#Almenor D&D

[jakey-beefed-it]

The Three DM reactions to Player Theories are, in my experience: 1.) Wow that is wildly inaccurate 2.) Shit they’re on to me/Wow they figured it out nice job guys 3.) ...Well that’s much better than what I had planned so that’s true now

The trick is to never let on which one you’re feeling

#Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Almenor D&D

[motheatenscarf]

Y'ALL.

I treated myself to some expensive dice to celebrate my space themed GOOlock reaching Level 20, and LOOK at them!

#I'm so happy ;A; #i was so prepared to be disappointed but they're SO PRETTY!!! #dice #Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D #Hakim ben Asenath

[jakey-beefed-it]

As of Wednesday, when we do the post-campaign wrap-up and epilogues, I will have officially finished DMing a long-term D&D campaign that went from level 1 to level 20 (and then some). 

I’ve been DMing games since I got the 2nd edition PHB and DMG for christmas in 1992, and this is the first one that I actually, deliberately, finished, and it didn’t break up due to people moving away or other life circumstances.

It was rough getting here. The first part of the campaign kinda exploded under mildly contentious circumstances, with only two of six players returning as we continued (and two others coming in at level 8), and the last part nearly derailed when one of those two long-term players blindsided us by ditching the whole thing like ten sessions before the end, but by god, me and those three players finished the fucking thing. And while I learned a lot and will do things differently next time, you know what? It was pretty decent.

#Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Almenor D&D #Gonna run another campaign in the same setting but like 100 years later #starting in a couple months probs #maybe a little sooner #but this is about the achievement not the future

[jakey-beefed-it]

I just spent several hours finally, finally, hashing out the calendar for my d&d setting

This is after I ran a 3 year long campaign in it, and am over a month into a second campaign in it

I didn't go full Tolkien on it, thankfully, but I did come up with a few different holidays and regional differences in names of months depending on societies

The good news is that I've now got this very handy reference which I can use to plan events and keep track of time in a consistent way. I can even note the PCs birthdays.

The bad news is that I feel fully wrung out, like a husk of a man with grainy eyeballs and a dull ache at the base of my skull.

#Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Mistbound D&D #Almenor D&D

[motheatenscarf]

Now that the main campaign of Almenor has wrapped up, our DM wants to run a fun haunted house/mystery horror type mini-campaign of like 3-4 sessions and goes from levels 1-3

I'm playing a Blood Hunter gentleman detectorctive who is slowly succumbing to a werewolf curse that I'm going to unleash on the party when we hit level 3 and he snaps and goes full wolf as he selects Order of the Lycan for his subclass :D

His name is Aloysius von Stumpf and he isn't TOO concerned that the tonic that keeps his curse at bay is becoming less and less effective. He's sure it'll be fine.

#Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D

[jakey-beefed-it]

Since my old character Arylla ‘Ryl the Wraith’ Darkmantle is going to be a prominent NPC in my upcoming campaign, I thought I’d take another crack at drawing her.

Took some of the elements from FFXIV miqo’te Ryl, and added them to her ‘canonical’ d&d design where she’s a half-drow*. Mostly the too-cute haircut, though the lil beauty mark and rounder face came through as well. I think the metallic accent color will be silver rather than gold, as well.

The most important thing to convey is that she’s the saddest poorest little meow-meow, complete with tragic backstory driving her half-mad with grief, and more than her share of atrocities in trying to cope with that.

Gonna scan this in probably tomorrow and then ask my fiancee very nicely if she’ll color it for me in exchange for a nice dinner out or some such. She’s just much, much, much better at digital art than I am, and I want this to look nice.

*duskwright elezen have the right skin and hair tones but they’re too fucking tall and also elezen proportions are nightmarish, whereas miqo’te are smol and cute and keepers of the moon can also get the right skin/hair, so in ffxiv, she’s a catgirl.

#Jake plays Final Fantasy XIV #Jake's dumb characters #Arylla Darkmantle #Ryl the Wraith #Jake plays Dungeons and Dragons #Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Almenor D&D

[motheatenscarf]

So, the spell Dark Star in 5e is fucking great, and my DM let me take it for my GOOlock because he had a big space theme through his pact with the Old Ones.

It's a big mean aoe that basically opens up an 80' diameter black hole in the middle of a room and does stupid amounts of damage while also creating difficult terrain and magical darkness in the same area.

Which, yeah, 8th level spell, it should be good.

