Today's session report is a bit different because... I was a PC!
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| Scamicus the Thief on the mean streets of Arganos |
So how did this all come about?
For the last 6 months (or more?) the PC MadEye the Venturer has been traveling down the river and back on trading missions in downtime to the larger city of Arganos. He decided this for story, roleplaying, and meta gameist reasons. What were those? Well he needed a bigger market to run trade routes so he could make some downtime XP. He, and the party, needed a bigger market to sell the high dollar magic items they had been grabbing as well. They had been finding it very hard to offload these in Dubzaron. Lastly, the party (and some patrons whom MadEye plays middle man for) had been unable to hire the number of mercenary soldiers they wanted.
Great NP I want PCs to be successful and have the campaign and stories they want so, even though Arganos is not part of my original campaign region design, I gave the thumbs up to this op. However, I don't have the time or energy to create a whole new city in the campaign just to help MadEye and his pals get paid. That's alot of work.
So I made a house rule that PCs traveling to big cities off my map must needs run their own random encounter for the travel (we had already been doing this) and run random city encounters while they did business or downtime silliness in those cities. Some players wondered if I was punishing them for going off the map but the real idea was that big cities can in fact be dangerous for PCs. And look pal if you're going to go off my map you're going to do the worldbuilding FOR ME. It's the BROSR way.
MadEye had been running a bunch of these encounters over the months as he made deals and such. Over time the city of Arganos began to have a personality primarily through these encounters and his response to them. He was sending me private messages like "hey I've decided arganos is like Hong Kong, big skyscrapers and bridges everywhere and coastal and...". Since I'm always inundated with downtime and patron requests between sessions I'd primarily respond "sounds cool, love it" or whatever.
Over time it became clear that Arganos had a serious personality and style all its own. Something quite different than Dubzaron. As such I've decided MadEye essentially built the city setting similarly to how a Patron might do it. But from the ground up instead of top-down like Patrons do.
So why not visit this place in session in see the sights? Session play can help color in the lines and give the place even MORE personality. Some might say "ok then take MadEye's notes and DM the thing". It would work fine. But it would be a bit like MadEye writing me a module. No thanks!
The better option, the one we chose, was letting MadEye's player simply DM the place!
Macho Mandalf recently DMed a lair encounter in Trollopulous of which I was a PC, showing me how Trollopulous successfully employs multiple DMs with no issue whatsoever. Also a few months back my Patron Player Vince McMaximus DMed some of the PCs through a little dungeon crawl during downtime when they were trying to chase down an Assassin Patron who killed Rapunzel. Vince didn't even ask me. The PCs were tired of waiting for me to respond to their downtime requests, realized Vince probably knew (or could approximate) what the sewer dungeon was like, and asked him about it. It then fell into a play by post crawl.
Jeffrogaxian 1:1 time makes anything possible.
I got with Drakon via the NPC prefect Dubzilio of Dubzaron city. Together we dreamed up a solid quest they could give about some concerns in Arganos. It was crafted in such a way where MadEye's pcs (MadEye, Kortes, and BriarWhisper in particular) really wouldn't be the best choice to tackle it. Namely, it was about perfidious elves having captured the Exarch of Arganos, replacing him with a changeling, and holding the real man in an entrance to Elfland somewhere near the city.
In session 67 I rolled up a PC and ran one in my own campaign setting. We trooped off into elfland and tried to save the Exarch and failed miserably. My dwarven pc in that session got hurt bad and needed like a month of rest. Players wanted to go back to Arganos, however, in session 69. I rolled up a new pc who is already becoming one of my favorite ever: Scamicus the Thief.
Weird part was, most of the Players had no interest in taking another run at the elves.
My house rule is new pcs (like Scamicus) can't take downtime actions until they've played in 1 live session. So I couldn't actually do anything in downtime to help the other PCs investigate some other things they might do in Arganos. But that didn't stop me from giving them strategic advice and bascially telling them if we don't have a plan before going into a session we're going to fail and we're all going to die.
This is basic advice from the 1e PHB. Everyone should read it.
The full DM session report for Session 69 is at this link.
The main elite level trick we employed then was doing rumormongering in session and stacking the results to essentially craft our OWN hook. BROSR is different in that way. You don't ask the DM "what's here, what's there, what's that npc like, what's that location like"; if those places or people are not already created you just TELL him.
It took us a few days of gameplay time but we nabbed enough hooks where we could tell the dm "so ok yeah there's this cult whose infiltrated the local syndicate in and around town and they have connections to the elves". Our thought was
1. This would mean we could heist the place with my thief.
2. There would be some cash on site so we'd cop some xp and treasure
3. Maybe we could convince the DM there was a story web here at our memed up cult warehouse that would help us with the elf quest later.
Well number 3 did not happen because most of the elves' connections with the city, it seems, were already created by the DM. But its all good because we were still able to make the best use of our class abilities and craft a hook suited quite well to who was available this night.
You can read all about the specifics of the session in the DMs report so I'll focus on what was fun and cool about running Scamicus the Thief.
I've noticed a distinct lack of thieves in Dubzaron since Ratface was killed and Laru retired. So it was cool to bring a greedy Neutral alignment attitude to the campaign world. Players of course are always greedy but many of the parties are primarily stocked by Lawful PCs who are more about "ridding the world of evil!" Yawn.
Scamicus, on the other hand, could care less about that. He is adventuring to get rich or die trying. As such, when he free dived and found a chaotic evil altar under the water he didn't even tell Xanthos or the Paladin in the party. As such this left that story point hanging wherein they tackled it in Session 70 when Scamicus wasn't present.
What I've noticed among much of the party is a desire to be Lawful for the story (and XP!) bonuses it brings. But then to make their plans, schemes, strategies and the like as if they are Neutral. Most DND players, during play, are themselves Neutrally aligned ime so I'm not surprised. This might become an issue when I introduce 1e style grading and training systems at the end of October so stay tuned!
But I wanted to run some PCs who are in fact Neutral and in fact play as Neutral. Enter Scamicus. And boy did he not care about ridding the world of evil. When some PCs lamented that Stormbringer was going to turn the sun green or blow it up he simply shrugged and said "so what?"
I don't have much else to say on the session itself. The fact that it even happens, and that I have run a PC multiple times in my own campaign, proves the superiority of #BROSR approach. If you haven't yet instituted 1:1 time and patrons into your campaign you are truly missing out.
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