Which story hours do you read?

[msd]

Story hours are never something I have really paid attention to here at ENWorld.

In an effort to change that, I would like to start reading a few. Given that many of them are really quite long, I was looking for some recommendations as to which are some of the more colorful and inspirational.

Thoughts?

 

[Herremann the Wise]

Read Sepulchrave's Wyre Campaign! Like now. Don't care if you think it's too long or old, It is still the best (in my opinion at least anyway).

Having read this I would then check out the following:
- Destan's Valus (Sins of the Father) SH
- Mortepierre's To Find a King
- Piratecat's (How could you go past it)

and for a newer one that shows lots of colour and promise:
- Kid Charlemagne's Golden Key: Form the Casebook of Nigel Spenser SH

and, if you like pictures accompanying a mighty fine story hour, you can't go past:
- Pogre's SH.

[pimp]If at this stage you are not too engorged with fictional goodness, you could then check out my own story hour: The Happenings of Lucifus Cray. It's fun, dark but hopefully in the end, entertaining and a good read. See sig. for details.[/pimp]

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

PS: There are a lot of good story hours out there that I have not mentioned. There was a recent thread in fact that someone might be able to point you to listing some of the forum's favourites.

 

[el-remmen]

Try the story hour sampler to get a taste of a variety of story hours.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Wulf's Story Hour. Accept no substitutes.

 

[Wisdom Penalty]

if you have gobs of time, read piratecat's (there's plenty of old info in word format).

then read the 'chronicles of wyre' - cheiromancer collected all of sepulchrave's updates and it makes for (much more) enjoyable reading without the bumps,

then read destan's 'sins of our fathers' - like sepulchrave's, a fan did the hard work and compiled all of it into a word doc (which you can find at the bottom of the first post in a link) - or wulf ratbane's gritty yarn.

if you want to read some 'current' story hours, id recommend herreman's certainly, and anything by pogre (images of his gaming set-up are way cool), wizardru's stuff (for epic play), and im also partial to moretepierre. unlike the first four (other than piratecat's), these story hours actually get updated.

welcome to the board. i spent a year at en world without knowing about this. i think you've found a new addiction for yourself.

still recovering from katrina,
W.P.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

and for a newer one that shows lots of colour and promise:
- Kid Charlemagne's Golden Key: Form the Casebook of Nigel Spenser SH

Thanks for the plug! This one is only three sessions old, and easy to get in on the ground level.

Try the story hour sampler to get a taste of a variety of story hours.

And one of the installments is posted in the story hour sampler thread!

For myself, my favorites are the long-term ones. Piratecat has been mentioned, but the one that really got me started on Story Hours was Sagiro's Story Hour which is a great example of carrying a long story arc over an entire campaign. It's very long, but there are well-formatted PDF's of the early stuff which make it easier to read offline.

The second one I ever read and recommend highly is (Contact)'s Temple of Elemental Evil 2. It predates the "Return to" adventure by Monte Cook, and it's a hilarious meat-grinder of a story hour. I think 18 PC's died in the making of that one. Read it; you owe it to the dead . The story continues on in The Liberation of Tenh with the one PC who survived ToEE2 from level 1, the amusingly vain Heydricus.

 

[weiknarf]

Welcome to the Halmae

The Jester's storyhours

Shemeska's Storyhours

and El-Remmen's since he didn't pimp his own

Lazybones and Blackdirge have some interesting game related fiction as well

 

[Arkhandus]

Hrm. I'd recommend you check out Old Drew Id's Medallions D20 Modern Storyhour (it looks pretty long, but really about half or more of the posts in it are praise and bumps ), Welcome to the Halmae (likewise, but since Spyscribe updates so frequently, most of it is actual storyhour posts), carpedavid's Land of the Crane (oriental adventures coolness, fairly new), The Shadow Knows! (long but cool; no longer updated as the Shadow has moved on to his Star Wars game and storyhour now; that one's called Chasing the Stars or somesuch, and is quite new), Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour #2 (it's much newer and shorter as-yet than his other PS storyhour, and it'd take you quite a while to get caught up with his first PS storyhour, which is about 25 or more pages), and Orichalcum's Roman storyhour (cool beans). If you're looking for short but good storyhours, you'll likely have to check out some of the further-back pages (3+ pages back that is), like First Sight (a spooky and visceral d20 Modern storyhour), contact's Gen-13 storyhour (can't remember exactly what it's called, but it's a neat little superhero-genre one; hasn't updated for quite a long while though), or Mekhet's Magnificent Seven, Redux (oriental adventures fun). I've read many more, but it'd take to long to read them all unless you've got insane amounts of free time, or plan to be reading the storyhour forum frequently for years.

 

[Shemeska]

Wanted to say thank you so much to Weiknark and Arkhandus for mentioning my storyhours.

Makes me a happy fiend, or something like that.

.

And yeah, some of the storyhours once they're started up and 'established' they can be pretty lengthy. My first storyhour has been going for a little over a year now, and I've lost track of how long it is here on my computer. I'll hazard a guess at something like close to 700 pages in a word document. The second storyhour, my current campaign, is about 100 pages or so, and it really only covers the first, introductory plot arc and starts into the second: getting the PCs established, giving some glimmerings of plotlines ripe for development, putting out some potential antagonists and changes to the setting since the events of the first campaign (#2 is 150 years after that first one, but there is little plot overlap, so reading #1 isn't required for getting into #2, and there are little to no spoilers).

 

[Funeris]

Ok....

Well here's what I'm subscribed to (and thus what I recommend...in no particular order mind you, I just scribbled down my SH subscriptions in the order EnWorld gave it to me):

- My "The Blade of Phoee"...see my sig
- Rel's "Quests of Samantha the Red"
- Cheiromancer's collection of Sep's "Tales of Wyre"
- Yeti's "Valus in Twenty"...again, see my sig
- My "In the Valus-The Heroes of Marchford"...for the third time, see my sig
- PirateCat's "Code-4: Reunion"
- Spider Jerusalem's "A Chronicle of Ice, Luck and Honour"
- Sagiro's Story Hour
- Sep's "Viridity and Saizhan"
- Herremann's "The Happenings of Lucifus Cray"
- Rel's "Faded Glory III: Glory Reborn" (as well as all the other Faded Glory threads by Rel and Old One
- Anti-Sean's "Cassael's Lament"
- PirateCat's "up-to-date story hour"
- Wizardru's Story Hour
- Jonrog's Darkmatter D20: "Drunk Southern Girls with Guns"
- Shemmy's "Planescape Storyhours" (both of 'em)
- Blackdirge's work (all of it)
- Destan's "Sins of the Fathers"...for the final time, see my sig
- The Universe's "A Kingdom of Ashes"
- Mortepierre's "To Find a King"
- Ragboy's "A Simple Plan" & "Is this anything?" threads
- Joshua Dyal's "Dark Heritage"
- Ranger Wickett's "Mother of Dreams"
And (obviously) Wulf Ratbane's Collected Storyhour

I'd also suggest checking out Capellan's X-Path Story hours...absolutely hilarious...

and those are just the one's i'm subscribed to....if I forgot to mention any SH author, I apologize profusely

~Fune