But because it's basically a black hole, I would always visually describe the people who died from it as getting stretched and crushed into oblivion rather than just being "disintegrated" like the spell describes. This is a thing that black holes do and is called "spaghetification," and it would be a gnarly way to go.

I feel like this is relatively common knowledge and me explaining this seems unnecessary, but all of this is to build up to the saddest story which is that the last time I was able to cast this spell as my Warlock, Hakim, I cast it on a bunch of demons that were trying to steal the throne of heaven (endgame is epic, y'all) and to announce this declared;

"Welcome to Hakim's spaghetti factory!"

and nobody got the joke :(

#Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D #Hakim ben Asenath

[motheatenscarf]

Anyway, after like, 2 weeks off and only half-sessions for 2 weeks before that, today's the first REAL game of Almenor D&D we've had since the whole group got into FF14, and on the one hand I'm glad we're back, but on the other, I'm worried about how in-the-moment folks will be, especially since we have maybe 4 or 5 more sessions before the campaign ends.

I wanted to wait until the campaign ended before focusing on FF14 in earnest like this, but people started up before me, and fomo is a thing. I'm glad I'm playing it, but uhhhhh, my concerns were WELL PLACED, the game is eating up my soul and free time, which I really wanted to spend on Almenor for this last stretch before the finish line.

Oh well :T

Gonna give it my all, I've never actually gotten to finish a campaign before so I'm looking forward to it!

#Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D

[motheatenscarf]

In Almenor D&D last night our Cleric succeeded on his FOURTH Divine Intervention in the campaign.

We were doing SOME BULLSHIT, I will get into the specifics beneath a read more in a second, but we hit level 20 at the end of the session, so that was the final time he's ever going to have to roll for a success on his divine intervention. At level 20, Clerics just get one free miracle a week that they automatically succeed on.

Again, this is his fourth success, so let's go through them;

The first one was when we had a battle in the artifacts room of an ancient temple, some of the artifacts were destroyed in the ensuing fight. The clerics there weren't too worried about that, they were more sad that some of their people had died, but it was a cultural blow al the same. Flint, our Cleric, prayed for the artifacts to be restored and rolled to meet a success.

The second time was after we killed an elder brain dragon, he prayed that the copper dragon who had been corrupted would be spiritually restored so it could reincarnate since that's apparently what happens to dragons here.

The third one was after we killed a lich. During our fight with her, she'd cursed the fuuuuck out of some of us and we weren't healing or getting better and were quickly decaying, and the dungeon up to her had been a slog, so we were all out of spell slots at that point. The cleric prayed to have people restored and it worked.

This final time was the BIG ONE. There is in this universe a lich god of secrets, heavily vecna-inspired but more interesting because he's not a cackling cartoon villain, he's a traumatized former slave trying to ensure he's never under the boot of a master again. He's done some terrible, reprehensible things to get where he is, but his face-heel turn came after someone murdered his son to get to him. Then he made his grief the world's problem and started snorting souls like coke. His son has been dead for like two thousand years but we've concocted some bullshit. After traveling to Elysium and then Arvandor to reunite the son's soul with his long lost wife, we acquired some artificially created organic bodies that were empty of souls and true polymorphed them into the correct shape and appearance to match them. We figured with that kind of sympathetic bond, we could then use like, planar binding to stitch the souls into the bodies, burning 9th level spell slots to make the thing stick for a year.

Our DM tends to reward investment in a miracle/Wish, the more resources you put into it, the more it costs you, the more you get out of it. If we'd just prayed to have these two NPCs restored free of charge, it probably wouldn't have worked, but through expending some major resources and reputations and fucking 9th level spell slots all around, we got more out of it.

So the cleric prayed that his goddess, the goddess of compassion, would see what we were trying to do, would see that restoring this lich god's son and ensuring there was anything at all he cared about on the material plane would maybe help to change him and keep him on our side, and she would help make this a permanent bond.

We knew at least we'd buy ourselves a year and we could try to work out a permanent solution once the campaign was over, so our cleric had nothing to lose by trying. He tried, needed a 19 or below, he had like a 1 in 5 chance of succeeding on the d100, and he rolled an 11.

Fuck yeah!

So, his goddess made it so that yeah, no, those are just... their bodies now. Souls as tied to them as if they'd been born to them. Resurrection spells would work on them now even if something else did happen to them. They were fully fucking alive again after having their lives cut short two thousand years prior.

