Welcome to -

Chrono Cross This! 3!

You can find Chrono Cross This! 1! and Chrono Cross This! 2! at their links here, and down below at the bottom.

The Story So Far!

This will get increasingly long if I keep giving full recaps of what happened last time, so, I'm going to start giving very brief summaries here and if you want to know more detailed info on what happened last time, check out the other blogs.

So far in the game let's see what's happened!

I woke up like Crono in Chrono Trigger, I met Leena down at the docks, I listened to a bunch of people tell me about all of the major events in the game including a demon cat, parallel worlds, FATE, a dragon temple, and probably other stuff I forgot about. I listened to a bunch of terrible accents. I met Toma the 14th. I learned how to do battle. I killed an entire generation of a species for their scales and their murdered their mom to make sure no one else from the village can collect scales to give to the girl that they like. I was sent to a parallel world (told you.) I DIDN'T pick up an annoying dog. I DID pick up an annoying blonde Australian girl (ok, she's not that bad, it's just her accent and its somewhat inconsistency.) I met a talking skull. I fought off some idiot knights named Solt and Peppor, twice. Oh, and I met a voodoo doll that-om likes to raaaaandomly add -om to-om his woooords and stretch out other words for nooo reason.

I think that catches us up to the city (really it's a town, there's like maybe fifty people living here, come on) of Termina!

The Story Now!

Last I left off I was just outside Termina, this time, I went into Termina. It's another sea side town. I imagine there are a lot of those, being that this is kind of all island-y down in this part of the world. Which as far as I can tell this game will only ever take place in this sectioned off area from the rest of the world. They keep talking about Porre (the southern most town in CT, that in the DS version Dalton turns into a military state and...something. It's not explained how he succeeded, why he succeeded, why I didn't just go stop him instead of worrying about the Dream Devourer that I couldn't ever beat, but whatevs) and its military from up above "coming down." I don't know, honestly this whole thing is really poorly explained. Maybe it gets explained later, but, I'm going to try not to worry about it.

Now that a small side tangent about the mystery of Porre is over, back to Termina. As I first enter town I see a man named Glenn (who looks a lot like what I imagine Frog in human form did.. so.. another CT reference. They really like getting those in here, don't they? "Hey, hey, remember that other game, CT? That really good game on the SNES? Ok. Just wanted to see if you remembered it." Maybe it's sort of in service of the fans or whatever, but I'm not sure it helps to remind people of a classic game that is so well loved in your sequel game. It kind of just makes me want to go play CT instead.)

Glenn is there talking to a flower shop owner about wanting a specific kind of flower (go figure, a kind I happened to pick up on my way here.) The owner doesn't have the flower, something about Dario being dead, Dario loving the flower and they want the flower for their formal praying at his grave. Long story short here, I ended up giving the flower to Glenn and some woman at the grave site. Maybe I should have held onto it so I could give it to the other world Dario at some point to recruit him (because I imagine he's still alive in Serge's version of the world) but oh well. They thank me, talk about the sword, about how Dario is Glenn's brother, how the sword at the grave has been passed down generationally (but Glenn doesn't use it, probably because of an inferiority complex) and then they're on their way.

I spent a lot of time in Termina, by the way. A good hour or so just talking to people. The element shop keeper has a special portrait, so I bet I can recruit her or something later. I also met a kid with a mohawk who's name I can't remember, but adds CHA to his words randomly in no discernible pattern, that scared off customers to a guy showing off a fake mermaid. The kid likes mermaids, apparently, which brings me to -

Apparently Termina, or this entire continent is kind of shitty. There are "demi-humans", humans that are part animal part human, and apparently there's this great big racist thing going on with them. Maybe it'll get touched on more later, but, so far some guy was using them as slaves, people seemed to have no problem with the concept of shoving one into a tank (not that it was a real mermaid anyway, but still) and they use the term somewhat derogatorily "Go back to your demi-human friends you kid that I hate!" This kid also tells me that he has a boat and that he can take me around on a tour in the boat, but for some reason I don't have time for that.

Why don't I have time for that? Because I need to get into Lord Viper's Manor. Why? Hell if I know. No, really, at this point, I have no idea why. It's not until I meet a guy cleaning a statue of Lord Viper that Kid decides to pipe up with "we should go there because you need to find out why he was maybe after you and so that I can do..something... that I'm going to be very vague about..." For telling me all of the major enemies in the game, just about, and some of the big plot twists (by the way, there was a kid in bed being read stories by his mother that was friendly enough to tell me ALL about this thing called the Frozen Flame. I'm sure it's nothing important, though, right?) they seem very unwilling to ever tell me any specifics about what's going on in the now. So, whether I like it or not (I told Kid I didn't want to go, she's still making me) I need to find a way into Lord Viper's Manor.

Which is where I meet Guile. Not that Guile, another Guile. A Guile that was going to be Magus, but then they added so many characters to the game that they scrapped that idea. I'm not kidding either. They felt it was a better idea to have 40 characters in the game, most of whom are useless, instead of have a potentially interesting story involving Magus and this alternate world and his search for Schala. So, Guile is a magician that looks an awful lot like Magus, but he isn't, that has a bet with a fortune teller. Guile needs to sneak inside of Viper Manor and obtain something from some room. Again, they're REALLY vague about this stuff. However, Guile tells me that even though Lord Viper's Manor is impenetrable, all he needs to get in is a boat. So looks like this fortress is impenetrable every place except for..nowhere at all because a mushroom man told me that you can also get into the manor from a "secret" underground passage in some forests. Do these people know the meaning of the word impenetrable? Because so far it's sounding like this place is anything but.

I know where to get a boat, I just don't want to go get it though. Because it requires I go spend some more time talking toCHA! that weird kid. So, in my reluctance, I spent some more time in town, helped a man sell his Lord Viper food by lowering the price from 100 to 50. I found the talking skull's (who's name is Skelly.. of course it is) mom, or grandma, or something, lamenting their son or grandson or whatever having gone off and disappeared. By the way, I looked up where ALL of his body parts are, and I kind of want to say fuck it. This isn't like "Go collect three things and we'll be good" this is along the lines of collect six or so things, all over the world, at different locations, some of which sound like they won't be available for a pretty long time. I also talked to a blacksmith and his wife. Zappa, and Zippa, Zappa's Wife. Seriously, that was her name every time she talked. How must she feel knowing that the only way anyone will ever identify her is as "Zappa's Wife." She even has a portrait and everything, but she's relegated to being Zappa's Wife every time she opens her mouth. The black smith was cranky, told me about putting a soul into the weapons he makes. I'm sure I can get one or both of them in my party later if I find out the magic way to make it happen.

Mojo is apparently looking for his brother, as I found a straw doll that he called brother, but then said no, that's not him, and he wondered where he might be. I also met a kid named Van, who's an artist and son of a wealthy merchant trader guy that doesn't really love his son and loves his work more because he came in and broke a promise to Van while I was just casually standing beside him and told him that he wouldn't get to go to the festival because he had to go work. I bet I get Van in my party later too if I really try for it.

And I think that's about where I stopped. So, I found out what my objective is, though.. not really WHY it's my objective other than "come on, you have to find out the truth of what happened to the other you, why some people were after you even though they only seemed to try once and I kicked their asses pretty easily, and because I need to be a tool for two of the other party members. Really, there's more reason for me to go to Lord Viper's Manor right now for Guile and for Kid than it seems like for myself. But hey, I'm sure I'll met a cat demon named Lynx there who can fill me in on everything that's going on.

Impressions & Closing Out!

So, not a lot happened this time, despite me having a lot more to write about. It seems they're finally starting to get to at least some story stuff; though more of it seems to be about everyone but Serge. That's fine though. Serge will get his time to shine when he switches bodies with... eh, I'll cover that when I get there. I know it happens, it's one of the few things I remember from the game when I played it the first time.

The game's not bad. The dialogue in the game still seems pretty annoying. It also still looks pretty good. Well, good for its time.

I also spent some amount of time doing research on the Dream/Time Devourer, and, that shit is fucking convoluted as all hell. Apparently it's a combination of Lavos, Schala, some air ships that FATE the super computer made, and the dragons and it needs Serge for some reason to come to maturity. What the fuck? I'll cross that bridge more when I get there, but, what the fuck?! The Lavos-Schala thing I got. That kind of made sense. The fact that it's supposedly actually like five entities in one is absurd.

I definitely want to keep playing the game though, but I won't be back until Monday or Tuesday due to going on a trip for New Year's Eve. So I'll see you all then when I get back and hopefully things will pick up a bit more in game.

