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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Of D&D Campaigns

Okay, so after talking to Dave about the campaign and the idea behind it all, I have come to the conclusion that damn it, I should run it. Therefore, so I don't have to explain it every time I tell somebody new, I shall post the entire concept and hook here, along with any particular rules that I will use (some are pending, haven't looked through everything yet).

Wings of Chaos: Ruined Wind

A silver haired man with blue-tinted glasses sits in a comfortable looking leather chair, a book in hand. He glances up to see his guests. “I see it’s time for a story, isn’t it? Ya know, I just found this one earlier today. My mentor wrote it. It’s a story of one of his later adventures.

“Who is my mentor, you ask? Why he holds the title of ‘Fuujin, the God of Wind’. He is the founder and leader of the Anarchy Cross. He’s a wanderer, and he enjoys writing stories of the adventures he and others have been through. This, is one of them. And this will be today’s story…"

The man opened the book and began to read it out loud. “Dark stormy clouds could be seen off the coast that night. The residents of Waterdeep could easily tell it was going to be the worst storm they had seen in years. But the storm would soon be the least of their worries…

“Oh, sure, it was a bad storm, but what came after it made the horrible weather seem like a child’s playground. The next morning, people awoke to the sight of terrible black obelisks framing a vile fiery portal. Next thing they knew, monsters started to pour out from this portal, and several others littered throughout the city. It was as if the gates to hell itself had opened on their door step. In some cases, that was very literal…

"For myself, however, things were far less pleasant. I didn't get to wake up to that sight. Didn't even get a full night's sleep, even. What I found was red skies. At first, I thought I was looking at the beautiful sunset sky, then looking a bit closer, I realized it was too dark of a red. And the bright pulsing veins in the sky were a good clue to tell me that I wasn't in Faerun any more. Or Kansas, which would've been slightly better than where I ended up.

"It wasn't long before I heard noises of something shuffling about. And that was when I found a rather ugly face only a few inches away from my own face. A combination of reflexes and instinct kicked in as I swung my right arm wildly. The ugly thing jumped away in surprise. If only that moment lasted longer. I would later call these creatures 'scamps', since they looked like tiny, scraggly humans with big, elongated ears and nasty looking claws. The scamp took a lunge for my throat. A rolled over, avoiding its attack, and sprung off my hands to get back onto my feet. Luckily, my sword was at my feet. I kicked it up and grabbed the handle, ready to draw. I focused my senses briefly, searching for that instant to strike. Before the creature could spin around for a second attempt, I drew my blade and cleaved its head right off its neck in a single motion.

"The monster fell limp onto the ground, which I had now noticed was barren dirt with a slight rust color to it. As I looked around my surroundings, the only thought that came to mind was How the fuck did I end up in Hell? Later, I realized that it wasn't Hell that I was in, but a plane I would later identify as Oblivion. I looked around a bit, finding dead mauled townspeople lying around. Maybe fate was on my side that day, however. I found survivors. And they were adventurers, too. Or maybe fate just loves to mess with me..."

_________________

Confused? Allow me to make this into more sense. In short, this campaign will take place in Faerun, the FORGOTTEN REALMS campaign setting. What is going on is that portals to Oblivion have opened all over the place. The party, however, doesn't get the chance to prepare to go into one of the portals, since they start off right inside one.

Yes, I realize that portals to Oblivion was covered in Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. I'm using that for a reason. And I'm not following that game's plot. After all, somebody else is behind this. Somebody with some very big ambitions.

Now for other important details. This starts off at level 10. Almost all WotC books are allowed, as long as I've seen it and have all the info I need. I intend this to be a good/neutral party, but there can be an evil character or two as long as they're not killing off the party or selling their souls to devils. All PCs and major NPCs will get the following extra goodies: one free regional feat and one skill that can be made into a class skill, regardless of what skills are available to their normal selection. Each character starts with 50,000 gp. More may resources may be given out as I see fit depending on character background and other interesting things.