The final goddamn miracle he had to roll for was a BIG doozey but like, the most perfect thing I can think of for a Life Cleric to accomplish, we're so proud of him.

#Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D

[jakey-beefed-it]

Tonight in D&D, the party confronted a furious archangel in the process of falling from grace. He very nearly roasted them to a crisp, but they managed to escape via teleportation and plane shift. Just in time to see the divine enforcer show up and declare that he was in violation of the peace treaty keeping the gods from directly intervening in the world. Which, as he had physically showed up in the middle of a city and been throwing (un?)holy fire all over the place, was patently true. 

The PCs are scattered across two planes, horrorstruck as they realize that if the archangel in question doesn’t ‘go quietly’, so to speak, then the conflict from the beginning of time, the Godswar, is back on, and the world itself was nearly destroyed the first time around.

In short, this was me at the end of the session, declaring a 3 week break while I travel around Canada:

#Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Almenor D&D

[motheatenscarf]

Almenor D&D continues to go well.

Well... for the players, anyway, our characters are living through what's being called a GODSWAR, so it's... bad.

But there's another dead god to toll up in the godswar!

Not killed by us this time, most of them haven't been.

It was the guy whose job it was to sort the dead. So there's a huge backlog of dead souls who are waiting for judgement, basically everyone who's died from the destruction of this Godswar in the last week. It's fucking anarchy in the afterlife now.

The GOOD news is that means that the boundaries between the afterlife are broken down and people who have been separated can now reunite. Like our Cleric's dead mother and father who were assigned to different afterlives. We're taking advantage of that as an opportunity to jailbreak the Lich God's son and his wife so we can have a bargaining chip if the lich god tries to betray us.

The BAD news is the king of hell, uh, definitely stole the divine essence of the god of Judgement and the afterlife and he definitely is leading this invasion of the upper planes so he can steal the divine essence left behind by the Queen of Heaven, goddess of Glory, who had previously killed herself rather than allow Corruption to find her.

So.

Um.

We have a plan to weaken him, and it's already on our to-do list, but he's twice as strong as he ought to be now, and if he gets his hands on Glory, he will have definitely gotten that by going through our Cleric's goddess, the goddess of Compassion, who is the LAST god standing in the upper planes apparently! So, we're racing on our way to get to the Thing We Have To Do, and we teleported in blind, arriving we're not sure how far from our target destination, and everything is on fire, and we just heard a big monster roar???

So.... I'm sure that's normal.

#Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D #Hakim ben Asenath

[motheatenscarf]

Almenor D&D went really well tonight!

My boy successfully defended his thesis and we got official aid to help prevent the return of the setting's primordial eldritch god of chaos which we're just calling Tiamat!

Also a priest of the god we killed whose essence we banished into the abyss where Tiamat resides ran into the Temple of Bahamut screaming about "Five heads, one hatred, she is coming!" before barfing up bugs until he uh... deflated?? Into an Oogie Boogie style skin sack??

But I'm sure that's normal, nothing to be concerned about!

#Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D #Hakim ben Asenath

[motheatenscarf]

Almenor D&D went very well tonight and was intensely fun and memorable, the whole party managed to kill a god and we're not even at endgame yet.

So much backstory, but the shortest version is thus;

Our DM has established that some of the gods are mortals who used HORRIFYING fanes of immense and profane power to ascend to godhood, essentially merging themselves with the natural divine power of a concept given form. These gods are generally more powerful and less changeable than the naturally occurring ones who shift with mortal expectations and belief, and they also hate each other and have vendettas against one another. One of these bad dudes is a mortal once named Istaphon who merged with the concept of Corruption/Ruin and has been manipulating the Sun Goddess, the Sun Pope, the Sun Religion, and now there's a big war between the gods that's spiraling out of control onto the material plane causing untold destruction and their followers are deciding now's the time to be crazed zealots about it. I mean, they were before, but now even moreso to the tune of a full on siege and straight up plagues of Egypt type shit going on.

