TTRPGs count as gaming, right? So tell me a little about what you have going on!
I’m currently in two DND 5e campaigns.
The first one is a homebrew setting, but still pretty standard as far as DND settings go. All the usual races. My character is Velena Zausek, a level 3 half-drow draconic sorcerer. Her backstory is that her drow father escaped the Underdark when he was young, then he and her human mother went on to start a successful weaving business. One day a badly wounded man stumbled into their town and they gave him shelter, fully expecting him to die. But he miraculously recovered, and then he claimed to be a dragon in disguise. As thanks, he offered them a boon: He would ask his dragon god to bless their bloodline. Thinking he was just nuts, they accepted and thought nothing more of it… until Velena hit puberty and started growing scales and setting things on fire.
When she reached adulthood, Velena inherited the weaving business but was bored to tears by it, so she decided to set out to be an adventurer. She and her buddies just finished fighting some drow who were about to sacrifice people to perform a ritual, and I suspect we’ll try to figure out what their whole deal was as our next move.
Oh, and one of the party members is a draegloth (drow monster thingy) who took one look at Velena and decided she must be in charge lmao. Velena didn’t initially realize this, but upon figuring it out she is so uncomfortable with it. I’m loving roleplaying it.
The second campaign is set in the Old Margreve, though I believe the DM just borrowed the setting and isn’t planning on using any of the premade stuff otherwise. This campaign is newer, so I have less to say about it, but it seems really fun so far. Amusingly enough, we’re following what seem to be drow through the forest, so drow are possibly the bad guys in both my campaigns.
My character is a Tabaxi swashbuckler rogue named Wind on Water. He just hit 4th level, and if anyone has any suggestions for feats, that would be appreciated. (I already have Alert.) He doesn’t have as much of a backstory as Velena, but he grew up dirt poor in a big city and is adventuring to make money for himself and his brother. He and one of the other PCs are con men who were hiding out from their last heist when they got roped into this adventure. Their game was that his companion would steal from nobles, then Wind would “catch” him and turn him in for a price before freeing him. Kind of like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, if you’ve seen that.
Both Velena and Wind are a blast to play, but for very different reasons. Velena is my first DND character, so she’s a lot like me because I figured that would be easier to roleplay. With Wind, I wanted to try something harder, so he’s not much like me at all.
But enough about my bullshit. Tell me about your bullshit!
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Unfortunately my group has been hit or miss the past few weeks, sometimes we hang but just don’t play DND. Our schenanigans have somehow found their way into space and on our last excursion, our party was following a lead on a volatile new fuel source that had a side effect of turning people into these weird slaad blob creatures. We were in stealth mode trying to pursue an enemy ship before it reached some massive star destroyer sized vessel… We ended last session with the dm heavily implying that we were gonna get caught in a tractor beam
I’m playing a wizard half goblin in a homebrew campaign named Gobble Snart, Son of Snoggle Snart. He’s the son of my last character (Snoggle) who was a pigman who had a thing for goblin women. So he’s half pigman, half goblin. He’s food motivated and about as rowdy and unpolite as one can be. So the party was going to turn me in to the police (on murder charges) but I lit their hotel on fire and dipped. I’m tailing the party eating their food scraps now. Next session I plan to either eat the player who’s a fairy in the night or try to ally with the big bad guy and make a new character, Wondle Snart the half gnome (Gobble’s daughter). Since Gobble went out for milk and never came back.
I currently have a group exploring the Hole in the Oak using the Old School Essentials system. They have completely missed the sheep people and had very little interaction with the heretical gnomes.
Same group is also playing a campaign in the Elrood sector using the old WEG D6 Star Wars system.
It’s been fun, but hard to keep it running as summer ramps up.
I’m GMing an Abomination Vaults campaign for Pathfinder 2e. Players are level 8 and coming close to the climax of book 2 of 3! We had to cancel last week so I’m looking forward to playing again.
The son of a storm deity, sent to earth to protect him from the fallout of a great divine war. He is the inheritor of great magical powers, destined to reign supreme in the court of elemental powers.
But he doesn’t really care about any of that. He’s having too good a time rocking out with the band as part of the “Save The World Tour.”
Behold, I am Queen Bullshit, explainer of hours of introspective superhero drama!
