Railroading (the Good Kind)

Posted on 16 May, 2016 by Law

In the process of putting together the world map for the Eight Arms campaign setting, I’ve also learned about some of the things that make a world go. It’s forced me to learn more about geography and politics than I did before, and I think that’s made the setting more interesting. That is, of course, my focus: I’d rather have something fun and dynamic that lets me set up good stories than something that cleaves to realism but plays drier than a desert. This means if you’re from the Worldbuilding subreddit and you expect me to say something like “I made sure all the mountain ranges followed local arrangements based on my world’s plate tectonics”, prepare to be disappointed.

So far the most interesting part for me has been trains. The Eight Arms campaign take place in a technologically-advanced version of D&D, an industrial revolution where mechanics and other non-magical opportunities are ramping up and nobody has yet stopped to consider whether it’s a good idea. Heck, the entire first campaign started when somebody said “Hey, I bet with a strong enough power source and sufficient gumption we could create a brand-new inner plane”. Nothing says “let’s do neat stuff and handle the consequences as they come” like a big, loud, powerful box belching smoke into the air of a world where we already have teleportation.

In that respect trains are very different from Eberron’s lighting rails, which are relatively clean and some weird hybrid of magic and science. I think they’re neat as anything, but that’s not what I wanted the setting to do. I was looking for something more like Final Fantasy 6 or maybe 5, a setting that’s a step beyond medieval fantasy, but also where nonmagical airships are a thing.

Initially I’d pictured trains as something rare, used primarily for long-distance travel across national borders, and the country in which the first Eight Arms campaign took place was something of an anomaly in that it had more towns connected by more rails than any other. But in looking into actual historical information about railways, I’ve found I was drastically undershooting how connected everything was. I’m still not going to link every little borough with each other, but I can at least connect every major city in most countries without worrying about turning disbelief on its ear.

This actually makes me happier, not because it makes it easier for players to get around but because it makes it easier for everybody else. Trade, and culture can bleed out farther and faster, so it’s not that weird to find people or things far from home. It alleviated one of the big problems I had with the setting, that I, who has frequently railed against race-based rules, built an entire setting around race-based cultures. Now that travel is faster and safer, countries are more like ancestral homelands. A human can say “I’m from dwarf country on my father’s side, and my mother’s is more of a mix” as easily as an American can say “I’m mostly Irish” despite never seeing Ireland more closely than a calendar photo, and both are equivalent excuses to drink.

I’m still of two minds on the “safer” aspect, though. If they’re safe enough for an average person to use them for regular business or personal travel, they’re too safe for a party to expect a combat on one. I’ll probably have to engineer a reason for a fight to break out, and knowing me I’ll split the party so the tough, strong characters are outside the train and the softer ones are inside, each fighting a different wave of bad guys, and the more I think about this the more excited I get.

The point is that railroads started as a bit of window dressing and a potential set piece, but with a little research grew into the most visible example of the setting’s differences from standard D&D. It’s actually kind of alarming how many ideas you can get from the most mundane sources. I could do an entire post on how song lyrics have built campaign villains, and I still have half a mind to run a campaign based on the Year Without a Summer. Of course, mine would have a magical, preventable cause because this is a high fantasy story, not a climatological study.

If I have any actionable advice from this, it’s to always keep your ears open. Inspiration isn’t something that happens to you as much as it’s something you find by looking for it.

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Houdini and Doyle (the Show, Not the People [Well, Kind of the People])

Posted on 12 May, 2016 by Law

After all the gushing I did about Lucifer I thought it would be fun to compare it to the show that moved into its time slot, Houdini and Doyle. As it turns out, that’s the only fun thing about the show.

I can forgive the writers playing fast and loose with historical accuracy; it seems they’re just about right on with Doyle’s timeline, so they had to make some sacrifices to shoehorn Houdini into it. I can forgive the incredibly unsatisfying explanations for the mystical elements; they had to do something spectacular in the early episodes to hook viewers, even if the answers were a bit of a cheat. I can forgive how it’s fairly terrible at being a mystery series because they don’t give the viewer a fair chance at figuring out the solution; most ostensible mystery series don’t. I can even forgive the bad acting; I liked Painkiller Jane so I don’t really get to complain.

