Threats without horror

A lot of the time when GMs are running fantasy games, there is an all-too-seductive temptation to lean heavily on supernatural or horrific cruelty to create a sense of stakes in the game, impressing on the players how important their mission is with demons, undead, or mangled remains of innocent victims almost from the jump. While this can be effective in certain games, it is an overused trope, so it’s been refreshing that Grant has used supernatural horror elements very sparingly and has instead focused mostly on natural threats. The first encounter of the game was with sahuagin, who basically act like a nasty school of predatory fish – they attacked and dragged prey into the water, but didn’t curse people with foul magic or ritually sacrifice them on the beach. The biggest, nastiest threat currently on the island (at least, that we know of) is a wyvern, which is a massive, venomous beast, but isn’t demonic or evil – just big and hungry. There have been some supernatural threats sprinkled in – a spectral undead and what we think is probably a hag – but for the most part, the difficulties and adversaries we’ve faced have been very grounded – taking care of the lower tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and trying to establish good relationships with the other people we’ve met on the island – the kenku.

It’s not all about alignment

Speaking of the kenku, one of the things I find cool about the game is that I have no idea what alignment Rishi is. I am similarly ignorant about the colony governor, Hester Warwick, and in fact about every single other character in the entire game except the other two player characters, whose alignments I know through metagame knowlege only. In addition, there is literally no way for Lambert to find out, despite the fact that he’s a cleric, because the “Detect Evil and Good” spell now simply alerts you to the presence of supernatural entities or magically consecrated or desecrated areas rather than letting you see where every sapient creature around you falls on a 3×3 alignment bingo card if you cast it enough times. That means that, in the game as in life, we have to figure out who is trustworthy and who isn’t by observing behavior and interacting with characters rather than simply scanning them. This is a change in the D&D system proper from previous editions rather than something Grant is explicitly doing, but after playing a number of sessions with it in place, I can say without reservation that I think that was an exceptionally good design decision.

Things that are interesting without being epic

The kenku look like walking, wingless crows, but they also have aspects of lyrebirds in that they can mimic all sorts of sounds around them and even pass these sounds down to descendants, which is why the party can communicate with them at all. The old mystery cult monastery we cleared out as our first dungeon was full of implied story and interesting bits of world history, but there was nothing world-shattering in there, just an old building that had some history.

The desire to make things epic or jaw-dropping is another pitfall a lot of campaigns can fall into, and having a world that is interesting and feels grounded and lived-in has helped me to stay interested and engaged in the game. It seems to be pushing our group to actually live in the world a lot as well – there has been a lot more focus and a lot more in-character time in this campaign than anything we’ve done since the Shadowrun game.

Limited violence

There has been combat, certainly, but the entire game is not a string of fights connected with flimsy plot. Some of the best moments in the game have been role playing ones, and that has been consistent. Grant has done an admirable job of keeping the challenges of setting up a society and interacting with a new one front and center, and I will admit that I (and my PC) have much more anxiety about the colonists going all conquistador on the kenku than I do about the monsters on the island.

Grant would probably ask me to balance this out with criticism, but I honestly don’t have any, and in any case he has done so in his own posts already. So there.

Personal Goals

One of the things I’ve been trying to work on is my tendency to hog the spotlight. Fortunately, the other players made deeper and more complex characters than I did, so they’ve actually been helping with that quite a bit just by being awesome. Lambert is a very busy PC, but he is certainly not the toughest member of the party (that is unquestionably Garm, especially now that he’s gotten access to some magic) and he’s not the most skillful or intelligent member either (that would be Aster, the unbelievably competent rogue).