I play in MASKS, which is a teenage superheroes game, sort of like Teen Titans/Young Justice. It takes place in Halcyon City, superhero capital of the world, somewhere in the northeast US. This character is one of my very favorite I’ve ever played. I’ve been blessed with really talented fellow players and a killer GM. Our adventures haven’t just been fun, they’ve also been thought-provoking and really emotionally resonant.
Adam Spinelli, better known as “Atom Splitter,” used to be a normal kid. He was into comic books, space exploration, and pitching for his high school baseball team. Raised by a loving but workaholic father (played by Tony Shaloub) he’d spend his nights working as a janitor with his dad’s small time sanitation company.
One night, he was sweeping the Halcyon Mass Array and… uh, definitely did not decide to sneak inside at night. Due to a malfunction, he was blasted with cosmic rays. To his surprise, he didn’t get cancer, but developed incredible cosmic powers. (For stats-heads, he’s a Nova.)
To a kid who grew up lower-middle-class, a gig like this was a godsend! You couldn’t BUY advertising like this. Adam has sorr of a young Darryl Hall/Joey Wheeler thing going on, with an Akira-style blue jumpsuit with Spinelli and Sons Sanitation displayed proudly on the back. He can fly and throw a shitload of power around. Sometimes, he’ll throw fuckin’ baseballs imbued with cosmic energy.
Beyond the kitschy fun superhero stuff, I’ve honestly been blessed to have such awesome fellow players and GM, because we’ve had a lot of emotionally resonant and surprisingly dark (in a good way, not an edgy way) stuff go on. One of the big themes of the campaign has been the way that superheroing intersects with capitalism. One of Adam’s teammates is Dante (formerly Flame Lad) a delinquent Bostonian who was financially exploited by his parents pretty much from birth, and who maintains close ties with his Irish uncle’s bar for retired villains.
Adam, despite everything that’s happened, fundamentally loves and believes in being a superhero, even as he’s found himself increasingly at odds with the structures that govern it (the hypertrillionaire Rutherford family, the shadowy government agency AEGIS, the prison system.)
Dante, meanwhile, has been stuck living as a superhero for so long that, even as he rebels against his family, he increasingly views it as “just a job” and is far more willing to go through the motions, even if it prevents actual justice or mercy.
Both of them, however, are very, very public heroes, without secret identities. Adam is fundamentally terrified of the power he wields and the way it destroyed most of his pre-hero friendships. Dante is struggling with Catholicism, years of being raised by absentee parents, and the fact he’s… uh, definitely not as heterosexual as he thinks he is.
Round that party out with two amazing outsiders to the mostly-human world (and also great nonbinary rep):
Redwood, a plantperson from a druidic order of tree-beings called the Watchers, trying to navigate their way through centuries of tradition nurturing the earth, caught between their responsibilities to the forest and their desire to live in the wider world. They’ve got a stolon of steel when it comes to protecting their seed-sibling Magnolia.
Scribe, a biblically accurate angel who may actually be a demon, a shapeshifting little bastard whose initial training for life on earth was decades of TV radio signals caught over the centuries-long journey aboard their sentient spaceship, Ship. They literally snuck us into a bureaucratic office of Heaven once, which was very distressing for Dante the Irish Catholic.
I’m a transfemme, and honestly, Adam is very important to me as a meditation on the masculinity I was raised with for years–how it can manifest in a wholesome way and how it can be toxic. Adam is, essentially, a conventionally attractive white kid. He’s got “face” written all over him, and was a natural pick for team lead. His natural instinct is to dominate the conversation, especially when he feels there’s an ethical question at stake. He’s always trying to thread the needle and find a solution which achieves justice, keeps furure consequences off their back, and lets them all more or less be able to sleep soundly at night. And yeah, he usually does come up with a really good idea. But his own sense of moral crusadership can have a spiteful streak: After arguing with Scribe over something incredibly unethical they wanted to do, and Scribe refusing to say they wouldn’t, Adam straight up resorted to blasting at them to get them to agree. He couldn’t convince them, so he just went with blunt force, because isn’t that what superheroes do? Try and talk out a problem, then pummel it if you can’t?
Adam is someone who–as part of growing up, both as a hero and a person–needs to learn to restrain his desire to be in the driver’s seat all the time, to wield the power and social privilege he has in a way that is considerate towards others. When he finally does see an excuse to let loose–a morally justified target to take out his anger on, because “Hey, asshole, we can’t DO that”, he does so with a whole lot of spite. He can absolutely be a big old bully when he doesn’t watch himself.
