Erik Mona is the publisher of Paizo Publishing, LLC, creators of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Planet Stories line of pulp fantasy novels. Mona has won more than a dozen major game industry awards and his writing has been published by Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Green Ronin Publishing, and The MIT Press.
An avid collector of pulp magazines and old science fiction paperbacks, Mona spends most of his scant free time reading old fiction and posting about it online.
He lives in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.
An avid collector of pulp magazines and old science fiction paperbacks, Mona spends most of his scant free time reading old fiction and posting about it online.
He lives in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.
Mona's Musings: New Beginnings
Posted 21st October 2009 at 12:33 AM by Erik Mona
There’s something to be said for taverns.
No, I don’t mean the aging, borderline run-down beer-and-burger joints in the side alleys of most American cities, though I’ve a soft spot in my clogged arteries and beer belly for those, too. I mean the bog-standard cliché-ridden hives of scum and villainy that lie at the heart (or at least the opening session) of nearly every fantasy campaign in the universe.
Although I play in a bi-weekly Pathfinder RPG campaign in the spacious and exciting new Paizo offices, I’ve considered myself a GM first and player second ever since I first picked up the funny dice back in the early 1980s. By that token, despite the fact that my barbarian Ostog the Unslain ravages the stunty humanoids of the world of Golarion every fortnight, I still consider myself “between campaigns” at the moment.
My last true game petered out about two years ago. It began as the official playtest of my first adventure for Dungeon Magazine’s Age of Worms Adventure Path, which I conceived and edited with my co-worker James Jacobs. The game started at a crazy time for Paizo, and since it consisted entirely of colleagues who also worked at the office during this crazy time, the game suffered more cancellations that any I’ve ever been a part of. Over time it became maddeningly difficult to rally the eight (!) players together for an evening of play, and somewhere around the middle of the Adventure Path enough employees had moved on that even polishing it off with a final mega-session became an unrealistic expectation.
Irregular as it was, though, it was a hell of a lot of fun, and the group of players became like a second family to me. We managed to squeeze a couple of years worth of bi-weekly (ok, ok, monthly) sessions out of only six magazine adventures, plus all of the random stuff about bullywugs and Wee Jas and the town of Diamond Lake that I added to fill gaps in the main plot and to maintain my players’ interest. As much as I enjoyed the Age of Worms scenarios beyond my own kick-off adventure, my favorite memories of the campaign come from the stuff I invented specifically for my players, and it’s that material I regret not following up on and tying up, far more than the big exciting fights against the dracolich Dragotha and Kyuss himself, which is where the campaign would have ended up had I followed through on its written conclusion.
Last time around, getting the player characters together was easy. After editing Dungeon for a couple of years and putting a huge amount of brain time into getting the party together for a given adventure or campaign when designing “adventure hooks” (which authors often helpfully left out completely), I decided to just say to hell with it and literally started the party at the front door of the opening dungeon.
Sure, I asked each of the players for a bit of backstory and did my damnedest to cobble together some contrived reason why the player characters all knew each other, but in the end I started them at the simplest place I possibly could have: the front door of the dungeon crawl.
But not all campaigns begin with a dungeon crawl, and I am loath to repeat myself. In the years since my last campaign began I’ve often thought about how it all started, and I’ve never been fully satisfied. Next time around, I’m going to have to do something better.
Next time around is looking like it may be sooner rather than later. I’ve got a hankering to get around to running a campaign based off of a huge edifice in the Pathfinder world called The Spire of Nex, a mile-tall tower than juts over the horizon of the fantastic metropolis of Absalom, the City at the Center of the World. Absalom is the centerpiece of the world of the Pathfinder Chronicles, surrounded by the ancient fortresses of the countless would-be tyrants, archmages, and petty dictators who have tried to take the city by force over the last few thousand years. The city itself has never fallen, but it hasn’t stopped the bad guys (or deluded good guys) from giving it a go over the centuries, and all of these ruined towers, castles, extradimensional hidey-holes, and tombs make for ideal adventuring spots just a hop away from the city itself.
I’ve been working on Nex and his tower for a few years now, scribbling hideous traps and ideas for cool NPCs into my beloved notebooks. I’ve always wanted to try a mega-dungeon campaign a la Gary Gygax’s Castle Greyhawk or Ed Greenwood’s Undermountain, and the Spire of Nex is my way of doing a mega-dungeon without all of the problems that can so easily creep into that style of campaign.