I am also trying to use this game to practice what we preach on the show. Lambert is a very deliberate attempt at breaking away from some of the more violent and self-righteous characters I’ve played in the past. What I’ve been trying to do with him is make him into “glue.” While he’s not a pacifist, I want him to be a peacemaker, and I also want his influence to be at least one reason why the members of the colony live in harmony with the natives of the island rather than conquering or disregarding them. Lambert was designed to be the kind of person who doesn’t get a lot of recognition, but helps society be better, more empathetic, and more compassionate, hopefully due to his example. I want to use him to practice humility, charity, and kindness rather than just righteous fury and decisiveness. I want him to help the other PCs become the epic, noble heroes they can clearly become. And most importantly, I am hoping that his story will point toward the life that really is life, that he will be a good example of how to be authentically human and a servant of God (despite the fact that he’s in a polytheistic setting and a cleric of a member of the pantheon therin). Time will tell how successful I am in that.

(A personal note: This blog post was supposed to go up last Friday. However, between a nasty head cold and some other issues, that didn’t happen. I apologize for not getting this out in a timely manner.)

Session 6

I’m going to try something a little different for this post. Since these two sessions were pretty action-packed, I’m going to recap each session and then immediately talk about it from a GM’s perspective, rather than packing all the GM notes at the bottom.

Recap

I left the party on a cliffhanger: Rishi (the wacky old kenku loremaster) was juuuuust about to tell the party something they could do to earn the trust of Kondou (head of the kenku village) and the other kenku. (I’m going to talk about that cliffhanger in the “GM’s Notes” section below.) Well, Rishi’s task was simple, on the face of it. He wanted them to retrieve a stone tablet, about 8″x12″x1″, with a kenku carved into it. It had “gone missing”, he said, and he’d just learned where it went: It was in Auntie Bloat’s house.

“Auntie Bloat”, it turned out, was an ancient kenku witch—much older even than Rishi—who lurked in a bog at the far western end of the island, living in a fish’s skull. She and Rishi apparently were in a bit of a standoff, and the PCs offered the opportunity to shake things up. So the next morning—after waking up to the sound of Rishi shouting a story off his balcony to passing kenku—the party set off to find Auntie Bloat.

The kenku village was just a bit uphill of the small lake the party had spotted the day before, and the witch’s swamp was (naturally) at the end of the small river flowing out of that lake. Finding her was therefore just a matter of traveling down-river. This occasioned an interesting debate, however: Aster (the scrappy, urban rogue with a … limited … grasp of the concept of personal property) was strongly in favor of taking a fishing boat, even if there wasn’t anyone around to ask about that. (Her player—my wife—invoked her “It’s not stealing if I need it more” flaw, and earned an Inspiration point for doing so.) The party argued this for a bit, and eventually nixed the idea on both moral and practical grounds, but it was a good (and 100% player-created) moment.

The trip down-river was uneventful, and generally skipped over aside from a general geographic description. However, I did make sure to describe a point—which the party reached right about sundown—where the terrain rather suddenly and drastically changed. The players could practically see a line in the trees where things went crooked and dark, and the trees became twisted.

A little further in, while it was still twilight, the party found what appeared to be an old campground. Aster decided to scout ahead while the other two set up camp. This turned out to be a mistake—as soon as Aster was out of sight, two twig blights and two needle blights ambushed Lambert (the cleric) and Garm (the fighter). Thankfully, Aster circled back quickly and, well-hidden by the darkness, started laying waste as only a rogue with advantage on all her rolls can. The party took practically no damage in this fight, and Aster wrapped it up by using the lamp oil in her kit to light the needle blights on fire (and managed to stay hidden in the process thanks to some great rolls.)

The fight did cause the party to proceed more carefully, however, and that let them discover and avoid the dangers of a stretch of quicksand I’d put into the swamp. Just at the point where they could see and hear the ocean through the trees—about a mile away from where they’d entered—they found one last feature of the swamp: An arc of scarecrows, set in a line around the mouth of the river. These would feature prominently in the next session! About this time, I started adding more sensory detail: A stench of rotten fish and seaweed, a slick slime on everything, and so forth. I did my best to convey rot and decay, and specifically the sort you find at the ocean.

