I was quite surprised when an old high school friend texted me a few weeks into the summer asking for help with a tabletop game of Hunter: the Reckoning. What followed was a few hours hanging out with friends I had hardly talked to in two years (good--the hanging out part, not the two years part) and reading through the Hunter manual the following day (not so much bad as ugly). Since none of the others had ever so much as played a tabletop RPG and I had just finished DMing a game of D&D 4E, they trusted my judgment when I said the Hunter manual was a mess and D&D would actually be easier for everyone. (They figured Hunter was something like "D&D lite", and it certainly has less rules, but that also means less structure, which is generally a bad thing for new players.)

Session 0

Our first session was simply character creation; since I didn't even know what game we were playing until a few hours before, I had no real preparation at all and simply brought four blank character sheets and a laptop with the official Character Builder on it (an extremely useful tool, though not without its quirks). After character creation, though, the players asked me to start the game . . . so I put it back on the players: how do you meet? Beginners, of course, need a bit more guidance than that and had no real ideas (my own fault for not coming with some kind of hook/basic intro prepared, but understandable given the circumstances I hope), but luckily one of my players had a bit more knowledge and suggested we go with the cliche and start in a tavern. After each player spun a bit of backstory for their characters--two, to my surprise and delight, connecting themselves prior to the official start--we were off, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, through a brief bar fight and theft. Then we adjourned for the night and my players decided on our next playing time--the following evening.

Theme Theory

My first recognition was that this campaign would be very, very different from the one I had run previously. My last (and first) campaign was built on around a world and narrative arc I had been contemplating and slowly evolving for almost a year before the campaign itself started (far before I had any idea of who my players would be or what characters they might play); thus I had a good idea of where I was going from the beginning but left little room for nonlinear exploration or character development. My players were also all as experienced as myself with the game; perhaps not always as encyclopedically knowledgeable about the system, but they understood the rules and all of their own characters' abilities (and indeed all of them had DMed a game of their own at one point or another). The campaign had a strong rooting in my personal thematic concerns toward D&D: it was in many ways an intentional deconstruction of many traditional D&D trends, notably the entire basic conceit of the players as powerful characters who nobly decide the fate of the world. (As one of my players said after its conclusion: "We didn't actually accomplish anything . . .")

This summer campaign had to be different, obviously. While I had toyed with ideas for another campaign towards the end of my first, they were all founded on 4E's paragon tier and meant to continue my deconstructive tendencies--not a framework that would work well with all new players, who clearly were best started at first level in a more traditional D&D adventure (as I had myself started). And so I essentially began from scratch--but with only one day to plan before the first true session, I didn't make everything anew. Instead I looked to the official D&D adventures--the first time I ever really considered substantially borrowing from others' material. I took the village from the (now free) first 4E adventure module (Keep on the Shadowfell), Winterhaven, and began plotting a short first adventure involving an ancient ruined Keep--which also became the basis of my first genuine dungeon crawl (excluding a short cave run in my first campaign which had only one actual combat encounter).

While I couldn't use many of the themes or plots I had considered for a second campaign and I was borrowing liberally from official D&D adventures, I did set out to follow another aspect of my thoughts for a follow-up campaign: increased player agency. My primary dissatisfaction with my first campaign was its linearity and the lack of influence my players had on its outcome--while some of this was the point (they weren't the ones to save the world), I wanted them to be able to influence their personal stakes, which also necessitated their personal stakes be a much bigger part of the campaign. I haven't quite gotten to this yet in the summer campaign's actual play, but it is a major consideration of my plans for the future.

I also want to cater to my players' desires more, and this I have been able to do more quickly: during character creation one of my players looked through the Monster Manual and found the "frog monsters" (bullywugs) hilarious; I noted this and made the first true enemy the party faced on the way to the Keep a tribe of savage bullywugs. (The player on figuring out what was attacking him: "Are these those frog things?!") My players seemed particularly amused by the idea of monstrous gnomes as well, which led to my deciding that the ancient wizard whose laboratory they would find in the ruins of the Keep would be a gnome.

