The following is the campaign log for the 20th session of my current Amber Diceless RPG campaign, entitled A Horse Of Another Timbre.
You might want to Start from Session #1 or check out the index of my Amber articles.
Campaign log: 24 May 2021, turn by turn
I don't get around to posting these very often, so I'm nearly a year behind. Details below the fold:
This was a piece of artwork I made for my Amber campaign a while back:
The following is the campaign log for the 19th session of my current
Amber Diceless RPG campaign, entitled A Horse Of Another Timbre. One of
my players keeps a log of the scenes, and another maintains a quote
list. As usual, I have combined them with a few extra notes of my own
after the fact. I post them here several months after... nearly a year later, as I've not been updating this blog... which allows me
to add in a few little clarifications without worrying too much about
spoiling future plotlines for my players.
You can also Start from Session #1 or check out the index of my Amber articles.
The PCs are:
Most
of
the NPCs are from the novels, such as Fiona, who always seems to know more than she should, and Corwin, whose main schtick is essentially the opposite despite being exceptionally well read.
Some NPCs are unique to this
campaign, such as "Blinky" (real name Argos) who is a dragon with extra eyeballs all over his body and is guarding Dworkin's cave: sort of an upgrade from Wixer (the griffon doing the same duty in the books). Bellantine and Armistaud are "Acquisitions Specialists" from a library world called Oberon's Loupe: they may be operating on special instructions from the dead king.
Campaign log: 10 May 2021, turn by turn
These minor complaints about a few weird Prompts in the excellent solitaire journaling RPG Thousand-Year-Old Vampire didn't quite fit into my previous posts about the game. Thousand-Year-Old Vampire is a ton of fun, and these don't really break anything, but they are... minor rough spots that aren't quite up to the slick artistry of the rest of the project.
I noticed that I do sometimes have trouble with prompts that imply a large passage of time. Prompts where an explicit passage of time exists are less troubling for
me. If you tell me the story advances 200 years, I can roll with that,
and cross out mortals. If instead you just imply maybe it's further into
the future now, I'm left wondering if I need to scrap my current plot
thread or not. The one that vexed me the most was Prompt #42, which asks about a piece of contemporary technology that gives you trouble
since it's beyond what existed in your mortal life. If your timeline has
advanced to the Industrial Revolution during play, then this is a great prompt, but if
your character started in the 12th century and you've now moved to the
early 14th century, it is really hard to come up with a good answer to
that. You're either going to want to jump ahead much further in time, or
settle in for a lot of research. There's nothing specific to 12th and 14th C there, feel free to pick any two other centuries about which you know just enough to run a
low-pressure one-shot solo game in, but not enough to really differentiate between the tech-levels thereof. Prompt 42 trips me up every time.
Prompt #54 also gave me headaches, but largely because it's mechanically vague. It says to "convert an old Memory to a new Skill for blending in." I'm just really not sure if that means "add a new Skill to your sheet, and base it on some sort of thematic link to one of your Memories", or if it means you're supposed to erase an entire Memory (including up to 3 Experiences) as well. I don't think 'convert' is defined anywhere in the rules. Zapping an entire Memory will have a major impact on your character an narrative, so I wish the instructions were a little clearer. But like I said, the game is super fun, so in the end I'm okay with having to put on my "GM-as-rules-arbiter Hat" once or twice per game.
I wish the 136 alternate prompts were laid-out in the same format as the original 71 prompts: three linked prompts per page, numbered by the page. There would definitely be value in having an entire second roster (or 3rd roster) of prompts like that. Then you could choose if you were going to play Prompt Roster A, B, or C at the start of the game, or you could swap from one roster to the other if you rolled the same thing too often. Instead, if you feel you've seen a particular page too often and want to use the alternate prompts, you have to roll a d135, and if you then end up on the same page/number in a later turn, there's often no obvious follow-up that builds on the random redirect you used. It feels like a missed opportunity... like they did 85% of the work necessary to make the alternate prompts actually organically usable, and just didn't quite get it across the finish line. If I played the game just a little more often, I'd be tempted to take that project on myself.
Overall a great game, despite my fussing.
As I mentioned the other day, I've now played 4 games of Thousand-Year-Old Vampire, a solitaire journaling RPG, where your character is a Vampire, and game play covers centuries at least. You come up with a brief sketch of a historical figure, and the vampire who converts them into undead, and then the game provides random events that bounce you forward in time. You create a big weirdly-sprawling timeline of experiences and memories, many of which get lost of mutated such that by the end of it your character is grappling with uncertainty or insanity.
