Ronan McNamee

Dungeons and Dragons 5E, Spelljammer

This campaign is called Scatterjammer. When I started playing RPGs regularly again about eight years ago, I started up a 4th edition D&D game, since it was the most recent edition that I actually owned. When that campaign fizzled out, I switched to 5th edition and have been playing one campaign after another since then. I invented a homebrew world that I called Scatterhome. There are a few things about this place that I really liked and I will probably write a post all about it another time. For now, it’s enough to state that Scatterhome became the home base for the PCs in the Spelljammer campaign I had been planning for quite a long time before the Spelljammer 5E set came out a couple of years ago. That set was missing a lot. A characteristic of a lot of the 5E setting content, I’ve noticed, is that, unless it’s Forgotten Realms, they’re really only meant for a single campaign that probably came with the setting. That is certainly the case with Spelljammer. Boo’s Astral Menagerie is a solid enough Monster Manual supplement but the Astral Adventurer’s guide is too light on detail for my purposes.

The premise of Spelljammer is just fun and silly and I have tried to keep the vibe fun and silly too. I have five players and, due to geographical peculiarities, we play online using Zoom and Roll20. We have a session once every two weeks on Wednesday nights and we’ve been going for over a year now. I always enjoy playing this game with the people I play with. My wonderful and dependable wife has been in every D&D game I have run since 2016 so she’s player one, the rest are a mix of newer and older friends. We have such a laugh with this game that we brush off the cons of running online.

But I have to be honest, the D&D system really slows things down. In one instance we spent three entire sessions on a ship to ship battle. Elements of that battle were immense fun and some of the players’ moves will live in infamy but, for a random wildspace encounter… I just think a different system could have handled it in a less time-consuming manner. Now, I am sure that, had I approached it differently, I could have sped it up as well, but only if I didn’t use the rules of D&D. It is actually something I’m considering for the bigger set pieces in the future. Black Sword Hack has an impressive system for dealing with NPCs fighting NPCs, allowing single die rolls to determine the outcome of their battles each round. It has a tendency to be a bit more deadly, perhaps, but it moves things along more swiftly. Even 4th Edition D&D handled this sort of thing better. You could have waves of enemies in a fight. The sheer number of them would scare the living shit out of the PCs but the majority of them would be Minions. They could still do damage but they only had one hit point apiece, so the party could mow them down with spells and the like.

If I want to actually reach the meat of the story we are trying to tell and that my players have told me they want in their stars and wishes, I am going to have to do something to allow large scale battles to resolve themselves much more quickly, that’s for sure. It’s either that or eliminate ship to ship combat entirely, and that seems like a shame in game where adventuring in wildspace is the whole point!

The party consists of

A Gnome Battle-smith Artificer who abandoned a promising career in the navy for the faintest chance of adventure! Likes spiders. What happened to her uncle?
A Gnome Illusionist Wizard who has a peculiar plethora of puzzling personalities and disguises to choose from. The main spelljammer. What happened to his brother?
A Changeling Mastermind Rogue/Bard with a dark past and a mysterious identity (that’s a bit of a theme.) What happened to his dad?
A Plasmoid Open Hand Monk following her ooze-heart to who-know’s-where? Has an Auto-gnome sister. What happened to her mum?
A Giff Fighter/Oath of Vengeance Paladin who is the sole survivor from his family’s spelljamming vessel. Total Casanova. What happened to his dad?

I’m sure I’ll write a lot more about this campaign in the future. The players have come up with some fascinating and hilarious characters, who all have just enough back-story to allow me to get creative with how I weave it into the events of the game. Some of them are very keen on pursuing their personal story threads while others are more focused on the narrative I put in place at the start. DMing challenges and opportunities abound!

What I’m playing, July 2024

Lists

The internet loves a list. A top ten, preferably. I don’t have a top ten today. Sorry to disappoint you, dear reader.
Instead, here I have gathered an unranked list of the six RPGs I am currently involved in. I’m running half of these and I’m a player in the other half, so it’s organised that way only.

