GM Notes: The Critical Hits
At a request from the audience, here are a few overviews and highlights from three of my campaigns:
Empyrean: A Monster of the Week campaign set in a fictional Colorado town in 1867. The monsters were largely drawn from Native American mythology and the Navajo idea of the Four worlds that predate this one, the last being the spirit world.
PCs:
Mona Beaufort: Southern Belle brothel owner with a shotgun making her fortune in the west (when she wasn’t flirting with the sheriff.)
Cu: An Irish warrior-hero to a goddess he hadn’t heard from in centuries.
Morgan Chauff: Drunken miscreant and werewolf.
Highlight: So, Cu’s player decided he wanted to change up characters around the end of the fifth hunt. I told him I had a story beat to go along with it if he trusted me. He was down, so when Cu ended up briefly dying at the close of the hunt, I took him aside before the party could resurrect him, and told him something else would be coming back in Cu’s body, and to go along with it. He still played Cu as a background character, so no one else knew.
Lo and behold, near the end of the campaign when Cu started acting strange a few months later and the party confronted him during a break in, we got to have a good laugh as I started monologuing for Cu as everyone else’s jaws dropped.
Prydwyn: Another MotW campaign set in the same world 12 or so years later in London, where the team was fighting monsters for a Secret Wizard society at war with the an evil German magic cabal. Pretty straightforward.
PCs:
Cordelia LeGrande: American actress trying her luck on London’s West End, possessed by a cruelty demon and just straight up vibing on it.
Lysander Talisker: Secret Society initiate whose uncle was a high ranking member. A goody-two shoes with a Greatsword.
Jace Smith: An orphan turned locksmith/part-time Victorian Robin Hood.
Guy Eyre: A weirdo hanging out with orphans. Put on a terrible French accent to seem fancy.
Highlight: So, Cordelia was possessed, and her constant drive was to be needlessly cruel. While asking questions in a church she tried to spike the holy water with whiskey, rolled terribly, and ended up being burned by holy water and hunted as a witch. The rest of the crew bailed her out of jail.
The Devil Went Down to Moonshae: my first long D&D campaign, set in the Moonshae Isles. A Devil has been all over the islands making deals to try to find a magical artifact, but the deals are magically secret. If you make a deal and try to communicate it to anyone, all you can say is: “Secrets are Sacred.” That opens up some fun asymmetrical information, with some party members knowing key parts of the mystery that they can’t tell the others about.
PCs:
Tempest: A Genasi warlock acolyte of the moon goddess whose dad is her Genie patron.
Captain Achlys: A Satyr pirate captain with a chip on her shoulder at having to work for the Pirate Queen.
Hewt: An Aarocokra ranger/bounty hunter with a southern fried accent. Virtually always in trouble with someone.
Rapid-fire Highlights:
Hewt made a deal with the devil almost immediately, and as part of his bargain had to inform on the group to the devil, telling him where to find Tempest’s loved ones. The devil told Tempest just to rub it in. THE DRAMA.
Achlys fought a Wendigo and ended up with a curse (insatiable hunger) that gave her a level of exhaustion per day, slowly killing her. She almost died because her player was too busy making jokes about cooking and eating the rest of the party to seek help.
After rescuing some elf children from a vampire castle, the team was escorting the kids back home when the children went missing on the ship. They found the kids drawing doodles of their characters fighting monsters. Each player rolled a Charisma check, and the better they rolled, the more power-ups I gave them as we played out the scribbled fight in initiative. One kid was drawing a fight to see which of the team was strongest, so we did the same thing with a Player vs. Player fight. (Tempest won.)
For perfectly logical reasons, the team is now trying to win a game of The Bachelorette in the Elemental Plane of Water. One of them immediately told the rest that, “they didn’t come here to make friends.”
God, these games are fun.