What I can’t forgive is how the advertising pitched the show as a bromance, when as far as I can tell it’s nothing of the sort. Our male leads don’t compliment and respect each other; they bicker relentlessly, denigrate each other’s opinions (and facts), and interact more meaningfully with their police liaison than with each other. It’s exactly the opposite of what I wanted and what was promised. I can understand taking some liberties with advertisement, but if viewers are explicitly told they’ll get one thing and but delivered another, I would expect those viewers to complain about it to anybody who will listen. I have to imagine this is a worse fate than disinterest. It’s the difference between “didn’t get good ratings” and “had one terrible but popular episode, then didn’t get good ratings”. At least you can build an entire career on the former.

The point is that Houdini and Doyle isn’t good, but more than that it’s not what I signed up for. I can tolerate a lot of problems if I’m at least getting what I want out of something, whether it’s a movie, a TV show, or a campaign.

Consider the One Piece campaign*. We snarkily called it “the hallway campaign” due to the number of battles that took place in a one- or two-square-wide area, something that has happened maybe twice in the source material. The campaign conflicted with the established setting fairly frequently. Several NPCs erred on the side of “goofy for the sake of goofy”, a recurring issue I have with the DM’s style (re: Slogg Sexipants, half-ton ladies’ man). And none of this takes into account the little problems I had week-to-week, like when the DM decided my character was going to charge down an elevator shaft so he could weld me to the floor so I couldn’t participate in the first stage of an arc-ending battle. It wasn’t perfect.

But the campaign was very good at giving us the feel of One Piece. We had arc villains who would pop up, do something bad just in time for us to arrive to stop them, and fight us on even footing. We had fantastic islands and creatures, including an actual giant enemy crab. We had naval combat as much about our weird powers and teamwork as about grid movement and turning radii. We had shounen abilities and growth arcs and hilarious arguments. And really, when I look back on it, the canon violations weren’t that bad, and they expanded the setting more often than they contradicted it. For the most part, it was exactly as advertised, and I think highly of it for that exact reason.

Contrast The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori. I pitched it to the players as “fight giant monsters”. They built characters to fight giant monsters. I came up with a plot that let them fight giant monsters and a villain who could control giant monsters. But as soon as the campaign started, it changed to a mission of diplomacy where the players wanted to understand and help every enemy they met. At one point we went four straight sessions without a single battle. That’s neat, and the players liked it, but it wasn’t what I signed up for. I wasn’t happy, and I still consider it one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever run.

I’m one of those people who judges something not by how good it is, but by how good it is compared to how good it could have been. If something exceeds my expectations I’m over the moon about it, even if my expectations are very low. If something fails to meet those expectations I don’t like it, even if it’s very popular or objectively good (links intentionally omitted; I’m not starting that fight). When you promise me something, I set an expectation for that thing. If you break that promise, you’ve failed to meet that expectation.

This is why I like having the occasional touchstone for long-running campaigns, where we step back and consider whether the campaign is still doing the job it set out to do. If it is, great, double down. If it’s not, we have to consider if it failed to meet its expectations or if the expectations have changed over time. It’s how we head off that sensation of falling out of love with a campaign and make sure everybody’s still having fun. It’s kind of like having a Session Zero, but between arcs rather than between campaigns, and it hits all the same points. If there’s a disconnect, it’s good for the campaign, the players, and the DM to catch it early.

So yeah, I’m really not a fan of being told I’m getting one thing and instead getting another. The best way to avoid doing that is to make sure your campaigns make promises they can keep, or at least don’t make promises you know they can’t.

* — There are a lot of links in this post. If you’re at work or on mobile, I apologize. If you’re at home and relaxing, you’re welcome.