The original Temple of Elemental Evil is one of my absolute favorite AD&D adventures of all time thanks to the brilliant Hommlet and Moathouse sequence and some really inventive and challenging encounters and NPCs. I’ve run the first part at least four times during my gaming career, and even new-school players who came into the game with third edition respond well to the challenges and open-ended nature of the adventure. Once you get into the Temple of Elemental Evil proper, however, the real trouble begins, and the true villain of the adventure rears its bestial head. No, I’m not talking about Lareth the Beautiful or even Zuggtmoy the Fungus Queen. I’m talking about the REAL villain in a mega-dungeon: BOREDOM.
Shortly after I joined the staff at Wizards of the Coast in 1999, I received a gift from the gamer gods when Monte Cook invited me to play in his official playtest for his revised third edition version of that adventure, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I subsequently played in Cook’s Ptolus campaign for seven or eight years. I consider Monte the finest DM I’ve ever had the chance to game with, and the lessons I learned watching him over this time could fill a book. I consider his “Return to” the best nostalgic adventure of its day, and a lot of the stuff he added flat-out improved the original module. But even Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil gets boring in parts (how many times do you have to fight gnoll guards before you get the idea?). Even in this vaunted playtest with a vaunted DM running his own vaunted re-take on a vaunted mega-dungeon classic, there was an everpresent risk that things could get a little repetitive and boring.
So why do I want to inflict a mega-dungeon on another group of gamers, when even my own experiences suggest that the format doesn’t stand up well to long-term play? Well, I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment, I suppose, and now that the final Pathfinder rules are out a lot of my friends have been bugging me to start something up. I’ve run a few levels of the Spire of Nex at various conventions over the last couple years, and I really miss the thrill of GMing a semi-regular game. I also have a hankering to run an entire campaign in which the players are trapped in an inescapable multi-dimensional prison with lots of linkages between “worlds,” and to see what happens when a mega-dungeon becomes the total framework for a campaign. What I envision is a sort of Castle Greyhawk meets the TV show Lost, with the PCs essentially marooned on an anchorless amalgam of “stacked” demiplanes that they must explore one by one to find a way out.
My notebooks are filled with scribbled notes about planar mechanics, gateways between realms, concepts for imprisoned demiplanes and the creatures who empower them, and all sorts of other crazy ideas and schemes. I know who the ultimate villain of the adventure will be, many of the key encounters along the way, and the solution to the riddle that binds all of the demiplanes together. I’ve got plenty of notes about fun encounters that I know my players will enjoy. Hell, I’ve even outlined a novel featuring a couple of my fiction characters exploring the dungeon. But it’s all been organic, day-dreamy “fun” design, and only now am I thinking about the adventure in terms of something I will actually play, and will most likely play soon.
Which brings me to the same problem a GM must face every time he sits down to conceive a new campaign. How is it going to begin?
The very first adventure in the Spire of Nex arc, wherein the PCs become imprisoned in the dungeon, is set at level 5. I did this to give the players some practical experience before they set out on a very dangerous adventure, but now I find myself with five levels to fill. Before I figure that out, I’ve been agonizing over how to get them together.
At the same time I’m also writing a big two-round adventure for Paizo’s Pathfinder Society organized play campaign. Getting the party together there is easy, because all of the players belong to the Pathfinder Society, a sort of adventurers’ guild. The four-hour events are essentially missions given to the PCs, and the PCs comply because they belong to the organization. Well, really they comply because they know they only have four hours to get from the beginning to the end of the adventure, which means as little time as possible needs to be taken up by technical stuff like getting the party together.
But a home campaign is not the same thing as a four-hour convention event, and I feel like my players deserve something better than “so you’re standing outside the dungeon” or “so you somehow all know each other.”
In the past I’ve started the action right in front of the PCs, so that they’re all riding in the same carriage when a strange event occurs, or they’re all walking down the same street when chaos ensues. I don’t want to do either of those again, and nor do I want to do the same old trick of “each of you knows this NPC in peril” plot hook that was so popular with Dungeon authors that we started cutting it after a while. For the time being, I am well and truly stumped.
Which brings me back to taverns.
Starting off a campaign with the PCs randomly wandering into an adventure hook in a tavern and then randomly deciding to team up to take on said challenge is a perfectly functional way to start off an adventure or even a campaign. It’s popular (and cliché) because it works. But I’ll be damned to eternal hell if I’m going to use it on the gang of persnickety game designers and professional writers who call themselves my friends. I’d never hear the end of it.