Today I'm going to list my full game logs from the 2nd session I ever played of TYOV, which was probably more than a year ago, maybe even from the early parts of the pandemic. I didn't think to put a date on it.
This playthrough was a bit longer than one I posted this weekend, and as I recall it entertained me for several nights of play. As a result of the length, and how that interacts with experiential limits hardwired into the game, the vampiric main character had a lot more memory issues. They kind of lost all sense of self before the end. Their fragmented timeline runs from pre-Roman Etruria up through an unspecified modern conflict that was probably World War 2. The usual Stoker-and-Hollywood vampire tropes are here, but supplemented by characters inspired by Etruscan Mythology, and some uniquely weird textile-arts and sutured-wings nonsense conjured from my own demented psyche (or, I guess, from the intersection of vampirism with an Etruscan goddess best known for her love of scissors).
Trigger Warning: Again, this is the play log from a horror game about weird vampires. This log will elude to violence, body-horror, sexual predation and literal carnivorous predation. While I don't go into a lot of detail, it does get kind of gory. If you've got a weak stomach, easily-offended sensibilities, or just horror's not your thing, you should turn around now.
Full game log can be found beneath the fold:
What follows is the play log from an entire solitaire game of Thousand Year Old Vampire. Sort of a weird fragmented non-linear short story of the unlife of a vampire.
I have played three games of TYOV before this one. This time, I began the game in pagan Scandinavia, with a young man named Torgny Hjalmerson who dreams of being a successful viking raider like his father was before him. He descends quickly into madness and villainy, and makes especially horrible relationship choices.
There's no default setting for TYOV, so I'm blending Norse Myth, a few standard vampiric themes from elsewhere in folklore and mythology, a bit of the trappings of sensationalized hollywood-style satanism, and some weird new stuff unique to this tale. (Not to mention anachronism and historical inaccuracy.)
This was a ton of fun, and definitely a game I'd be happy to play again. It also works well as character-building exercise for Vampiric NPCs in other RPGs. (That's actually what I did with 2 of my 3 previous plays of the game.)
Trigger Warning: This is a log from a horror game. There's a good deal of violence in what follows, including mutilation, body-horror, blasphemous devilry, and violence against women. While I don't get overly lurid with the details and everything is kept kind of brief, there's some seriously awful stuff in what follows. If you've got a queasy stomach or are easily offended, you may want to skip this post entirely.
Full log follows below the fold:
Had two great sessions of D&D over New Years, about 15 or 16 hours of play across 2 days. Hardly any combats in that time. The PCs avoided every fight I intended them to get into, by way of clever actions and occasionally good luck. Then they picked a fight with one encounter that was intended to be an info dump. It was huge fun, but very unpredictable.
The best part was right at the very end of the second session: the party's Paladin accidentally adopted a Redcap. The Redcap was assigned to a Pixie noble by his boss, and the Pixie was kind of hoping to get the Redcap killed so they wouldn't be supervised any more. The PCs managed to subdue the Redcap via quick thinking, and then, axe to his neck, said something along the lines of "try any more funny business, and I'm keeping your Redcap". To which the Pixie replied "It's a deal! You want him, he's yours!" A few minutes later, a contract was signed on a mushroom stalk, and ownership of the Redcap had transitioned to the goodie-two-shoes of the party. The Paladin didn't understand at that moment that in D&D, Redcaps need to murder every 3 days or else they shrivel up and die.
Corruption and deals with the devil have been major themes of the campaign, so it was some kind of wonderful for the moral-compass of the adventuring party to accidentally volunteer himself to be the keeper of a literal murder-monster. Good times all around.
Here's a useful low-level Wand for your D&D game. It's an upgraded version of the Wand of Pyrotechnics from Xanathar's Guide to Everything, rendered more useful (and less harmless) but still weak enough that you could give it to 2nd level characters without it wrecking game balance.
Wand of Fireworks: (Wondrous Item, Wand, Rarity: Uncommon). Description: This redwood wand has a blackened tip that faintly glows with a smouldering inner red light like an old coal not quite extinguished. Despite this appearance, it's not particularly warm to the touch.
Properties: This wand has 7 charges. While holding it, you can use an action to pick a target creature, item, or space that you can see within 120 feet, expend a charge, and decide whether you want the effect to be harmless or dangerous.
The harmless effect is a burst of multicolored light and sparks. The burst of light is accompanied by a crackling noise that can be heard up to 300 feet away. The light is as bright as a torch flame but lasts only a second. The controller may choose the color of the flames.
The dangerous effect is as above, but the flickering firework is briefly hot enough to actually burn things or start small fires. The target must succeed on a DC 12 Dexterity saving throw, or else suffer 1d10 fire damage. If the target is a flammable object, it ignites if it isn’t being worn or carried.