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Eight Arms Setting Map

Posted on 5 May, 2016 by Law

I haven’t done absolutely nothing over the last month while the A to Z Challenge was going. I’ve gotten started on some articles that will post at various times, including a few about the Zelda campaign that will post when it ends sometime this summer. I also finally hunkered down and did something I’ve been promising to do for a few years: making a world map for the Eight Arms campaign setting.

I followed a very nice tutorial at http://imgur.com/a/6K80W, which I think I found by way of the normally-far-too-deep-for-me Worldbuilding subreddit. I couldn’t do everything exactly as the tutorial recommended because I have Photoshop Elements 8 instead of Photoshop for Artists and Expensive People 2018, but I think I managed:

This is just the general map, with no cities or non-geographic landmarks, to lay out roughly how the countries work together. It also does what I promised I would do by integrating the elemental races into the continent proper. There’s no scale intentionally because I don’t want to be beholden to a travel time or distance I previously defined. I’d rather leave it vague so I can work it to the story at any given time.

In more boring news, I also finally got the campaign wiki to work with picture uploads, so I can start the legitimately thrilling process of getting character portraits done for the various Eight Arms characters. If you happen to know or be anybody who can art, let me know.

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A to Z Challenge Postmortem

Posted on 2 May, 2016 by Law

The Blogging from A to Z Challenge was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Going over all of my campaigns to pull out characters was a neat historical exercise, and figuring out which ones were interesting enough to warrant five hundred words got me thinking about how my gaming style and the styles of my players have evolved. I may go back and do some retrospectives for other characters, too. About fifty characters didn’t make the cut, and several of them really deserved an article but didn’t get one because their letter was taken by someone else. If nothing else, writing about them will give me something to link to whenever I say things like “half-ton ladies’ man” or “kobold werepanther ranger/sorcerer raised by goliaths”.

I will admit to failing one portion of the challenge, though I also admit no wrongdoing in that failure. See, one of the points of the challenge is to visit other blogs. The managing blog put it pretty well on day G:

One of the best things about the Challenge is meeting new people and finding cool blogs that are super-interesting. However, the only way people will know you’ve visited is if you leave comments on their blogs. That not only says that we’ve dropped in, but that we were engaged enough to introduce ourselves.

I tried to do this, I promise, but every time I tried to leave a comment something technical got in the way. One blog banned all comments from anybody who wasn’t signed into a Google account. Another pretended to let me comment, but when I tried to submit my comment it took me to a separate login page and erased what I had written. I’m not sure a technology designed to foster communication is doing its job if it limits that communication only to a subset of the audience. I ended up following a few blogs for the entire challenge, but I specifically want to give a shoutout to Fuzzy’s Dicecapades; it has a lot of interesting things to say that merit discussion, but its commenting system means I am in no danger of saying so on each post.

I also didn’t want to get into the habit of commenting along the lines of “yep, this post sure was a post”. I feel like if I’m not contributing to the discussion I don’t need to assert my presence in it. It’s why this blog doesn’t have many posts about updates on my campaigns or their settings unless they pertain to some greater conversation about gaming (or I just want to show off my swank Zelda maps), and why every post in April had to involve something about how the character made me an angrier a better DM. If there’s no advice in my comments I’m doing a pretty poor job of representing an advice blog, and if there’s no actual commentary then what’s the point?

Accordingly, if you made a comment here this month (or ever, really) just to say “my keyboard works, here is a link to my blog” and you’re wondering why it didn’t get approved, there you go.

I’m already trying to figure out whether I’m going to do this next year and, if so, what I’ll talk about. I thought about covering the most fun NPCs and villains I’ve run, but that feels like a month of patting myself on the back for being amazing. Another option is to spend each day telling a story about some monster in my campaigns. I know I have stories about a xorn, a zombie, a qlippoth, an umber hulk, and a jyoti, so that’s half the battle right there. Apparently the other half will be wrestling my auto-spellcheck into submission.