Notably, there is no gate or bulwark or veil or ANYTHING that can physically separate the gods from the material plane in this setting; they can come down whenever they want. The only thing that was ever stopping them was mutually assured destruction and the threat of the Material Plane's destruction meaning no more followers meaning no more power. The ascended mortal gods don't have to worry about that as much though, and ever since the Sun Goddess took her own life rather than allow Istaphon's corruption to reach her, her Pantheon and church started getting more paranoid and zealous, and her divine sidekick god, described as an archangel, went BERSERK in her absence and apparently had a semi-mortal daughter, whom we... y'know, killed, because she was full on Spanish Inquisition evil, so he went insane and tried to kill us, and then the divine balif god showed up to try and drag the archangel home, but he got ganked, and then the archangel's equivalent in hell went, oh sweet, no cops to stop me now! And then archangel killed HER before our lich god came to stop him, and then every other god went, fuck it, everyone else is doing it, and now there's a godswar, and we're in it, and it's... insane.

So, we're trying to pick up the pieces where we can, and currently in this session the Sun Pope was leading a siege against the city we'd JUST freed from the Sun Emperor (who was the husband of the archangel's lunatic daughter whom we murdered, so he's not happy with us either) and was vowing to make us pay for our apostacy. We brought the Orcish god of ass kicking, Sun Pope called down the god of Civilization, they duked it out in a field while we fought off hordes of angels and pitted straight up dragons against each other.

We're level 18, insane shit is happening!

We're only fighting HERE instead of being at any of the other like, FORTY places that are about this awful, because the Sun Pope has an artifact we need to forge a godkilling weapon designed by our lich-god buddy named Bel-Katash, whom we call B-Kats, because 1.) we have to break the fanes that turned these mortals into gods in the first place so no more can be made and also so that they can't be used to summon the WORST of the asshole gods, an ancient primordial being of chaos who takes on the form of a dragon, a reinvented Tiamat, and 2.) it would actually be great to have something to threaten these assholes with so they stop fucking up our material plane! We should maybe kill the gods, actually!

Anyway, B-Kats only designed this weapon because he was a mortal himself once, but he made a baaad deal with, essentially Istaphon, out of desperation to escape execution at the hands of his enslavers. B-Kats isn't a GOOD dude, he only ascended to godhood by snorting the souls of his empire of descendants like a line of coke after a thousand years of lichdom to gain enough power to kill the previous god of undeath and steal his job, but he isn't the WORST dude because at least all he wants is never to be a slave again with no one holding power over him or his soul. He doesn't want the world to be plunged into perpetual chaos and he has no interest in the petty wars raged by the other gods so... fine, we'll work with that!

Back to the present, we manage to finally punch a hole in the Sun Pope's defenses and incapacitate her in like 2 rounds with some of our hardest hitting tricks, and she calls upon her angelic guide to help her. And he answers!

Except her angelic guide is Istaphon, who wants to brag about his evil plan and thank her for starting his mission of ruin so thoroughly. Then he casts a plague on all of us because he also means ruin and corruption in the form of DISEASE and PESTILENCE, so that's fun! We've all got like maybe 10 rounds at most before this plague kills us if we run, and we have maybe ONE round before he obliterates us if we stay; what are we gonna do?

We all say fuck it, hail mary, go down swinging!

Sorcerer starts it off by using her 9th level spell slot to cast Wish and try to break the strands of weave stitching Istaphon to Ruin. She makes some STUPID high save to succeed and then another so as not to die immediately. She succeeds on both, but is knocked down to 0 hp and has her strength reduced from trying to control THIS much magic around, y'know, RUIN HIMSELF. My Warlock sees this and is close enough that he can try some insane bullshit, making a grab for the successfully untethered essence of Ruin and casting Plane Shift to banish it to the depths of the Abyss where Tiamat is still trapped. The hit lands, the thing is banished, but my boy fails his Con save and instantly dies from, y'know, Plane Shift being a melee spell and having to PHYSICALLY TOUCH the IMMATERIAL CONCEPT OF RUIN in order to banish it from the Material Plane.

With Istaphon momentarily weakened, our Cleric casts HIS hail mary and casts Gate, trying to call forth Bel-Katash so he can have his revenge. Bel-Katash comes through and is like, HELL YEAH, and restrains Istaphon, freeing up our Rogue to grab the artifact off the Sun Pope's rotting body and assemble the final piece of the blade before landing a fucking crit and shattering him on impact, the blow rupruting out and killing basically everything below a certain HP threshold in like a mile radius and instantly killing our unconscious Sorcerer and almost killing our Cleric and Rogue, who are still plague stricken and fucked up.

Bel-Katash says good job, I know you still need that blade to finish destroying the fanes, but that blade is a loaner and I'll be coming back for it. Ominous shit, but COOL, thanks, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it, I guess.

