Behind the Scenes: Notes, Maps, and more

Greetings!

I've been building up a few things in the background that may be interesting, but aren't worth spamming inboxes for. So here they are in one bigger post collecting lots of little bite size nuggets of back end content creation.

Maps!
I've been working on creating an OG / Ancient Arcadia map, and things are coming along well. You may have caught some of the streams, but here we have 2 images to do an overall progress update. The darker image is where things were at the end of last year, the lighter one is where they are now. In between I've been working on getting a custom tileset made, and I've done a lot of tests of how I want to plan out my hills, valleys, mountains, and cliffs. The big letters indicate biomes (F for forest, P for plains, D for desert, B for badlands, H for hills, FH for forested hills), There are some rivers placed, but they may not be easy to tell apart from notes. There are some towns, but their locations are only rough guesstimates.

One of the things I'm really happy with on the update is the northern hills / mountains area and the waterways within. For a long time I've struggled with denoting rough terrain, but between this new map tile set and a better understanding of hydrotopology (a term I'm making up right now to talk about how water over the surface of the land), I've done a much better job of intertwining rivers into rugged landscapes and using specific tiles to help shape their flow.

The maps are still deep in progress, and changes will continue to come in. You'll notice for example there ended up being more mountains in the north center, and the range in the north west went from doubled with a valley between them to a single range with a steep western side and a more gentle eastern side.

The Lazarus Expedition Notes
The Lazarus Expedition is really living up to the branding of Save or Die. I don't know how much longer the campaign can continue like this. It may end sooner than expected. But in the meantime, here's how I tally XP. We get the following types so far:

• Combat XP: pretty straight forward CR xp. I'm not increasing XP totals for large clusters of monsters, which you can do, to keep the pacing a little slower.
• Discovery XP: Visiting new places is an experience in and of itself! Our players got a small amount of xp (50) for visiting their first outpost, and a good chunk of XP for visiting an important city (300). Anything place of significant interest will bring with it XP.
• Roleplaying XP: This is the hardest category to assign XP for. Unless you hand it out in the moment when something cool happens, you'll always forget what events were xp worthy by the time it comes to total it up. Here we've given RP XP for
• > Stymir taking time to introduce Roy to his world, and guide him through life.
• > Experiencing the Queen Priestess Mehohlahtah the Divine
• > Making friends with the cleric. They could have just taken the job, but they connected with the guy instead.
• > Their initial interactions with guards on the north side of the river, and learning about the culture of the area
• > The frustrating conversation with the boatman charing them an arm and a leg, and learning about the culture of the area
• > The conversation amongst the party about how to manage huge cultural differences that are seemingly impossible to integrate was super well done and worthy of a lot of xp. I expect this to be an ongoing conversation that will continue to rack up xp as they make more progress in managing a difficult situation with no clear or easy answer.

We also have a list of gear that I think the PCs will want for their expedition. Basic gear and weapons can be found in Abalar, but advanced armors will have to be sought out. This is really nice, since it gives us a way to increase our PCs combat abilities without leveling them, and serves as a GP drain by having to buy armor over and over again. GP drain is also an excuse to give more GP as found treasure, so they can reap great rewards and then have a reason to spend it all.

On this gear list you'll see Blanket, Bedroll, and Tent. These are things that often get skipped over, but that I want to impress are important to achieving a short rest in the wilds. At the end of the first segment of this last session I talked about the sand blowing in on the winds - that's the priming for why you need a tent when you travel. You can't sleep well, or really much at all, when you're in a sandstorm, or rain storm, or even a windstorm, without some level of protection. Deserts are hot in the day, but cold at night and they'll need blankets (I forgot about that when they got their first short rest out of town, which I'm kicking myself for) for when the temperatures drop. Bedrolls are will help them when the ground is hard - not an issue in the sand, but in badlands or packed earth they'll be needed.

Bringing a shovel and a hand axe, or two of each, is some core gear that players rarely pick up, but I think could be of great use. Worried about being spotted in the wilds? Dig yourself a foxhole and use your tent to cover it. Now you're underground, away from the elements, and not providing a profile. Want to bury a body? Shovel. Want to make a fire? That sword doesn't cut wood very well, but that axe sure does.