Blogs CCT1 and CCT2 can be found at their respective links.

Welcome to the second installment of

Chrono Cross This!

You can find Part 1 Here, or down below in the next paragraph, or all the way at the bottom.

The Story So Far!

So, in my last trip back to Chrono Cross, I barely played the game at all. I went through a tower dream, got bossed around by Leena, heard a lot of foreshadowing of events to come (cat demons, dragon castle, talk of fate, alternate realities. The only thing they haven't spoiled, I feel like, is the only thing that semi-connects Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross and everything being one of a bajillion parallel worlds.) Then I slaughtered an entire generation of komodo dragons, and their mother, for THREE of their scales. Then I stopped after a CG cutscene that brought me to a parallel dimension (even though I "don't know it yet".)

So, where did the story take me from there? No place interesting yet, I can tell you that.

The Story Now!

So, strange guy on the beach told me to go back to town to find Leena because she was babysitting (but wait, she had just finished babysitting to come visit me! What's going on here?!)

Ok, side tangent.

Sorry about that. Back to the story.

So, I stop by the dragon rock to fight my way back to the town (because of treasure and xp) and find out that there are completely different monsters here! Eh, I'm sure the local wildlife just switched out while I was unconscious and it's the exact same place. Right? I make it back to the village only to find out, long story short, it's not the same village! Well, it IS the same village, but it's different! All of the people are different! The guy that had caught a monster fish has no fish at all and can't catch anything for the life of him! The poet girl in the restaurant gave up on poetry and is all cynical! And the chef's wife is running the place while the chef went off on an adventure! And a great fisherman hasn't been a fisherman and now worships a voodoo doll, and had a friend that had a son that died 10 years ago! And there's a different village chief! And Serge's house is owned by someone else! And a boy in the village was attacked by a cat and then drowned a couple of years later! And.. this all feels super heavy handed. So heavy handed, in fact, that the girls in the village even like a necklace made out of rainbowshells, NOT komodo scales. I get what they're going for, and hopefully this is something that they don't continue to be so forceful about, but man does it feel kind of crappy right now. Maybe the problem is just that I like talking to random NPCs though and they don't expect that you want to do that.

So, I find Leena and she explains the whole story to me about how she used to like this boy, named Serge, that lived in the village, but then he died, and she doesn't know why she's telling me all of this (other than the fact that I asked...) and then she doesn't believe that I'm Serge and she tells me that I should go visit Serge's grave up on cape howl (because for some reason this boy is the only boy that ever died of drowning and therefore is the only one that gets a grave up on some cliff overlooking the ocean/sea.) She's also very insistent about this. Off to cape howl it is.

So I get there, fight my way to the top, then I get jumped by three guys. Three guys that are after me because a mysterious "He" said I would be here. Why bother with "He" (they even put it in quotations, yes) when even if they SAID the guys name, I would have no clue who it was. This seems pointless. Well, we're about to fight when Kid, the Australian Sch-girl, I mean, the Australian girl, shows up. Her accent is so thick and constant it makes me long for the days of Ayla and Frog's original CT accents. In fact, almost EVERYONE seems to have some kind of crappy accent, and none of them are the same. Anyhoo, we fight the guys in what is a semi-tutorial boss fight about natural colors and weaknesses.

Then I win and go back to the village to rest. Where I then also go down to the not-a-fisherman-anymore and show him a giant tooth that the other-him gave me and explain the whole thing about parallel worlds to him, he doesn't believe me (or, rather, he does, but doesn't want to admit that he's been wasting the last 10 years of his life worshiping a voodoo doll.) When I go to leave the doll comes to life! It's name is apparently Mojo, and he has a dumb as shit accent too! He likes adding -om to the end of words, randomly, and drawing words out all the time. This is growing a bit infuriating, actually, and maybe I'll bitch about it in the next installment. Anyway, he senses a destiny and joins me. So, here I am, not even two hours into the game, and I already have 3 party members. There are going to be a LOT of party members in this game. I know that, and I could piece it together even if I didn't. I'm not liking the sound of that.

So, I leave the village, go up to this fossil dig site. While up there I lie to some soldiers about me being an exorcist and sure I'll take care of their problem. So I climb a ladder and find a talking, moving clown skull that tells me that it knows I'm dead too and that he can't remember anything but that maybe if he found the rest of his body he'd remember, so, I agree to help him out. I'm guessing he's going to be another party member. So, four-ish party members already. Really?

I fight some dodo's and some dingo's and some creepy plant things and steal a dodo's egg and some flower and then head back down and go off to the other side where I meet... SIGH

Solt and Peppor!

No really, those are their names, Solt and Peppor (and apparently they don't have wiki pages on the site.) One is a really tall skinny knight, the other is a fat, short knight, and the one named Peppor is forced to work the word "shake" into every sentence he utters. "Shake it to him!" "Let's shake it on out of here!" this is groan inducingly bad. Anyway, it's another boss fight (by the way, these are two of the guys that jumped me back at the cliff.) This is, again, more of a tutorial boss fight than anything as Solt tries to use black magic on me (because I'm white... these racist assholes), but all he does is turn my color alignment black, meaning that I'm now weak to white magic, except they didn't bring any white magic, because they're bumbling idiots. So we kick their ass. They were considerably easier than the two seperate giant dodo's I had beat up like five minutes ago, but whatever, they're trying to be played up as incompetent.

Then I keep on going and get to the other side of this canyon and stop just outside the town of Termina, which is where I was headed.

Impressions!

All right, I'm talking kind of a mess of shit about this game (there's a lot to talk shit about so far, honestly) but I don't actually hate this game. I'm still playing it, and it's enjoyable enough. I just honestly have no idea if the game was written this badly or if the localization team for the game is the one that so thoroughly helped screw the pooch here. Why does everyone and their dog (I'm not kidding about that dog part, and I'll get to that in a moment) have some stupid accent? Is it because they figure there are so many f'ing characters in this game that if each and every single one of them didn't have some kind of accent that I wouldn't be able to tell who was talking at any given time?

As for the battle system. I'm not hating that either, and I understand it pretty well by this point, even if some of the decisions don't make sense and I don't understand WHY some things happen, just that they work that way. Why, in the middle of me attacking, does the enemy get to override me? Why do enemies sometimes get to take two attacks in a row? (Like the Dodo, that will spend a turn squaking at me, will spend another action squaking, and then as soon as my action window pops up, for just a split second, it then gets to attack instead of me getting to do anything at all?) I also don't entirely think it was really necessary for them to go to such lengths in this whole element thing. It's not bad, and maybe it will get more interesting later, but it just seems needlessly involved for relatively little pay off.

The party characters.. Boy oh boy. This is something that will piss me off to no end. When you have 30 some odd characters in a game like this, they don't feel cool, they feel wasted. I won't end up caring about any of these guys. Why should I care who Mojo, the talking voodoo doll is? He just woke up and joined my party for seemingly no reason. I know nothing about him other than he loves love and talks really badly. And I know the clown skull will be a dude if I can find his body. And the Chef that's off on a journey will undoubtedly be able to join me. And then I have Kid who I 'might' care about to some degree, but, I know the story there, so, not really. The other problem I have with this sort of comes from me being a completionist. While doing some wiki work and research I found out that I already missed recruit the dog with the funny accent. I don't know if I get a later chance to recruit her or if I already messed that up and I won't ever be able to get her now or not. I know that there will be characters in this game that if I do not do specific things for, I will not be able to recruit them. I hate that. So, I'm in a position here where I have to decide if I'm going to start the game over or not so that I can get the stupid dog. I'd just like to point out - I don't care about the dog because I care about the CHARACTER of the dog, I only care about the dog because I'm a completionist that gets annoyed by things like this.

The one saving grace to this game so far, or rather, the one thing that I haven't had any real issue with yet, is the music. The music in this game is legitimately good. The CT victory music remix is "ok" (I guess they wanted it to be like the FF victory music, so, I can put up with that) and everything else music wise has been fantastic.

I'll also say the game looks better than I was expecting. Most PS1 era 3D games hold up very poorly, but this game looks pretty ok. Sure there are jagged edges and everything, but, this is really good looking by comparison to stuff like FF8 or FF7 even.

Closing It Out!

For those of you that have played through this game before, or at least remember the game better than I do, should I restart the game to get the dog? I figure I'm not really that far in, so restarting now wouldn't be too big of an issue. Or can I still pick the dog up later? Should I really worry about collecting all of the party members? CAN you even collect all of the party members? I know most will be a pain in the ass if I don't use a character guide for them. But, if I did do a run through where I collected them all, I could fill out all of the wiki pages on the site about them (there are a lot that are missing still, and some that have almost no information at all.) I'll probably take a small break from the game while I wait to hear back about collecting all of the companions (including the dog.) Unless I don't hear anything, then I'll just go do a bunch of research on my own.

