Lantern Noir Presents

  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...

Let me preface this with a simple fact:  I'm not an expert. I started down the road of live streaming DND games back in November of 2020, playing with a few friends from RL and the stream community.  While I've picked up a few things to share, I'm by no means Matt Mercer or other Geek and Sundry or other major DND streaming player.  But here's what I've gotten out of it. Visuals When using Twitch, one of my top priorities is the visual space and making sure I'm putting emphasis on the things that matter to the audience.  As my games tend to skew very RP heavy, very discussion focused and very little on tactical combat (we use theater of the mind whenever we can), I don't dedicate a lot of screen space to my players over the map.   If you're running a game that is very focused on where everyone is, how  far they can move, and who's in range of a given spell or attack, it makes sense to make that the focus of the stream "space".  And when so ...