Our PCs don't need to buy all this stuff, and there may be other stuff they do want, but this is my short list that I will encourage them to pick up. They might need a pack animal too. This stuff gets heavy.

Legends of Arcadia: Light of Illumis
This game ran a little long, 5 sessions instead of 4, but oh was it worth it. Here's a quick breakdown of how I saw the game going by session.

• 1) Perfect. Couldn't have asked for anything better.
• 2) I botched this one. The players did great, but you know how I love to dig into the details and slow the game down. We spent too much time dealing with the threats on the road, the investigation of a body, and the happenings around town. While the PCs may have felt like that was their doing, it is up to the DM to manage the session and I encouraged the "lets spend time with all the small stuff" instead of big actions and big ideas. I hope you enjoyed it, because from a campaign pacing and session management point of view, I screwed it up.
• 3) This is what the previous session should have been. Dealing with real threats, showing the dangers of undead, finding interesting uses for Turn Undead, navigating complex social issues without getting lost in them, and PCs projecting their power through conversations with NPCs.
• 4) Oh buddy. The gauntlet here was supposed to be a 1.5-2 hour fight, but ended up taking the whole session. There were zombies and skeletons and it was a mess, but I was hoping the slow drawing in of more of them would get our players to move quickly and isolate threats rather than stop and deal with each one along the way. As they say, no plan survives first contact with your PCs, and this session nearly ended the campaign. In the end, Jexel smiled on us and lucky rolls saved the day.
• 5) The final session. Our players did well, but the combat here was a bit lacking. I wanted to make sure we finished quickly, and I wanted the enemies to feel overwhelming without getting caught in the mess like the previous one, but I don't think there was enough variation. At the end, the PCs tried to draw the game out to a 6th session, but luckily they decided against running back through the town when all the undead started to stream out.

Overall I'm very pleased with this campaign. Our players did well, we all had fun, I got the ending I had hoped for, and we had a nice wrap up of the importance of these events.

City Dwarves
Oh yeah, this is going to happen. A bit slowly though. We can play every other week on Tuesdays, and might be able to toss in another game on another day from time to time, for a bit. Our cast is confirmed as Anna Prosser, Gen "Livinpink" Forge, and Rachel "SeltzerPlease" Quirico.

I'm working on overlays right now, but don't have anything to show for them yet. Our players are all super busy with other things, so our first session will be viewers and players being introduced to everything together, and hopefully we'll hit the ground running and can get into some legitimate dwarven business in the first session.

We'll be playing 5th edition D&D, in Ancient Arcadia, set in the Age of Mist! For reference, that is the age before The Lazarus Expedition, when gods walked the earth among the mortals, magic was everywhere, and major components of society, history, and mythology hadn't happened yet. Specifically we'll see Dwarves deviate from their stat blocks and racial traits quite a bit and feel a lot more like short heavy humans than what you and I might recognize a dwarf to be.

Project Cosmo
I've made very little progress on this. It's harder than I had anticipated to do right, and there have been other, more pressing, easier to solve, projects that I keep working on instead.

Luna Inu Una
One of the other things that has been taking up so much of my time is my new dog! We just call her Luna, or Donkey Face, or Moon Dog One (or Snow Dog One when she's playing in her favorite biome). She's not D&D related at all, but she is distracting me from D&D.

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Cosmo's Kitchen
I can't believe I left this out. This is not related to Project Cosmo, but is an intermittent campaign for the Save or Die group to be played when people out of town, with guests, or in between main campaigns. The idea is still in construction, but the elevator pitch is as follows:

Cosmo's Kitchen serves cosmically good food from fine and exotic creatures. Run by the greatest Gastromancer to ever grace the gods' green earth, Cosmo elegantly mixes exotic animals with marvelous magics for the ultimate in culinary experiences. It's all peaches and cream when you're a guest, but life in the kitchen is a different story. Special orders for hard to find creatures means some poor line cook needs to get out there, bag a cockatrice, and bring it back fresh.

How you turn that into a D&D campaign... well that's harder. Since it'll be a series of stand alone sessions, or maybe just a single one shot, I think we'll end up with mostly fetch quest mechanics; but at the end of the day what makes a good D&D campaign is it's flavor.