Game of Tones

Our party of wayward, island hopping swashbucklers has arrived at the city and island of Severanthor. After week long voyage they wish to know the interesting sights and sounds of the island. But before they can hear about the wonders they spot trouble on the coastline! Kua-Toa slavers are dragging people out of the docks, wrapping them in rope, and taking them back to the sea.

They load into their small sailboat and thanks to a bit of wind magic are hurtling toward the shore at breakneck speeds. The hull hits the shallow sands and the party’s orc flies off toward the Kua-Toa for dramatic, acrobatic action!

They fight off the Kua-Toa and save the people. Heroes are rewarded a small purse of gold and the people return to their lives as though nothing had happened. Then I get the chance to tell them about Severanthor.

A city of seven temples, built in a spoke-wheel fashion with one temple in the center and the other six on the outer edges. Elven terrorists are being hunted throughout the city by Dragonborn special forces. There are rumors of a powerful lich living in the city.

The party is amazed! What a rich and vibrant place. Thank goodness they think so. I made all of that up while they were fighting the Kua-Toas.

I am very much an improvisational Dungeon Master and I learned that I preferred that style of gameplay after my first campaign. Like many foolish youths in college I believed that my ideas and stories were perfect and that everyone was blessed to have a chance to hear them play out. I realized, fairly quickly, that unless I was writing a 14-book series about dark fighting light that I was wrong.

I suffered from railroading issues. Driving the players from event to event, city to city, encounter to encounter, without really giving them a chance to choice. I gave them the illusion of choice, sure, but nothing ever substantial.

My second successful campaign was a healthy mix. I made it clear to the party that they were being sent on missions for a faction they belonged to and that those missions had a goal but they were free to choose what to do and how to do it within that context. It led to some of the most amazing gaming sessions I have ever experienced. Most of them have already been recounted on this very blog.

My third successful campaign was player driven. I sat down with only the knowledge of the world in my head. We made characters and through that I realized a good place to drop them would be a gangster controlled island where slavery was prominent. They rose up and freed slaves, took advantage of foolish tavern patrons to acquire a ship, and headed for the high seas to find adventure and plunder. I did zero planning between sessions. I made everything up as it happened.

The city of Severanthor, a place they came to love and explore, was created because of a few rolls on the city creator in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for 5th edition. They had a few intense sessions there, some battles with elven barbarians, and left for the promise of treasure elsewhere.

Improvising that much turned out to be kind of stressful, though. I started to get worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with new and interesting things on the spot. I needed a solution to this problem and it presented itself when the co-author of this blog and I remembered that we like dragons.

The title of this blog entry is about to make sense, I promise.

Work gets in the way of creative enterprise. Whether you’re teaching students history they don’t care about or answering phones and fixing the problems of people who actually do have access to Google to search their own shit, work keeps creativity from being expressed and expanded on easily.

My co-author and I accidently started playing writing games via text message (Game of Tones!) while at work. Through the wonders of a list I am going to introduce you to those writing games!

• Dragon Creator: Make some strange, garbled syllables. Type them out. Fix some of the vowels and the flow so that it looks like a reasonable dragon name. Like Vixrathes or Casrothrang. Got a good dragon name? Awesome. Choose a descriptive word, location, item it hoards, or whatever. Vixrathes, Playing Cards. Casrothrang, Deep Forest Cave. Here’s an example one:
• Authzavan is a trickster dragon, often taking the form of an ancient old elf woman. In this form, she sells magic monkey paw candles at markets that cause mischief, disappearing as soon as the market closes. She does, however, actually possess real useful magical candles and if you venture to her hut deep in her swamp island, you can barter with her. (I'm totally picturing old crotchety Toph)
• Dungeon Creator: Give your writing friend a location for your dungeon and a kind of dungeon that they need to write about. Like an Underground Lost City. Or a Jungle Temple. Then they have to provide you with a description of the dungeon, the main boss, and a weird feature. You won’t be able to run the dungeon in the next hour but you’ll have a good enough idea that you could make it a full fledged one in the future. Here’s an example:
• Description: at the base of the world's tallest mountain pilgrims meet to attempt a dangerous climb up the mountain slopes. A stairway was carved there eons ago but no one knows by whom. Most pilgrims make it to the first landing of the steps before ominous warnings turn them back. Climbers are constantly assaulted by snow storms, ice elementals, and the reanimated bodies of those who have died on the slopes.
  Main boss: at the top of the stairs is a humble temple where an abandoned Angel has waited for someone to challenge them for a relic that allows the bearer to speak to the gods. The angel is joined by a series of angelic hounds.
  Halfway up the mountain magic will create a physical representative of every persons worst fear to make them turn back.
  Weird feature: a Pilgrim that nearly made the journey but was driven mad stalks the stairway, hunting pilgrims it deems strong enough to make it to the top.
• Set Piece Generator: This one started as an item creation game but evolved to include locations and NPCs. You provide your writing friend with the basic description of an object and they have to come up with why it looks the way it does and how it is a magical item or a part of a D&D style world. Same with people or locations. I’m gonna give you two examples:
• Your set piece: a cursed dagger with a vine motif handle that wraps around the user's wrist and will continue to grow up the arm. The dagger is a relic of an ancient tribe or forest people who were slowly being wiped out by a werewolf curse. Their greatest sorcerer created the knife to protect the user from the curse but it came with a curse of its own, driving the user to become one with the forest. The curse can be fought but eventually the bearer will be driven to return the dagger to the final Glade of the forest people where it was found. At that point they will realize that all the nearby trees are actually the former dagger bearers who have become entombed in vines forever. The dagger itself is powerful, dealing double damage to lycanthropes. It can be thrown and returned because it is attached to the vines that have rooted into the bearers arm. The longer the dagger is held the more benefits given. Natural armor, resistance to poison, and eventually healing through sunlight. But it is a death sentence no one has lifted yet. The dagger is found by the party in the depths of a dungeon where its last user was liked before it could take him back to the forest.
• Your set piece: an antique Bell from a sailing ship that emits the most alluring sound when rung. Some would say too alluring. Decorated along the bell are waves and shoals and cliffs with just the hint of something hiding among them. The captain of the ship was a lovely selkie and the gift was given to her by her family to both remind her of her home (hoping to convince her to come back home) and give her safe passage around unfriendly sea beasts with its calming tones. It was so effective that many captains hired the selkie to guide their ships through the most dangerous areas of the sea. But this angered the sirens of the rocky cliffs who fed on the crashed ships. They began a struggle against the sailors and the selkie captain, fighting the charm magic of the bell and capturing the selkie. The bell had not just been charming the sirens though. A sea lich, long living beneath the waves, had been soothed by the bell as well. He rose up from the sea and used his magic to save the selkie, binding the leader of the sirens to the bell. The selkie returned home, giving the bell which now rang on its own with a more sinister sound to the lich. It has a stronger pull, allowing the holder to draw in and hold in thrall creatures of the sea.

We have another game that is simply for creating materials and resources for the Japanese Tabletop RPG Ryuutama but I would rather save posting about that game until my co-author has revealed how amazing that game is in a post of her own.

In the meantime! Monday means the Patreon should be updated today with new resources. Continuing the theme of Random Generators I will be posting a few tables to help Dungeon Masters create Nemeses for their characters, Friends for their backstories, and Traits to flesh those people out and make them interesting.

Remember to pledge a little bit of support if you like the blog! Thank you everybody!

https://www.patreon.com/Farmane?alert=2