Finally, the party spotted the witch’s house, and it definitely shocked the players and characters alike. Rishi had warned them that Auntie Bloat lived in “a fish skull”, but the two-story tall, jagged, prehistoric skull of a deep-sea horror was certainly unexpected. The bone stairs leading up a glistening, sickly-white hill standing on a rocky outcropping jutting out into the sea; the flickering light leaking out of the skull-house’s gaping eyes and between its clenched teeth; the slime and rot coating everything—all of it worked to put a genuine scare into the party, and that reveal ended up being a great moment for everyone.

As they watched from their hiding-place, the moon began to rise over the ocean. At that moment, the jaw-door creaked open and a hunched, kenku-shaped shadow lurched down the stairs, turning at the bottom and walking straight into the ocean. Looks like they’d arrived just in time…

GM’s Notes

Given my errors last time, I was trying very hard to let the players take the lead in this session. I think I was successful in that, at least.

It took me two solid weeks to come up with whatever Rishi was going to ask the party to do. I’m really glad one of our players canceled on us, because I desperately needed that time. I knew I was going to introduce “Auntie Bloat” sometime soon, but I wasn’t sure what Rishi could ask of the party that he (a) couldn’t do himself, and (b) would make sense in this setting. I ended up paging through the Dungeon Master’s Guide the night before the game looking for a macguffin, and finally spotted sending stones. Those solved a lot of problems: One of the pair would be worthless to the players (but important to the kenku); it’d be something Auntie Bloat would happily trade for just to spite Rishi and hurt the kenku; and it served an important role in the setting (which you’ll read about next.) Tough one!

One thing my wife called me out on after this session: Distances. I’ve been deliberately vague with distances, since I’m not good at drawing terrain maps and I just don’t have every feature of this island sorted out in my head yet. I’ve tried to describe distances as “a day’s travel” or “about an hour away” or the like, and that’s worked. However, apparently I’m not doing that consistently, and that makes it harder for everyone to understand where they’re going, what they’re experiencing in-character, etc., and thus what to do. Something to work on.

Not much to say about the fight with needle blights and twig blights, except that the players definitely thought it set the tone for the “evil swamp” area nicely. It wasn’t designed to be especially hard, and there were a few fun, creative moments, so that went well.

Auntie Bloat’s house was the highlight of this session. It was creepy, the scene description involved multiple senses, and there was a real sense of wonder—”what do you mean, a two story tall fish skull?!”—mixed with danger. We wrapped up with a real sense of anticipation for the next session, and I need to try to do that more.

Session 7

Right—back to our story!

Recap

With the witch apparently gone, the party now had to figure out how to get into the witch’s house. Fortunately, Aster (experienced thief that she is) had little trouble climbing the bone plate wall of the witch’s house, especially with a boost from Garm. She peeked through the knuckle-bone curtains (another ‘eww’ moment for the players) and determined that the upstairs of the house seemed empty. Once again the immovable rod came in handy, anchoring a length of rope for the rest of the party to climb up. (Aster smartly coiled up the rope and laid it on the ledge inside, so it wouldn’t show from the outside.) Then the party crept into the witch’s hut and began searching for the tablet.

The upstairs was disturbing, but distinctly lacking in carved tablets. A stove with a cauldron; a table with various foul ingredients for concoctions spread out over it; a blood-stained stone block and ritual knife; a few bookshelves (with books in some sort of unreadable language that hurt the eye); and various trophies, ranging from surprisingly mundane to surprisingly gory, filled the driftwood floor. (A stuffed sahuagin head stood out among these trophies.) A rickety staircase led downward to a cellar filled with mud, bloody cages, barrels of rotting fish and other sea life, crates of collected items, drawers full of junk and detritus—a grotesque mockery of a normal, junk-filled basement or attic. A search here turned up a few items: Potions, a Quall’s feather token (anchor), a few gems and a fair amount of gold squirreled away in various places, a pair of magic arrows (which Aster discovered and immediately squirreled away without telling the party), and, at the bottom of a particularly foul barrel, the tablet Rishi had sent them after.

Right as they turned to leave, however, a shrill, buzzing voice whined “I’m telling…!”

