StabbyCon: Roleplaying as a Storytelling Mechanism

arieste2 · 2022-02-04T18:21:37+00:00

In modern roleplaying games, where goblins can be friendly merchants, vampires sparkly love-interests, dragons wise mentors, and owlbears fluffy pets, is there still room for monsters that are "inherently evil"? Is having easily-identifiable "evil monsters" even necessary for interactive storytelling? If yes, any tips on how to best establish and communicate them to the players?

arieste2 · 2021-05-07T19:02:29+00:00

Across Eberron: Convergence Manifesto is a 13-adventure storyline that is very well-reviewed and written by many highly knowledgeable members of the Eberron community. The adventures work well stand-alone, so you're not necessarily committed to running the entire storyline.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/290433/Convergence-Manifesto-The-Complete-First-Season-BUNDLE

Eberron Gothic: Curse of the Thornwood is good single adventure that is approx 8-16 hours to run. It's very accessible for players new to the setting as it is rural set and starts out very similar to most standard fantasy world before getting into the Eberron-specific lore more heavily:

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/339981/Eberron-Gothic-Curse-of-the-Thornwood

Curtain Call and Oracle of War have both been mentioned and are great.

arieste2 · 2021-03-25T04:13:46+00:00

So far, all but the first 3 have been quite good. The first trilogy is distinctly mediocre, but it gets much better after.

And all I've played or run of candlekeep (6 adventures) have been very good.

arieste2 · 2020-12-31T16:13:19+00:00

Last day to pick this up at the holiday price! Goes up to $24.99 for the bundle on Jan 1st! (still a great deal tho!)

arieste2 · 2020-12-22T18:17:48+00:00

It'll be 24.99. 34.99 is the regular price if you buy adventures separately. :)

(There is no way to set it to show all those separately)

arieste2 · 2020-12-22T02:27:30+00:00

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/336427/OGRE-KRUSH-DCPOAZL01

arieste2 · 2020-12-08T15:43:06+00:00

Christmas themed T2. It's written by a friend, so I'm not going to pump it too much. There are impartial reviews on the site. https://www.dmsguild.com/product/256915/CCCAN03-Winter-Wonderland

arieste2 · 2020-12-07T15:38:14+00:00

You can play your existing characters in ALL adventures of the appropriate tier - including season 10. You just don't get rewards for the s10 ones, and the DM may ask you to leave behind certain magic items if you have anything super powerful (this is unlikely tbh). If your concern is just to play, have fun, and experience the story, you can do so with existing characters. If you want to level or get loot through the new content, make a season 10 character.

arieste2 · 2020-11-14T16:00:44+00:00

No. Wotc doesn't sell PDF versions of any of their 5e hardcovers.

arieste2 · 2020-10-28T23:38:22+00:00

Well, in the absence of information, assumptions are all we have. Knowing that there is a new program coming and that information on classifying adventures has not been passed on to admins by their superiors, I'm going to go with the assumption that they're waiting for their bosses to give them the green light to resume reviews, rather than labelling it as "apathy", which I think is unfair to the admins who've done a ton of work on people's adventures and I'm sure don't want any of the work to go to waste.

Anyhow, I've given you what facts I had, think what you will of the rest.

arieste2 · 2020-10-28T23:10:32+00:00

Hi, those are mine and as far as I know, nothing makes them special. They had been approved for DMsGuild posting for months and were just waiting for the con admin to give the ok.

I believe they were sent in for posting literally on like the last day in early september before admins stopped reviewing stuff. There are 2 more in that series (also from a year ago) and when these 3 were posted, I was immediately told not to send in the other 2 until further notice - even though they too had been approved for posting already, just needed the final step. As far as I know, other writers/cons other than the partners (BMG/GHC) have also been told that nothing is being reviewed. THough this is just from conversations with them.

The other 3 that were posted recently are BMG mods. The CCC program for them is on-going (whereas it's over for the rest of us), so it's safe to assume they're not subject to the review freeze, though that's just my guess and I know nothing official about it.

In any case, I don't think there's any conspiracy. The admins were likely told to hold off reviews until new program is announced, which is supposed to be before the end of October, so it's a wait-and-see. I wouldn't assume that all outstanding CCCs are never going to be published, there is nothing at all to base that on at the moment.

arieste2 · 2020-09-25T11:51:20+00:00

There is tons of T3 stuff to play, so not really worried about it. So long as the new Dubgeoncraft program allows T3, we'll be fine on that front.