So I’ve got to put some serious brain time toward this issue, and I need to come up with something creative. Sitting here at this desk hasn’t generated any ideas, so perhaps I need to change my environment. I do most of my best thinking in public, and I’ve found that nothing calms the mind like a nice, frosty alcoholic beverage, the dingier the source the better.
In short, I’m off to go solve this problem over a beer.
At the tavern.
--Erik Mona
Seattle
October, 2009
No, I don’t mean the aging, borderline run-down beer-and-burger joints in the side alleys of most American cities, though I’ve a soft spot in my clogged arteries and beer belly for those, too. I mean the bog-standard cliché-ridden hives of scum and villainy that lie at the heart (or at least the opening session) of nearly every fantasy campaign in the universe.
Although I play in a bi-weekly Pathfinder RPG campaign in the spacious and exciting new Paizo offices, I’ve considered myself a GM first and player second ever since I first picked up the funny dice back in the early 1980s. By that token, despite the fact that my barbarian Ostog the Unslain ravages the stunty humanoids of the world of Golarion every fortnight, I still consider myself “between campaigns” at the moment.
My last true game petered out about two years ago. It began as the official playtest of my first adventure for Dungeon Magazine’s Age of Worms Adventure Path, which I conceived and edited with my co-worker James Jacobs. The game started at a crazy time for Paizo, and since it consisted entirely of colleagues who also worked at the office during this crazy time, the game suffered more cancellations that any I’ve ever been a part of. Over time it became maddeningly difficult to rally the eight (!) players together for an evening of play, and somewhere around the middle of the Adventure Path enough employees had moved on that even polishing it off with a final mega-session became an unrealistic expectation.
Irregular as it was, though, it was a hell of a lot of fun, and the group of players became like a second family to me. We managed to squeeze a couple of years worth of bi-weekly (ok, ok, monthly) sessions out of only six magazine adventures, plus all of the random stuff about bullywugs and Wee Jas and the town of Diamond Lake that I added to fill gaps in the main plot and to maintain my players’ interest. As much as I enjoyed the Age of Worms scenarios beyond my own kick-off adventure, my favorite memories of the campaign come from the stuff I invented specifically for my players, and it’s that material I regret not following up on and tying up, far more than the big exciting fights against the dracolich Dragotha and Kyuss himself, which is where the campaign would have ended up had I followed through on its written conclusion.
Last time around, getting the player characters together was easy. After editing Dungeon for a couple of years and putting a huge amount of brain time into getting the party together for a given adventure or campaign when designing “adventure hooks” (which authors often helpfully left out completely), I decided to just say to hell with it and literally started the party at the front door of the opening dungeon.
Sure, I asked each of the players for a bit of backstory and did my damnedest to cobble together some contrived reason why the player characters all knew each other, but in the end I started them at the simplest place I possibly could have: the front door of the dungeon crawl.
But not all campaigns begin with a dungeon crawl, and I am loath to repeat myself. In the years since my last campaign began I’ve often thought about how it all started, and I’ve never been fully satisfied. Next time around, I’m going to have to do something better.
Next time around is looking like it may be sooner rather than later. I’ve got a hankering to get around to running a campaign based off of a huge edifice in the Pathfinder world called The Spire of Nex, a mile-tall tower than juts over the horizon of the fantastic metropolis of Absalom, the City at the Center of the World. Absalom is the centerpiece of the world of the Pathfinder Chronicles, surrounded by the ancient fortresses of the countless would-be tyrants, archmages, and petty dictators who have tried to take the city by force over the last few thousand years. The city itself has never fallen, but it hasn’t stopped the bad guys (or deluded good guys) from giving it a go over the centuries, and all of these ruined towers, castles, extradimensional hidey-holes, and tombs make for ideal adventuring spots just a hop away from the city itself.
I’ve been working on Nex and his tower for a few years now, scribbling hideous traps and ideas for cool NPCs into my beloved notebooks. I’ve always wanted to try a mega-dungeon campaign a la Gary Gygax’s Castle Greyhawk or Ed Greenwood’s Undermountain, and the Spire of Nex is my way of doing a mega-dungeon without all of the problems that can so easily creep into that style of campaign.