Session 1

Due to my limited time I didn't get the power cards (an almost necessary tool for 4E, in my experience) finished before the session; therefore I simply brought index cards, made a few examples, and gave them to my players to do themselves. This I think was actually helpful (despite my replacing them next session with better printed ones) because it forced my players to actually read each of their powers all the way through, and although they still didn't have a complete grasp on the rules and terminology and thus what each power actually did mechanically, they did get a better idea of their capabilities. (One of my players picked up on his chosen encounter power being an immediate reaction and asked if he could use it in our first combat when he was attacked; I hadn't even remembered he had it.)

Not so successful a mistake was my lack of planning for player eventualities; for some reason I have a tendency to come up with a plot or way for things to play out (itself not a very good habit as a DM) and then not develop the necessary justification for it to players. (I just tell myself that's a small thing I'll get to in time--and then rarely do.) This is the realm, of course, of hooks; how to get players to bite on the adventure you've prepared. Coming off an extremely linear campaign in which there was rarely alternative courses of action (in a way that mattered to the general plot of the campaign, at least), I'm still rather inept at making hooks work well, especially in the more open world I'm trying to present. Nonetheless, players generally make up for such DMing ineptitude by recognizing a plot hook when they see it (even if they haven't gotten enough justification for their characters to pursue it) and eventually biting just because they realize there's nothing else for them to do (which is helpful for the DM but obviously quite damaging for player immersion).

Once on the quest, however, the path became linear and things proceeded more smoothly. I tried to gradually introduce the aspects of 4E combat through the first encounter (with a bloodthorn vine and a group of bullywugs), and while the party rouge would wait until next session to figure out how sneak attack worked, everyone seemed to get a decent handle on how combat worked. I even managed to introduce some of the various types of terrain and obstruction (a favorite toy of mine).

Tools

This is my first time using miniatures; I bought some near the end of the school year simply because they were cool and cheap, and I only use them for player characters (or otherwise important characters that I don't have a token prepared for, such as the wizard's summoned fire warrior in the second session). I'm still somewhat split on the idea of minis: obviously they're cool-looking, but since there's intrinsically less choice than with custom tokens (especially when you have as few as I do) I worry that their image will overcome the internal image of the characters in a way that custom tokens don't. So far, however, this doesn't seem to be a problem, even with my players having barely experienced role-playing before.

I've continued to use custom tokens for enemies and NPCs. These are simply 1" wide washers (at their outside; washers are measured by the diameter of their interior hole, however, so buy accordingly) with images formatted with RPtools's Token Tool pasted on top. This time I've also added a second image on the bottom with a red ring to represent bloodied, which is both a nice visual reminder and a reward for players who enjoy flipping over the token when they bloody a monster. The images are also glued using liquid Elmer's Glue instead of a glue stick this time, which is much stronger (no more problems with images always falling off as we did with my first campaign) but also can cause warping and/or strange discolorations (my set of tokens for the second session all somehow ended up color-shifted green after gluing).

My combat maps are drawn on vellum graph paper left over from an old school project; the sheets are 11" by 17", marked off in one-inch squares, which is generally sizable enough for any normal arena and when folded in half fits neatly into a standard file folder. I generally create a general layout of a map on the computer with a tool such as Ye Olde Map Maker (an online flash program) and then transfer it to the paper pap and draw in details with pencil. For this campaign I've also begun retracing the pencil in pen and then erasing the pencil to make a cleaner look and maps that I can if necessary draw notes on in combat and not worry about erasing the underlying terrain.

Pardon for the lack of updates.

"Everyone's a Hero" from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

It may not feel too classy
Begging just to eat
But you know who does that? Lassie--
And she always gets a treat.

So you wonder what your part is
Because you’re homeless and depressed,
But home is where the heart is,
So your real home’s in your chest!

Everyone’s a hero in their own way.
Everyone’s got villains they must face.
They’re not as cool as mine,
But folks you know it’s fine to know your place.

Everyone’s a hero in their own way--
In their own not-that-heroic way.