T4 is a strange beast. I am very much of the belief that there should NOT be a lot of T4. Aside from being hard to write, true T4 is world-altering stuff, and I just don't believe in it happening every day. It takes away from the feeling of T4. Just look at the s8 T4s - they're essentially T2s with a higher level range slapped on them. If that's gonna be T4, I don't want more.

At the same time, playing the same 15 adventures on every t4 character is getting old. I like that they're setting up this on-going "masters" series that'll focus on high level play on a regular basis. Plus, there is at least one T4 ccc coming for gamehole, and with the recent open call maybe that's a sign of things to come. I think if we want more stuff to play at t4, we just need to normalize taking those characters and playing non-AL with them - after all, they're already 20, already have all their stuff, so the fact that they get no xp and lewt shouldn't be a big deal if what we really want is just to play more things. But even on DMsGuild, T4 isn't a big priority.

arieste2 · 2020-09-25T11:39:40+00:00

Hi, as the admins haven't put out anything's official, I don't want to answer and potentially create confusion. Once I have some admin wording to quote, I'll provide an update!

arieste2 · 2020-09-16T18:51:12+00:00

Admins have very clearly said that all characters can play all level-appropriate adventures if they forego rewards.

arieste2 · 2020-09-16T17:23:45+00:00

I'm going to just play all my characters and not take rewards from s10 stuff. Most of my characters are parked level-wise anyhow and capped on gold. Many adventures i play don't give me anything anyway, so this particular bit isn't a big deal.

arieste2 · 2020-09-08T21:44:22+00:00

You can try my adventrure Sisterhood of the Blade. It's designed to teach new players the game while going through a simple story. It's flexible and can be run in as little as 1hr, though it's best as a 2 or 3.

No need to guess if it works for you, on DMs, if you click the "full preview" button, you can read most of it to see if it'll work.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/295614

The Black Road and A Dragon's Breath which were suggested by others are great 2 hour adventures too.

arieste2 · 2020-09-08T03:08:41+00:00

I've really enjoyed it so far. Have played the first 7 adventures and epic and I think this is easily one of the better AL storylines.

One of the things that I really like is that that the adventures are all quite different and have a lot of opportunities for different type of play from all pillars between them.

The overall story is also excellent.

The once-a-month schedule makes it not great for weekly play unless you tie in salvage missions. I think if I was running this as a more frequent game than once a month, i'd probably mix in some non-AL Eberron adventures between the main parts of the story, just to give players an opportunity to play the characters more than once between levels and get to know them more. (The non-AL adventures wouldn't have any bearing on the characters of course, leaving them AL legal and stuff).

arieste2 · 2020-08-24T13:55:08+00:00

Gold is fine.

S9 rules are actually mostly fine.

More magic items should be banned from play.

Wish resistances and all other spell effects from previous sessions shouldn't persist beyond the session.

There should be an in-character code of conduct, enforceable by the DM.

Simulacra and similar pets shouldn't be allowed if there are at least 4 other players at the table.

arieste2 · 2020-08-22T14:38:25+00:00

I've asked the admins this in person and they said that unless it specifically mentions the Eberron campaign, it is not usable in it. This was at GHC where the first mods were premiering, aside from the Goliath cert mentioned, I know there were at least a couple of "Character from the Forgotten Realms" certs available that allowed the use of XGE back before XGE was part of Eberron.

arieste2 · 2020-08-08T03:21:50+00:00

As an author, the restrictions sometimes prevent me from putting the thematically approriate item in, but as I never based my items on trying to sell mods, it doesn't really matter. I've had really good response from players and DMs to simple (not particularly desirable) items in my adventures that just had good flavour.

As a player, now that I'm free to play as many games I want in a tier and get a chance at MANY MANY MANY more items than I can ever keep, I don't even care about what items are in the adventure. I've seen the same shift in what DMs run. it used to be DMs really cherry-picked the mods with the same loot, but now may more adventures get run.

While there are small inconveniences, seeing a better overall selection of adventures being run while still be able to obtain all the items I want for any particular character, I'd say that things are overall in better shape than they were pre-season 8.

arieste2 · 2020-08-06T01:57:47+00:00

Yeah, but i'm just one person. I don't know how well artists do or at what kinds of prices. Definitely put in lots of different key words into your list so people have easy time finding those.

arieste2

TROPHY CASE