Anyway, thanks for reading (hopefully. I can't imagine this will be a popular blog series, the episodes are kind of long and a bit drawn out and I imagine people don't care much about reading about someone playing through a game, but, hey, maybe, just maybe) Hope you join me again next time!

Edit: Here's the link to Chrono Cross This! 1! In case you haven't seen it yet.

Welcome to my first installment of Chrono Cross This! my journey back to the "sequel" to Chrono Trigger.

So, as a forward for this, I want to get a couple of things out of the way. This is a result of a couple of things, 1) the Chrono Trigger endurance run. 2) a poll on these forums asking which was better, Cross or Trigger. 3) me beating the special ending added to the DS version of Trigger.

As a quick warning; spoilers. Everywhere. There will be spoilers all over the place. You don't like it, don't read. I won't give warnings before the spoilers.

Now, what does the bonus ending of CT:DS have to do with this? For those of you that haven't seen it, or haven't played Cross, or haven't beaten Trigger, the important thing to know about this extra ending that they went through extra effort to create specifically for the DS version of CT is that it only serves a purpose to connect CT and CC. The ending literally serves no other purpose than to justify the existence of CC as an actual sequel. I just want to reiterate that one more time - Square Enix went back to CT and added an ending to the game to try and better justify the existence of a sequel that is (now) 11 years old. How fucking crazy is that? Not like, crazy awesome, just, crazy. Was this a regret that someone at Square Enix had that CC was viewed as a non-sequel because for all intents and purposes it WASN'T a sequel until the end of the game? Was this something they had wanted to do back in the day but just couldn't get around to it/fit it into the game? This is like them adding the anime videos to the PS1 version of CT that also tried to 'support' the existence of CC (the ending video of Lucca finding the child in the basket in the wild) and shouldn't be that offensive or anything? I dunno.

I will say it felt like a real shitty ending. It took me from a great high of fighting Dalton YET AGAIN and him escaping YET AGAIN, to probably the lowest of lows I've felt during a CT play through (wait, I don't get to go fight Dalton again even though he specifically told me where he was going and what he was going to go do? wait, I got to fought Lavos-Schala and WON but then they just one-shotted me? And then Schala teleports me back to my time and this all becomes a non-issue? Oh, and other-Magus (because an alternate reality Magus is there, by the way, because alternate realities are a thing in Chrono Cross, and that needs to be addressed) gets teleported to a new place where he loses his memory; forgets who he is, where he's from, everything, and then vows to do everything in his power to remember who he is. And that's the end. We have no idea where he ended up, what happens to him, anything. He could be a character in CC, and maybe this is an attempt to say that he IS the same character (a man named Guile. No, not THAT Guile, a different Guile) as that was the original intention with Guile in CC, that it would be Magus, except then they added way too many other characters to CC and scrapped that idea and made him his own new character. So what was the point of having other-Magus get thrown into a different dimension and lose all of his memory? Ugh.

Ok, sorry, my disgust over that ending still kind of lingers in my mind.

So, back on topic. This blog is going to be my return visit to the sequel of Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross. I played through Chrono Cross once when it first came out. Now, however, I barely remember anything at all about it other than feeling kind of ripped off that they called it "the sequel to Chrono Trigger!" Now that I'm older and can potentially appreciate the game some more, and maybe follow it's rather absurd and complex plot better, I want to take a look back at it and see if it is really as bad as I remember, or if I was just being too harsh on the game at the time. Hopefully, one way or the other, I'll be able to make it all the way through CC so I can have a better idea of what this game truly is, isn't, was trying to be, where it succeeded, and where it failed. So without further ado-

CHRONO CROSS THIS!

So, Chrono Cross, where to start.

I put the game in the PS2, turned it on, and it worked. And then the game started and I watched a cinematic that is undoubtedly full of spoilers, that talked about fate and cogs turning and was being all melodramatic. Then I got into the game. I kept the main character's name the same, Serge. I hate his name so much already. Serge. But whatever, games are great and naming characters poorly and who am I to argue with the creators of the game.

The game starts in a dream sequence where you're, undoubtedly, already much farther into the game (about a forth or halfway through the game, if I had to guess) and are in some strange tower with two other companions (who you didn't get to name.) One is a really obnoxious female character named Kid. For some reason she has an over the top Australian accent. The other is an older guy with a mustache, named Fargo (he's not special enough to have a page in the wiki, apparently.) I have no idea, at all, what I'm doing in this tower, just that I should be playing. So, I run around, find a balcony overlooking a crystal thing I'm supposed to get to. Kid makes some comment about how "we're so close to the crystal but so far away still." I just shouted at my screen "Then how about you jump over the fucking railing and hop down to the room below where it is. I bet that would work really well and save me a lot of time." But nope, no such luck, so, I had to leave the room and go explore and fight some more in the tower.

At this point in the game the fighting system isn't explained at all, in any way. But it breaks down like this (and this is really an overly complex system for little to no reason) -

When you attack you have 3 levels of attack; 1 (weak), 2 (standard), and 3 (strong.) Your have so much energy to spend on those three different strengths of attacks. So, you may have 7 stamina, for example, and a strong attack will use up 3 stamina, leaving you with 4 to spend. So then you use a weak attack, which uses up 1 stamina, leaving you with 3. So then you use a standard attack, which uses up two, leaving you with 1. Then you do a weak attack since it uses up 1. Ideally, you start with a weaker attack (which has higher accuracy) and build up to a strong attack (which has lower accuracy, but gets better the more times you hit an enemy in the same attack.) Now, while all of this is going on you're building up elemental levels. It's sort of complicated, but, the important thing to know is that you assign elements (or magic) to slots on your character, after you attack you build up power to use those elements. Each element can only be used once per fight (unless otherwise noted.) So if you have 3 bars, like this - - - you have 3 different levels of elements. When you attack, those bars fill up, granting you access to those bars, and thusly, their elements (bars go both horizontally as well as vertically. The power level being horizontal, vertical slots granting you access to more than one element of that level.) Also, there's an oval in the upper left hand corner of the screen that isn't explained at all, but has different colors to it. I later find out that that has to do with the element affinity of a fight and that casting elements of the same element increases the power of that element while weakening the opposite element. Don't worry, some old guy in a village later explains this all to me.

Ok, so, gameplay is confusing and a bit needlessly complex it seems. But that's ok. I keep on fighting and murdering stuff and collecting a crystal and listening to this Australian girl ramble on with her terrible accent. Then we get teleported through the floor. This causes Fargo and Kid to FLIP THE FUCK OUT. I don't know WHY in a world where I can call down meteors from outerspace to hit my enemies inside of a building being teleported causes these two to lose their shit and be unable to comprehend what just happened. Maybe it was an excuse for Kid to talk some more with her Australian accent and to give Fargo a chance to say something, ANYTHING. Then I reach a door and I find out I was dreaming.

So, then I wake up. The exact same way that Crono in CT frst wakes up. In his bed, eyes closed, text on screen of his mom calling out to him. Then I open the blinds to my room. And then I go downstairs, and meet my mom, and my two cats. That's how you can tell it's different than Chrono Trigger, there are TWO cats, not just one. This felt like it was trying too hard to give a wink and a nudge at CT fans, but, whatever. I found out that my friend Leena has stopped by, but because I was sleeping I missed her and she went off somewhere, and that I should be nicer to Leena because girls something something... I dunno, I stopped listening to her.

I make my way out of the house, I'm in some sea-side tropical village. I don't remember any place like this being in CT, but, whatever. I'm sure it will ALL get explained EVENTUALLY, right? Aaaaanyhoo. I wander around town, there's a guy talking about a dragon castle under water (I'm sure that won't come up later) and a guy talking about the Porre army (for those that don't know, Dalton escapes and goes off and makes an army from the town of Porre in CT:DS to get back at you. You never get to see ANY of that, by the way.) So, Porre army, something something, all very vague and kind of useless information other than to have another CT callback. Speaking of CT references, I then meet Toma the 14th (Or, The Great Explorer Toma, as he likes to be called) who insists that he's exploring for treasure, not gardening (he seems kind of insecure about the matter.) And then I have a long conversation with a guy talking about taking alternate paths and wondering what life would be like if he made a different decision a long time ago (this is a really long, drawn out conversation that only serves as foreshadowing for the whole alternate realities thing.) It's briefly mentioned somewhere that Serge was attacked by a panther demon when he was a kid, but was saved and he used to be afraid of cats because of it, but not anymore. So far there's just a whole lot of CT references and foreshadowing. Also, there's something known as a cube of fate, or the fate something something that records everything. They felt the need to explain save points in the game (and I'm sure this won't become a thing later as a result of that either) for some reason. Anyway. I also hear a lot of talk about girls, and some kid asked me to break his sister in to make her more ladylike? What the fuck was that about, it seemed kind of creepy, to be honest, and maybe a bit sexist, I'm not sure.

