Brave Story 2

It's taking me a little longer than I'd hoped to get comics out. Not because of artist block, but mostly just lack of materials and some details that I just can't quite remember. Like what Synova looks like and who was in what scouting party.
So I've been working on cheap alternatives for coloring that show up well on Will's scanner's resolution. Enjoy.

We should have known from the start!!!

Hmmmm Well this'll do till I can get the bugs worked out. Click on the image to see it enlarged.

A new road

Since I'm figuring out I'm waaaay better a story telling than I will ever be at Journalism this Noob Tale is going to take a different path than when I first started out.
I'm going to draw.
No, don't run away. I promise it won't suck that badly, especially if Sir Matt is kind enough to let me use his photoshop program from time to time to help me color (because I'm not very good at it if I can't use crayons. XD!

So as I was saying, I'm going to draw memorable things from the campaigns that I'm in right now. I should have the first one up in a few days. Maybe It can be a weekly thing provided I have a scanner available for my use.

Hoping not so much to change things as to overturn them~ Remerly

And Tacit Strikes Again!

I have a striker, her name is Tacit, she's 16 and girly and odd. Even when she's saying things like "let's cut off their heads and throw them in a bag to take with us, as evidence." she's still super cute and innocent.

Well our adventurous adventurers found themselves in an Oasis, surrounded by baddies. Not only did my Sorceress not take any damage, she also ran up to both the enemy casters and dealt them something in the neighborhood of 19 damage with her morning star (and she's a level 2). She's a striker in every way, she just can't take a bloody hit!

Anyways I get a little too into playing Tacit sometimes (not crazily or anything, but like anyone really into drama would tell you I 'become' the character for a little bit). So when she got a double critical I got excited and played her as I imagined her. Dropping her dainty umbrella to pull out her huge mace and run screaming around a sand dune to smash the enemy party's healer in the face! As Matt would say: "She was a vicious ball of screaming hate holding a mace."

Oh I haven't told you nonexistant readers about Matt's campaign yet. Let me just say that the way Matt does things holds my attention and excitement way better than the way Adam does. Maybe we just roll in the same general direction, but I digress.

Jex and I are probably going to be playing every day because, well, going from being very busy to having ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do is hard on him. I have the internet and am very good at busying myself (hooray for bookworm artists and their antisocial tendencies) so I could care less. But I have to keep the man occupied or suffer his despondency.

Random Encounter: From Dungeon Magazine

In all my minute experience with D&D I've never played a prefabricated dungeon. We've played in Adam's version of Faerune (or however it's spelled). Jesse has a world of his own. I made up an island. So, far we've all thought out the encounters and story line ourselves. We made up the badguys and good guys, the NPC's that you run into are guests from our imagination to guide or distract the players from what the 'grand scheme' is.

Jex pulled out a level 1 prefabricated dungeon today. Mostly because there's not much to do at Leon's. And let me tell you... it's different.
In some ways it's a little freeing. Jex can play with me at the same time even though there's not really a "DM" it makes it more of a two player game than the traditional set up.
The different mostly comes in the form of the monsters you fight and how the DM reacts to it. Jex didn't sit down and memorize the prefab, so there's lots of cheezy dialog that get's thrown in, a few flash backs and fast forwards. A lot of things like rolls to avoid encounters and such that aren't as obvious when the DM has laid everything out themselves (yay facial expressions!).

Today, our adventuresome little group comprised of a 15 year old human sorceress, a deva psion, a dragon-born warlord, and a gith (can't remember if it's yanki or zerai) sword mage nearly got slaughtered in the desert by a swarm of beetles. Ew.
It was fun. For the most part. Till everyone dropped but the girls who only had an AC of 13 & 14. lol But we survived!

Oh beloved DM.... I don't want your job!

Yes, I have decided that I absolutely, positively, HATE being the DM. Not only is my husband going around messing up my plot line, my line of thought, and how I set up my encounters so that I have to have everything eight sessions in advance, plus alternate and sub sessions, if I want to even have hope that his party won't decide to do something I'm unprepared for.