The original Temple of Elemental Evil is one of my absolute favorite AD&D adventures of all time thanks to the brilliant Hommlet and Moathouse sequence and some really inventive and challenging encounters and NPCs. I’ve run the first part at least four times during my gaming career, and even new-school players who came into the game with third edition respond well to the challenges and open-ended nature of the adventure. Once you get into the Temple of Elemental Evil proper, however, the real trouble begins, and the true villain of the adventure rears its bestial head. No, I’m not talking about Lareth the Beautiful or even Zuggtmoy the Fungus Queen. I’m talking about the REAL villain in a mega-dungeon: BOREDOM.
Shortly after I joined the staff at Wizards of the Coast in 1999, I received a gift from the gamer gods when Monte Cook invited me to play in his official playtest for his revised third edition version of that adventure, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I subsequently played in Cook’s Ptolus campaign for seven or eight years. I consider Monte the finest DM I’ve ever had the chance to game with, and the lessons I learned watching him over this time could fill a book. I consider his “Return to” the best nostalgic adventure of its day, and a lot of the stuff he added flat-out improved the original module. But even Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil gets boring in parts (how many times do you have to fight gnoll guards before you get the idea?). Even in this vaunted playtest with a vaunted DM running his own vaunted re-take on a vaunted mega-dungeon classic, there was an everpresent risk that things could get a little repetitive and boring.
So why do I want to inflict a mega-dungeon on another group of gamers, when even my own experiences suggest that the format doesn’t stand up well to long-term play? Well, I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment, I suppose, and now that the final Pathfinder rules are out a lot of my friends have been bugging me to start something up. I’ve run a few levels of the Spire of Nex at various conventions over the last couple years, and I really miss the thrill of GMing a semi-regular game. I also have a hankering to run an entire campaign in which the players are trapped in an inescapable multi-dimensional prison with lots of linkages between “worlds,” and to see what happens when a mega-dungeon becomes the total framework for a campaign. What I envision is a sort of Castle Greyhawk meets the TV show Lost, with the PCs essentially marooned on an anchorless amalgam of “stacked” demiplanes that they must explore one by one to find a way out.
My notebooks are filled with scribbled notes about planar mechanics, gateways between realms, concepts for imprisoned demiplanes and the creatures who empower them, and all sorts of other crazy ideas and schemes. I know who the ultimate villain of the adventure will be, many of the key encounters along the way, and the solution to the riddle that binds all of the demiplanes together. I’ve got plenty of notes about fun encounters that I know my players will enjoy. Hell, I’ve even outlined a novel featuring a couple of my fiction characters exploring the dungeon. But it’s all been organic, day-dreamy “fun” design, and only now am I thinking about the adventure in terms of something I will actually play, and will most likely play soon.
Which brings me to the same problem a GM must face every time he sits down to conceive a new campaign. How is it going to begin?
The very first adventure in the Spire of Nex arc, wherein the PCs become imprisoned in the dungeon, is set at level 5. I did this to give the players some practical experience before they set out on a very dangerous adventure, but now I find myself with five levels to fill. Before I figure that out, I’ve been agonizing over how to get them together.
At the same time I’m also writing a big two-round adventure for Paizo’s Pathfinder Society organized play campaign. Getting the party together there is easy, because all of the players belong to the Pathfinder Society, a sort of adventurers’ guild. The four-hour events are essentially missions given to the PCs, and the PCs comply because they belong to the organization. Well, really they comply because they know they only have four hours to get from the beginning to the end of the adventure, which means as little time as possible needs to be taken up by technical stuff like getting the party together.
But a home campaign is not the same thing as a four-hour convention event, and I feel like my players deserve something better than “so you’re standing outside the dungeon” or “so you somehow all know each other.”
In the past I’ve started the action right in front of the PCs, so that they’re all riding in the same carriage when a strange event occurs, or they’re all walking down the same street when chaos ensues. I don’t want to do either of those again, and nor do I want to do the same old trick of “each of you knows this NPC in peril” plot hook that was so popular with Dungeon authors that we started cutting it after a while. For the time being, I am well and truly stumped.
Which brings me back to taverns.
Starting off a campaign with the PCs randomly wandering into an adventure hook in a tavern and then randomly deciding to team up to take on said challenge is a perfectly functional way to start off an adventure or even a campaign. It’s popular (and cliché) because it works. But I’ll be damned to eternal hell if I’m going to use it on the gang of persnickety game designers and professional writers who call themselves my friends. I’d never hear the end of it.
So I’ve got to put some serious brain time toward this issue, and I need to come up with something creative. Sitting here at this desk hasn’t generated any ideas, so perhaps I need to change my environment. I do most of my best thinking in public, and I’ve found that nothing calms the mind like a nice, frosty alcoholic beverage, the dingier the source the better.