Ok, so, lots of exploring, finding useless items, people telling me about komodo scales and love and blah blah, fight tutorial, blah blah, a girl gives me a foreshadowing hint about how to recruit her dog as a character later, blah blah, so much pointless talking that seems bent on trying to suck me into the world or to make me want to keep playing because "don't you want to know more about this thing that was mentioned in passing now?" It all feels kind of weird and maybe a bit forced. But we'll see, maybe it all pays off. So I find Leena down at the docks babysitting (since because I was sleeping she had to babysit instead? I'm not sure how that logic worked, but, it is what it is. Then she breaks out the whip and tells me to go fight some komodo dragons so I can make her a love necklace.) I guess this Leena is my love interest and childhood friend.

So, I go off to fight some komodo dragons and get their scales (after getting some advice from an old man about how to catch them all.) Honestly, it's all pretty boring, standard combat. I stab stuff, stuff dies. It's at this point though that the combat is actually starting to frustrate me. Not because it's too complicated or anything though. Remember how I was explaining that you have stamina and you have to spend that stamina on attacks and that you have varying levels of attacks? Well, let's say I attack something, I tell the game to do - 1, 1, 2, 3. Except that after I hit the second 1, before it gets to 2, the enemy's turn comes up. The enemy INTERRUPTS MY ATTACK and gets to hit me in the middle of me doing these bloody combos (because I can't tell it what combo to do ahead of time or anything) and then after the enemies attack I'm forced back to the original action menu screen of "Do you want to attack, cast spells, use items?" meaning every time I'm in the middle of attacking, if an enemy interrupts me, it's like I have to start all over again. It's frustrating as all get out and it has no reason for being this way.

Ok, anyway. I trap some dragons, kill them, for ONE scale each (I need 3, and apparently each dragon only caries one scale on its entire person. Sometimes only one scale for TWO dragons. This seems pretty brutal, actually. My love interest wants me to massacre an entire species just so she can have a necklace that proves that I love her?) Then after I kill the third one the MOTHER komodo dragon comes out. She's probably pretty pissed that I've been murdering her children in cold blood. So I kill her. This is all really easy so far. After every battle you also get to heal back up to (if not full, then almost full, using left over unused elemental energy and the cure element/spell. So I'm not even being drained of resources as I do all these fights.)

Next I make my way down to the beach where I'm supposed to meet Leena and give her the scales of the innocent dead. She takes the scales, talks about how if I remember when we were kids and used to sit at the beach and listen to the water, and how water is as old as time, and then talks about having kids, and wonders if we'll remember this when we're older, and how memories are funny because when you've forgotten them they then come floating back up to the surface. Then a strange voice started talking to me. Then I had a flashback to when I was a kid and a demon leopard attacked me. Then there was a tidal wave, some magic, and I passed out. Leena was mysteriously absent for ALL of this cutscene. When I awake Leena's gone and some strange man is standing over me wondering if I'm ok. I ask where Leena is, he says "oh, I think she's in the village babysitting. if you're a friend of hers you should go visit her."

Ok, I already know what happened, but they lay this on pretty thick about what just happened without showing it to you yet. I'm in an alternate reality. Plain and simple. I know this. The guy talking about "other possible futures", the mention of me being attacked when I was a kid and that I was lucky to survive, the flashback to that event, the mysteriously missing Leena, the fact that she's still babysitting despite the fact that I know she's not babysitting anymore and that she wouldn't have just left me to go back to babysitting. I'm positive, however, when Serge finds out he's in another reality, he will be flipping his shit (as much as a silent protagonist can) an be dumbfounded and confused about what's going on.

This is where I stopped.

So, I haven't been hating the game so far, but it seems very uninteresting at the same time. I guess it's an RPG though and I shouldn't expect for anything genuinely exciting to be happening so far. The game seems to be relying so much on foreshadowing so far though that I wonder if they realized that there was nothing compelling about the events that start the game off that they want to try and dig some hooks into you to make you want to see all of the hinted at stuff to get you to keep playing instead of just giving you good stuff from the start. I mean, think of it this way, if Lavos, Zeal, and Magus were all hinted and nudged at in the first half hour to hour of play in Chrono Trigger, would that have made it any better? Or would it have tainted the fun of everything that was going on? I'm thinking it would have made for a worse experience. But who knows, maybe things will get turned around at some point. I don't have high hopes though, know what things I already know about CC, but, I'm trying to keep an open mind and to keep on playing regardless.

So join me next time as I find out that I'm in a parallel world! And that Leena thinks I'm dead! And that nothing is as it was! And combat continues to be just sort of annoying and mediocre!

Episode 4 is here a day late! Episodes One, Two, and Three are at their respective links.

This one is going up late because, well, honestly, I got wrapped up in Blizzcon, and then by the time I realized I should be working on D&D for Sunday it was suddenly 10pm at night and I had to call it a night so I could get up early for a brunch meeting with some friends stopping through town.

So let's see what we can come up with in the last day before I need all of this stuff ready!

Creating A D&D Campaign: Episode 4! (Oh Shit, Tomorrow's Sunday!)

Ok, so, while this blog may be up a bit late, I have been doing 'some' amount of work on the side to at least have a playable session ready for tomorrow.

As such, this episode will take a haaaaard swing in a different direction to start with and will talk about my sort of 'last minute preparation to get a runnable session ready in time' and less about creating the region or the city or anything.

I Need A Start to the Story!

This was actually taken care of pretty quickly once I decided I wanted them to be based out of one single city. More or less I decided that the start for the campaign would be that all of the players have just joined an Adventurer's Guild (for their own personal reasons, that's up to them.) I know that the party make up is going to be, roughly, a dwarf crusader (from the Book of Nine Swords), a human barbarian, an elf rogue, and.. well, a very indecisive player that last time I was talking to was thinking of a shifter ranger/barbarian (but this was his like third character idea, so, I have no idea what he's doing.) This does mean they have no healer at all, but, being apart of an adventurer's guild, I can easily help assign helpful NPCs to their group to help them fill out rolls they might be missing.

So, this is a nice, simple start that lets me send them off wherever, gives them an excuse to work together despite potentially not knowing each other, and sets up future potential plot hooks with inner guild problems, guild vs guild problems, crooked people hiring them for jobs that seem innocent to start with, so on, so forth. Also gives them something to potentially lose within the city already. Not that I plan on just stealing away their guild just because I can, but, giving them things that they can lose gives them things to get attached to, which is good.

So, as a starting point, they'll have just joined the guild, and they'll be given a 'handler' that will assign them missions or give them missions to choose from. Early on they'll be given a rather straight forward escort mission, something to 'cut their teeth on.'

The players will be escorting a merchant and his cart of supplies (mostly food and water) to a border town/fortress that rests on the edge of a desert (between two mountains) but the traditional 'safe' path has recently suffered from a rock slide, meaning that the merchant needs to take a longer, older, more dangerous path that may be littered with monstrous humans or just dangerous animals. I still have to actually decide WHAT they are going to fight, but I have set up an old abandoned travel house on the path that they can rest in.

I'm thinking on the path TO the house they'll probably get jumped by a couple of random wild animals, maybe some wild dogs or some eagles or something. At the house I'm a bit sketchier. I could have goblins or kobolds or something squatting in the house and needing to clean the house of them, or, I may fill it with insects or vermin or something, something more 'innocent'. I think I'll lean more towards bugs and what not, have it be a bit more of a 'surprise', like, them going up to the beds in the house, pulling back the sheets and going "Oh shit! a bed full of centipedes!" Yeah, I like the sound of that. Ok, I'm going with vermin/pests/etc for the house. I have a map drawn up of the house that I'll be posting up later (probably tomorrow morning since I don't have access to my scanner at the moment.)

Where Do We Go From There?

