The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

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Wrathbone
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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Wrathbone » Thu Aug 19, 2021 5:58 am

Thanks again everyone for making it a campaign that was incredibly fun and rewarding to run. It’s bizarre that we have all these stories and incidents that we created over something like 130 hours that will stick with me forever, but when I try to relay them to someone else they look at me like I’m deranged. How do you begin to explain that making a deal with the devil was ultimately to the benefit of everyone? Or how slaughtering several hundred babies was probably the right decision? Or that the thief who stole enough riches to wreck the global economy and helped rig multiple sovereign elections was also the moral compass of the party? :lol:

I keep coming back to that scene at the end of the LOTR films where the four hobbits are in the Green Dragon and share a moment of silent recognition of everything they went through and that nobody else in the Shire will ever really understand what happened. All I can say is that to finally run a campaign of this scale with players who hopefully have enjoyed it as much as I have means the world to me, and I look forward to many more. :)

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Sly Boots » Thu Aug 19, 2021 7:59 am

Seeing how much I've enjoyed our campaigns, my wife's been on at me to join another group (as a way of getting me out of the house and, I suspect, out from under her feet), and pre-covid anyway there was a drop-in game in the town centre. But I've always resisted, because I know that Wrath's storytelling, humour, willingness to accept daft ideas and, if not exactly bend the rules than at least stretch them on occasion when it makes for a better player experience, can't be replicated. It just wouldn't be the same.

I also think it's entirely in keeping with the spirit of our campaign, that we ended it with what was effectively a monster we met in our third or fourth session, who we befriended instead of killed, ended up becoming the god of a new religion that we basically forced everyone to convert to :lol:

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Raid » Thu Aug 19, 2021 8:27 am

I've just thoroughly enjoyed how much Wrath has given us free reign and indulged our less sensible whims. At no point have I felt restricted in what I thought I could do, and we've always worked together to see how things would play out. This was my first D&D game, but I'd played a handful of TTRPGs before with DMs of very different styles (albeit for far less time due to other circumstances), and I think this is the game I've had the most fun with.

As for Charr's ascent to godhood; I've basically had the idea that Charr would eventually Wish to be the God of Fire for almost as long as I've had access to the spell (and knew it was where I was going when Wrath asked us to think about how our arcs would end a few weeks back); I just decided to riff on what Sage was doing as the motivation. The funny thing was that I only got the idea of making him Wish to win the election about a minute before I did it, which was why I was trying to get you all to go first as I hurriedly thought up how he'd do it. The way I saw it, he's had a bit of experience using Dominate Person now, which I feel is basically a politician's wet dream, but going full Howard Hughes / Monty Burns with the Spruce Moose was the only way it was going to work as he'd have gotten bored of politics within minutes.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Mantis » Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:08 am

I'm so chuffed to finally get to run through a full campaign from level 1 to 20, it has been suitably epic all the way through. I thought we were gearing up for our big bad showdown with Belmaphet to round off the campaign, so it came as quite a surprise when Asmodeus made his play and gave us two greater demons of the Abyss to contend with as a final boss. It was a nice touch to see the return of the Demogorgon too after we had vanquished it so many sessions ago.

I don't know exactly how much of the overall events of the plot were planned out and executed with you carefully nudging us in the right direction Wrath, but suffice to say it all came together in such a satisfying way that it's almost hard to fathom just how much we did over the course of the whole campaign. It really felt like it came full circle by the end.

Some personal highlights, though there are many more not listed:
  • Dropping the sarcophagus on top of a brand new adventuring parties heads
  • The fight to avoid utter obliteration with Ygorl
  • Narrowly avoiding screwing up the entire campaign by unleashing a Death Knight in Luskan and blowing the last charge on the reset item to personally retcon our own mistake
  • The entire Luskan heist where we split off into teams and executed it without a hitch
  • The epic battle at Helm's Hold fighting off enemies from the walls
  • Being taught the very hard way to not pull a card from the Deck of Many Things right at the crucial moment of facing down a worldwide dragon/devil threat
  • Every eye rolling encounter we had with Jeff (or is it J'ph?)
Thanks again for running everything Wrath, it's been great.

Re; the new campaign, I'll get a bit of info thrown up on a new thread later today just to give food for thought as people plan their new characters over the next couple of weeks. I think we'll probably look at a start date on either the 16th or 23rd Sept for it.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Wrathbone » Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:36 am

Mantis wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:08 am
I don't know exactly how much of the overall events of the plot were planned out and executed with you carefully nudging us in the right direction
We can go over everything in the debrief session, but broadly speaking from very early on (around when you first arrived in Neverwinter) I knew who Belmaphet was and what he was trying to achieve, and how his plans filtered down to the challenges you were facing then like Brior Felhim and the Black Spider. Every few sessions I'd review Belmaphet's master plan because inevitably you guys kept scuppering that plan, and that changed the trajectory of the campaign all the time. I thought it was important for me to understand how that plan was evolving in the background, even if you had no sight of that, but if there's one regret I have it's that perhaps I didn't signpost enough how significant some of your actions were in the grand scheme of things.

