Timekeeping

The Faerûnian calendar is extremely elaborate. I've been trying to keep track of when things are for my adventurers, and it's really hard!

It doesn't line up very well with our calendar and I can't figure out when the seasons should start to change.

The months are:

• Hammer
• Alturiak
• Ches
• Tarsakh
• Mirtul
• Kythorn
• Flamerule
• Eleasis
• Eleint
• Marpenoth
• Uktar
• Nightal

Great fantasy names. However, the solstices and equinoxes don't line up, they're all a month later than I want them to be. If Nightal is December, then the winter solstice should go between Nightal and Hammer, but it's between Hammer and Alturiak instead.
So, when does spring start? March is the third month, but it also has the vernal equinox in it. And the spring equinox is between Tarsakh and Mirtul.

It's annoying.

My players are in Ches now, I think I'm going to declare that spring is starting anyway though.

The Curse of Distraction

I've had a lot on my mind this week, so I forgot that I was supposed to run a session until about 3 hours before our usual start time. Luckily this is a filler session, but I still need to have more things ready for a filler session than I have right now.

Post-Session
 I really didn't need all that much after all. All my goals were achieved, and everyone joked around about how they're going to leave town. The Stone of Golorr has been taken, all the seeds have been planted for future fun stuff, they asked Zelifarn to come along, and let all their allies know where they were going.

Clink Manor

This is my first custom map. I tried using some software to make a digital one, but everything I tried is really clunky...
Frankly, including this.

Even if it is still a little weird and unwieldy, this map at least looks prettier than what I could get otherwise, and it's ready for a few sessions from now, when we finally need to get here.

Scheduling fun!

I have been focusing solely on Dungeons and Dragons for the past few weeks. Finally getting a job is great, except for insofar as it means I will need to figure out how to have a job and run my campaign.
The timing is also not great for the campaign. We just finished the Dragon Heist module, and are entering the wilds of homebrew.

The character who was supposed to be the center of the next story arc has now revealed that he won't be available for the next two sessions either, so the next one is going to be everyone preparing to leave the city, arranging who is going to take care of their bar and saying goodbye to all of their friends. 

Then we will skip the session after that.

We have already moved from Wednesdays to Tuesdays, but I think that we may scale it down to every other week.

Magic Items: Barbricent's Magnificent Mansion

This item is a tiny model house, the size of your thumbnail. The house, despite its small size, is quite extravagant. If you set it down and recite the command phrase "Come on Barbie let's go party," it creates a portal into a Magnificent Mansion, the interior of which is out of your control.

The Mansion contains 8 bedrooms, a library, a workshop, a kitchen, several bathrooms, and a comfortable lounge.

All of it is decorated in hot pink and a vibrant teal and made of materials unheard of in the material plane, such as plastic. All foods served by the 100 spectral servants appear cartoonish in nature.

To deactivate the item, someone outside the mansion must say "Come on Barbie, let's go party." Ending the spell as described for Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, and leaving the model sitting in the space where the portal once was.

Uncertainty in Dungeonmastering

I don't like combat in rpgs.

I know it's supposed to be fun strategizing, and blowing things up, but I do not want to spend anywhere near that much time on stuff that doesn't move the plot forward.

So, in my last session, I asked the party if fighting was deeply important for them, after setting up a fight where I would need to play 12 characters, one of them being an ancient dragon, on the side of the party.

They said no.

So we skipped the fight and let them take all their stuff. Everybody won.

So You Want To Build A Wizard?

• Who is the crazy wizard who made the door into the vault at the end of Dragon Heist?
• What madman decided to turn an aboleth into a rock that can tell you where you left your keys? 
• Who decided that to open the door you needed bagpipe music and part of a bugbear?

 Well, they're all the same person, and probably a good person to have a huge stash of weird magic stuff. I want a reason to give my players a huge pile of weird magic stuff. So, he or she has a castle or tower or workshop that the players can hit up later for cool loot.

 Possible names for this crazy wizard: Zurusorn, Xobothung, Pabrovund, Zaviduas

Zaviduas Pabrovund, Administrator of Orogoth. Orogoth seems like a good place, I know nothing about it, but it has a good wizardly sort of a name. Administrator is a strange title, but I've already demonstrated how weird this wizard is. 

Ah, I've accidentally hit on an actual title, currently Orogoth is a wizard college, they probably have administrators...

Zaviduas Pabrovund should not be one of those.