So, I know they'll go through this old mountain path, get down to these badlands that connect to this fortress type town on the border. They'll spend at least a night there in the fort town while the merchant does business, off loads stuff, picks up stuff to take back to the trade city, etc. I'm thinking there may be another encounter during this, maybe involving hyenas attacking the town, or attacking a child just outside of the town or something. The problem there is that I have to come up with a reason for why the town guard can't handle it themselves. Maybe I'll have a child fall down into an antlion/ankheg pit or something just outside of town and the players will need to get down there and rescue the child. Though an antlion or ankheg would be far too difficult for the group, so, may just be that the creature's lair is currently empty, or maybe filled with something else (could be an old pit that is just no longer inhabited.)

From there the players will head back through the mountains and back to the city.

I'd like to hope that this will be enough for one session, but, you never know. It's hard to say how long these things will go sometimes. So just in case, I'd like to have the START of something else. So I think after getting back to the city they'll get their reward and everything from the merchant escort (some of which in turn goes to the guild) and then either later that night or the next night will get sent to a nearby tavern or butcher shop that is having rat troubles. This won't be as simple as "clear the basement of rats" that you see everywhere, but I love the feel of taking that sort of overused idea and putting a spin on it. These aren't just rats, these are rats that are being controlled by a wererat below the city that the players will need to locate, possibly in the sewer system, and take out, lest he become too powerful.

Complications and Things to Consider

So, one thing that is really different between 3.5 and 4th ed D&D is the combat and creating encounters. In 4th ed you can throw encounters together really easily going by an xp budget and the creatures are almost guaranteed to be a decent challenge (but not too much of a challenge) to players so long as you build the encounter intelligently (a fight of nothing but minions won't be that difficult, or nothing but swarms will probably wipe them out pretty quickly.) In 3.5, however, although combats are still pretty easy to piece together, gauging player strength is a lot more difficult. Players building characters smartly in 3.5 or ones with really good stats can make such a difference in how easily they deal with monsters. Something that, according to the book, is a proper challenge may not even come close to putting up a fight. I'll have to be ready to adapt these combats on the fly as need be once I see how the players deal with the encounters. This will be tricky, but, hopefully I'll be able to create proper encounters that won't be too hard or too easy, but we'll see. It's one of the things that I enjoyed a lot more about 4th ed vs 3.5, but, it's not something that bugs me enough to keep me away from 3.5, so, I'll manage, I'm sure.

Rewards!

Well, fighting so many creatures that wouldn't carry loot, I have to find other means by which to give the players loot. Thankfully, I have two good outs for this, and a third minor one that can work. The first is to simply say that gems or artwork was left in the travel house on the mountain path that the players can take with them. Another good source is a reward from the merchant who hired them. This is an easy way to give them a reward without any enemies dropping loot. The third one is that if they do rescue a child at the fort town, the family may try to offer them some kind of small reward. I still have to figure out how MUCH money to give them, but, I can do that pretty easily and come up with that pretty last minute. I don't think for their first adventure I'll give them any kind of item reward. I may save that until after the wererat that they'll deal with at the end of the session or at some point during the second session.

Yo, They Will Probably Interact With Some People

Oh, right! Yeah, so, I'll still need to create NPCs. So, I know that they'll need to deal with their guild handler, and the merchant that they're escorting, as well as their healer, and maybe some people in the fort town. Let's start in order of appearance.

• The Handler

So, first thing's first, I should have a name for the handler. How about... Randal Cutback. Randal, or Cutback if you want to call him that, will be an older fellow. I picture him wearing more 'proper'/'elegant' clothing that is just dingy and grungy that he's probably owned for a very long time and simply refuses to get rid of them. I picture him getting people's names wrong rather often, maybe due to poor memory or just bad hearing. Keeping with his dirty clothes, I picture him being a tobacco chewer. As for his physical description, I think he'll be a bit shorter of a human, maybe about 5'5", is a bit portly or pudgy, but not really 'fat.' I also think that he'll be somewhat balding.

• The Healer

This helpful NPC will be somewhat on the young side. I haven't decided on race or gender yet, I'll figure this all out when I sit down and make the character later, but I can still figure out a name and personality bits here. The personality.. I picture them being somewhat impatient, something that they need to work on as a healer, or, if not 'impatient' then 'easily agitated', a short temper. Despite being easily riled up, I picture them being very quick to try and make penance for any outburst they may have. I think the healer will be a male, or, at least this first healer will be a male. And as for a name... Gregory Johana. I'll figure the rest out later.

• The Merchant

The Merchant... hmm.. The Merchant will be female, impatient, very punctual and kind of grouchy. I think she will be a halfling. I also like the idea of her whistling a lot while traveling. Her name will be Gloria Goldpocket and she'll have a scar horizontally across the middle of her face, across her nose and under her eyes. I think that will be about it for her.

I think that's all I'll really bother coming up with a lot for right now. In the fort town I don't expect them to interact with too many people that I can't come up with stuff for on the fly using random charts and the like.

Bonus Talk!

So, this is something I've been meaning to get to but keep forgetting about. I won't have this done in time for the first session, and I recognize that, but it isn't too much of a problem considering the party make up I don't think. When thinking about the world I'm making, I'd like to create a new pantheon of deities for this world, or, at least this region. I want at least something to really stand out from the core books and everything, and for me, I've chosen to go for the deities. I know that I'm going to have six prime deities, an aspect for Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and then one deity for Life and the Sun, and Death and the Moon. I certainly will have more deities than that, more minor deities, I think, probably only six PRIME deities. I'll have to come up with names for each deity, I'll probably look to historical or mythological history for names. No need to create a new name for a fire god if somewhere in history someone already believed in a fire god with a really great name. I will need to come up with domains that fit for all of the gods however and that will probably be one of the harder parts of it all. If anyone has any suggestions though, if anyone's created their own pantheon or anything and has some advice to give for doing this, I'd love to hear it.

That's it for now though. Thanks for reading again. There won't be a blog tomorrow since that's D&D day and I'll be too busy getting everything ready and then actually playing to post anything, so, next one may be on Monday where I hopefully can finish fleshing out the region and everything and I can draw up city plans/layouts and region layout and all of that. As well as maybe more Pantheon information.

In today's news, Episode 3! Here you can find Episodes One and Two, and now episode Four!

So, these blogs don't seem to be getting much response at all, least right now, but, that's ok because I'm still using them to help me finish getting the start of this campaign ready for Sunday, so, at least until then, they shall continue!

Last time we did some basic history work and talked about population ratios within the city. This time I'll be talking about city government and law. There may be time for something else to work its way in here, but, I'm not going to force anything else in if it doesn't feel natural.

Creating A D&D Campaign: Episode 3! (I Am The Law!)

Here we are today talking about government. This one shouldn't be too long, I don't think. I'm not going to get into a great big list of laws that the city has, most laws are pretty common sense after all. Don't murder, assault, harass, steal, so on, so forth, you get the idea. But there are still things that have to be worked out.

As a starting point, I'm going to answer some questions proposed in the Dungeon Master Guide 2 regarding-

Law Rank

Law Rank is more or less defined as "The degree to which any jurisdiction upholds the rule of law. The fairness of its authorities and their effectiveness in suppressing criminality." (pg. 101 DMG2) The scale isn't so much defined by exact numbers as it is by whether or not your total is positive, negative, or approximately zero. To get this Law Rank Number, you answer a few simple questions that have some math associated with your answers.

Question 1!

• What is the alignment of the local power center? (+2)

3.5 D&D is based off of an alignment system consisting of 9 different alignments: Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil, which create a 3 x 3 grid with the upper left corner (Lawful Good) being "the most good guy" and the lower right (Chaotic Evil) being "the worst bad guy." So this question more or less comes down to "is the local power center good or bad, are they lawful, neutral, or chaotic?" Civilized power structures don't tend to be chaotic, as they don't often do whatever they want whenever they want because they simply have the power to do so. Not that they CAN'T be, but, chaotic societies don't tend to advance very far. At the same time, many power centers don't actually tend to abide by the law all the time. They may put on a face of abiding by the law as often as possible, but they also tend to bend and break the rules when others aren't looking. People are prone to moments of corruption or self interests more than they are to uphold the law even behind closed doors. Anyway, I'm getting into this probably more than I need to. So the answer here I think is that the power center will probably be good, but neutral. By the book, this gives me +2 points.

Question 2!

• Over the past fifty years, have all transfers of power from one ruler to the next been peaceful? (+4)

Hmm, this means I have to consider the history some. Let's say the city is maybe... close to 300 years old (the lycanthropy incident taking place maybe... around 200 years ago.) As for what the power structure/ruling body is, let's say that there's a prime ruler that has a council working directly under him or her that keeps the city running. The prime ruler, let's say, is an elf that has been in power since just shortly after the lycanthropy incident, meaning he's been in power for let's say 174 years (oh elves and their absurdly long life span) and let's say that the council members have never been replaced through violence or anything. So, according to the book this means that there's +2 for 50 years and another +2 for more than 100 years. Putting us up to +6

Question 3!