What I definitely won’t do is another month of characters in my campaigns. Even though I enjoyed it, I only had one options for F, H, N, O, Q, U, X, Y, and I’m not planning on asking my players to run characters only in the disused section of the alphabet. Since my next two campaigns are going to use mostly characters from earlier campaigns, I just won’t be able to get the volume I need.

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Z is for Zee, Extraplanar Bereaucrat

Posted on 30 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Zee
Campaign: Unnamed Monster Campaign

We started the month with a character who started off looking one-note but became awesome accidentally through play. Let’s bookend it by talking about a character who started off one-note and intentionally stayed exactly that boring.

Zee was a cleric from the Plane of Law. Readers well-versed in D&D cosmology may have read that and said “oh, you mean Mechanus.” No, I mean a plane named “Plane of Law”, created solely for this character. This was the home of the zenythri, who lived in their capital of Zenythriopolis. It was here that Zee, a zenythri, joined the Church of the Lawful Pantheon and dedicated herself to law, religion, and good, in that order.

To this day I don’t know how much of the above paragraph is a exact and valid example of zenythri culture, how much is a joke at my expense, and how much is it is just incredibly lazy character design. See, zenythri only exist in The Book of Bad Ideas the D&D 3.0E Monster Manual II, where the full description of their race, philosophy, history, culture, and racial powers fits on half a page. This gave us a lot of freedom to design them, and Zee’s player decided they were direct in naming and pretty much everything else (almost—I think she decided her racial language was Bureaucracy, which is the least direct thing possible but did come up during play several times).

Her key personality trait was that she had purple skin. If you do not consider this a personality trait, you’re right. Zee had little to no character, again intentionally. She took a heavily bureaucratic race, applied a low Charisma modifier to it, and played it to the hilt. She didn’t try to understand the other members of the party because she knew they were wrong, and she only stuck with them because they were her best way to find the demon lord she’d been sent to kill. To that end she treated them as minions, mostly snarking at them whenever they erred and reprimanding them for not following the byzantine tenets of law only she knew by heart (take a drink).

The player, however, did not, and that’s the point. She was an irritating, stoic curmudgeon, but her player applied it in a way that was fun for everybody at the table. Zee didn’t refuse to participate in plots that didn’t further her personal objectives, she didn’t force other characters to pledge their allegiance to her, and most of her ire was reserved for the campaign’s half-dragon orc barbarian because that’s what was funniest. She was the blue oni to his red oni, and their sniping always had a comedic edge to it. Still, she went along with whatever harebrained schemes the party had, and if you’ve listed to the podcasts I linked during Thrae and Valitude you’ve heard most of them. She was the most likable unlikeable character I could ask for.

She did manage to kill the demon lord she was after, then got killed by that demon lord’s father, then killed him back. A few sessions after that the campaign ended, with Zee successful but still not entirely clear how to get home to a plane nobody else had ever heard of.

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Y is for Kalodal Ybarra, Halfling Bruce Wayne

Posted on 29 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Kalodal Ybarra a.k.a. The Whisperthief
Campaign: The Umbrageous Sodality and the Ghost Opera

Normally I refer to a character by their first name, but that gives my spellcheck fits.

Ybarra was also a vigilante, and also the stealthy kind. He was known as the Whisperthief, Lady Evening’s consort, because when your epithets have epithets you know you have a reputation. He was a gambler by trade, wandering about from place to place looking for a good time. This served as his cover, explaining how Whisperthief could flit about the continent, dispensing justice under the guise of an innocent traveler. His vigilante identity was aided by his physical transformation into a creature of shadow, giving him mystical ability along with his skills.

If I had to pick a superhero analogue for Ybarra it would be Batman, not because he was a genius or combat expert but because he loved leaving fearful enemies in his wake. Ybarra is the mask and the Whisperthief is the identity; the gambler was a means to an end, explaining his movement and letting him get close to a city’s seedy underbelly so he could take it apart piece by piece. He focused on precise strikes, slowly getting into a position from which he could exert overwhelming force, and he supported himself with ambiguously magical powers. Even at the end of the campaign he didn’t reveal his identity to his allies or officially join their group, leaving it unclear whether he would be there to help in the future. He is most definitely the lancer.

