get the game, ladies and gents. i’m “on-line” again and here’s a post about the longest running game of DND i’ve ever been a part of part 1 of 6 or whenever i run out of steam and stop posting about things people like:
here’s some backstory
probably ten years ago when my brothers and i were all on speaking terms and my oldest brother was still with his highschool sweetheart we all got together for a legendary game of DND among our friends. We houseruled our own campaign setting and then played a Sky Pirates themed game of DND that took inspiration from the roleplaying game i was involved in Valikorlia + Eberron and a bunch of shit my brothers and i made as kids.
It was very much a Family Game
I guess when my brothers moved away they kept playing in that setting and then it evolved a bunch. my brother always craved adventure in his life, but he’s never really gone anywhere or done anything until recently.
we’d been playing at the house we lived in, a table with our friend Ransom that was inspired by Anime and japanese folklore that was kind of this crummy group storytelling exercise. One night after playing it, my older brother gets all wistful with me about the campaign setting we’d made as kids. I get all wistful about playing that roleplaying game Valikorlia and kind of the last days of the server.
We were expecting a different cast to play the first table than what we got, so after explaining what it was like I tell my older brother I’ll write a table that can kind of let him know what it was like to really play that huge roleplaying game back in the heydey of it. I’m sitting and thinking all fuckin day: how can I do this? this is stupid. what have i done
then I get to work writing. I know my brother also wants to do a table in that campaign setting. as a joke, we used the band The Ramones name backwards, so our campaign setting was Senomar.
I had to ahve something to pull my players in immediately, which ended up being my brother playing the great-great-great Grandfather of the character he played as a teenager. That character is Marcus Firebrand, and my friend Ransom ends up playing Rou, a tiefling blackguard/paladin esque guy i let him come up with cuz he’d never played DND before.
Immediately I set my hook: i was gonna use a bunch of music and references to shit my players like to get them invested.
You gotta understand: Megaman Legends was maybe the only fuckin’ videogame my older brother ever liked. He’d talk about it all the damn time. I bet he’s still telling his girlfriend who hates me and videogames all about how Megaman Legends is the best thing ever.
so I did a foreward for my campaign. I set it up with the opening line from megaman legends that I know my brother never forgot:
“In a world covered in endless water…” that was my hook. here’s how to get me though: start the campaign in a musty tavern filled with too many NPC’s in a city covered in snow. that’s what I love in a campaign setting and it’s exactly what i did for my players.
They immediately made friends with an anarchist, blew up a church and robbed a bunch of people cuz I was extremely flat footed and had never DMed before. My brother wanted to steal an artifact and i let his pirate character do it when they held up a church full of innocent people: a flask that makes you sober when you drink it.
the lesson i learned was: all players have things they like, and you can game the system to make em feel like they’re playing something you haven’t written over so everybody gets the enjoyment out of it they want
