sense

In addition to the dreams that each player would experience in proximity to their lost item, any player who had a lost item in the current zone would feel a magnetic pull or sorts. They would know which direction their item was in and maybe an approximate distance. This is mostly from the book. How to keep them from going straight there and ending the chapter in a single session?

Well, Hither has a neat built-in way. The item is with the hag, the hag is in the town of Downfall, and the most convenient way to enter Downfall is through Brigand’s Tollway, occupied by the harengon brigands and their leader, Agdon Longscarf. But, the party learned that someone had recently been to Downfall and gotten out…mostly safely.

A goblin named Jingle Jangle had stolen a key from the hag’s cottage, but the brigands had stolen a bag of truffles from her and beat her up on the way back. She would know a way in. Jingle Jangle was a bit odd though. A hermit who once had a deep fear of finding herself on the wrong side of a locked door. Bavlorna removed that fear, but replaced it with an obsession with collecting keys and a dulled sense of self. Jingle Jangle only refers to herself in the third person.

The party went to Telemy Hill, a living hill where the goblin made her home. The hill was concerned about Jingle Jangle (who hadn’t left her cave in days) and let the party know it through two living trees who Hakewood named Treech and Trong.

I have exactly the players I deserve.

When they met with Jingle Jangle, the party got the information they needed through talking and through kindness. They offered her food and talked with her for a while. I started noting things like this because I wanted it to pay off at some point. If the players were going to show kindness, make friends, and attempt non-violence, then they would be rewarded for it.

And it wouldn’t be long before they surprised me again.

Hareraiser

Jingle Jangle gave the party a map with a relatively safe path through Brigand’s Tollway. There were still harengon brigands about, but at least they wouldn’t be marching right through their camp. Time for stealth checks!

DM’s Bane #413: Pass Without a Trace

If you’re unfamiliar, Pass Without a Trace is a spell that gives +10 to stealth checks to any ally within a 30 foot radius. I believe it was Artie who cast this on the party as they entered Brigand’s Tollway, and it lasted for one hour. The harengons only had a passive perception of 14, so as long as the stealth rolls were at least 5 or higher even without a modifier, they would pass.

The final check was at a chokepoint to get into Downfall and Agdon Longscarf was there with his 16 passive perception. Confrontation time! Agdon tried to shake them down for everything they had. This is a badass bandit who has been stealing from people all over Hither and giving their stuff to the hag. Clearly a fight was going to happen.

They offered him friendship.

This isn’t a D&D campaign, this is a preschool cartoon.

Okay, I’d let them try to do some convincing and then set a high DC (Difficulty Class), because Agdon wasn’t entirely unreasonable. He hated the hags as much as anyone. The party made Persuasion checks and succeeded.

You know, that was a cool encounter where Agdon would be running around at high speed, hitting the players, and doing some hefty damage. The best way to stop him would be to grab the end of his scarf and hold him in place, at which point he would surrender in a panic because he doesn’t like being trapped.

Well, I guess the party has some bandit friends now.

How Can We Screw This Up More?

Downfall was pretty straight forward. There was a path around a central bog with a large three story cottage on stilts. Along the way, they party met an elf without a heart (theirs was taken by Bavlorna in another deal gone wrong), found reanimated heads of deceased frog kings displayed on pikes, and the current ruler of the frog people, a puppet king who reluctantly served the hag. He allowed the party to pass through to the cottage because they had found the hag’s book - Bavlorna’s Big Book of Bad Blood.

As a joke, I had one of the king’s men take the party to the dock where they were introduced to a luxury boat known as the Royal Skiff. After being told of all of its features, the frog pointed them to the boat they would actually be taking, a rickety row boat that looked like it was about to sink.

They didn’t even hesitate to steal the Royal Skiff. I didn’t penalize them for that because that was absolutely the correct call.

So, I’ve mentioned frog people, or bullywugs. These were prevalent throughout Downfall, as well as a giant toad, and Hakewood himself kept a pet toad familiar under his hat. I say this because Rhin’s player wrote in a character quirk that Rhin was afraid of frogs and toads. This is about to be really funny, but first, a dungeon crawl.

In one of the first rooms of the cottage, the party found sewing supplies and pincushion dolls. One of the dolls had four arms - similar to the arms that grabbed Ana in Elora’s dream at the start of the chapter. She grabbed this doll, filled her alchemy jug with oil, lit the oil, and held the doll over it for a Batman-style interrogation.

I hated that the doll was just a mundane doll and not actually alive or linked to anyone, because that was hilarious.

You Did What to the Gelatinous Cube?

In the previous part I mentioned having an idea brewing in response to Elora trying to do some science on living mud creatures in the middle of battle. Now, I’ve got a party full of magic school students. An alchemist, a wizard, a cleric, a druid, and a fighter. Their different classes and backgrounds would give them unique sets of skills, and if they wanted to take a non-confrontational approach to the campaign, I could allow them to use these skills to do some off the wall stuff.