Ybarra was also frustrating, but this time for valid reasons. One of my soft rules is “no summoners”, not because their power irks me but because I’m so tired of seeing them in every campaign. So, of course, in this vigilante-only campaign, Ybarra had four levels of summoner. A synthesist, no less. His form gave him several benefits: it let him change size, so figuring out his identity became almost impossible and negated one of the key dramatic tensions of the vigilante; it gave him concealment, so even if something could hit his absurdly high AC he had a change to ignore it, and he ignored sneak attack from any ruffians in the campaign; it gave him a climb speed, so he could make it almost impossible to pin him down or approach him in melee. I never came up with an opponent that could challenge Ybarra without that same opponent pancaking the party. The character wasn’t a person, he was a powergaming exercise in a flimsy person disguise, and the only reason I didn’t force a complete rebuild was because the other players didn’t seem to mind and I didn’t want to create any table drama. I don’t have the same problem between campaigns.

In addition, Ybarra started as a lone wolf and ended there. His justification was that he couldn’t trust the rest of the party with his identity, and from the standpoint of a vigilante he was right. But from the standpoint of Law 4 and the clearly-defined campaign theme he definitely was not. I expect this won’t be a problem the next time the character appears, or he won’t be appearing at all.

I did get him back, though. In eidolon form Whisperthief was tall, strong, covered in grasping shadows that could look like fur in low light, and good at stealth. Some of his victims started thinking he was a bugbear. He also attacked from above with his climb speed, so they gave him a new, criminal-approved superhero name: Dropbear.

Again, Ybarra will return when the Eight Arms Crafting Team fights the Umbrageous Sodality (take a drink; if you still have the same drink as yesterday, that’s cool). Normally I love paring good guys and bad guys off with each other, but in this case the synthesist summoners on each team will probably not fight each other. Ybarra is a lancer, so he’ll probably fight the Eight Arms’ lancer. I’m not sure if that fight will be clever and satisfying or a meaningless empty slog.

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X is for Xavier Beauchene, Elven Clark Kent

Posted on 28 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Xavier Beauchene a.k.a. the Voice
Campaign: The Umbrageous Sodality and the Ghost Opera

Full disclosure: I started putting together the list of characters for these posts months ago to make sure it was actually possible. It turned out I had never run a campaign with a character whose name began with an X or a Y (though I did run for a character named the Roman numeral IX, which is so close). Around that time I was starting the vigilante campaign, so I asked the players if they could kindly help me out. Conveniently these letters are right next to each other, which lets me do a bit of comparison. You may even want to skip this post and come back tomorrow so you can read them back-to-back.

Xavier was, obviously, a vigilante. He didn’t start the campaign with a code name but was soon forced to adopt “The Voice” given his predilection for very high Stealth checks during conversations with characters who had very low Perception. A member of the town guard by day, he worked the beat so he could explore the city as research for his nighttime activities. As a build he was focused on the sap, which let him apprehend criminals without killing them, and mobility, using a vigilante trick that let him get a sneak attack during the movement he made to get into position for further sneak attacks.

If I had to pick a superhero analogue for Xavier it would be Superman, not because he was a top-tier powerhouse but because he wanted to do what was right both in and out of costume. Xavier is his identity and the Voice is his mask; he joined the guard to fight for justice, and when the legal system proved too corrupt to mete it out he starting doing it himself. Despite using stealth he still took his fight to his enemies up front, and he did no permanent harm when he could help it. Most of the time he approached the other party members to talk rather than the other way around, and he was probably more into the idea of a superhero team-up than any other character (which I appreciate, since that’s what the campaign was about and I made sure everybody knew that). He is most definitely the hero.