A lot of detail went into my world (without overwhelming me). And that's not enough.

Jex: I climb into the junk.
Rem: You see more broken bits of building.
Jex: I know but what is it?
Rem: *rolls eyes and thinks "I just told you!!!") Roll a streetwise check.
Jex: 25! *smug smile*
Rem: *Damn!* Okay there's a table that once had pottery on it you can tell by the fragments, the rotted out cross beam is like so (draws on the board)there's some scrapes of clothes, decimated chairs and what looks to have been a set up similar to the other side of the room. You can tell from here that the collapse here is what caused the floor to sink in outside the door.
Jex: What kind of pottery is it?
Rem: GAH!!!!!!! The regular kind!!!!!

I had clothing styles for the corpses they found. I had hidden keys that are going to go in little places scattered throughout the island. NOW he's going to every door handle in the area they've already stripped bare trying out ALL THE KEYS ON EVERYTHING. In a fit of Godmodding I declared that the keys are obviously too small for any key holes you find. He still tried. So I erased the keyholes all together.

Jex: I check this door.
Rem: No keyhole.
Jex: And this one?
Rem: None of the other doors seem to have their handles.

We haven't played again in like... a week or so... and I still don't want to. I don't care anymore. He can never find out why all those god statues were smashed now. I quit!

((not really, I'm probably going to have to finish the campaign now, but it's most likely going to be really really half assed now.))

Stop... Hammer Time!

DMing is easier and harder than I thought it would be.

No really. There are a lot more things that I was able to just 'pull out my butt' that I didn't think I'd be able to.

I love adventure tools.

Like when I was describing the ship wreck and Jesse asked: "So there are life boats."

Rem: "Well yeah there are life boats. Their filled with unsavory sorts that were the people that took you captive in the first place."

Jesse: *thoughtful look, moves his defender's piece* "Crushank grabs hold of the boat."

Rem: "Athletics check." ... he passes. "OK, you now have a hold of the boat and three angry pirates are now going to attack you." *quickly looks up a level one pirate that is a fair amount of nasty*

Jesse then proceeded to get very frustrated very quickly. There was a storm raging, I wasn't about to let him forget that. The waves got choppy, people fighting on the boat got tossed off the boat before they could attack. Rain increased, making it harder to see; luckily he didn't have much in the way of ranged characters or else he would've been pissed I gave the baddies partial cover.

They get to the island shrouded in mist. Make camp. End first session.

Second session wasn't much better. Jesse gave me some guidelines to use while picking bad guys. Maybe he wasn't serious but I wanted to make this campaign a little more of a desperate type. It's a hostile island, with hostile people, you have to fight to survive, and if you can find and put the clues together that I scattered around the Island Ruins and the one safe place I set up you could be the first to come face to face with the gods in a hundred years! Exciting right? Well maybe a little too exciting.

The characters found the ruins of an old port on the beach and found the used basement doors. They were like: Hey! Lets check it out!

I threw a few minions and a fairly annoying Kobold at them. They made quick work of the minion giant rats. I made Jesse laugh when I described the rat master's attack as him picking up one of the larger rats that were at his feet and throwing it at his Defender as one would throw a cat at some one. It all went down hill from there.

I guess a level 4 soldier type bad guy is a little much for four level ones. I don't know where I got this weird idea that if you add everyone's level together they could fight a monster of that level. On further inspection of this though I found it to be ludicrous and not based on anything factual. Four level 2's would have had a better go. With a +9 to every attack that hit fortitude and a +11 to anything melee I didn't have to roll very high to hit them. They managed to kill him tho' barely. Mostly because in trying to keep track of everything I'd forgotten about the aura around the rat master until the last few rounds.

I'm the DM... it's my job to try and kill them... lol Within reason.

Now I'm working on a more detailed maps of the areas. I've rethought the 'hostile people' aspect and am currently building 2 more safe places on the island to give Jesse a break. Maybe next time it'll be a better balance of challenge and fun.