• Does the city have a written legal code? (+3)

It sure does. A legal code that has more or less been in place since the town's founding, it may have been adjusted a bit over the years, but, not major overhauling of the legal code. So this means that we add +1 for a code of law and +2 for it being around for more than 100 years. Another +3 for a total of +9.

Question 4!

• How strongly does the ruler enforce the laws?

This is sort of on a four option scale. Very Strong - nearly always catching or killing criminals. Moderately Strong - catching or killing criminals more often than not. Weak - crimes tend to go unpunished more often than not. Virtually nonexistent - Criminals are almost never dealt with. Well, being a trade city, crime is probably at least somewhat common, and the law can't catch all of them, especially when some people are too afraid to even let the crimes existence be known, so it definitely won't be very strong. There is however law and law enforcement in the city, so, it's certainly not nonexistent. This leaves us with moderately strong or weak. I think I'm going to go with moderately strong, even though I'll probably use the definition of "catch criminals more often than not" a bit more closer to, say, a 60/40 ratio than, say, an 80/20. Either way, that's +1 to the total, putting us at +10 so far.

Question 5!

• How many of the ruler's law enforcement officials are ready to ignore crimes or harass innocents in exchange for bribes?

Well, of the given options, I'm going to go with 1/3rd of officials are corrupt. I think had I gone with a weak strength of enforcement I would be more likely to run with 2/3rd of the officials being corrupt. I certainly want corruption to be rather common place in the city, despite it's overall good standing. I mean, this is a trade city where people's lives are made or broken behind the curtain, where guilds struggle against each other just to survive, and many people are out to make enough of a living to not just scrape by, even if they have no direct intention of actually being bad people. So, 1/3rd corrupt officials gives us a -2 rating, putting us at +8.

Question 6!

• In many places the difference of social standing/power/influence between two parties in a case of law effects the outcome. How often do these conditions effect the law cases in your city?

In this city, money, power, influence, status, it's all very important. If the city has to lose an influential person, for example, because the owner of guild A did something bad to random poor citizen B, the entire city would suffer an economic loss. This means I know as much that it WILL matter, now I just have to decide if it just simply 'usually' matters, or if it 'always' matters. Could random noble person being apart of a murderous cult really get off lighter just because he's a noble, even though he's murdered 20 people for the cause of trying to perform black magic? Probably not, I suppose. I'll say that it only usually matters, even though always matters is actually rather tempting. This choice is a -1 to the total, bringing the total to... +7.

This is a pretty healthy positive law and it means that it has a deserved reputation for justice over all and legal cases are mostly decided in favor of the deserving party. Which, brings us to the conclusion of the decision of Law Rank! Yeah, this may not have been very exciting, but it did make me come to a couple of theoretically important decisions concerning the way that this city handles the law and criminals and what kind of power structure it has.

The next part regarding the laws of the city is actually pretty simple and shouldn't take up much time, but, is at least a tad more fun for me than answering questions about how corrupt or not corrupt the city might be.

Laws The Characters/Players Probably Need to Know Even Though They Will Totally Ignore Them Most of The Time Anyway!

That's right, laws specific to the city that may actually effect the party members on a somewhat regular basis. This won't be a long list since, as I mentioned earlier, most of this stuff is already pretty much common sense. What follows are things that may not be as much common sense, but, totally make sense when you think about the reality of the world these characters would live in.

1. Your weapons must be bound with chord at all times within the city to make drawing your weapon a difficult task. If I was running a very heavy magic campaign I would probably have this solved by magical means within the city, but, since this campaign will actually be somewhat lighter on the magic, people in the city will be expected to be able to police themselves to some extent and bind their weapons in their sheathes with rope or some other similar type material.
2. Drawing / wielding your weapon against an innocent person is a crime. This essentially will be part of the common sense law of "don't assault people" but sort of extends the "don't assault" to also include "don't threaten with a brandished weapon."
3. You must have a city granted permit to cast any spells at all within the city limits, and even then any spell that may cause area damage/property damage/or rob people of their free will in any way are still illegal, as are invisibility spells. (More spell type effects may get added to this later, but, those are what come to me off the top of my head.)
4. Lycanthropes are forbidden from residing within city limits, whether natural or infected. If seeking treatment for the disease, one must send a messenger into the city as a representative for yourself to contact someone that can attempt to perform treatment.

And really that's just about it. I mean, there may be more I think of down the line, but, much is covered under common sense laws that I hopefully will only really have to worry about laws regarding weapons and spells. I'll glance back over the kinds of things they tell you to take into consideration later, I'm sure, just to double check, but, I'm running out of time and that will suffice for now I believe.

There is one last thing I'm going to throw in here, since it's also pretty short.

Superstitions Within The City

These aren't really 'laws' but are more behaviors or the like that they may see within the city. I only really have three primary ones off the top of my head, and if you've been reading along with the blog so far, you'll probably understand why.

• Residents within the town stay inside during the three nights of the full moon. They are cautious during the day time even during the event of the full moon, but come nightfall parents bring their children in early and the streets are barren until sunrise.
• Many families hang a sprig of belladonna somewhere within their home (although this makes the belladonna potentially useless for preventing the lycanthropy disease as only fresh belladonna grants the effect needed to counteract the disease, many families look at the spring as a good luck charm and a ward for evil.)
• The guards in town are all outfitted with silver weapons that have also been blessed by holy clerics, and the majority of holy symbols within the town are also made of silver (although a silver holy symbol wouldn't do much to fend off a lycanthrope, silver has more or less come to be viewed as a blessed material within the city.)

I'll probably, at some point, come up with some non-lycanthrope related superstitions, but right now those will do fine as little quirks for the city I think.

And with that, I'm calling this a blog folks. As usual, please feel free to leave any feedback at all that you may have. Or, at the very least, I hope you read all the way through and are finding this to be an at least somewhat interesting blog even if you aren't commenting. Thanks again and see you tomorrow for the next installment of Creating A D&D Campaign where I might actually get into some map making!

Here we are again for episode 2 of creating a D&D campaign. You can find Episode 1 here. Edit: And now you can find Episode 3 here! And Episode 4 here! Go check it out after reading Episode 2, below.

Last time we left off talking about city and region history, so, I'll be picking episode 2 up about there and try to answer a couple of more questions about the city. I'll try to keep this episode a bit shorter than the first one. I'd rather have to have two more shorter ones that are more manageable to read through than one giant one again that probably most people don't want to trudge their way through.

So without further ado-

Creating A D&D Campaign: Episode 2! (I Have to Build This City Faster Than Rome)

Continuing With History

So, talking about city history, I've been mulling over some of the things I mentioned last time. I still sort of like the idea of using a sort of lycanthropy outbreak being the reasoning behind shifters as a race in my setting. I'd sort of like non-human races to be common in my city. I'll get into it later, but, most reference books regarding cities and city building for D&D tend to list even something like a "mixed race population" as being made up of upwards of 80% humans and all of the remaining races make up the last 20% or so, often with at least 1% being just undefined races; which in a 10,000 person population, 1% means there's only about 100 of that race within the city. But I'm getting side tracked, I'll get to city population makeup further on.

Back on track with history, I like the lycanthropy outbreak idea. I need to figure out, however, if this lead to any kind of war, if it was just an outbreak of the disease, how did the city/region deal with such a dangerous outbreak -

• Were the lycanthrope infected persecuted and kicked out of the city?
• Was a cure for the disease found and was it forced on many of the citizens, those desiring to not take the cure fleeing or trying to hide?
• Were most of them just killed off?
• How did the outbreak start and how did it stop?
• How have city laws and precautions been effected by this outbreak?

There's a lot of things to consider here. Lycanthropy is spread as a disease through being bitten by someone already afflicted with the lycanthropy disease. There are natural lycanthropes as well, who are born with the condition, but, for them it is not considered a disease, they consider it as more of a racial modifier (being a shapeshifter in addition to their normal type.) As for the disease version of lycanthropy, there are several ways to cure it, though most are not particularly easy.