A pair of mud mephits, indistinguishable from the mud around them until they moved, began complaining that they’d seen everything and were going to tell the witch about the party. (I made sure to use whiny, dissatisfied, childish voices for them, which quickly turned the whole situation comical.) They were avaricious, beggarly little creatures, and obviously not a combat threat to the party—but they also couldn’t be permitted to tell Auntie Bloat who’d been there, or that she’d been robbed. Aster bribed them with seven gold coins apiece—from the witch’s own stashes of gold, no less—and they greedily accepted, stashing the gold away in a rafter and a rat’s nest. Then they fell to squabbling about who had more gold, at which point the party left.

Two other actions, in no particular order. First, Lambert (who is proficient in the Herbalism skill, and a neutral good cleric to boot) took a few minutes to ruin as many of Auntie Bloat’s potions and poisons as he could without just smashing up the place. Second, Aster searched about until she found a musical instrument—an ocarina, as it happened—and stole it. Her player refused to explain why she’d done this until later, when she handed it to Garm without a word. (Garm, you may recall, is a gifted but very shy and secretive musician.) That ended up being a clever little roleplaying aside, and was met with broad approval.

The party left the way they’d come, taking their rope and immovable rod down as they left and hoping to slip out undetected. Unfortunately, something had apparently noticed them. Remember that arc of scarecrows I’d described before? All facing out, away from the witch’s house, as if keeping an eye out? That ring had turned inward, looking at them.

This completely freaked the players out. They froze in hiding, debating what to do for a while, before Aster (with another amazing Stealth roll) slipped up behind one of the scarecrows and checked it out. It wasn’t moving, though I made sure to describe it in such a way that it was clear it could move—it wasn’t just clothes on a pole. Then Aster had the bright idea to blindfold that scarecrow with a strip of something.

The moment when the scarecrow reached up and pulled the blindfold off might have been the highlight of the night. Everyone flipped out—in character and out of character—and panicked. The resulting fight with two scarecrows was very tough (I’ll talk more about it below), and Aster ended up using both of those magical arrows she’d found (+2 arrows, as it turned out) while Garm and Lambert both nearly went down. Scarecrows take half damage from non-magical weapons, and their fear and paralysis abilities really hampered everyone’s ability to put out damage. Lambert’s bless spell saved the day, helping Garm and Aster hit more consistently (Garm’s player was rolling very badly) and providing a big boost on saving throws against those status effects. After six long rounds of combat, the party barely scraped by with a few hitpoints apiece and extra kindling.

After that, the party did their best to move carefully through the swamp, keeping an eye out for more dangers (and thus avoiding quicksand on the way back.) Once they were clear of the swamp, though, they made all possible speed back upriver towards the kenku village. They arrived near dawn, exhausted, filthy, hungry, and successful.

Rishi was delighted, of course, and revealed what the tablet was: Half of a pair of sending stones. The other half was kept in another kenku village on a distant island, and was their only regular means of communicating with them. Rishi had “lost” it (implying he’d traded it away to Auntie Bloat, either foolishly, or as a very dear price for something else he’d needed more at the time) nearly twenty years ago, and the village had been unable to communicate with its counterpart since then. Naturally, when the party woke up that evening the kenku were celebrating the tablet’s return, and Kondou agreed that this service was proof of the party’s friendship with the kenku. He asked that the party take word to the colony that the kenku would deal with them as friends, and added only one condition—that his son’s bones be returned from the old monastery the colony had settled in.

The next morning, the party traveled back to the colony, where they were debriefed by Governor Warwick and one of the colony’s other Council members, a bookish gnome named Bas Holst. The latter wondered if Auntie Bloat might not have been a hag—a twisted sort of fey creature—and Lambert determined to ask the naiad in the monastery about that. The Governor ordered that news of the kenku and the witch (or hag, if she was indeed a hag) be kept secret, but that everyone be warned about the wyvern. She also told the party that a small group of lumberjacks, who had gone a bit far afield of the colony on the northern shore, had been ambushed by sahuagin storming up out of the waves. Two were dead, and two more hurt. Lambert rushed off to tend to the injured colonists, while Garm and Aster sought out dinner—and that’s where we wrapped up.