The wand regains 1d6 + 1 expended charges daily at dawn. If you expend the wand’s last charge, roll a d20. On a 1, the wand erupts in a harmless pyrotechnic display before burning down to ash, destroying itself.
It's basically the Wand of Pyrotechnics, plus an optional damaging effect that's a modified version of the Fire Bolt cantrip.
Clever characters will quickly figure out its not a great attack, and often better used for distractions or signalling. The color-change aspect was added specifically to empower that utility, so that even if that's all you're using it for, it's a minor improvement on the Wand of Pyrotechnics. Evil characters will quickly figure out that it's even better for arson.
Why'd I make such a thing? Well, I'm gearing up for some D&D on Roll20 over the New Year. At the end of the previous session, the PCs had surprised me by searching a place that totally made sense for a recently deceased NPC wizard to have hidden something. In fact, it was unintentionally implied by something I'd narrated, and they'd picked up on my unintended implication. I'd been focused on the main plot, and had nothing prepared for this hidden stash, but wanted to reward their clever thinking. Since it was near the end of the session, I told them they found a wand hidden there, and left the discovery of what type of wand for next time.
Well, "next time" is almost here, and I've made myself a minor problem. My characters are just third level, so there's not really a good wand for them.
A Wand of Magic Missiles is probably a too large step up in offensive power. Even at just using 1 charge per turn, it's 6-21 guaranteed damage per turn at a time where the PCs are still rolling a single damage die and no one has Extra Attack yet. Dropping 4 or 5 charges would vaporize the campaign's current big bad in a single turn. So that's out.
Xanathar's Guide to Everything has some common Wands, but I hadn't read through them yet at the time. They're cute, kinda fun, but have sort of the opposite problem of the Magic Missiles: they aren't useful in a fight at all. If the dour old wizard hid away a wand for safe-keeping, it's got to be a little better than making people scowl, or grow a single flower. My players were excited at finding a wand because there have been relatively few magic items in the game, and now they've had some time to imagine what the wand might be and do, so it's possibly built up a bit in their minds.
Unfortunately, all the Uncommon Wands are either too powerful for the current moment in my game (Magic Missiles, Web), or so limited as to be nearly useless (Wand of Secrets in a group that already has two Rogues with pretty decent Perception/Investigation skills).
So I need a wand that's a little more useful than any of the common Wands in XGE, but not such a step up that it causes the group's fighter or one of the rogues to give up their normal attack in favor of the wand for the first two rounds of every combat. Something that's cool and useful, but requires some cleverness to get the most out of.
I went with an custom upgraded version of the Wand of Pyrotechnics because it fit nature of the deceased NPC wizard: he was a bit of a show-off in his youth, but was old and frail and not so great at magic anymore. This wand was his crutch. D&D doesn't really have provisions for growing old, so there's no official reason why he couldn't just use a cantrip that would probably do more damage since he was at least a 5th level wizard in his youth, but it makes narrative sense for him to have lost most of his magical edge in his final years. The "old coal not quite extinguished" was a pretty apt metaphor for the character before he was murdered.
Also, currently the PCs are at odds with the local Duke, and I like the idea of them being tempted by the newfound ability to burn down the Duke's manor. I think that will lead to some fun role-play moments as they debate the ethics of such skullduggery.
Thinking a bit about a quote from Nine Princes In Amber by Roger Zelazny, and how I wish I'd paid more attention to it at the start of my campaign more than a year ago:
I was a prince of Amber. It was true. There had been fifteen brothers and six were dead. There had been eight Sisters, and two were dead, possibly four.
The nine princes active during the original novels are: Benedict, Eric, Corwin, Bleys, Brand, Caine, Gerard, Julian, and Random.
The four princesses active during the original novels are: Deirdre, Fiona, Llewella, and Florimel.
So that leaves 6 dead princes, 2 dead princesses, and 2 princesses of unknown status. Let's just call them 6 and 4 to keep it simple, as in many Amber campaigns any off-camera death is instantly suspect.
A few books into the series, we are told about Osric and Findo, who long ago died "for the good of the realm", so that leaves 4 and 4.
In the later novels, we are told briefly about Sand and Delwin, so that leaves 3 and 3.
We're also introduced to a few others in the later novels, such as Dalt and
Coral, but they presented in a way that makes it incredibly unlikely
that they should be subtracted from that total. They were never part of the family when
the "kids" were growing up, anyway.
The various third-party guidebooks about Amber (the "Complete Amber Sourcebook" and the "Visual Guide to Castle Amber") mention a princess Mirelle, so that leaves 3 and 2, for a total of 5.
