Ambar Campaign - second session

And why NOT reuse a bit of wargames scenery :D

(Hey, I'm a computer scientist, I count from zero :D)

I was all set and kind of planned for Saturday's session until a shipping notice from eBay told me that the Reaper figures I'd ordered weren't going to arrive in time. So that fun little encounter was put off till next time, which handily means less prep. This time, though, I had to write a few notes, and design another more major encounter in case they got that far. Amusingly, I spent almost as much time realising I'd now come up with enough of the Tarani language (borrowing words from Hindi and Urdu) that I needed to write myself some notes on the language structure. As yet, none of them speak the language, but there are some interesting subtleties waiting for them when they do.

As you may recall, we left our heroes debating what to do with the bad guys - namely, hand them over to the watch, as their priestess, C, gets on with the local watch (she heals them, they like her). After some scratching of heads and figuring out how to read a paper left in a language none of them speak (see above, but B has Comprehend Languages), they headed for the marked lodgings out by the Eastgate, cased the joint a bit. spoke to the owner, decided to wait...

And back came the three bad guys they'd handed over to the nice but dim watch, having been let go on... someone's orders. Clearly of a mind to collect their stuff and bug out. The party were of a different mind, needless to say. Upshot, three dead cultists, some language help from the landlady who was half-Tarani, and a couple of bits of paper.

One was a credit note (clearly for emergency funds) on a Tarani merchant in Ambar - yes, Ambar appears to have invented banknotes, which I had great fun with: "It is as good as money! A credit note on Master Bishen is better than gold!" The other was another map, which they went to investigate the location of. This turned out to be a ruined, rumoured haunted temple on a cliff-top: as they approached, half a dozen skeletons arose to engage them...

Whew. That was possibly a bit close to a TPK. Admittedly, C as the only person with healing was perhaps unwise to wade into combat, but some good dice rolling from the skellies did drop C, B and A, the party tank to zero. Fortunately the remainder of the party managed to pull things together, aided by the ranger K grabbing A's warhammer (ooo, look, bludgeoning damage!) and laying about her with it.

Thoughts arising:

• I do need to mount the spare TV on the game room wall. I want to do it anyway, so I can watch what I'm doing when streaming wargames, but it would have been great to be able to toss portions of the city map up on it, or even initiative displays. 
• I need to figure out how I'm awarding XP.

Character Creation

Look! Dice!

I am, before I'm done, going to be running three campaigns set in my world of Altrion. Two involve resurrecting (in the meta sense :D) old parties, one a face to face group, the other play-by-email (which will probably end up play-by-Google-Docs), and the third is a new party set somewhere across the other side of the world.

I've promised at least one reader an explanation of play-by-Google-Docs, as I've been in a largely systemless campaign doing that for most of the past decade, but that'll come later. I'm also putting off converting the older face-to-face group's 2E characters, although I have reached the decision that trying to match stats and abilities exactly is not going to work, so we're going to aim for characters that feel right.

So - the new party. Great fun, as it's a brilliant way to get my head round 5E. All the players (barring my wife) are younger than most of my dice (:D) and all but one haven't played 5E, Two of them are DMs, and have said they're interested to see how an old school DM does it. Thanks. I think :D

Things I've learned so far:

• There aren't enough backgrounds for my world :D Probably inevitable, and I have managed to fit most of the characters in with existing D&D Beyond backgrounds (in a couple of cases rewriting backgrounds from the Sword Coast book).
• Having an original world with a rich background that I know well is such a blast. Being able to pull in existing story and locations into character backgrounds is really cool, especially when you can hand a player over a thousand words of backstory that his character was involved in. Amusingly, writing that gave me an idea for what the play-by-Docs party is going to be doing next.
• You need to be careful with D&D Beyond custom content - there are places where there is no error checking when you type into fields, and (for example) when you type 12 into a 'spell level' field because you mistakenly think its 'caster level', the 'spells' tab on the resulting sheet causes the site to crash!
• I wish Altrion had less than 16 gods. It's a LOT of custom subclasses, and while the forms for designing that are mostly OK, it can involve a lot of typing.
• From my early attempts at converting older characters - some things just don't translate into D&D Beyond - the classic AD&D longsword +1/+3 vs undead, for example is impossible to get into the system in such a way that both sets of to hit and damage bonuses appear separately in the attacks tab.

More later. I'm hoping to start blogging more regularly from here on in.

Creating Cleric domains

I'm busy working my way through the 16 cleric domains needed for Altrion in 5E. This, it transpires, is not easy. Fortunately most (but not all) of them are based on existing ones, but they're all going to require some tweaking, and getting the presentation on D&D Beyond up to the standard of the system-provided ones takes a bit of effort. This probably explains why I'm asking questions on the Discord channel and firing off enhancement requests/suggestions as I go.

All grumbling aside, this (the whole creation of the things that make my world my world) is one of the things I love about RPGs. I also married someone who's possibly even more detail-obsessed than I am, so I know I can farm stuff out to her as well.