In other words, it’s the experience I had as “the really smart kid” in school–all that aptitude, all those expectations, an entire background chorus subtly saying that, no, you’re the one who deserves to speak the most, you’re the one who’s always right, don’t worry about making time and space for other people to speak.
I’ve grown out of the belief that I’m a guy, but there’s a whole lot of baggage there that doesn’t just evaporate when you start taking estrogen.
Playing Adam, I think, is somewhat therapeutic in helping me sweep out the cobwebs of that version of myself.
I haven’t played a TTRPG in a very long time. I’d like to try to find the time to learn roll20 and invite some people to play Pathfinder there. I bought a copy of Abomination Vaults a while ago.
FYI Foundry is a million times better than roll20
Especially for Pathfinder 2e!
Don’t currently have a group, but I’m working on a dieselpunk setting I’m pretty stoked about.
TEN years ago, the world powers signed a détente to end the disastrous Nachtkrieg war. A combination of escalation, outdated military tactics, and the development of chemical necromatic weaponry resulted in millions of deaths with no clear Victor.
Worse, the untested necromatic weaponry resulted In the destruction and abandonment of a large swathe of territory on the Asturican continent where the Mindless undead roam in endless torment; horrible amalgamations of dead flesh and barbed wire.
Unable to cure the afflicted, or diffuse the chemicals they released without understanding the consequences, the geopolitical powers of the world were forced to collaborate and formed a defensive barrier around the dead-lands in hope to contain this threat. But that is not to suggest that they have set aside their differences.
The Nachtkrieg exhausted most nation’s armed forces, and a non-aggression pact Amongst member-states of The Symposium (a League of Nations Analouge) makes outright war both unfeasible and foolhardy. Most average citizens are relieved that the war is over, unaware that the conflict never really ended.
Mercenary companies, composed primarily of battle-hardened veterans of The Nachtkrieg, have flourished in the post-war era. Hired by Nation-states to sabotage and otherwise cause mayhem to their political opponents, they operate largely unregulated; resulting in a cold war where military contractors operate in the shadows for the highest bidder.
All the while, the undead menace remains a very real and present threat to the world. Military intelligence from forces stationed along the defensive barrier have reported that the undead have begun to mutate, their twisted forms becoming less recognizable as anything that may have once been mortal. Behind closed doors, scientists and researchers fear they may eventually be there unable to halt the ceaseless march of the soldiers they left behind. An international man-hunt is underway by covert intelligence agencies for a mythological figure only alluded to in obscure scholarly texts, the first and perhaps only true lich, Zosimos The Apostate; whose supposed writings were the basis for the development of chemical necromatic weaponry.
Anything goes in this brave new world, and traditions clash with progress behind a thin veil of optimism and peace.
I have a lot going on lol
Wrapping up a Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign as a player. Playing a Swarmkeeper / Nature Cleric who is a squirrel/small mammal ecologist from Candlekeep on a field study.
When that’s done, I’m taking up the mantle and running a Shadowrun game heavily inspired by fairy tales. Quests will include things like the Big Bad Wolf terrorizing apartment blocs owned by three “pigs”, following digital breadcrumbs to find a hag kidnapping children in cyberspace, and a space elevator heist with a giant guarding the space station.
Also running a character-focused Deadlands game on the side. Posse is up against a corrupt lawman sacrificing his town to the tree of forbidden fruit from the garden of Eden, the Yeitsoh/Anaye monsters from Navajo oral tradition, and the Ravenites who are trying to incite war between the steampunk Mormon nation of Deseret and the US.
It’s been fun running something in the “real world” since I feel like I’m actually learning stuff when I do prep. The big set piece locations are places I can actually go.
I’ve got a campaign I’m running, started with Lost Mines is Phandelver which then rolled into Wild Beyond the Witchlight and will roll into Storm King’s Thunder. In that campaign our rogue/warlock’s patron is an archfey who is the reason they are now in Prismeer. We have a dwarf cleric who is very mistrusting of the fey which is a really interesting roleplay dynamic and a fighter/barbarian who is frequently the voice of reason. They have a pet mimic called Philip and Bill the pony who is currently a giant snail. As you can imagine it frequently devolves into the best kind of bullshit!
