Tales around the Campfire - OOC Discussion

This thread is dedicated to light-hearted one-shots and short, pithy vignettes to divert the associated participants.

Tale-spinners in the limelight:
Hella na Haerad, played by doghead
Mustafah-al-Rasheed, played by DrZombie
Slate Vaslet, played by Ferrix
Elial, played by Wizwrm

Tale-spinners in the wings:
... played by Gnomeworks
... played by Otakkun
Stumbin Reck - The Badger of Arrowyn, Bearer of Sorrow, Thorn of Mishael, played by Sparky

Retired tale-spinners:


Theme, Adventures, Story and Characters:
The heroes in these tales are travelling with a massive caravan of nomad traders headed to the fabulous Kingdom of the Vale. Each adventure is a story told around the campfire some night along the way.

Each adventure must have a Location, a Conflict/Villain, a Goal, a Twist and a Title. The first player (first by virtue of posting) kicks things off with...

Player 1: There we were, deep in the sewers under Varan... (Location)
Player 2: Surrounded by the minions of The Dire Count Suvaris von Kelpsucker... (Conflict and Villain)
Player 3: As we sought to rescue the Tavern Keeper's blind pet basilisk. (Goal)
Player 4: Little did we know that the basilisk wasn't so blind anymore. (Twist)
Player X: This is the Tale of the Keeper, Count Kelpsucker and the Calcified Cloaca. (Title)

The bolded words will always be used, but the first Player is not bound to describe the location. That Player could very well have described the goal, "There we were, rescuing the Tavern Keeper's blind pet basilisk," and left the other bits to the other Players.

Any player who comes up with an alliterative title (all the major words start with the same sound - if not the same letter) that encompasses the adventure's elements will get an XP reward.

The DM is very much in-cahoots-with-and-at-the-mercy-of the Players. In a fun way. Like a low pressure, light-hearted round of Iron DM.

Character Generation:
For simplicity let's stick with standard SRD races and classes and a 30 point buy.

While I don't intend to be the only DM here, I'd like to lay the ground rule that Players make and post their own rolls and that we keep meta-discussion of character stats to a minimum. I've really enjoyed that in other games and I think it will help maintain a certain degree of mystery.

And away we go!

Hey Sparky

I'm up for it. Need to reread the setup again. My first thought was a sprite (or another Tiny creature) illusionist. But I'll go with a small Gnome or Hafling - and a big dog. Humm.

How about a 30 point buy to keep in LEW compatible - just in case.

Hmm... sounds fun.

Bit of a bummer that it's SRD-only, as the last few concepts I've come up with that I like use other stuff (the one I'm itching to try is a gunslinger-type - if you've read the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, you know what I'm getting at )... but I'm sure I can come up with something interesting.

I like doghead's idea of keeping it LEW-compatible, as well. We should stick with 30.

If you read nothing else, read the portion in this color further down the post...

As far as spells, doghead, starting out I gravitate to the pragmatic spells that best support my image of what a sorceror is - a spontaneous caster whose powers reveal themselves out of need or stress - like Resistance, Light, Mending... Shield, Feather Fall. I won't say these are the best choices, just that I like them.

And, yeah, sorry about the SRD only. It's not necessarily easy to come up with fresh ideas you're excited about with just the SRD, but I just don't have jack for books outside the core rulebooks and it's easier for logistics and communication to keep it nice and draconian. There are trade-offs, but I have heaps of faith in the general devilishness of players to come up with interesting PCs.

These PCs and adventures weren't meant to be ported over to LEW, so if you guys just want a 30 point buy, that's fine by me. Changed shortly.

******************************

Some more thoughts on the campaign...

My vision is that the PCs as the story opens are a famous Band of Adventurers and know more about themselves, their world and each other than we do.

I think it's really cool for the PCs to reveal themselves to everyone (including the DMs and their own players) organically over time, in adventures, through their actions and behavior in an ongoing campaign. Much more immersive, in my opinion.


Another facet of this is the way we will come up with what adventures - the Player-generated-Adventure-seeds. You will be laying out the skeleton of the adventures to me and I will be revealing the world to you all, and myself, as we go. I ask your patience as I do this (I haven't logged all that many hours behind the GM screen) and your flexibility, if you feed me an NPC that didn't exist before and you imagined a devious, crochety old human man and I portray a noble, buxom halfling lass... well. We'll roll with things as they come, hey?

So - really - I want all of us to take this step together and embrace not knowing just what will come next or even, really, what has gone before. To that end I would like us - from here out not to discuss our characters, traits, abilities, skills, classes, races, gear, gender and trust that all will be revealed as the game unfolds. What is known (sorta) is that the PCs survived their adventures enough to 'tell the tale' and if one of them doesn't survive... well. We'll uh... roll with... yeah. We'll work it out.


This method also allows me to be a lazy bum and only craft bits of the world as needed. Really, I love world-building and my 'campaigns' largely stall out in the world-building phase because love cultural, geographical and historical detail and I bog down. So, it's time for me to come out of my note-book and just run some daggum games!

If everything works as planned (ha!), this should also allow us - or anyone - to share DMery of this campaign - because we'll all share similar levels of information.

And hopefully it will somewhat seamlessly allow PCs to come and go (and players too, though not necessarily). I'm not an especially experienced DM, so we'll see how this all works.

Oh yeah, and this...
Whee!

I think I might be interested in playing my halfling monk...

She started out under a vow of silence, but - since she's helping to tell the tales - she had to be brought out of it somehow, right? Provides an interesting hook... and I loved playing her.

just seeing this thread every once in a while, it seems like what you guys are set up to do looks like a great deal of fun and a very interesting collaborative effort. I like, if you ever want another person, I'd be happy to hop in, I'll be watching the playing the game to see the stories unfold.

I'll be out of town, like I mentioned in the other thread, until a week from this Sunday - sorry to be leaving right before we get this started.

Cool. I actually like it that way. I've removed the post full of crunchy bits above.

Once we have a character made up, would you like a physical description posted?

Hella na Haerad is done. I'll post up a description if thats wanted.

Personally, I'm happy keeping it to the core SRD classes.

The penny finally dropped on the setup. Do you want that posted in the ic thread? It would seem like the most logical place to do so, so ...