The party hit level 3 at the end of this session. Aster officially took the ‘Thief’ sub-class; and Garm took the “Eldritch Knight” subclass (which I’ll talk about a lot in my next post, since the next session ended up being a lot of roleplay involving that choice.)

GM’s Notes

The whole time the party was in Auntie Bloat’s domain, in or near her house, I did my best to play up the gore and horror of the area. My group doesn’t have much problem with that, but the rather wanton use of it definitely played up the grotesque Black Forest / Slavic fairy-tale witch vibe I wanted. (As it happens, it’s also the sort of thing hags do, according to the Monster Manual.) Lovecraftian horror permeates our group at times, and this was actually sort of a refreshing change.

The encounter with the mud mephits went very well. It definitely wasn’t a combat encounter—though if the player characters had waited around to ambush Auntie Bloat when she returned, the mud mephits would’ve been part of a rather complex combat I had in my back pocket. Without that, though, the mephits posed an odd sort of question: What do you do when evil isn’t gloating or nefarious, but rather whiny and childish? It was fun, it set the tone a bit and introduced mephits into the setting (which I’ve only otherwise encountered, in any form, through Bioware’s D&D computer games!) The party’s solution was also fine.

Aster’s little moment, where she snagged a musical instrument, is part of a complex and evolving relationship she and Garm have. Aster technically owns Garm and can (and does) order him about. She’s also very curious about him, and wants him to be a relatively normal person instead of the emotionally-stunted killing machine the arena turned him into. Silently giving him that ocarina was a signal that (a) despite Garm’s best efforts, Aster knew about his musical talent; (b) it was totally fine with her; and (c) she was going to keep it secret from everyone else, at least for the time being. Lots of subtext in a single action—and excellent roleplaying.

I need to talk about, and apologize to my players for, the scarecrow encounter. Turns out two CR 2 monsters is a really tough fight for three second-level PCs, especially when they take half damage from almost everything! I didn’t do the encounter math ahead of time; if I had, this wouldn’t have been nearly so hard a fight. Having said that, though, this was also the only time I think the party has really felt challenged in combat. Since we’re not really doing dungeon crawls much, where long chains of less-difficult encounters can wear a party down, I may have to put more difficult fights in—when appropriate, of course.

And with that, I think I’m done recapping! I’ve got more to write about still—we wrapped up session #8 this past weekend, and it went extremely well. At this rate, I may never catch up with our fast-moving game… how awesome would that be?

Anyways, let’s talk about exploration—and bad GMing.

Recap

For those keeping track at home, I’ve written about three sessions so far. Here’s a recap of the next two.

Session 4

So after exploring the ancient monastery and clearing it out, the various colonists moved in (somewhat) and started settling down in earnest. After a day or two of helping with various chores, the PCs decided to explore and try to find an easy way to the top of the cliffs they had settled in front of. They went south, following the coastline, and found a sizable bay there that might one day be a good harbor, though the current colony location is a bit far away to use it themselves. In the distance, well to the south-south-east, they also spotted a sharp, solitary spire of rock jutting out of the ocean. (The picture I sent them to illustrate this was of Bell’s Pyramid, a pretty amazing natural wonder in the ocean between Australia and New Zealand.)

After about half a day of travel, they eventually found a place where they could get up the cliff face. They found a sub-tropical forest at the top, along with a few high places they could get a better view of the inland terrain from. That gave them a glimpse of a bit more geography—a tall, volcanic mountain in the distance, a plateau sloping away from them … and a thin, barely-visible plume of smoke rising in the distance to the west of them, suggesting that someone might live there.

After getting a bearing on that, the PCs traipsed back along the cliffs to a point above the main body of colonists, still gathered around that ancient monastery. They found a few indications that there had been outbuildings of a sort at the clifftop, but everything except the foundations and a few pottery shards was long since gone.