I’ll admit I was frustrated when I saw how easy it was for Xavier to knock out an opponent in a single turn, approaching an enemy and making two sneak attacks with bonus damage before the enemy even knew he was there. But that only really happened with low-level mooks, which is the exact point of low-level mooks. The more I saw Xavier work the more I liked him, and he could be the unofficial leader of the unofficial vigilante team if they ever got around to considering such things (this does make the fourth time this player has been the party leader, so I’m starting to think he has a type). I think it’ll be really interesting to see how he works when he’s not in a town where he’s working in the guard and how the character changes as he works with people who have his back.

The good guys won, so Xavier is still alive and active. One of the explicit points of this campaign was to build the characters as antagonists for a future campaign, where the two groups the players have in this setting face off against each other (take a drink). I’m looking forward to that.

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W is for Nate Westerling, Every Western Hero

Posted on 27 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Nathaniel “Nate” Westerling
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Conqueror Worm

For as proud as I am of the Eight Arms campaign setting, I haven’t leveraged the cross-campaign ramifications of it much. After seven campaigns there have only been six characters who appeared in more than one, and one of those was an NPC. Four of the others are part of the same party, and I couldn’t get away with not mentioning them.

Nate Westerling was a member of the Eight Arms Crafting Team, a group of adventurers ostensibly united by having some sort of item-making skill. Nate was the group’s bullet-maker and he also happened to be an expert rifleman, which was good considering how often “making bullets” segues into “fighting for your life” in my campaigns. He didn’t much trust fancy modern technology, which was an interesting trait for a person whose boss fought in a steam-powered flying suit. Most importantly he had a nice hat, which we think was the reason he was hired into the Eight Arms in the first place.

I like to think he was the result of a government experiment to pack as many Western tropes into one character as possible. Sometimes he was a young guy looking to make a name for himself with only the gun on his shoulder, sometimes he was a grizzled veteran of many a strange and unspeakable thing, and sometimes he was the loyal deputy willing to ride anywhere for the friend at his side or the woman he loves. But he always, always, pronounced the letter G as an apostrophe (fightin’, thinkin’, tryin’, etc.)

…Cripes, he had “west” in his name. How did I not see that before just now?

I should point out that Nate was a gunslinger that didn’t use guns. When the Eight Arms campaign setting started there were no gun rules, so I made some that largely treated guns as mechanically-viable crossbows. Paizo published gun rules between that first campaign and the second, but we generally don’t like them. The bits of guns that were good were balance-breaking good, and the bits that were bad were fun-destroying bad. Instead Nate used the gunslinger class and with one of our homebrew guns, so I got to see the gunslinger without the “does so much damage so safely, nobody else in the party matters” issues I hear about. That may be the most readily a player has ever adopted one of my custom rules.

Nate’s story isn’t over, though after he went on trial for the murder of a supervillain, got the Eight Arms banned from Scotland, accidentally helped the love of his life change sexes, and overthrew a country’s rightful ruler to put a demon in his place, he might want a break.

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V is for Valitude, Insufferable Mirror Man

Posted on 26 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Valitude
Campaign: Unnamed Monster Campaign

You know, I almost made it through a whole month without admitting I had a campaign name “Unnamed Monster Campaign”. I didn’t realize they were all at the back of the list.

Valitude was the monster campaign’s third arcane spellcaster, after the first died to a frost worm’s death throes and the second died to an incredibly overpowered arrow demon. He was a nerra, a race of mirror-people from the 3.25E Fiend Folio. He was in many ways a mirror of his player: laid-back, didn’t have a lot of relevant knowledge but didn’t need fancy thinking to do his job, reflective spell resistance, and so on. He didn’t guide the plot or even follow it as much as hitch a ride with it whenever it was going someplace.

Please understand that it’s a little hard for me to effectively describe Valitude without also discussing his player or degenerating into a fit of enraged spittle, both things I’ve tried hard not to do this month. I have never had a character or player so emotionally distant from the storyline, the other players, or the table mood, and I’ve run for characters named Fat Albert, Gloves Badidea, and “Richard, son of Ganon.”

