dismallyoriented | Entries tagged with campaign stories

Realized only just now I typo'd the title of my last recap post. Boo. At the time of writing this draft, I was trying to make sure I got this one out before we finished Mission 2. I did not finish this before we finished Mission 2 lmao. [Wife's note: HE SO PROFOUNDLY DID NOT DO THAT] Anyway, delays aside, it's time for Downtime!

For those of you who don't play Forged in the Dark games (FitD), games that use that system have a codified Downtime phase that occurs between missions. It's time for PCs to rest and recover from whatever stress & harm they've racked up, work on long term projects for themselves, and deal with any other complications and random events that the GM rolls up. It's also a fantastic time for character interactions between party members and NPCs. Each player has two actions to spend working on those aforementioned things.

All FitD games (as far as I'm aware) have a Complication that occurs during downtime. The GM rolls for a random occurrence off a table, based on certain in-game conditions like "how much trouble have you caused with your missions." Crews that have accrued more heat and bad attention will have more troublesome random events, some of which will involve factions that they've pissed off coming to. Resolve their problems, let's say. For example, we've taken -1 rep with Children of the Fault, the group that Isaiah belongs to, because even if you have really good reasons to scrub a mission it's still not a good look to take on a job and then say "Actually, never mind." Despite that we're still within the most basic heat level, so we would've been fine - had our GM not rolled the "reroll on a higher danger table" option and landed on "Quintessent Life - troublesome spirits and magical creatures".^[1] Which, to be fair. We did bring home a wholeass dragon wisp, so.

Because Songs for the Dusk is so community focused, it adds another feature to its downtime phase called "Threads". At the start of the downtime, you pick a broad theme or concept about your community that you can build your downtime scenes around. For this downtime, we chose, "How does gossip work in this town?" and began filling in the different avenues of how news spreads in our community, and how people talk to each other.

( A side note on Love Letters )

( Downtime 1 )

Hello! It's been a hot minute since the last one of these. In hindsight, session-by-session updates was never going to be sustainable. However, as dedicated table notekeeper, I do have a nice big document I can hammer into a full-mission update. We'll do this in sections: player character intros, an NPCs reference section, and then the sessions themselves.

First, player characters. We're running the "Magpies" crew type, a party based around engineering, salvage, and demolitions work. Songs for the Dusk features crew playbooks, so that any given party has a "class" of its own, with a missions specialty. Ours was demolitions, hence the party name of "Crashers" and our home base, which we dubbed "the Crashpad"

On the roster, we have:
- Marl, the Aegis (it/she) - the team bodyguard, an ex-military wilderness guide who ran escort and protection missions for people in remote locations. It is a quadrupedal crab-like robot with shield-shaped legs and armor plating that it can swap in and out for different missions
- Yara of Nowhere, the Scholar (she/her) - An owl-esque person with feathers and big eyes (enhanced by her glasses). Scholars are the general nerd and research class. Her player came up with the organization "Nowhere", a semi-secretive order which preserved the infrastructure of the internet and archived digital knowledge through the apocalypse and into the current times. All formally inducted members of Nowhere have access to a set of accounts and digital permissions that allow them to hack into systems from the Radiant Era
- Quentim Parable, the Charter (he/him) - my guy, bog standard human, a former traveling caravan merchant who stayed in town to help during a time of struggle and has failed to notice that he no longer intends to leave. The most concise way to describe Charters is the "logistics & support" class. All of the abilities are themed around Blades in the Dark-style flashbacks, planning ahead, and giving mechanical advantages to the rest of the crew. It's very "all according to keikaku" and I love it so much
- Gail, the Scrapper (it/she) - the team techie, a bat-like person with a prosthetic left leg, and a dragon therian. She came to New Haven in the hopes of learning how to become a dragon. Gail is the hardware person to Yara's software expertise, and she has a toolkit full of Fun Gadgets and a lil dragon buddy-bot named Byte
- Morena "Momo", the Witch (she/they) - a New Haven native, a human with green-tinted skin and gold-speckled eyes from a childhood case of dragonpox. She works at the town library, and was granted some small mobile DIONE nodes that can function as her familiars. They take the shape of animal-themed jewelry that can spring into action when needed

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( NPC reference )

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( Mission 1 Summary )

You ever play a worldbuilding game and then some players make a pitch that turns into a 30 min discussion that proceeds to define the entire rest of the campaign?