So I thank my girlfriend Penny--
Yeah, we totally had sex--
She showed me there’s so many
Different muscles I can flex:

There’s the deltoids of compassion,
There’s the abs of being kind.
It’s not enough to bash in heads;
You’ve got to bash in minds!

Everyone’s a hero in their own way.
Everyone’s got something they can do.
Get up, go out, and fly--
Especially that guy, he smells like poo!

Everyone’s a hero in their own way,
you and you and mostly me and you.

I’m poverty’s new sheriff
And I’m bashing in the slums.
A hero doesn’t care if you’re a bunch of scary
alcoholic bums!

Everybody!

Everyone’s a hero in their own way.
Everyone can blaze a hero’s trail.
Don’t worry if it’s hard,
if you’re not a friggin' ‘tard you will prevail!

Everyone’s a hero in their own way,
Everyone a hero in their--

Another piece from Creative Writing.

Linnaeus has failed us:
The old taxonomy
Now shows itself to be
Only a pretty dress.

We try molecular
Phylogenetics—not
Good enough. Such a plot
Cannot explain our scar.

Beneath our K-T line
Our history is swept
Clean: all truth lost except
The mass extinction's sign.

What chondrite struck us then?
Where is our Chicxulub?
Caked with ash we can't scrub
Off: how came this bleak pen?

This was written for my Creative Writing class last fall. For various reasons I haven't posted it until now. I wrote it for an assignment with a multitude of unrelated requirements aimed at inspiring something new and weird.

She is a dire radiance, a star blazing dark
Against the gibbering mouth of pity and self-
Indulgence. Her words dissolve this landscape to stark
Clarity: expose these relics upon this shelf

Of ancient wormwood—sturdy-looking, smelling foul
As decapitated roses—as nothing more
Than hollow tokens, the hooting of a barn owl
Captured by the deaf scribe scratching upon the wet shore.

Because she soars, burning, the world turns—the sun rises—
And the soul of that cursed man, Merlin, master wizard,
Soars above the fields of Albion, no guises
Or masks or crude lies. At long last he hears the word.

With ash on his tongue, the Revelator did speak:
Et nomen stellae dicitur Absinthius—thus,
The name of the star is Wormwood: she shall blaze bleak
Against the dark sky and, pitiless, destroy us.

Like Carthage, Babylon, Ilium before, all falls.
The fields burn, and the cities, and the land and water.
Two star blaze dark together beyond all the walls
Of Earth, the crumbling relics, the noble slaughter.