This list does not represent the full catalogue of games I have been involved with so far this year. That will come in a separate post or series of posts in the near future. I guess this might seem like a lot of ongoing games to some. On the other hand, I’m quite sure it doesn’t seem like all that many to others. I usually fit in the odd one-shot into the schedule too, but other than that, this works well for me, especially as they are all fortnightly, pretty much.

I play two of these games in my house with my wife and friends, I play one with some members of our fledgling local RPG community, Tables and Tales. We play that in another friend’s house. Two more are online with friends and the last is played online with members of the international RPG community, The Open Hearth.

There’s no doubt that the ability to play online has opened a world of possibilities that, up until the start of the pandemic, I had not really even considered. It’s not the same as meeting around a table with snacks and drinks and banter. You can’t have cross-talk on Zoom. The chaos that is allowed to reign over the table in home games at times is to be treasured, in my opinion, and you really can’t recreate that on a video call. But when your mate you want to play with lives hundreds of miles away or when the only people you can get to play the little-known, esoteric story game you want to experience are located all across the world it’s definitely a boon.

Anyway, for now, I’m going to write a post on each of the games I’m running since I have more to write about each of those. I’ll do a single post for the games in which I am a player.

The Dice Pool

Taking the initiative

Do you consume a lot? I feel like I do. Food, beverages, books, videos, films, music, podcasts, games, opinions, facts, feelings, content, content, content. I get a little bloated, to be honest, physically and mentally.

So this is one outlet for my mental bloat. I think I’ll write how I feel about some of the things I consume as a way to digest them (not the food and drink, I’ll do that in the traditional way.) But, mostly, I’ll be writing about my main creative outlet, playing, running and making things for tabletop role playing games. Let’s not be coy about this; the internet is not lacking for nerds going on about their games, or someone else’s games or games they watched other people play or games they hate or games they actually quite like, surprisingly enough. So, even knowing this, why would I have the gall to add to it? Good question, good question indeed. Maybe I will figure that out as I do it. The adventure is the journey and all that.

History check

So, I started playing RPGs back in the eighties, when I was a kid. What an amazing outlet for my imagination and a way to share it with my friends. I remember the feeling of playing games like AD&D, Twilight 2000, MERP, every single Palladium game. What feelings? Well, there’s a fair bit of dissatisfacion, frustration, and boredom if I’m honest. But, crucially, all of that is tempered by moments of sheer elation, joy, sorrow and anger. I don’t remember that much about the games themselves now, other than that there were a lot of numbers and arguments about numbers.

A few years ago I started to get back into RPGs (I know TTRPG is the more standard term these days but it is rather unwieldy and I can promise you that there will be few occasions for confusion on this blog) again, partly because my wife was curious about trying it out and partly for the sake of nostalgia. Anyway, as I got back into the hobby and started playing with adults, I discovered a whole new world of games the likes of which the tween me could never have conceived.

Treasure

RPGs have changed since I was a kid, and I don’t mean the edition numbers, or the abandonment of THAC0. I’m not sure when or how it occurred, but at some point, someone very clever and observant realised that you don’t HAVE to wade through a morass of stats and modifiers and encumbrance and spell descriptions to get to the real meat of the story you and your friends want to tell. You can if you want, that’s its own sort of fun, but if your aim is to just have a laugh, or to tell a particular story or to make your players cry, there are games and systems out there to allow you to do that. You don’t want to solve problems with violence? Cool, try out Wanderhome. You want to solve problems with ultra-violence? Give Eat the Reich a go. You want to investigate mysteries with a creepy-weird feel, pick up Public Access. You just want to tell an emergent story with your friends, you have so many options, give Blades in the Dark a try, or Heart, or Wildsea, or Mountainhome. Look, this is still relatively new to me. I’m still trying to figure out what’s OSR and what’s just trad. I am still mostly mystified by GMless games and a little intimidated by story games.

I’m learning a lot all the time so, this is where I’ll be writing about that. Other stuff too, no doubt, but mostly the games I play and the stuff I learn from them.