Cleric now only has like 3 rounds before he dies, and our DM just asks what he does. Thirty seconds of panicked spell scrolling and spell slot availability checking later, he can, in order, cleanse our Rogue, revive me and our Sorcerer, and then DIES, with like... one level 2 spell slot left and nothing else. Sorcerer and I wake up just in time to see him gurgling on his own diseased blood as our Rogue begins to panic because he thinks he's the only survivor. Rest in-

Just kidding, Death Ward kicks in and he's at 1 hit point! Fuck yeah, Clerics!

We head back to our headquarters in the recently liberated palace over a mile long march of corpses and we are all FUCKED UP with several levels of exhaustion and over the trek realize that my boy has a withered and nonfunctional main hand that he can barely cast spells with and is definitely cursed as fuck, but we did it!!... for now.

There is... so much else to do, but we assembled the god killing blade and it is OPEN SEASON NOW, BABY! Curses be damned!

It was a very cool moment where everyone got to show off and do what they do best, and it was very fun. I'm still super hype about it and this was like 4 hours ago. My Warlock is definitely getting a new fucked up looking cursed arm out of this and GOD, I wish I wasn't broke from Christmas shopping, I want to commission art of this new look so badly, my poor Warlock boy is like if Tyr were a stringbean nerd, sacrificing his arm to delay the fuckin wolf time and give the world time to prepare.

#Caitlin Plays D&D #Almenor D&D #Hakim ben Asenath

[jakey-beefed-it]

One of my players decided to leave my ongoing d&d campagin... like two or three months before it wraps up. They’ve been in it for the past three+ years. And admittedly they have expressed frustration with d&d as a system on a number of occasions- this player was also the DM of the game I got to play Altanin in, and it has fizzled out twice due to their frustrations -and admittedly I’d be lying if I said this came as a total surprise. 

I feel... less upset than I probably should. I decided a while back that I was gonna finish this goddamn campaign if it killed me, and I mean to stick by that. I’ve still got three players, we can finish up. It’s frustrating, but mostly on a theoretical level. Practically speaking, it’ll make more room to resolve everything for the remaining players since they’ll each get 33% of my attention instead of 25%.

I dunno how I’m feeling about this to be honest. Part of me is like ‘the expected reaction is to be mentally flipping tables while maintaining outward calm’ but I’m not... really feelin’ it. There’s nothing to be done about the situation but move forward with the remaining players, so, no sense fretting about it I guess? Is this a situation where if I stop and think about it a lot I’ll get more upset so my brain is just saying ‘keep moving, don’t look back’ as a means of protecting itself? Am I honestly that chill with it since I knew I was losing this player in the next campaign anyhow? No idea, man, I just work here.

Weird to not really understand what I’m feeling, or not feeling, much less why.

#boring personal bullshit #Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Almenor D&D

[jakey-beefed-it]

Having spent a whole lot of time coming up with statblocks and a battle map, I find myself in the position of needing to flesh out the buildup to said fight. Both in the "getting to the showdown needs to be dramatic and suitably difficult" and in the "establishing a proper Tone for thus final confrontation with an Oath of Conquest paladin who proclaimed himself Emperor and has been on the level 16 party's shit list since like level 3" senses.

This really isn’t a whole lot of work from a DM perspective, not for most people, but I am feelin’. A little bit like I just crested a hill to see another hill, you know?

Oh well. No use complaining. If the game’s gonna be half as good as I want it to be, I’ve got to put in the effort. 

But I hate effort.

#Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Almenor D&D #The fun stuff is that I'm juggling a LOT of BIG plot points which are DRAMATIC and COOL #the less fun stuff is that I'm JUGGLING a LOT #and also after we get to a point where the PCs actually get a long rest and a chance to breathe #I'm gonna bring an old PC back for a few sessions #which isn't a LOT of extra work in itself but I' already feeling a bit whelmed

[jakey-beefed-it]

Thursdays, being the day after I run my d&d game, are usually a bit hard on me. I often get pumped up from the game, and even when the game itself doesn’t pump me up, I have a habit of drinking too many energy drinks (one is too many, sometimes i have two, which is definitely too many) so I can be “On” for six hours, and then have a hard time getting to sleep anyhow.

In short, the game went well, I got pumped, and now I am so tired

#Jake runs Dungeons and Dragons #Almenor D&D