Lantern Noir Presents

 Are you looking for this week's DM log? Going forward, all DM logs for The Convergence and other games will be posted on my Patreon.  Fear not, there will not be a pay wall between you and my reflections of The Convergence and I assure you that most of my other DM logs will be available publicly in time.   That said, if you enjoy the content, please consider supporting my work by becoming a Patreon.  You will get early access to other blog entries as well as podcast episodes of our session.  I am also planning more exclusive Patreon content as well. This week's log can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63129210 Thank you for all your support.

  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 ...