On Dungeons and their Dragons: A Hiatus Tale

[Grimmie]

Hey dungeoneers.

I'm not really sure how to put this, but I guess you can probably tell by the ~8 month hiatus on my latest adventure that my interest in the story is flagging a little bit.

Having watched other people run campaigns I've realised I'm sort of running a kill X monster in Y location with Z setback, and I want to avoid doing that. I want to make some rich NPCs for you to interact with, and flesh out towns better than "They're corrupt" or "They have a big library" or "They're farmers".

I'm not really one-hundred percent sure on how I'm going to do that yet, however. Maybe I need to read more, or sit down and write down a couple of long arcs first.

I love the team, I'd hate to see Glib', Forenrond, Thor and Orovan (and an honourable mention to Thororar and Bart) put to waste by a total story re-set, so I thought maybe we could throw a few ideas around between us and get the campaign back on track.

Ideally the team would find a purpose other than "Good natured friends helping people out whilst having a wander", so that I can focus on a particular sort of adventure path instead of throwing random hooks at you and hoping you enjoy them.

Do you want to be thrust into perilous situations to recover magic items or artefacts? Do you want to be mercenaries, or crusaders against the evil horses bubbling under the surface of the lands? Do you seek fame or fortune? Are you all friends of the forest and want to re-locate somewhere more rural, or city folk looking to rub shoulders with royalty?

We could go crazy, advance you a few levels, and do a time-skip to when your team's a little more battle-hardened, but that might blow all the fun out of lower level character building. I dunno.

If you're all still interested I'll try and get the current game finished, but in the meantime I'd love some input, feedback, direction - whatever you have to offer!

[Dog Pants]

I love your campaign Grimmie. I love the detail you put into your world, I love our characters, I'm excited to find out more about it. For me, as a GM, the holy grail is to have the players find their own adventures and simply simulate the events as they cause them. It's not easy, you really have to put them into a place where they have a clear enough view of the world to visualise what they want to achieve by themselves, and to do that you need to paint a very vivid picture. I think you have a natural affinity to do that, based on what I've already seen. This is far easier if your players have clear backgrounds and motives. You can tease them into roleplaying things that you know their characters would do, and as long as your characters have a reason to stick together you only need to concentrate on one at a time. Of course you need ways to get your characters to stick together, and throwing in standalone adventures is good for building initial connections and breaking up the campaigns. All my opinion of course - I've been a GM for a long time, but not everyone runs things as I do and not all players like the same thing.

You should have a few hooks for Shankley from his background, but his overarching ideology is that of an idealist anarchist. He doesn't realise it yet, he just doesn't like authority at the moment, but that disdain could be tugged by the GM and nurtured into a campaign of revolution against an oppressive ruler if you wanted to.

[Roman Totale]

The campaign has been brilliant so far, and I've loved every second of it. I'm sure all our characters have something in common that would lead us towards a common goal that could be woven into an overriding story arc. Also Glib has defeated loads of evil things in the past, and rescued hundreds of kingdoms so I'm sure something could crop up there

[FatherJack]

I've loved it so far, the detail and work Grimmie's put in is great and I like how we amuse ourselves with IC conversations. I've mentioned before that it would be good to explore the world a little perhaps visiting places where characters have already been, or just heading off somewhere and finding adventure on the road.

[fabyak]

As an outsider just following the story I've enjoyed it immensely

[buzzmong]

As an outsider just following the story I've enjoyed it immensely

[shot2bits]

Only just remembered to reply to this, I agree with what everyone else has said, thoroughly enjoyed the games so far and you manage to set the scene very well imho.

I do agree with you though that the group could maybe use something really ties us together a bit more, a common cause or overarching goal we would all like to see acheived. maybe there's someone we've pissed off with our recent adventures who wants revenge or something like that which could possibly naturally bring us together as a group.

[Dog Pants]

A villain? What would Scooby Doo do?

[Joose]

I remember a short campaign I played far in the Before Times that a mate of mine ran. He had a handful of largely unrelated adventures that he wanted to tie together somehow, so he started us off in a small town with the overall quest of marching off somewhere quite far away, chasing some evil wizard or something, and the unrelated adventures were stuff we stumbled into on our way there (which later turned out to have all been set up be the evil dude to try and stop us getting to him. Sneaky! And also I'm pretty sure planned retroactively )

[FatherJack]

It was Bogrot's Mum all along!