I’m playing a gnome monk called Fiddlesticks in Curse of Strahd who is running from the same archfey as above because he stole his staff of striking, we haven’t got very far with that story yet but dope monk shit is dope.
I’m in one homebrew campaign as a great old one warlock called Zensira, I’m minmaxing him and having a lot of fun being overpowered. I ended up with invisibility and misty step at first level thanks to feat abuse!
Finally in another homebrew campaign I’m playing a Luxodon Paladin/wild magic sorcerer called Probosedia, he’s not very smart so it’s nice to play a low intelligence character and be lead a little bit.
I’ve been DMing a Scum and Villainy campaign, a space opera based on the Forged in the Dark family of games.
My group has been playing a few different systems together for a couple years now and this might be the most fun we’ve had. They get to cruise around space stealing, smuggling and generally being a bunch of scallywags. The campaign setting is a really solid base that I’ve been building on top of and I have so many ideas for things I want to try.
I’m jealous of your 5E campaigns. My D&D group I play with has been on hiatus this summer so I haven’t gotten to play much this year but I’m hoping we can start up something soon.
Azalad the Black was born to a powerful hobgoblin warlord, but due to an inherited disease from his mother he was crippled. Azalads father only wanted a son to inherit his position, so Azalad was mostly neglected. Due to his condition, Azalad would spend most of his life studying and reading, and quickly became a devoted follower of Bane, and an accomplished necromancer. After attaining enough power, Azalad killed his father as part of a magic ritual that sapped his father’s vitality, curing his condition. Azalad now travels the realms as a necromancer for hire. His black iron armor, forged from scraps mined from the armor of Bane himself, has led to him earning the title of The Black.
He’s become the unofficial party leader. Although the rest of the party is mostly good alingned, they realize that Azalads tactics get the job done, despite how cruel he can be.
He is a Necromancer with the Death Knight subclass (from Valdas Spire of Secrets, a third party book).
After running in a, at this point, well established home brew world for well over 5 years in Pathfinder 1E, I switched over to 2E and began crafting a new world to indulge in my love of grimdark fantasy at the request of a player. Said player then had life happen, and left the game, which brought a chuckle.
That being said, I after years of reluctance to switch systems, I am enjoying running in 2E. Combine that with switching from running on Roll20 to FoundryVTT, my experience as a GM has skyrocketed.
The concept for the new world is, what happened when the heros failed? The world had a cataclysmic magic disaster, resulting in most people hiding underground for over a thousand years. In the last few centuries, the reclamation of the surface has begun. I use modified Manga Wellspring rules outside of established cities/towns, utilizing the concept of flipping a coin in magic fallout areas from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
My players have expressed that they are enjoying things so far, and I can’t wait to see what they do when they get out of their current situation (first real job, which has led them to a ruin) and things really kick into gear. :D
In a DnD5e campaign, I’m playing a tank tiefling battle master called Karugg. His backstory tells that a necromancer murdered his family & he managed to kill the (aspiring) baddie with a huge stroke of luck. Been a mercenary ever since.
Everyone in our group thought Charisma is not a great stat to pump points into & Karugg ended up being the most “charismatic” character… & the least wise. You can imagine how well that fares during most social interactions. A lot of fun to play him.
Been playing “No Thank You, Evil” with the family for a few years, with me mostly running the sessions. Recently, I’ve been sharing GM responsibilities with the kids and they’re having fun with it. Our session from this past Friday ended with me permanently passing the NTYE guide torch to them, along with an in-game “new-to-us” clunker of a spaceship to give inspiration and a ride to the group’s new adventures.
While NTYE is fun an all and we’re not going to stop playing anytime soon, I’ve been wanting to give something new a try for a while and have been exploring other TTRPGs to play. Pathfinder sparked my interests, but since NTYE is Cypher-lite and I don’t want to overburden the kids with too much of a rules change, I’ve been leaning towards settings using the Cypher System. I love the artwork and concept of Predation, dinosaurs and sci-fi tech. Who doesn’t want to hang with a dinosaur with laser cannons that can watch your back while you’re hacking into a SATI mainframe? So that’s why I’m currently reading through the Predation material and prepping for our first session for this coming Friday.