3. How does international law attempt to limit the propensity of sovereign states to go to war?

War is the purview of a sovereign state--sovereignty is fundamentally the right of a state to impose legitimate violence, which is defined as war (or more generally justice). Therefore the project of international law is to limit and eventually revoke sovereignty and impose a world government on the free Christian peoples--God's chosen--of America. The United Nations--which mocks through its very name the divinely-inspired sovereign righteousness of the United States of America--is obviously the most prominent actor in this conspiracy, a desperate but more successful revision of the failed Leage of Nations--brought down by the righteous refusal of the American people to bow down before such an obvious and overt attempt at external seizure of control despite the President's unlawful attempts to bypass their will--but there are far more actors working against sovereignty, some obvious and inept, like the International Courts, taking the names and symbols of holy justice but clearly missing the divine mandate that enables such proceedings to have any legitimacy, or a few more insidious entities, secret groups whose activities are closely guarded but nonetheless, like all agents of the Anti-Christ, occasionally make mistakes--groups like the Trilateral Commission or of course the Majestic Twelve, who are far greater threats to American sovereignty than any open international organization, infiltrating American society at its highest levels--no President of the last fifty years can be trusted, all puppets or pawns of one or another attempt to destroy the glorious American peoples foiled only by American ingenuity and of course God's will--and slowly gaining control of culture, media, the national consciousness, eating away at the average American's divinely innate sense of superiority and attempting to replace it with the mindless values of equality and unity that are of course the hallmarks of communism, another enemy of American sovereignty and explicitly, openly in the service of Satan but--or perhaps as a result--far less successful, the grand dream of a world socialist government, all individuals nothing more than automated cogs in the machine of production without purpose, never anything more than a mad dream of those Satanic idealists who poured out their dark hearts onto so many pages of texts no righteous American ever read, save for of course the purposes of educating himself about the enemy, studying as one might the ways which Satan attempts to corrupt the faithful so as to be better prepared against his true advances, that in their misdirected passion failed to actually accomplish anything short of blowing up a few buildings, which actions were, ironically, highly antagonistic of whatever public unity they sought to achieve--another sign of communism's clear and intrinsic failure as a true threat to sovereignty--and in its own perverse way more a reflection of the American holy values that protect we glorious chosen people against such threats to soveriegnty, by way of course of the Second Amendment, which decrees or more rightly reaffirms, for it did not establish God's will but merely stated it plainfly for those righteous souls who cannot sense it from birth, the right of all Americans to keep and bear arms as divinely-ordained defense against attacks on our sovereignty--even by our own American government, which as discussed can rarely be trusted to hold our best interests in mind, despite its positioning of itself as a physical incarnate of God's will (itself a blasphemous Catholic notion, as any true Christian understands the soveriegnty of the individual leaves no authority between himself and God), often being corrupted by those Satanic forces it was established to protect us from--and more importantly a symbol or better the physical means itself of our soveriegnty, which if as previously defined is the right to legimiate violence then is most incarnate in this Second Amendment, the most holy Amendment in those second Ten Commandments, the succesor to that which established God as the sole authority over any individual, as proclaimed to Moses upon Mount Sinai but inevitably misunderstood by those near but not completely within God's light and corrupted within that limited gap of misunderstanding by the ever-malevolent and lurking machinations of the Devil and his servants, who include not only communists, the United Nations, the Majestic Twelve and the Trilateral Commission but also of course more ancient evils like the Elders of Zion, that false of council of false chosen who have deluded so much of the world for so much time and orchestrated the most successful of efforts against American sovereignty, most notably the complete control of American government with regards to the illegitimate nation of Israel, which persists today solely through the power of American aid bought by the most heinous scheme in all of history, the intentional massacre of many of the weaker, less "useful" members (as if they were all but tools of the greater Zionist good rather than individuals whose only loyalty lay to God), sacrificed--if such a noble word can be applied to such a horrifically ignoble cause, perhaps the greatest crime in all of history from Adam to now--to achieve public approval for their first step towards revocation of sovereignty through immense guilt, unwarranted of course but inevitable given any good Christian values, an unfortunate consequence, allowing our enemies to exploit God's given goodness to further Satanic purposes, an irony that the Devil must deliciously appreciate even as he fails to realize that such a victory could only be achieved through taking advantage of true Christian values, for no American would ever willingly consort with Satan, and such a victory is achieved only through the utmost deception and fortunately (or not, as it is surely not fortune but simply an aspect of God's eternal plan) cannot be furthered, for any advancement against our sovereignty would require more open corruption, an attempt unhidden by the massive deceit that previously allowed such great evil to come to pass and thus doomed inevitably to failure, as all such schemes are when forced into the light of God by his faithful, those few who recognize the Devil's deceptions always and without failure due to our being chosen by God and ordered as shepherds to protect the chosen people from the great dangers of deception, deceit, and other such Satanic devices, weak of course but nonetheless dangerous, for while to remain righteous the faithful must be ever vigilant, the Devil is pleased with each and every minor success, every minor corruption or disruption in divine righteousness, a satisfaction that is both pathetic, for such minor offenses are small and insignificant in comparison to the totaility of good that is Creation, and misplaced, for God's forgiveness and grace means that all such minor victories are ultimately meaningless, forgotten, more, erased by the light of God's love, all of us imperfect beings transformed into the image and more importantly substance of perfection by God's will and according to God's plan, of which Satan's attempts to disrupt and minor disturbances that are from the total perspective variations upon the whole that add to the fundamental beauty of Creation rather than take away, so that in the end the Devil, ironically, is nothing more than another unknowing servant of God.