It’s no secret that we can sometimes be pretty starved for content around here. Our Let’s Play of Alpha Protocol will be coming to a close on Friday and if you remember what happened after we finished our first season, you’ll recall that we sat pretty much entirely dormant for the better part of a year before we picked stuff up again. I’d prefer to avoid that this time around so I’m making a pre-emptive strike against the looming threat of delayed site updates.
As a long time reader of Shamus Young’s Twenty-Sided Blog which for a time ran an entertaining account of his D&D games, and having been more recently introduced to the absolutely incredible SilverClawShift campaign archives, it dawned on me that I’d like to do something similar. With a website soon to be in dire need of content and with a semester-spanning campaign currently in progress, I figured that now would be as good a time as any to try my hand at the art of telling a story… and then writing down how much the players destroy that story and posting it on the internet.
To get a few things out of the way right off the bat: I don’t necessarily consider myself to be an especially talented writer (I’m reasonably sure you can still find a number of grammatical errors in each one of my posts). Nor do I consider myself to be anywhere near as talented a Game Master as either of the individuals included in the links above: I’m a fairly novice GM with this being only my third attempt at running a campaign and the only one that has lasted beyond three sessions. This is a learning experience for me as much as an attempt at entertainment, so don’t expect plots, characters, and setpiece events to be of particularly novel quality. I shamelessly borrow from movies, video games, and basically anything else that I think could make for a cool adventure and those influences (see: blatant ripoffs) should be fairly apparent to most of you.
Nonetheless, this is still easily my most successful attempt at running a game and I’ve managed to scrape together a pretty great group of players with over 20 years of experience between us. Really, it’s about as good as it gets for running a game as everybody is more than accommodating when it comes to staying on track (while still cracking a joke now and then), checking an obscure rule against various source books, and of course, chipping in to buy pizza. It’s been a pretty good experience so far and my hope for this series is that those of you who enjoy seeing the antics of another adventuring party will have fun, offer advice, and maybe even take home a few new ideas of your own.
Now for the details: The game system we’ll be using is D20 Modern, a system released by Wizards in 2002 to try and bring the 3.5 ruleset into a modern day setting. I’ve found that this system tends to be somewhat polarizing for many players and to be sure it’s not without its faults, some of them being rather serious. But what I love about this particular rule set is its versatility: with the rules provided you can create a campaign in virtually any setting in any time frame with any focus. As a result, you’ll see me dip into a lot of different genres throughout the course of this series simply because I can. And it keeps things fresh.
The campaign will draw heavily from the award-winning Planescape setting for flavor and background, with me tinkering with it extensively to give it that modern-day twist. Essentially, I wanted to keep the massive size and scope of the Planescape setting while opening it up to the technologies and influences of the modern (and near future) day to widen the possibilities even further. I’ll admit that I don’t know everything I’d like about the setting (seriously, it’s freaking huge) and it’s more than likely that I’ll get a few things wrong in my descriptions. Feel free to call me out on any mistakes I make in this regard, as I’ve never tired of learning new things about the D&D campaign settings.
I’ll include a more fleshed-out description of the setting and an introduction to the player characters shortly, and by next Thursday we should be more than prepared to actually start posting the adventure logs themselves, which will be posted under the name “We’re in it for the Money”. Other games may come later, in which case you’ll be able to find them in the campaign logs category but under a different unique title so as to differentiate the individual campaigns from one another. We’ll announce these as they come, but for now we hope you’ll enjoy reading these adventures as much as we’ve enjoyed playing them.
Stark Raving Sane 