Dungeons and Dankness Part 12: Summer Nights and Autumn Leaves

Hojo is a Pirate King who controls much of the underworld of Korotiku.  Styling himself as a gentleman and noble, he has recently taken up play-writing and poetry.  Even then, his sadistic nature shows, as when a character gets hurt or dies in the play, they dies for real.  Hojo believes that an actual life and death situation will create the most genuine acting.

His play, titled Summer Nights and Autumn Leaves, is a short, two act play that draws inspiration from Romeo and Juliet and  Othello.  The chief characters are Veronica, the guard of Prince Cosmo's palace, the thief Giovanna, and Giuseppe, the clown.  Veronica and Giovanna kill each other over Cosmo's love, and a distraught Cosmo leaps off the highest set on stage.

Two of the players act out the characters Giovanna and Cosmo while an NPC named Othella plays Veronica.  Othella, like hundreds of actors before her, has been forced to kill her fellow thespians in Hojo's  theater.  The players will have to choose if they will try to set her free while escaping, or defend themselves in this dark play.

Dungeons and Dankness Part 11: Spring Break

Over Spring Break, I mostly worked on re-editing my main quest outline document, but I also came up with a brand new monster for our campaign: The Water Wizard.

Coming up from the briny deeps is the legendary Water Wizard who swings a deadly anchor.  However, this anchor is enchanted.  Instead of being dragged in water, the anchor drags water out of the sea, creating a flail of water.

Dungeons and Dragons Part 10: The Lord's Last Dinner

This week, I got the privilege to playtest one of the stories I wrote for the campaign.  I wanted to as many of the player's adventures to have as little combat as possible.  The players will probably be fighting a ton of monsters and bad guys in side quests and random encounters, so I wanted them to have a chance to flex their non-combat skills.

I wrote the outline to a whodunit where the players eat dinner at a lord's palace, only for the lord to die halfway through and the blame being placed on the players.  I'm very good at writing mysteries and I hit writer's block trying to come up with all the clues, luckily, our dungeon master Ian Ehlers managed to come up with a great mystery on the fly, and gave me inspiration for various clues.

Dungeons and Dankness Part 9: Driders and Pirates

An NPC, or "Non-Player Character" is someone in a game who is not the player nor an enemy.  They exist to either be important characters the player interacts with, a vendor for supplies, or just and extra to populate the world.  It was my task this week to stat out and give backstories to the most important characters that the players will be interacting with.
The document can be found here.

My two favorite characters to work on were Malvyr the Drider Librarian, and the Pirate King and playwright.  Malvyr was a promising drow warrior who failed her trials and was cursed to become a half-spider creature.  Exiled, she wandered aimlessly until she heard about a spider god named Korotiku.  She thought that if she killed this false spider god, she would be redeemed in the eyes of Lolth (the drow spider goddess who cursed Malvyr).  But when she saw Korotiku in all his glory, she was frightened and surrendered without a fight.  Korotiku, being a very benevolent god, took Malvyr in, making her his ward and Head Librarian of his vast library.

I wanted a sort of Jabba the Hutt kind of character for our campaign, someone who was incredibly vile and sadistic, but who also felt very highly of himself.  Initially, he would've had gladiatorial fights in his palace, but I didn't think this fit his "upper class" ego.  So now he writes plays that he forces actors to participate in, but whenever there's a fight or death scene, the actors are expected to actually kill each other.  Hojo's sadistic mind believes this add more believability to his violent plays.  I think this fits more with how he wants to be scene, plus it's not as cliched as gladiator fights.