Lantern Noir Presents

  Preamble The nature of a sandbox game is that it goes where the players go.  It asks "here are some hooks, here are some locations, what do you want to do?"  Generally I don't like sandbox games.  They tend to get bogged down in confusion as to what to explore.  They tend to require over-planning of locations in the world and hooks and story arcs.  While they can be generally fun, they also suffer from potential discontinuities in story.  How do you create a story arc when you don't know which arc they're going to follow?  Now there are ways to do this, such as moving the plot you want to run to the locations the players go, but that also invalidates what I think is so important to a good story:  the purposeful placement of the NPCs and other story elements.   The Aftermath Coming off the tails of our fight last session, the party had time to talk more about the world.  They learned that Delilah had also fled from her village...

  Preamble We have turned the corner in the campaign from the point of view that the game was projected to run 10-15 episodes.  As we enter into session 11, we should be on track to begin the final climb to the campaign's climactic ending and "post credits" set up for Season 2.  The party is on their way to recover the needed tools to reverse a convergence event, and hopefully not kill the major NPC along the way.  Of course they've also assumed that both he and the convergence shard are safely hidden away.  Fools these mortals be... Picking up with  Combat When we left the heroines they were engaging with men in full plate mail armor.  The fight that ensued was solid and while I'd love to share the statblocks here, these particular beasts are coming around for another go at the group in the future so, no spoilers there.  What was fun was to explore some alternative attacks to the standard "hit them with my sword" but adding some surprises in the ...

  Preamble Last week I looked at the clock at 9:45pm.  We end the session right around 10pm.  The dragon was revealed and not yet defeated.  He was giving them a fight.  The question was simple.  What should we do? On the one hand it was reasonable for the dragon to take it's wounds and fly away.  They had killed it's masters, it had fought valiantly and seen it was outclassed.  It made sense for a juvenile white dragon to take to the skies and escape.  It would end the session on an up note (we sent a dragon flying away in fear!) and a cliff hanger (a reveal of a character a short time later).  The party had different ideas. So we ended session 9 in the middle of the dragon fight and started where we left off. Dragons but of a Fun Variety Combat can be boring.  I attack, I roll, I tally, I repeat.  We go back and forth and back and forth. My hope was to keep this fight interesting while also letting my players kick out some of...

  Preamble The party has a purpose and set out towards the Arbor of Ann, a lost ruin of what remains of what was a grand university.  There they would find the needed mcguffin, I mean, particle tunneler to test Ted's theory of returning and repairing a reality fractured by a convergence event.  Of course, unless I wanted to jump to the actual end dungeon we needed something to happen.  The question was:  What? Can I interest you in a side quest? This is the real question.  We wrapped session 8 of what was slated to be 15 sessions of gaming.  We're past the halfway mark and the party could still have quite the challenge of getting the particle tunneler, getting it back to Ted and then seeing what wackiness ensues.  If we try to high that benchmark of ending the game around session 15, there are lots of things that can happen.  They could pass a community in need.  They could decide to explore a ruin.  We could always have a lovely ro...

  Preamble I try when I set up to run a game to have a rough idea of my goal for the night.  Is it set up the players up with some quest items?  Is it to have a really interesting combat?  Is it to get to a particular point in the story?  Basically I don't want to sit down at the table and say "so what do you want to do?" only to hear back "we don't know." For this session I had one real goal:  Let the players meet Tedophilise or "Ted" and understand what the role of the convergence shard could be in starting to restore the multiverse to its infinite possibilities. The Plot Hole As I sat down to play that afternoon I realized I had one unanswered question, a plot whole of epic proportion in my mind.  I had no idea why Ted would entrust the party with his knowledge.  I had the power point ready to go.  I had the entire Ted Talk scripted.  I knew that the party had access to the shard he wanted and I knew that he had to show them some resp...

  Preamble The holidays were the holidays, a time of family gatherings, last minute meal prep, and getting away from "all the things".  For the Convergence family that meant a few weeks on hiatus as we followed our various and varied holiday traditions.  But then, as though we had never left, we were back at it, trying to figure out who this strange woman was and what part she played into the bigger picture. Yes, but where's she from? One thing I've never put too much work into as a DM prior to streaming was my voice work.  I might change the pace of my speech or add physical mannerisms but accents and voice were not a focus.  Sure, Steven the Guard had a lisp, and a few characters from time and again would have very affected language, but until I dove into Arabelle, the Vistani teen from my Curse of Strahd game, I really didn't put much there. And I really should have as the night that Arabelle made her entrance was a rough one.  My accent for her flittere...