So when they found a clogged up well in the cottage feeding a small wading pool, they started doing some science. Elora determined that what little water there was had a slight acidic quality to it. The others noticed the well was full of water but it didn’t seem to be moving. Artie made a check with all of this information and figured out there was a gelatinous cube in the well.

If you haven't seen one of these, it’s like a 10 foot cube of acid jello.

The players began asking if they could neutralize the gelatinous cube by introducing a base because science. Artie piped up that he had some mushrooms because he’s a Circle of Spores druid and into growing mushrooms. Reasoning that mushrooms are alkaline, that could act as a base and–

Me: “Hang on, let me think about what that would actually do.” Players: “Bases neutralize acids, so–” Me: “No, I know. I’m trying to figure out what it would do to a gelatinous cube.”

Yeah, weirdly, they don’t cover this in the Monster Manual or the Dungeon Master’s Guide, so I was left to make a ruling on my own. Now, the obvious answer is this is a magical creature who does acid damage and a handful of mushrooms aren’t going to do anything to it, so just have the cube attack the players and do a long boring combat.

But I want to reward this creativity and have silly solutions to problems in my campaign, so they toss the mushrooms into the well. A moment later, the gelatinous cube rises out of it, partially dissolving into water and looking as angry as jello can look. The party ran upstairs and left that little surprise for someone else.

The Line Has Been Toad

On the way through the cottage, the party had a look at that Big Book of Bad Blood. It’s basically Bavlorna’s “burn book” where she talks about how much she hates everyone. The party discovered one entry had been erased and replaced with Zybilna’s entry. The replaced entry was faded and difficult to make out, but with some investigating, they were able to determine it said “Natasha”.

That becomes important later.

For now, the party is ready to confront their first hag. I decided that barring extraordinary circumstances, there would be no getting around the hag fights. These were Chaotic Evil hags who had done horrible things. There was no bargaining, they needed to die. Bavlorna was paranoid, wouldn’t listen to the party’s attempts to get her to stand down, and she felt cornered by the way they were circling her.

Fight time. And I discovered a massive flaw in the encounter design right away. Yeah, Bavlorna has a pretty big weakness in that she can be slightly nerfed by someone running “widdershins” around her (counter clockwise) which induces a sneezing fit to prevent her from doing some of her moves, but she has minions who attack three times per turn. A party member almost went down right there. The encounter, allegedly, is doable at level 2 or 3. The party was level 4 and it almost went bad for them.

Eventually, Bavlorna fell, musing that her sister Endelyn was wrong - it wasn’t Elora’s sister who would be the downfall of the Hourglass Coven.

With Bavlorna dead, Rhin felt a stronger pull, leading her upstairs to the attic and a room with a giant brass toad statue that acted as an pocket dimension.

I swear, that’s straight from the book. I had forgotten all about that container when I assigned Rhin’s missing item to Bavlorna. Rhin, the one with the fear of frogs and toads. But, she pushed through her fear, reached inside, and pulled out a rosary with a raven’s skull on it.

A vision showed Rhin the same scene as her dream, only she remembers things differently now. She joined the widower in his prayers to the earth and offered him comfort. She discovers a drive to revolutionize how funerals and burial rights are done, offering cheap and creative ways to honor the dead and respect the traditions of them and the loved ones they leave behind.

The rosary itself, named Eternity’s Canvas, would be a legendary item for Rhin that would grant her a feat and a couple of special abilities. I wanted these recovered items to be special, and this was the first.

Rhin was kind of a mortuary student at Magewood Academy. Her player decided to flavor the goblin ability Fury of the Small as Rhin's familiarity with anatomy helping her deal extra damage. And since Rhin's player and I are both fans of Caitlin Doughty/Ask a Mortician (I think fae may have introduced me to that channel actually), I themed Rhin's rosary and restored creativity around that.

The rest of the party saw a portrait that confirmed the appearances of the other hags, as well as another - a human woman with dark hair whose name was scratched off of the name plate and whose face had been torn off the portrait. They had the four armed Endelyn Moongrave and the doll-like Skabatha Nightshade left to find.

Hither, Thither, and Yon

With the first hag defeated and the first item recovered, I had pretty effectively communicated what the players could look forward to for the rest of the game. They knew the stakes, they knew the rewards, they knew what was expected of them. Now they were off to the next land, Thither, but first they had a few stops to make. I’ll roll all of that together in the next part.

#d&d #d&d 5e #dm #gm #journey into the wild beyond #the wild beyond the witchlight #puns will continue until morale improves #is it me or are these getting longer

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inkskinned · 7 months

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the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.