At this point, the party’s creative instinct took over. Using the immovable rod they’d recovered in the previous adventure and some of Aster’s rope, they set up a crude pulley system and pulled one of the thick hawsers from the Brazen—the colonials’ wrecked ship—up to the clifftop. Using this much sturdier rope, they worked to create a relatively safe route up and down the cliff. It would still be a hard climb for most of the colonists, but it would let those who needed it get up and down without significant danger.

Then the PCs reported back to the colonial governor, got permission to go investigate that sign of potential habitation in the morning, and … well, that was it for the session. Not a great session, but I’ll talk more about that below.

Session 5

The party packed up, made a few simple arrangements, climbed up the rope system they’d helped create the previous session, and headed west.

The journey took most of the day, and (not wanting to interrupt too much) I mostly just described the terrain. That was mostly sub-tropical forest, with a few clearings, gently sloping downhill as they moved away from the cliffs along game trails through the forest. I only threw in one stop of any importance: They encountered a very large stone head on its side—clearly ancient, and badly worn away by weather and plant growth, but recognizably humanoid. A bit of searching found what might have been more pieces just barely sticking out of the ground, equally proportioned and suggesting that this statue was massive when it stood upright.

Naturally, the PCs had to climb it, and they eventually did so. (No rush, so I don’t think I made them roll for it. I just said it took a little while.) Even though the statue head sat among trees, it was big enough to provide a vantage point. A thin, glimmering thread of light suggested a stream in the distance eastward—the first surface fresh water the PCs, or any other colonist, had yet found!—and possibly a small lake. Some rolling hills could be seen to the south, and they could see over the water to the north just a little—enough to see a dark shadow on the horizon that might have been another, very remote island. To the northwest stood the mountain they’d spotted the day before—a smooth volcanic cone, not especially tall (certainly not snow-capped) and green about three-quarters of the way up.

Unfortunately, between the party and the mountain flew a wyvern.

The wyvern was certainly not close enough to cause any immediate concern. However, the fact that it was close enough that the party could make it out, and that it was carrying something about the size of a dairy cow, wasn’t exactly comforting either. They watched it carefully as it flapped toward the mountain, until they couldn’t make it out anymore. Then they flipped out for a while. We talked about wyverns for a bit (and traded more images off the internet—Google Image Search has been my constant companion throughout this campaign!) until the players got back on track and continued onward.

As the ground evened out a bit, the forest began to change. It still looked like a natural forest, but fruit trees became more and more abundant, and the ground was a bit clearer—as if it had been tended to. That’s when I sprung the second surprise of the evening: A bent kenku with a staff stepped out in front of them, halting their progress. There was a moment of shocked staring—none of the party having ever even heard of a kenku before—before the elderly kenku spoke to them in a language they didn’t understand. Lambert greeted him in Common and told him they had been washed ashore by the great storm a few days previous, at which point the kenku threw up his hands and danced happily around a tree, shaking his walking stick and shouting (in heavily-accented Common) “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! I told them the storm brought change! No one believes Rishi when he says things, but whooo’s the fool now?!”

That was their introduction to Rishi, easily the players’ favorite NPC so far. He spoke a sort of pidgin Common, with plenty of ancient words from other languages thrown in and a great many mimicked sounds as well. (We had to stop to watch this old David Attenborough video about the lyrebird, to give some idea of the level of mimicry involved.)  It was clear enough for the PCs to understand, however. He escorted them to his village, and through it to his house—a low-ceilinged structure built around a large tree, about thirty feet off the ground. The village was a maze of rope bridges, thick branches acting as aerial walkways, houses and other buildings on the ground and in the trees, and a few communal cookfires. The other kenku didn’t seem to speak Common—only the same language Rishi spoke at first, and which the party would eventually learn was Auran. (About this time, Aster picked up on the fact that the bird’s-beak dagger she’d picked up from the monastery might be of kenku make.)