I intend to use the taint rules presented in the Heroes of Horror book (also found in Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures). I am considering using the Action Point system found in Eberron, as well, but I need to look that through some more.

Comments, suggestions, or questions should be directed to me via comments or AIM (RiotTheStorm). There's more, but since I'm kinda tired, I need to think more and look through more rules.

EDIT: These are the forums I plan to use for the game. Link

-Locke

Monday, May 21, 2007

I'm going to try to update at least once a week, perferably more often than that. But knowing how I work, I doubt it'll go as planned.

Minor news:
Me and Louis are planning to move out of our respective parent's homes and get our own apartment. This will be easier once I can convince Louis that the apartment is more important than the furniture (Louis was raised rather oddly in this respect). We're looking at a target due day of moving out of September.

Other random news:
I am suffering from a minor cold. A running nose and a sore throat is the worst of it. It is driving me insane, though.

Completely random but more of what I wanted to post about:
Okay, so I've had this idea running circles around my head for a few days now. I've had this idea for a D&D campaign that I'd like to run. Problem is that there are very few people in the area that play the game (outside of the Living Greyhawk people). 2 solutions came to mind. The first would be set up an RP on Gaia Online. Chances of it, I'd use that as my test run of the game. The second solution would be to use a forum that I had made years ago but never used and set up the game as a more free-form styled RP but using D&D as the basis and as the combat rules and god-mod limiter for characters in general. I'll post more of this idea if anyone cares or has any interest whatsoever. (Hint: comments would be nice ^^; )

Well, that should do it for now. See ya next week, or next time I feel like posting, whichever comes first.

-Locke

Sunday, May 13, 2007

ACen '07 Report

Well, I'm finally back. I am tired. I'm running on about 5 hours of sleep. I'm sore all over. I feel like I could pass out at any moment if I wanted to. But I'm going to upload my pics from my camera to teh compy and post about my adventures. So let's get started.

Friday, May 11
Around 11, I get home with Louis in tow. We stand around and talk with my mom for a while and then went to put in the new headlight and turn signal for my car. Around 2 we went to bed.

Saturday, May 12
Got up at 6:20-ish. Showered. Took meds. Gathered all the stuff I wanted to bring with me and put in the car. Woke up Louis around 7. We take off about 15 minutes later. We pick up Chrissy, go get donuts, realize that Chrissy didn't print out the info she needed to get her badge and ran home to print it out. We finally hit the road to Chicago around 8:30.

About 2 hours later, we had arrived at the Hyatte. The short version of the drive was we got lost for about 5 minutes, during which Louis got better directions than Yahoo did. We went inside, got in line for registration, waited for like 20 minutes, then go into the pre-reg line (which had maybe 1 other person in it at the time). We get our badges (there was a mix up so I got only a Saturday badge while Chrissy got a full one, so I had to steal hers later). We head to the dealer's room for the next hour or two. Very little was bought at this time, but Chrissy did try on two corsets. Sometime during this we lost Louis and ended up going to the main building and watching AMV's, which included a decent Haruhi one and one with the Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle from Metaloclypse. There was some more shopping stuffs, some signing of Chrissy's boobs (Hawk and Mookie got to sign one boob while I got the other one to myself), some listening to the Spoony Bards, and some general hanging out.

I took a number of pictures throughout the day. Found cosplayers of Guilty Gear (that surprised me, too), Fate/Stay Night, a Vertech, Dr. McNinja, Solid Snake, and a horde of Dan Hibiki's. I will have a link to the folder in my photobucket for this later.