Those 5 are presumed dead, and completely open for GMs of the Amber DRPG to fill in. A lot of word-count is spent in the novels telling us how Corwin and his kin are fratricidal and traitorous, so presumably several of these 5 died in ways that were memorable and/or suspicious. They could potentially give you great backstory and motivation details for the existing Amberites: lots of axes to grind over the tragic deaths of beloved siblings.
For some reason, I always forget about them when I'm starting a campaign. At the outset of Amber, I make individual decisions about the status of Osric, Findo, Sand, Delwin, and Mirelle, but I never remember during session zero that there's 5 others I need to decide on as well. I very commonly make a detailed birthorder chart that's canonical for my campaign, complete with pictures of the major NPCs to help new players wrap their heads around the massive family, but I never seem to remember to add 5 entirely new names to that list.
I need to put that on my checklist for future campaigns, I guess. Make up some new siblings, and kill them spectacularly before the first session.
While I'm on the topic, I might as well mention that there's a couple different birth orders in the various sources, with the most important bone of contention being the switch-up being whether Caine is a full-brother or half-brother to Corwin. The novels give mixed messages about him. The guidebooks muddy it further, with the "Complete Amber Sourcebook" by Theodore Krulik claiming they share a mother, while the "Visual Guide to Castle Amber" by Neil Randall list Caine's full brothers are Gerard and Julian (and puts their births in slightly different order, as well).
Other places where the guidebooks contradict each other include:
Benedict, about whom the lineage charts in the two books disagree about whether he was the eldest or the youngest of the three children of Cymnea. He's the surviving one, and that's what matters, I guess.
Sand and Delwin are listed as the children of Harla in one guide, and children of Lora in the other. The two books also disagree about whether Sand and Del are older or younger than Random. To make it more confusing, the book that names their mother Lora says
that Oberon did also have a wife named Harla, but that it's unknown if they
had any kids. So there's no chance that Lora is a nickname for Harla.
Crazy session of Amber tonight. Semi-accidentally killed off King Random.
Over the past 15 sessions or so, a villain was using a network of special jewels to cast devastating attack spells at a distance, blasting anyone who had one of these gems. Two or three sessions previous, this had nearly killed 1 PC and her mother (Princess Sand), but the actions of 3 PCs working together had saved them both. One of them figured out how to use the Pattern Lens to seal the gems that Sand and the other PC had on them so they couldn't get blasted, and then rushed the injured Sand to a high-tech sci-fi hospital to save her.
These 3 PCs, it should be noted, all really liked King Random, and would genuinely want to save him.
Tonight, one of them was present when suddenly the King started getting blasted by the same methods, only through the Jewel of Judgment instead of these other Spikard-y stones. The first two shots incapacitate him, but since the one of those 3 PCs was nearby, and he knew the other 2 PCs were present at a high-tech hospital, they spring in to action. He Trumps his cousins, and passes the King's unconscious body through to the PC who had sealed the other gems.
Who then doesn't seal the Jewel, and instead loads the KO'd King into medical scanner (kind of like an MRI tube) to diagnose his injuries, and leaves the King alone with just the NPC scanner technician while he steps out of the room to make a call.
This is a really bad idea, so before I pull the trigger, I subtly remind him that the King is wearing the Jewel and he could do something with it.
This instead makes him consider running off with the Jewel for himself. Steal it, head to Amber to attune to it, draw his own Pattern, etc. He thinks about it a bit, and then ultimately decides to be better than that. He leaves it on the King, because there's a chance the Jewel might be all that's sustaining his lifeforce.
(Which, to be fair, is a thing that does happen in the books, more or less. Corwin gets stabbed and says the Jewel may have saved him. But he's not really sure if it's saving him or dooming him, so Corwin stashes the Jewel in a compost heap.)
So, having resisted the temptation to steal the gem, the player instead leaves the KO'd king in the medical scanner, still wearing the Jewel that they know for certain was just used to blast him with sorcery twice. It was a great little moment of temptation and moral victory. Good stuff.
"Okay," I say to the players a few heartbeats later, "I feel I've given you enough warnings. About that, there's a series of explosions in the other room, centered on the Jewel."
"Enough warnings -- oh, crap! You're right, I should have realized that!"
"Oh, it's okay," says one of the other players, "I'm sure the King has several centimeters of plot armor."
Nope. No he doesn't. No one does. Mistakes like this need to have consequences.
"Oh, no! He died in my hospital, on my watch. All his siblings are going to think I did this!"
Yep. Yes they will. And my game is suddenly pivoting in an entirely new direction.