Weirdly, Valitude is a contributor to, if not responsible for, one of that most important realizations I’ve had around my gaming style: the DM is a player too; as with any player, if he or she isn’t having fun there’s something wrong. Running for Valitude wasn’t fun. He liked save-or-die spells, which broke encounter balance and session timing. He responded the same way to everything, which broke emotional pacing. He had a racial ability, his reflective spell resistance, that hurt the cleric’s healing and buffing powers and thus broke one of her key roles. Once his player even played a full session without a character sheet, making up his numbers as he went. I don’t think I can properly describe the breadth of ways in which that stuck with me as a DM and as a player.

Rather than describe him in detail, I recommend you check out the beginning of the episode of I Podcast Magic Missile where we talk about him some years after the fact. It’s better for my blood pressure. Valitude’s ignominious death is also discussed there. Suffice it to say that while there are several characters where I’ve had to talk to their players and make significant changes, Valitude is the only character I’ve ever had to put down.

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U is for Mikau the Unwitting, Zora I Remember

Posted on 25 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Mikau the Unwitting
Campaign: Osaevu the Chosen

U is a hard letter. Leveraging an epithet is a bit of a cheat, but whatever.

Mikau was a 3rd-edition character in a Legend of Zelda campaign, so prepare for a lot of unrecognizable words: he was a zora hexblade who multiclassed into warmage. His gimmick was low Wisdom, and his method of expressing it was by manifesting overtly evil magic in a way that used it for good (this is not the same player as Sammael, but they travel in the same circles). As a character in a campaign based on a video game setting he didn’t have a massive amount of complicated backstory, or at least not any that came up during game.

He may be the first character I saw in a campaign who had an arc, however limited. He started as a pure hexblade, and as the story progressed he realized his powers weren’t cutting it, resolved to change, and branched out into a mechanically similar (Charisma-focused combat magician) but thematically opposite (self-taught shadow paladin vs. academy-taught explosion wizard) class. A less forgiving DM might point out that he went from a class with excellent accuracy but low damage into a class with high damage mitigated by its bad accuracy, but there isn’t a lot of game-breaking damage you can do with 1st-level spells in an 8th-level campaign. I, on the other hand, encouraged the switch entirely by accident: when the players entered the Dark World I gave them corruption effects, and his (absolutely random, I assure you) corruption was a penalty to the schools of magic hexblades use and a bonus to the schools of magic warmages use. I figure if my dice like Mikau that much, who am I to argue?

I don’t have a lot to say about Mikau, but the point is that I have anything to say about him at all. He’s the only character on this month’s list from either of my first two campaigns. Most of the characters in those campaigns were forgettable stereotypes of either characters (the one-off joke, the straight-out-of-the-book rogue, the mechanical thinking exercise who really wasn’t a character, etc.) or players (the cheater, the joker playing himself, the I’m-only-here-because-my-boyfriend-is, etc.) Before reviewing my notes for this month I could only name half of them off the top of my head, and I certainly couldn’t put together two paragraphs like the above. Compare to my third campaign, where even ten years later I can say “oh, character X joined the party in session Y because the previous character died to monster Z despite the following list of mitigating effects”.

Mikau was the lone exception, memorable for something besides a gameplay story or a mechanical gimmick. In a way he was a more advanced character than we were ready for at that point in our careers so I didn’t give him as much chance to shine as he deserved. Now that I’ve caught up to him I’d like to run for him again, but he’s not in the current Zelda campaign and I’m not looking to run another any time soon. The only way I’d be able to do it would be if somebody else ran a Zelda campaign in which I was a player.

…Interesting.

The last session of the campaign is kind of a blur. I think Mikau survived the final battle against the campaign villain, the for-reals final battle against Ganon, and the during-the-credits accidental final boss disaster. As a victorious hero in a Zelda campaign, he probably started roaming the world looking for ways to make fans argue about timelines.

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