For the end of the campaign, what I'd had in my head for a long time was that it could culminate in Belmaphet leading an invasion of Mount Celestia, having found some way to break his banishment. For a long time I'd thought that would probably be with him at the head of the divine army he'd planned to create with the gold in Neverember's vault, but of course that plan was also scuppered, which drove him to more desperate measures. I'd wanted Asmodeus to make a cameo at some point late in the campaign, never anticipating that he'd play such a big role in the ending or with Sage. All that happened very quickly - literally within the final few sessions I had the idea of him leaping on this unique opportunity and then triggering the end of the Blood War by forcing everyone's hands and bringing the war to you.

So in some ways there were similarities with how I'd originally pictured the end of the campaign, but ultimately the campaign took off on its own direction and finished in ways I could never have anticipated.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Mantis » Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:46 am

I think there were plenty of sign posts to be honest, it's nice not always knowing what the longer term consequences of your actions are until they suddenly present themself and take you by complete surprise.

The Brior Felhim error on our part was simply because we were being far too trusting and a bit too dim to recognise that he was quite obviously up to no good. :lol:

The only time I was really taken aback by events was the sudden dragon invasion when we were in Waterdeep. I think we were slowly piecing things together with the devil worshipping Lords, but in a meandering and pottering about way that was so typically our fashion. For us to leave the Inn after speaking to Neverember and suddenly see the city under siege by an enormous red dragon really made me stop and think "oh boy, maybe this event was on a timer and we really should have paid more attention to it!". Though it was very exciting to be sent back to Neverwinter on the run and trying to recruit survivors into an underground resistance at the mansion.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Sly Boots » Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:47 am

I still look back with fondness on my progression as a thief who botched an early stealth check to plunge head-first through the window of an NPC (a certain Mr Reidoth, no less), to one who could become basically invisible at will :lol:

In fact, it's a lot of my failed rolls that are some of my favourite moments, or rather Wrath's brilliantly narrated outcomes of such. Like when, I think, Charr and Sage had just joined the campaign and I inadvertently shot one of the previous party-members to death after rolling a critical 1 :lol: Or accidentally obliterating our butler and having to cover it up for the rest of the campaign (and the succession of additional Gainsboroughs).

Then there was the way sheer randomness could take over, such as when we were facing a vampire lord and I pressed The Button, and the resulting d100 roll paralysed us both. Which for a moment looked like it had managed to save the day... until Charr dropped him into a river, one of the only things that could have woken him up :lol: I don't know how long thereafter was spent playing through the repercussions of that, but it was a lot.

Jeff was one of my absolute highlights, not least our intra-campaign adventure that resulted, amongst other things, in the Lord of Neverwinter being chained up in our basement, and the many deception rolls required to convince him (and others) that I was his rescuer and not his captor :lol:

I've honestly been in stitches more times than I can remember, so well done all.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Wrathbone » Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:57 am

Mantis wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:46 am
The only time I was really taken aback by events was the sudden dragon invasion when we were in Waterdeep.
Yeah, I shamelessly stole that idea from Critical Role. :lol:
Sly Boots wrote:Then there was the way sheer randomness could take over, such as when we were facing a vampire lord and I pressed The Button, and the resulting d100 roll paralysed us both. Which for a moment looked like it had managed to save the day... until Charr dropped him into a river, one of the only things that could have woken him up
That was one of my favourite moments of the entire campaign, and a rare case where brutally enforcing the rules (with the vampire in running water) I think made it funnier. For me at least, anyway. :lol:

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Sly Boots » Thu Aug 19, 2021 10:16 am

Wrathbone wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:57 am
Mantis wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 9:46 am
The only time I was really taken aback by events was the sudden dragon invasion when we were in Waterdeep.
Yeah, I shamelessly stole that idea from Critical Role. :lol:
Sly Boots wrote:Then there was the way sheer randomness could take over, such as when we were facing a vampire lord and I pressed The Button, and the resulting d100 roll paralysed us both. Which for a moment looked like it had managed to save the day... until Charr dropped him into a river, one of the only things that could have woken him up
That was one of my favourite moments of the entire campaign, and a rare case where brutally enforcing the rules (with the vampire in running water) I think made it funnier. For me at least, anyway. :lol:
It was funny and horrifying in equal measure :lol:

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Raid » Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:39 pm

I still maintain that dropping the vampire into the river was a genius idea. There are just so many innocuous things that kill vampires instantly, I assumed that running water would do the same.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Wrathbone » Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:46 pm

I mean you’re not wrong - running water harms vampires. It’s just that the vampire was stunned/asleep in a state where damage snapped him out of it. It was a perfect combination of clever intentions and unfortunate circumstances.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Mantis » Thu Aug 19, 2021 4:18 pm

I think we were doing a relatively good job of being heroic good guys up until that fateful trip to the Shadowplane with the Shard of Night and subsequent release of said vampire. From that point on I think it was a slippery and long slope downward.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Mantis » Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:09 am

Are we still thinking of having a little campaign debrief chat at all? This week could be a good time to fit one in if people want it.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Raid » Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:18 am

Yeah, I'm still up for that.

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Re: The return of the D&D campaign: This time it's potatoes

Post by Sly Boots » Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:26 am

Same

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