Eventually, Louis rejoined me and Chrissy and we went to Denny's for dinner. Around 10:30-ish, Chrissy's brother came and picked her up. I went downstairs and played D&D with the most incompetent bunch I've ever seen. Only me and the GM knew what should've been going on the entire time. The rest were either too tired or too crazy to play with much sanity whatsoever. We went through 3 different sorcerers (who all looked the same and had the same abilities/spells/etc) and the fighter became a mutated yup-yup... thing. I got to see in 8-bit vision for a short while, we exploded one of the dead sorc's with a corpse explosion potion (which I ended up throwing into a room of skeletons). My paladin ended up ditching the party once he realized that he couldn't disbelieve the halfling rogue in an attempt to salvage what was left of the group. This was around the time I was getting too tired, so me and Louis went back to the car to crash.

Sunday, May 13
After waking up around 9-ish, me and Louis waited for an hour until we could get into the Dealer's room (it was supposed to be open at 9). We bought what stuff we had left on our list and then headed out. We ended up missing the turn off and taking a somewhat round-about route to get back home. It worked out alright in the end, though.

Loot gained:
3 pins (one of Shakugan no Shana, one of Haruhi, and one of the Spoony Bards)
1 figurine of Shakugan no Shana
1 Apple Geeks T-Shirt
1 Fate/Stay Night pendant
1 Hi-grade Gundam model of Strike Noir
The DVDs for Seasons 3 and 4 of Red vs Blue
And a 3 sword set for $40

Well, I'm out of things to say, so I think I'll leave it at this. It was a lot of fun and as a note for myself next year, I'm so getting a room. Sleeping in the car sucks.

-Locke

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Off to ACEN

I'll keep this short since it's currently 6:33 and I'm planning to leave the house around 7-ish. Anywhos, I will be out for the weekend. Even turning off the computer (gasp!). I'll be at Anime Central for the weekend. If you see a guy wearing a Purdue Anime Club shirt walking around with a red-pink haired girl around him, that might be me. Go ahead and say hi.

I'll be posting more after I recover from the con. Which means more than 4-5 hours of sleep.

-Locke

Monday, May 7, 2007

Umm... I can't think of a title

Okay, so now that I'm not dealing with a particular emo kid now, nor recovering from a trip down to Purdue, nor dealing with the guilt of hitting a deer (more on that later), I can make a real post.

Anywhos, last weekend (not the one that just past, the one before), I went down to Purdue for the Anime Club's Marathon. A 1 and 1/2 hour drive after leaving my house, I ended up at Cary Quad (the dorms I used to live in and where Chapel resided until finals ended last week). Surprised the shit out of John, who didn't know I was going to be visiting. A long story short that I don't remember most of, I hung out at the Union playing games on my compy and hanging out with peoples.

Silly things that happen include:
-The discussion of a 'rape setting' (along with the comment of "set rape to stun")
-Chapel finding a small portion of my hentai stash on my computer (this search came about when he remembered the challenge that my g/f made long ago to find some hentai on my computer back when she hated the stuff but now sends more to me than I actually have).
-I obtained one of this years PAC shirts, which has all of the PAC officers from this year (which includes me)

I ended up spending the night at Dave's apartment. The next morning I called in sick for work (didn't want to drive another hour and an half and then work 7 hours). The two of us went to the IHOP in town for breakfast, which included jokes about Sunday drivers ("Damn Sunday drivers." "Aren't we one of them right now?" "Shut up."). And then later on I drove home.

I hung out with Chrissy for a while when I got back to Valpo, and on the way home from her place, I hit a deer. I was lucky that I only clipped the poor thing in the ass with the side of my car, but I'm sure it hurt and it certainly hurt my car. I have to replace the right headlight and turn signal now. That's a good $200 down the drain. Atleast my car is still drivable even without those parts and the turn signal still works alright (the cover is what needs to be replaced, along with the frame).

So yeah, that was an eventful weekend. And now, I have posted. I think I'll do some drawing or something soon-ish. Or play Black and White 2 some more. Picked that up last week. It's nice to be god every so often.

-Locke

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Of Demanded Updates

Okay, so I updated. Happy now, Pally?

(more posting to come. Need to go on a murderous rampage against overly angsty friend who wants pity that I don't have.)

-Locke