The party ate dinner with Rishi—mostly fruit Rishi had picked as they walked, from what he described as his “garden”—and traded information. Rishi called himself a “Windspeaker”, and apparently fulfilled the role of elderly advisor and lorekeeper in the village. After the sun was down, a stout, young, angry-looking kenku appeared at Rishi’s door and summoned them all to meet with Kondou, the village headman.

Rishi translated what ended up being a fairly unproductive meeting. Kondou wasn’t especially trustful, and figured the arrival of more than a hundred-fifty colonists would be a disaster, but claimed the kenku would weather this storm as they had others before. The angry young kenku—Kondou’s son-in-law Janno—saw the beaked dagger Aster had and snatched it away from her, claiming it had belonged to Kondou’s son. The party told where they’d found it and the circumstances, and Kondou asked them to return his son’s bones to him. Janno voiced suspicions that the PCs, or the colonists in general, had killed him themselves. Beyond that, little was accomplished.

On their way back to Rishi’s house, Rishi casually mentioned that there was something the party could do to earn Kondou’s trust. A little favor for him, and for Rishi, and for the kenku village in general…

GM’s Notes

Looking at the description for these two sessions, the casual reader might be fooled into thinking this was a productive and fun two weeks of gaming. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The feedback I got after Session 5 was straightforward: Stop telling us what’s happening, and let us do things ourselves.

This sort of narrative railroading is a trap I fall into a lot as a GM. It’s occasionally necessary when a party is exploring—it’s important to describe the setting and set the tone, I think, before the players try to do things which don’t fit the environment. In this case, I do feel that I needed to describe a bit more than usual. However, what resulted was two solid sessions of GM setting description and plot narration, and that was definitely too much. I even did this once they had NPCs to interact with! That might’ve been because I was caught up in describing the world, and didn’t notice my ‘cue’ to hand narrative control back to the players; but I suspect it’s just a bad habit of mine. (I pointedly didn’t do as much narration in subsequent sessions, and of course that worked much better.)

That significant criticism aside, there were a few bright spots in these two sessions. Rishi was the breakout NPC. I based him heavily and obviously on The Lion King‘s Rafiki, which I think is fine—he’s not exactly the same, but having a baseline character reference for the players saved a lot of roleplaying effort and established a common ground.

The other big hit was the wyvern. This is unsurprising, and actually something we talked about a lot on our recent episode about epic monsters. The presence of a large, dangerous animal—one which certainly threatens individual colonists and their livelihoods—was rather unnerving. The weirdly normal nature of the wyvern was also a big deal, though. Wyverns aren’t malicious; they’re just large predators, with bad tempers and a taste for livestock (and occasionally farmers.) That was oddly reassuring.

Lastly, I want to talk about the kenku in general. Astute GMs and players who know their Monster Manuals well may be writing angry comments about how the kenku don’t actually speak. That’s true, sort of—according to the 5th Edition Monster Manual (and previous editions’ kenku writeups as well), the kenku understand Common and Auran, and can mimic it very well, but can’t exactly speak it. They can’t make new words, develop a language further themselves, and so forth.

I really liked the kenku as a sort of native people—one of the things I’m developing in the history of this setting is that the “traditional” D&D races don’t exist anymore in this part of the world, and that leaves room for more interesting NPCs like kenku, gnolls, lizardfolk, etc.. However, the language thing was a problem: The mimicry ability of kenku is distinctive, and I wanted to keep it, but I also wanted the player characters to be able to talk to these NPCs. If they only mimicked what they heard, and they hadn’t heard Common, Dwarven, Elven, or any other “normal” D&D language in thousands of years, how would that work? My solution was to let them be capable of normal speech (with Auran as their native tongue), but excellent mimics—so good that their storytellers and lorekeepers could easily pass down most of an ancient form of Common to their students. That neatly handled both the communication problem and my main issue with the kenku as an NPC race. Easy!

So—that was sessions 4 and 5. I’ve got more to talk about, though, because for all that didn’t happen in these two weeks, the last two sessions have been action-packed and player-driven. Stay tuned!