1. Ingesting a sprig of belladonna (aka wolfsbane) within 1 hour of being bitten gives the victim a chance (but only a chance) to prevent the affliction. Wolfsbane however is also toxic, meaning that eating it has a chance to cause serious harm to the victim (but at least they won't be afflicted by the disease, and the serious harm can also be only slight harm, or no harm at all, and is not permanent damage.)
2. A remove disease or a heal spell cast on the victim within 3 days of being attacked, but the spell must be cast by a caster of at least 12th level (which, when you max out at level 20, 12th level is pretty high, and isn't always that easy to find.)
3. Finally, a remove curse or break enchantment spell can also remove the disease, but, it can only be successful during one of the three days of the full moon, at any other time the spell has no effect at all. Even cast during the proper time, however, there's not a guarantee that the spell will be successful (though, unlike the other two options, this can be repeated at later times.)

So, with most of this in mind, this gives me a couple of ideas of where I may want to go with some of this.

• There will probably be a law in the city against lycanthropes, whether natural or otherwise, being forbidden/illegal/whatever word you want to use. Probably on pain of death, for fear of an outbreak happening again in the future.
• It probably started as a result of a cult of natural lycanthropes that wanted to "spread their blessing to the masses" (maybe they worshiped a god of some type that ties into that.)
• Afflicted lycanthropes during the outbreak were probably mostly killed at first, since they probably wouldn't have known what was going on or that they were really innocent people. In the more long term, I'm thinking I'm going to leave it hazy for now. I know that's a bit of a cop out, but, I need to get the bigger picture done ASAP and the details can wait; plus I picture this being one of the darker times in their history, they wouldn't want a lot of the details being passed on down through the generations.
• This would have happened at least several hundred years ago, but with races that live hundreds of years such as elves and the like being 'common' in a fantasy world, for them, even several hundred years ago wouldn't be 'that' long ago for them, although it would certainly be a long time ago for many of the other races.
• Maybe the elves know the truth behind much of what happened during the outbreak, and were the source of bringing the outbreak to an end, but it is something that they simply don't talk about.
• Belladonna may be a common sight in or around the city due to people being overly cautious from the past.
• At least one 'tribe' of peoples broke off from the city during the outbreak, lycanthropes that needed to flee from the city (whether due to persecution or in an attempt to do the right thing and distance themselves from innocent people) which is probably where shifters as a race came from.
• There is probably still some amount of superstition and/or fear regarding full moons and many citizens probably stay in doors on the nights of the full moon.

I think that covers everything that I'll start with on the matter, at least in regards to the lycanthropy idea.

As for the idea regarding ruins, I still want ruins to be 'a thing' in the campaign, but, I think the ruins will be more hidden than anything right now and will be fairly more 'mysterious' over all, so, I'm not going to worry about it right now beyond knowing that I want their to be hidden ruins in or around the city. I think I'll call it good at that for now, I may think of more stuff later, but, I can't spend too much time on the finer details here really, so, moving on!

Population Ratios!

So, I started touching on this some earlier, but, here we get into the nitty gritty of it. This will also probably be considerably more boring than any of the rest of the stuff since it's not overly important and is a lot of math stuff.

So, every city is made up of different races in different population numbers. As briefly mentioned before, most books/reference material assumes that races all sort of have their own cities and that in human cities, which are considered 'normal' or 'mixing pot' cities humans make up around 80% of the population. Let's take an example city from one of the books that has a population total of 18,680. The racial make up of the city is 80% humans (14,944 people), 8% halflings (1,494.4 people), 4% gnomes (747.2 people), 3% dwarves (560.4 people), 2% elves (373.6 people), 1% half-elves (186.8 people), 1% half-orcs (186.8), and 1% "other" (186.8 people.) Which means all of the rest of the races all together are still outnumbered by humans 4-1. And most of the source material is like this.

So, I have to decide if I want my city to be human based like most, and human dominated by such a large margin, or if I want this to be even more of a mixing pot of the races than "the norm." I don't mind humans being the largest single group of people in the city, but I'm really not that fond of them outnumbering the other races all combined by 4-1.

Either way, let's start by figuring out what races will be present in the city.

• Humans
• Elves
• Dwarves
• Gnomes
• Halflings
• Half-Elves
• Half-Orcs
• Shifters
• Other (there will certainly be other races that will take residence in the city, but, not in any appreciable number to be counted on their own by their own race.)

Humans will make up the majority of the population, but that means their percentage could be anything at 51% or more. Even below 50% they as a single race would take up more than of the percentage than any other individual race. I think I'll probably just put them at 50% and call it good for them. Should they maybe be greater than 50%? Maybe, but I can rationalize their lower numbers as a result of the lycanthropy outbreak dwindling the city's numbers by a considerable amount in the past and they're only slowly recovering from it while many other races moved in to help sort of re-stabilize the city after the outbreak.

Elves, if they helped put an end to the outbreak in the past may make up more the second largest population percentage. Or, they may be tied for it with Half-elves; more elves in a human city is bound to increase the number of half-elves over all, logically speaking. So I think elves and half-elves will tie for second place. I know that humans will be 50%, and I know past the elven races I'm still going to need six other percentages worked into the total. So let's put elves and half-elves at 11% each. Bringing us to 72%

Dwarves will be the next highest race, many having been brought in in the past to help rebuild the city after the destruction caused by the lycanthropes, and mountains and a mining town not being too far away from the city itself also helps boost dwarven population numbers for the trade city. Let's put them at 9% of the total population, bringing us up to 81% total.

Now we still have gnomes, halflings, half-orcs, shifters, and "other" remaining. Halflings will be next, taking to a trade city rather easily. Let's put halflings at 8%, bringing us to 89%. Gnomes will be in the lower numbers, but, still rather populous compared to shifters, half-orcs, or the 'others'. Gnomes will slide in at 5%, bringing us to 94%. This gives us 6% remaining to divide up between the last three races. I debated about this for a bit, but I think I'm going to stick shifters, half-orcs, and the other races all at 2%, bringing us to a 100% population total. I still need to figure out a population number for the city, though, but, I think I'll start with something along the lines of... 10,584. It's sort of an arbitrary number, but, I don't want the city to be TOO big, but I do want it to be big ENOUGH so that it still really feels like a city.

1. Humans 50% (5,292)
2. Elves 11% (1164.24)
3. Half-Elves 11% (1164.24)
4. Dwarves 9% (952.56)
5. Halflings 8% (846.72)
6. Gnomes 5% (529.2)
7. Shifters 2% (211.68)
8. Half-Orcs 2% (211.68)
9. Other 2% (211.68)

Some numbers will get rounded and all of that, but, this is just for a general make up of the population, so. I may come back to these numbers at some point before Sunday and go back over them and tweak them slightly, maybe change the elf and half-elf numbers, maybe drop humans down some, not sure. If anyone has any feedback about population numbers, let me know what you think.

In Closing

That's it for Episode 2. Next episode I'll get into city alignment and the laws of the city, since those sort of go hand-in-hand. I may get into more than that depending on how much room that takes up. Either way, very shortly I'm going to have to get into the map making process to write up a map for both the city and for the region that the campaign will be taking place in.

As usual, please feel free to leave any feedback that you might have. Let me know how I'm doing, any advice or tips you might have, or anything else you may randomly want to throw in here at me. I'm up for hearing just about all of it. See you next time!

I get together with a group of friends "weekly" (it's supposed to be every Sunday, but, often times we only end up meeting once or twice a month) to play table top pen and paper roleplaying games. We've played 4th edition D&D, 4th edition Legend of the Five Rings (L5R), and new World of Darkness (which will probably sometime in the near future become a Werewolf or Vampire game.) Right now we have a game of World of Darkness running and just ended our 4th ed L5R game and are replacing it with 3.5 D&D (which we used to play back during high school.) As it turns out, I'm the one running this campaign.

Unfortunately, although I want to run the campaign, as I enjoy running campaigns, I also have found myself really slacking off lately with getting everything ready and planned out for our gaming sessions (I also ran the L5R game.) So, with my most current procrastination in mind, I decided that maybe if I create a blog about what work I have done, and still need to do, to get things ready for the 'bi-weekly' 3.5 D&D game that I'm running, it will help me get things done in a more timely manner than sitting there on Saturday night/Sunday morning trying to scramble enough stuff together to be able to at least run the session by winging it.

I don't know what kind of structure these blogs are going to take, exactly, if I'm going to want to include my entire work process, if I just want to talk about what things I have to do and create still, if I'll use it as mostly a means to talk to myself without actually talking out loud to myself and write out random ideas as they come to me and use the blog itself as an actual work tool to sift through them and see what I want to keep and throw out as I'm writing it, etc. So I'll kind of just be writing these out randomly, and the format/content might change on a per episode basis, but, I figured there are probably people in the community that may like a behind the scenes look at how someone (or at least how I) create the content for a D&D session, and, there are probably people in the community that might actually be able to help give me advice or input on things as they go.