Zaviduas Pabrovund, Wizard of the Northdark Woods. It's a nice small forest near the ancestral home of one of the players, so he will be more likely to deal with his many family problems that I've been planning.

Unfortunately, Zaviduas sounds like a male name to me and all of the other villains I have planned are men. Zavidua Pabrovund sounds much more feminine though.

Zavidua Pabrovund, Wizard of the Northdark Woods is going to leave some advertising on the back of the doors in to the vault. She's not dumb, she knows adventurers are going to end up inside of the vault, but adventurers appreciate a good and tricky magic door. Maybe they will want her services.

Welcome to the Party: Zelifarn

So, the party had a really nice chat with Zelifarn the bronze dragon, and suggested to the dragon that she should try adventuring.

She has taken their advice, and is getting ready to start adventuring, either with them or by herself. Zelifarn is going to show up, even if the party doesn't want her to join them, because she is too cool to leave behind.

I like working on paper, even though our entire campaign is going on online. I gave Zelifarn one trait for Adult Dragons so that she can be a more effective adventurer.

A Large sized creature would have some serious trouble getting into most dungeons with enough treasure that she would like to explore them.

The Next Challenger 1

This is the official nemesis of Tavin. When the party gets out of the module, one of their first stops is going to be his ancestral homeland, and eventually they will fight this person.

There are some story details that I still need to figure out about him, but he has a still-secret name.

After the Dragon Heist

Once I finish running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, I plan to keep running this game. However, I don't really like running dungeons, so the official follow-up, Waterdeep: Dungeons of the Mad Mage, is not really an option.

Dungeons are fun to play through, but a huge hassle to run in my very limited experience, and this campaign is still sort of an experiment for me so I don't want to trap the party underground from level 5 through level 20. I want to take them through a world, so I am planning some custom adventures for my players.

After the party leaves Waterdeep, we will go overland to Tavin's ancestral barony, where he will attempt to reclaim it and take vengeance on those who framed him for tax fraud. This will be a ridiculously melodramatic, Arthurian situation. I don't have a lot of details for this section of adventuring yet, although I have a large pile of strange and exotic bears to throw at them to cover for any lack of preparation.

Once they finish there, Pearl has a massive bounty in Calimshan that is only going to become more valuable as time goes by. The City of Waterdeep is extremely serious about getting Pulvi Lutum brought back to them, either to interrogate, or to at least confirm that he isn't causing them any more trouble. This sounds like it should be pretty easy, but Pulvi is a spellcaster and he has an Amulet of Proof Against Location and Detection, stolen from a Closed Lord of Waterdeep, so he cannot be found through magical means.

By the time they finish there, I should have everyone up to level 10, and so I will bring in the Big Bad.

Since the end of the Spellplague about ten years ago, the Blackstaff has been working on a method to distance the world from the Feywild and close the portals that can currently been found throughout the world. She has a lot going on, and it's really hard, but she has just made a major breakthrough and started recruiting more capable spellcasters to help with her research. Unfortunately, certain occupants of the Feywild have heard of her new efforts, and so are forming a powerful rebellion, led by a talented and crudely drawn druid.

So they will be facing as many unhappy fey creatures as possible.

Experience Points

As I've mentioned, I have not played all that much Dungeons and Dragons. Nor have most of my players, except for the two behind Elephant Joe and Niv, they both used to play a lot of 3.5. Niv's player knows mountains of lore and tried to run a couple of campaigns in 2018, both of which ended pretty quickly after his players started killing each other. My characters are more than just a little bit responsible for those, but we're fine now. Elephant Joe enjoys reading modules and needs to be reminded frequently that he does not get to see this module until we finish playing through it.

Both of them have looked things up, and know things they should not know. Elephant Joe and I live together, and so we talk about my plans for after the party leaves Waterdeep, and the weird and exciting monsters I have found to hide in the wilds. Niv however, has looked up fountains of lore on the city and all the notable magic items and personages it contains. I get a lot of interesting lessons on the history of the Blackstaff during our sessions.

Part of how we are dealing with this is through their characters and roleplay. Elephant Joe is not very bright, and so he can't really tell the party any secrets and be believed. I also use him as a point to introduce new optional sidequests that I want to send the party on. Oskar was replaced by Niv partly because Oskar being so knowledgeable about this city he had never been to before made no sense, partly because the player loves making new characters, partly because he thinks that there will be a new version of the Artificer class coming out that he can upgrade to, and finally because Oskar didn't have a whole lot of story stuff to work with.