by streams that never find the sea
Hey gang - (gotta try this greeting at least once right?)
It’s been forever since the last newsletter, and might be awhile before the next one, I know. I haven’t been reading as much, I haven’t touched Disney+ since Moon Knight was over (I think?), I think I haven’t touched Netflix longer than that except yesterday I watched like two episodes of Bocchi the Rock! which was totally up my alley - it’s basically BECK meets K-ON!
The main reason I’ve been away, of course, is D&D. Last Saturday I went to the fan screening of D&D: Honor Among Thieves, and it was so good. The joy I felt seeing the map of Sword Coast appear on the big screen! But this post isn’t about that. It’s about all the games I’m currently playing/DMing because, well, I would also to keep a record for myself.
- Nyx and Riree
These are two gnome sisters who snuck out of school for a weekend of mischief… but thanks to a faulty teleportation spell, found themselves stranded in the Sword Coast of Faerûn while the school is slowly moving from Iletha to Kamiyojima. (Yes, the school is a Moving Castle. Or rather, a Moving Huge Chunk of Land, lol.)
They remember that their first year teacher (they are now third year students) had a brother in Faerûn, and are looking for him, in hopes that he has a way to contact the school.
I’m DM-ing this one, but because Pat is my sole player (it was originally meant to be our main game with other players, but that didn’t pan through) I used Riree’s character as a DM PC of sorts.
- Llona and Gang
I think… I really need team names for all these separate games. This is a game set in the school that Nyx and Riree snuck out of - most of my games are set in this school. Llona and her best friend Finn are first year students and most recently, they’ve won a Mage Tower scrimmage and went on a weekend holiday on the Damarran beach, in Zakhara (Al-Qadim). They saved a bunch of kids from being eaten by a Sea Hag, just in time to return to the Damarran Turtle Run Festival.
This is another one that I’m DM-ing, while running a couple of regular NPCs/DM PCs in the game.
- Seroja and Reinwyn
More first years of the school. I did have a DM PC for the first game, but I think it might not be necessary for future games since I have at least two players for this one. So far, Seroja (a tabaxi monk) and Reinwyn (dragonborn sorcerer) have explored the ruins of an ancient order of knights, and accidentally released a bunch of skeletons into their campus grounds. Ooops? They were also went on the Damarran trip, although fortunately they didn’t have to fight a Sea Hag.
- Ailani, DeeDee, Lucien, and Mao Shen
Four first years and my biggest group so far, absolutely no DM PC needed :) They’ve only done Orientation Day as students and almost destroyed the library cafe, although they did manage to save it instead.
Most recently, Lucien helped his school club crack the translation of an ancient tome, and Mao Shen’s club (the school orchestral band) had a busking project to raise money for future concerts.
- NPCs
While running all of these, I am occasionally running solo games using several NPCs, because (1) making up these stuff is fun, and (2) I absolutely want my NPCs to have lives of their own. Occasionally I would hint at their stories in the school paper that the players of my other games get access to.
I’m also playing one other game not set in this school or the world that this school is in, but I won’t be talking about that one I guess.
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Anyway, the thing is, once upon a time I used to run these events at work, celebrating books that are kinda sexist and fatphobic, and extremely racist, and written by Jo the Queen Terf. And while we receive guidebooks on how to run these events, I find most of the guides given kind of boring, and would put in my own twists to the games given, or hack my own games. I basically created my own Cards Against Humanity system for the world of those books, as well as my own Unstable Unicorns hack. And I really, really enjoyed it.
(I also made up random board games to refer to in some of my Arashi fanfic, and in those fic, I get comments asking where they could get those games.)
This isn’t the first time that I play/run D&D, but every game I’ve run myself before this, were based on modules, and set either in Nentir Vale or the Forgotten Realms. And I don’t even know why I decided to do a weird mishmash of my favourite books and films to create this new world (Faerûn is still a part of it, but the surrounding lands are different), but I’m realising that this is where I have the most fun - hacking other systems to translate into a D&D game. I feel like this is a really roundabout way of saying I enjoy worldbuilding, but this is both true and untrue - I don’t know if I can say I’m actually worldbuilding when I’m just using elements from other stories. And yet, at the same time, sometimes I change the bits I took to the point where the only thing that remains is the frame or even just the name? (I hate naming things, so I will happily steal all the names.)
Right now, only a small portion of the “hacks” I come up with are being implemented in my games, because I’m still running my game using the D&D system. I have a feeling that if I keep on doing all the stuff I’m thinking of doing for the game, I might accidentally come up with my own gaming system just to incorporate the things I love from all these games that are so different from one another. Wouldn’t that be fun, though?
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Note: the title is from one of the songs in the Lord of the Rings books. You know which one - “the road goes ever on…”
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Stay safe!