Highmoon's Ponderings

Ever since I posted that I was going to start playing in a D&D/d20 Play by eMail campaign called West to the Empire I have not said anything else on the subject. It has been mostly due to real life stuff and my attention drifting to other things, but fret not, I have been playing and it has been awesome.

This is my first time playing pre-gen characters–Squire Fisner, in my case–and while, indeed, at first I had absolutely no attachment to the character, little by little that faceless pre-packaged set of stats has become MY character, Squire Argus Fisner, of the noble Fisner family of Argalis, novice in the Order of the Red Griffon, and now heir to the honor and legacy of his falled mentor, Sir Galwaith. I very much look forward to playing Argus a lot more.

Mark, our DM, has been doing a bang up job running this play by email game. The main problem is the lag time between actions, and at one point or another we all have been either waiting or causing the wait; it happens, it’s part and parcel of the format, you deal with it. One thing Mark has been doing that I am incredibly glad for is that, as a DM, he treats this as a narrative, so even though the technical part is a bunch of statement declarations and dice rolls being emailed back and forth, Mark takes the time to, every Action, weave all our disparate orders and rolls and whatnot into a narrative block of description that incorporates all the ambiance of our environment.

So, to summarize, it’s been awesome, and now we are heading back into the dungeon to begin the final act, and track down this minotaur that has been terrorizing the forest and villages nearby, and enslaving a tribe of kobolds to do its bidding.

You can check out the West to the Empire website Mark put together for our mutual benefit.

After a loooong time in the works, after a lot of interruptions and other projects getting in the way, after I got off my lazy butt and put the finishing touches on what I was missing, my wife and I are finally ready to start our Victorian Age Vampire chronicle in about a week or so. We’d start this weekend, but we’ll be out of town on a mini-break, though I plan to use the driving time to talk about the game and her character, as I try to get as much info possible to weave the story around that of her PC.

This will be a New World of Darkness game as far as system, using the Victorian Age Vampire book as thematic source material, but for the most part I am looking forward to creating a semi-new mythology for our game; as I told my wife, you might meet a vampire that calls itself a member of the “Ventrue,” but you simply cannot assume you know what “Ventrue” is or means based on your player knowledge. I’ll go into the reasons more in depth later on. I’ve actually set up a tag for “Victorian Age Vampire” so it’s easy to follow the development and the game play.

Fortune of fortunes, I am now also playing in a D&D play-by-email campaign built around Goodman Games‘ Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) adventures. The campaign, West to the Empire, one of the suggested Adventure Paths in DCC #35 assembled from various of the DCC modules, is being run by the excellent and tidy Mark Gedak (who has done a lot of HMP work both for and with me), and aside from myself, there are two other players, a fella named Kurt and David Jarvis (of Reality Deviant Publications, my collaborator on the DaVinci Labs line for HMP). I am playing a 0-level aristocrat named Squire Fisner, a pregen that came with the first adventure, DCC #35A Halls of the Minotaur (part of DCC #35 Gazetteer of the Known Realms). I’ve already customized this pregen a little by giving him the name Argus and a bit of a backstory which I hope to expand as we play. Though I’ll admit play-by-email is not necessarily the optimal way to play for me, I’m just happy to be in a game, and Mark is organized and detailed enough that I feel good about the whole enterprise and about the opportunity to actually do a bit of roleplay via text. I’ve also created a tag for “D&D PBeM” to track thoughts and play reports from this game.