Needless to say. A lot of TQY happened since my initial post, so now I'm making this general summary of events for personal reference and to holler at folks about it. You can see my previous recap of the first chunk of Spring at [this link].

Some important Spring details I left out

Our scarcities were History, Lake Ecology, Fuel, and Familiarity with the Landscape. Our abundance was Wild Game
The teens, who were doing a secret mapping project to learn about the area, landed themselves in huge trouble when one of them fell into the canyon while carrying a DIONE node they weren't supposed to. Thus making contact with the tech restoration community in the canyons, and \*also* revealing DIONE's existence to them. The adults elected to revoke node access to all the kids due to this recklessness
General attitude toward the cavern community is "cautious interest". People are very protective of DIONE and don't know if these techies can be trusted yet. We successfully establish communications, a relationship of information sharing, and DIONE grants them a single node for communication

Now for the rest of the seasons!

( Summer )

( Autumn )

( Winter, the final season )

( Post-Winter addendum )

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[1]: Songs for the Dusk is very explicit about Tamaris being a post-cataclysm Earth. The Radiant Era that preceded the current time was a technomagic utopia (with an exploitative underbelly, same as the world now). ^[return]
[2]: The text of the card: "Winter is harsh, and desperation gives rise to fear mongering. Choose one: Spend the week calming the masses and dispelling their violent sentiments. The week ends immediately. [Or]: Declare war on someone or something. This counts as starting a project."^[return]

ghostqueens has been running a Songs for the Dusk campaign for me, metamour, and a loose collection of other friends. Earlier this month we finally met for the first session, a round of The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. It's a map-drawing and worldbuilding game, where you use a deck of cards to play out one year in the life of a community, before the Frost Shepherds arrive in winter and end everything. The deck is split out by suits, one for each season, and each card is a prompt describing what happens each week of the titular year.

It's a game I like a lot; I'll be bringing a copy with me to a new year's eve party I'm attending next week. It's been a fun way to get everyone used to being at a table together, and riffing off of each other's ideas. We've managed to make a really Songs-ass community

Highlights

- Our town borders the Resolution Lake in the Meridian Valley. Both of these are part of the existing SftD setting. It’s flanked by a swamp, and there’s another tech restoration community living in a canyon to the north of us, who have settled into caves in the canyon walls.
- A large potentially pre-Radiant pump station lies at the edge of the lake - it’s old, abandoned, and completely untouched by nature even after centuries. There are a lot of other underground caverns and passage to an underground portion of the lake
- the oldest community member is Distributed Intelligence One, aka DIONE. She is an AI who was stolen from unknown previous creators/owners.

- By distributed I mean that she has nodes which are either normal servers or portable nodes carried by community members. She needs a minimum of 5-6 nodes within 10m of each other to achieve full sapience.
- Nodes which fall below that concentration can still record input/retrieve data, those just behave more like Siri-level programs, and return information to the whole when brought back within range.

- A coming of age ceremony for children involves being granted their own personal node to carry.

- there are flowers in the area that attract a lot of Transcendent and/or spirit beasts. we’ve yet to elaborate on this detail

- other notable fauna include the crocodiles who live in the lake (one of which has gone and laid a whole nest in the middle of our town), and a large pack of wolves who are a eusocial hivemind

We're only 10 weeks into Spring, because one of our players couldn't make it, and we want to make sure it has a chance to play in the starting season before we move on to Summer. But mannn I'm so excited to find out more about our lil town and to keep playing in this setting together. DIONE is everyone's favorite NPC already (including passerby I've told about the campaign), one of the players wants to make her familiar an active mobile node, and her maintenance needs are an Immediate good hook for our crew (Magpies, techies and scrappers). It's gonna be real fun to figure out how each of our players fits in with the community and what each of our social connections are.

[Originally posted on cohost, August 2024]

So back in like, 2021-2022 (exact end date no longer clear), I was in a Spire campaign run by an internet friend of mine. It's one of the few campaigns I've ever managed to play to completion, and I fucking loved the system and the game we made together.

I was recently reminded of one of the standout sessions we had, so here is a recounting of that session, recreated from some old discord logs at the time. Generalized plot spoilers for the pre-written campaign Kings of Silver to follow

( Read more... )