So, with all of that out of the way, let's get on to -

Creating A D&D Campaign: Episode 1: Creating A World!

So, from the get go I knew that I wanted this campaign to focus around a single location, whether that means setting the campaign in a single city, or just having a single city be the main hub for the group and keeping them mostly limited to the city itself and the region around it. One thing I've found in our sessions so far is that I think most of our games move around so often that people don't really get invested in any NPCs or locations or anything because they all mostly feel disposable. I want to try and change that by having the group based out of one location for as much of the campaign as possible.

So, having this in mind tells me a couple of things already: I need to create a city for them to be based out of, I need to create a region around the city so I have places for them to go that allow them to still work out of the city. That may not sound like a lot, but, I'm going to break down what all kind of information I need to come up with to be able to create those two basic foundations for the setting.

Some Questions To Consider

• What kind of city is it?

1. Trade city?
2. Capital city?
3. Port city?
4. Etc.

• I need to create something of a history for the town and the region. This can include, but is not limited to -

1. Has the city ever been involved in war?
2. What kind of rulers/power structure has the city typically had in the past/does it have now?
3. How did this city develop? Did it develop because the natural surroundings made it a good defensive position? Because it was near natural resources that helped make it important? Etc.

• What does the racial make up of the city's population look like? Is it mostly human? Are monstrous humanoids 'accepted'? How do the races within the city treat and view each other?
• What laws does the city have?

1. Is magic restricted beyond the obvious types of spells that cause mass destruction or rob people of their free will?
2. How are weapons treated in the city? Are adventurers just allowed to walk around town with their weapons on them all willy nilly? Or is drawing/wielding a weapon considered to be a crime instead but adventurers are allowed to carry whatever they want?
3. Are there any other strange or notable laws for the city?

• What alignment is the city as a whole and what alignment is the ruler of the city? Is the general population good? Are they neutral? Are they evil? Are they good people being ruled by an evil king? Or neutral people being ruled by a good council that's trying to help make the city a better place?

From there still more questions arise, but, for now, I'm going to try and narrow down the answers to at least some of these questions here already.

Answers! Maybe! To at least one question surely!

I figure I'll start at one of the more general questions, and one of the easier ones to answer; What kind of city is it going to be? There are a lot of options to choose from: military, port, trade, capital, slave... it goes on. I think, however, that I have it narrowed down to a capital city, a trade city, or a port city.

A port city forces me to put the city by a body of water. This can be good because it already helps me set up the natural surroundings of the city. It also opens up a good bit of choices for things to happen in the city; pirate attacks, smuggling rings, water monsters, water based natural disasters, and so on. The downside is that there isn't likely to be anyone overly important at the head of the city, it won't be like a king or a prince or anything is in charge of the town. It also comes with a pretty different air about it than either a capital city or a trade city, which can be either good or bad. As much as I like port towns as a whole, I think this is the least likely option. I think I would end up being more inclined to having a port town be located 'near by' the main city.

A capital city is nice because it means that you end up with a lot of elements of the trade city, but also have a king or someone like that residing there, which can open up a fair amount of adventure and plot hooks, like assassination attempts, attempts to overthrow the ruling body, to be attacked by an invading force, peasant revolts, etc. The downside is that it means that city would also probably be larger than what a trade city or port city might be, though, being the creator of it all, I suppose that's still up to me and I can have a somewhat "small" ish capital city. One of the downsides of a capital city though is that the laws there would probably be more strict than in either of the other two options, since they have to be considerably more careful about protecting

Lastly, a trade city would probably be closer to a bunch of farms, mining towns, fishing towns, be on good ground for trade routes and all that, and could still be near some 'frontier' land. A capital city can be close to much of that as well though, but a trade city is a bit more likely, and probably would be home to a more diverse group of races. A trade city also makes having an arena/coliseum more plausible than in the capital city (since it's bound to bring in more dangerous types and house dangerous monsters that they may not want in a capital city.) It also allows me to be somewhat more relaxed on the laws within the city, and gives me a bit more flexibility with the power structure in the city.

Writing this out I'm realizing there's perhaps not a whole lot of difference between a capital city and a trade city, except that the trade city may be a bit less work. But the extra work may be worth it for the extra things it adds, or at least adds to the list of possibilities. I do kind of enjoy the idea of having an arena in the town, however.

So, I think in the end I may end up going with more of a trade city. I can still have important political figures within the city without having them be as high up as straight up royalty or anything, and can also work in princes or people with connections to the royalty that governs the region. Though, now knowing that it's a trade city doesn't do a whole lot, but, it at least helps me narrow down some things and lets me know I have to worry less about some other things.

With that out of the way, I think I'll bring up the next question I'm working on, lay out some of my thoughts for it, and then call it good for episode 1, since, I don't want this to go on for too much longer.

The next thing on the agenda is history!

HISTORY!

I don't need a ton of history to get started, after all, there can be some amount of 'secret history' as well, but, I do need to have some amount of history established for this place. How old is the city, what major events have happened in or to the city over the years, potentially how was it founded, things like that. I don't need a mountain of history, mind you, just enough to kind of set up some potential plot hooks as well as to help set up some of the city's layout and that kind of stuff.

So, already I'm going to have the city founded around a river, which I think will actually divide the city up into 3 sections. This tells me that the city was probably established here because of the source of water that the river provided, as many cities are established on or near rivers due to the benefits they provide.

Next I need to figure out is the faction that currently owns and runs the city the people that originally founded the city, or, was the city taken by force, or, did they just move in on some ruins of a former city and take the place for themselves? Or maybe it was actually a wizard's lair originally that was abandoned and someone just decided to build over it for themselves. I kind of want there to be SOME kind of ruins around the city, so I'm thinking that the city was established over top of an existing settlement of some kind. Maybe when going to expand the city in one particular direction they discover some ruins that reveals the truth of the matter to much of the cities population. Then I have to figure out who those ruins belong too, how old they are, things like that, but, much of that can wait. I at least know that the city will be founded on top of some old/ancient ruins.

I also need to figure out what kind of turmoil the city may have gone through over the years. Has the government ever been overthrown? Has it ever been involved in a war of some kind? Has it ever suffered economic hardships despite being a trade city? Have droughts, plagues, or violent weather ever been a serious problem for the city? Have criminal organizations helped shape the city in any way? Is there anything of racial or religious significance in the city? Was it maybe built upon a holy, or, unholy, site, dedicated to some unknown god?

I'm not sure of a lot of this stuff yet. One thing I've toyed with, at least entertained the thought of so far, has been a war with lycanthropes (were-creatures, if you will, though not limited to just werewolves, as the D&D rules support all kinds of creatures, like wererats, tigers, bears, and on, and on) that ravaged much of the region. Though, other than purely 'just because' I don't have much in the way of reasoning behind why such a war would have taken place, aside from the war was actually more like a plague that just tore its way through the populations. So, I could put it as more that it started as a plague that spread across the region that turned into some group of the population using their newfound power to try and start a war. Either way, lycanthropes would still be relatively rare in the current day of the city, but it gives me an excuse to explain in shifters (which are sort of bestial humans descended from lycanthropes that take on more animal traits and appearances, but aren't true lycanthropes either) as being something of a more common race in the setting. Not that many shifters would live within the city, may just live 'around' the city, but, still, I sort of like this idea so far, so, I may run with some version of it. Though I'd be curious to hear some feedback on the matter.

With that said, heck, I'd be happy to hear some feedback on this blog all together. Should I keep it up? Should I use this blog to help me keep working on my D&D campaign? Is it an interesting behind the scenes look at what all has to go into actually creating a pen and paper campaign/setting? Is it boring as shit and should I stop digging the hole before I'm in over my head? Do you have any useful advice or tips or just general input for helping me create this campaign setting? Let me know! Though I've already given some thought to looking around online for already made city maps and that kind of stuff, but, for the most part I think I'd like to come up with as much as I can on my own first before going down that path (though we'll see how I feel by the end of the week when I need to have everything done...)

At the very least I'll probably have episode 2 up by tomorrow sometime, as these first several ones I need to put out pretty quickly to help me get ready for Sunday, but after I get all of this ground work established the episodes will start showing up more like on a weekly basis or something. Anyway, thanks for reading and please leave some feedback.

Edit: Episode 2 is now up! Located here! Go check it out!

Edit: Episode 3 is now up! It is located over here in this link! Go check it out!

Edit: Episode 4 is now up! Over here, in this link!