In short, I’m off to go solve this problem over a beer.
At the tavern.
--Erik Mona
Seattle
October, 2009
Total Comments 17
Comments
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Did you ever consider talking to your players to learn about their backstories and tieing that into the campaign start?Posted 21st October 2009 at 10:54 AM by MichaelSomething
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Of even specifically asking the players to come up with a shared set of circumstances.Posted 21st October 2009 at 11:03 AM by Olive -
UK1 Beyond the Crystal Cave.
they all failed their original saves back when their PCs were 1edADnD style.
now the PCs find themselves waking up in a whole new game.
edit: tell the players you are going to run a 1 shot.
get your players to make 1edADnD PCs. and then have them during the first session update the PC to your game of choice. i am guessing Pathfinder.
adventure from there.Posted 21st October 2009 at 04:53 PM by diaglo -
Why not take a leaf from lost in that they are all stranges thrown together by exteral forces. Either they were passengers in a vessel or simply take from their bedsPosted 21st October 2009 at 05:37 PM by ardoughter -
Suggestions:- Players make 2 characters: 1) a first level commoner and 2) their character WITH THE EXACT SAME NAME AS THE COMMONER (this is important). They know they will be playing the commoner for about 5 minutes but if they write a backstory, it is for the commoner. The first five minutes of game has the commoner characters going about their daily lives and none have ever met before and suddenly (mysterously) can't breathe. They all die. They wake up in beds next to each other in a room they've never seen before next to an old spellcaster who's in the middle of having a heart attack. Through some means (talking to the old caster before he dies, reading a journal, weird knowledge check) the players know that they are now in the bodies of some people that died and the caster tried bringing them back with a custom spell. Casting that spell ended up killing the caster. But now the players are stuck in these new bodies with new abilities and all their equipment.
- Pathfinder AP #2 Issue 1 is another good one.
Posted 21st October 2009 at 11:22 PM by dmccoy1693 - I always liked the "let the players figure it out" approach. You give the players a view from 30,000 feet of where the campaign takes place and require each member of the group to make up back story including hooks linking them to two other players. If they can't do it, why should you?Posted 22nd October 2009 at 02:51 AM by jmucchiello
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Hi all -
Most novels revolve around just a single person, maybe two. When it's a single person it's easy, and meeting a second person is real easy. However, meeting 4-8 people for an adventuring party is much harder. How is it that we all meet to form up our own gaming groups? We post messages at hobby stores, or just buy the book and see someone else looking at a game related book, go to local conventions. But in all, groups form naturally. It is humanity's natural aspect (or in this case, humanoid's natural aspect) - to be part of a group. Something binds us together.
Thus I propose that all the PC's own Chihuahua's. They gather for the monthly meeting to discuss issues revolving around Chihuahua ownership in their various districts of Absalom. While the overall protagonist is a Chihuahua hater. He follows and secretly attends the Chihuahua meetings and finds that the PC's are avid Chihuahua owners and supporters and thus he/she/it does their vile best to attract the attention of the PC's by holding a Chihuahua race (Think the Wiener Nationals for Wiener Dogs). Thus all the Chihuahua owners come together and realize that the PC's are somehow best suited to stopping the Chihuahua races.
My problem with this is one with all starting games. The King asks the PC's at level 1 with no fame or fortune to save the kingdom. Because his people somehow can't. And the people that are higher level that could do this with ease would cost too much. Wait! It's your kingdom, spend whatever you have to do keep it. Don't skimp on low level adventures when you could raise taxes and afford the ones that'll fix the issue in a fortnight.
Be Well. Be Well Raced.
Theocrat IssakPosted 22nd October 2009 at 04:00 AM by Theocrat - I am going to try with kids that they awake in a different world, and are going to school, and they have to take there gear along/ and then there paired together as a class Homework Assignment to Kill x amount of things using Skeletons/ as Halloween theme.
I've also used military theme in in the past and they have been brought together for an assignment. To Investigate weird circumstances which will then lead them to your tower.Posted 22nd October 2009 at 07:23 AM by James Bragg - I have really only ever found 2 ways to do this that works. The first is to have all PCs in an organization. Adventure Guild, military, Secret Service, same newspaper, whatever. And have their superior send them on the mission/quest/campaign.
The other is to let the players sort it out. For the last years I have preferred this. Tell the players straight out to come up with a reason they will stick together through a hard and difficult adventure/campaign.
