Seeking Ferret

Fourth D&D session last night. Interesting... Transitional session, which is a thing I think I should stop conceptualizing. Having wrapped up the faery plotline for the moment I wanted to shift the players into gear on several of other plotlines, while still keeping the faery plotline in the background. I succeeded in that, but the result was that Not A Lot Happened. Which is maybe not the best plan for D&D? I dunno, I'm keeping an eye on player response to make sure they're still okay with it. So far we seem fine. But there's probably a way to do the transition in an action-ier way.


After the players returned to their home city, they met first together with a guild leader, and then separately with each of the leaders of their guilds. I pulled each player into another room to roleplay those scenes, which in each case were wildly different in themes and story hooks. Mixed feelings on that- the scenes went great, but it was a while to leave the other players sitting on their hands. I had considered handling those scenes in email pre-session, but I decided it was more important to set the scene as a group before doing the individual scenes. Afterward, the players decided to meet up for dinner and share some but not all of the information they'd learned from their individual sessions. Those two segments- the individual meetings, and the post-meeting debrief- were perhaps half the session. That didn't leave much room for moving forward the action, but in terms of character development I thought it was great. They all know now that their actions can make a big impact on the world, unpredictably and sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, and I love seeing them weighing their actions more carefully with that in mind.

The last half hour of the session finally got the next mission in gear- the players are now traveling with a giant asshole of a young paladin who has been tasked by the Gods to defeat a great evil in the Mannheim Vale. They're pretty sure he's been making up fake prophecies in order to justify his work, but in any case he is super-earnest and keeps banging on about fighting for what's right, and... this is not a campaign about clear cut good and evil, so I'm having fun playing with that. On the way, the party has also picked up several side quests, including figuring out where all the cats have gone.

I ran my second D&D session last night. Lots of woodland exploration, lots of character interaction, minimal combat. Two sessions in and none of the PCs have killed anything, though some NPC allies of theirs did kill a couple of monsters. But that's okay, they don't get XP for killing, they get XP for making money.

I am having so much fun, and I think the players are too. I was grinning the whole drive home afterward. To rescue an ally from a faerie kidnapping, the players decided to trade her a valuable token that will radically alter the balance of power among faerie kingdoms. Afterward, sitting in a tavern learning more about the faeries, they had a collective oh shit moment about the consequences of their actions. It was so satisfying to see them piece together clues I'd dropped over two sessions to figure out some of what was going on. There's still a lot they don't know. :P

I had planned that three or four sessions in, something major would happen to alter the political status quo of the fey realms, but... the players' actions have radically shifted what that something major will be. I'm having so much fun thinking through the changes.