And not even these two work unless the players are willing and able to do the necessary small adjustments to the PCs that reduce internal conflicts to a manageable and enjoyable level. With stubborn, uncooperative players even the smallest differences and conflicts will escalate to destroy even the best thought out reason for there to be a party adventuring together.Posted 22nd October 2009 at 09:39 AM by Gulla -
Erik, your happiness is just a twelve sided die roll away.
Or perhaps a percentile die roll, depending a bit on perspective.Posted 22nd October 2009 at 10:34 AM by Windjammer - While it is a bit simplistic, the notion of the PCs meeting each other in prison is interesting. They are immediately are thrown together as comrades in their opposition against the guards and/or other prisoners. An unusual occurrence (earthquake, prison riot, guard strike, government coup, mass escape, etc) results in them being thrown out on the street with nothing. This level of abject need encourages them to seek adventure.Posted 22nd October 2009 at 03:41 PM by rogerkernsmith
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All you really need is to get them in the tower together where it's best if they work as a group to get out. An easy way is to have short solo adventures where each PC ends up a prisoner of the tower, close by the other PCs.
This might not account for 5 levels but is a very easy and different way to get the group together.Posted 22nd October 2009 at 03:54 PM by Toriel -
For my style of game it always worked best as a hybrid:
DM:"OK, you've all already met and all get along for the most part. You guys work out the how's and why's while I go order the pizza."
DM:"I'm back. What are you guy's arguing about?"
PLAYERS:"indescernible mixed arguing"
DM:"We're not even playing Rolemaster! You guys have been figthing about Rolemaster the whole time I've been gone!??!"
DM:"The Adventure Begins: You're all in a tavern called 'The Last Drop'..it's a wretched hive of scum and...WOULD YOU GUYS PLEASE STOP ARGUING ABOUT ROLEMASTER!?!"Posted 22nd October 2009 at 06:35 PM by Emirikol -
"Well, we keep sacrificing people by lottery to the Spire of Nex every year and it seems to have worked. No sign of Nex yet!" Remember the old slavers adventure where the PCs had no equipment? Good times starting off just scrounging for makeshift weapons and food. Heh.
OR
Players contract some supernatural disease that clerics can't cure. They meet up all trying to get healed at a local temple. Temple records indicate there was a similar disease that flared up centuries ago during the attack of Nex. Perhaps a cure can be found within the Spire.Posted 22nd October 2009 at 07:03 PM by IronGolem -
Sometimes a twist on an old classic is better than a completely different idea. Here's a couple of twists on the "meet up in a tavern" approach that I've heard of over the years:
1) Players start off in a tavern, like normal. It turns out that in the bedrock, underneath the tavern, kobolds or goblins have been tunnelling around building their lairs, and attempting to find a way to sneak up at night and snatch food, or livestock or guests, or whatever. While the PCs are in the tavern, the tunnels literally collapse, and the tavern falls into the dungeon.
2) The players are in a tavern. A patron comes to hire adventurers. A bunch of people respond, the patron hires them, and off he goes, into adventure. The PCs are not the adventurers he picked. However, a local hints that the patron has been set up and he and his adventurers are walking into an ambush, or certain disaster of some kind, unless someone can go bail them out.Posted 23rd October 2009 at 04:22 PM by Hobo - Ahh, to play in just one GAME, let alone a campaign, with Monte Cook and the rest of you guys...'twould rank up there with playing with Mr. G. himself eve.
And Greyhawk Ruins was always the #1 MODULE in our group. We played 'em all, from A1 to X10, and for sheer scope and possibilities, GR was always the best.Posted 31st October 2009 at 02:19 AM by rogercox -
Ultimate Toolbox says...
Table 7–7: Getting the PCs Together
1 All related or from the same village
2 Bound by charter or contract
3 Common goal or membership
4 Common social class
5 Conscripted or press ganged
6 Down to last few coppers
7 Former/current rivals
8 Grew up in orphanage
9 Hand-picked by king
10 Highly patriotic
11 Hired by local lord known for his fairness
12 Owe favor to a particular NPC
13 Paying off a debt
14 Received a mysterious letter/invitation
15 Rival families working off blood-oath
16 Served in army or aboard a ship
17 Serve the same church or patron
18 Survived the same tragic event (ambush, etc.)
19 Worked together before
20 Wrong place at the wrong time
And then they're my favorite based off #18, the party wakes up the only survivors of a shipwreck, with only some memories intact.Posted 7th November 2009 at 10:34 PM by DM_Jeff
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