Campaign Log: We're in it for the Money

[Guildenstern]

Hey folks, Guildenstern here. While I normally spend most of my time over in the Gaming(Other) forum posting and keeping up with a few Let's (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=194841) Plays (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=228338), I am of course also a rather large D&D fan (I seriously doubt I'd be using these forums otherwise). So with that in mind, I'm going to try a slight variation on my usual Let's Play formula: a campaign log.

I've read a few of these here and on other sites and I've gotten a real kick out of some of the stuff adventuring groups can get into. So with that idea in mind, I set out to start running a semester-long campaign involving a group of four players with myself in the GM's seat. While I have no idea how much interest people might have in this, I figured I'd give it a go and post the whole thing online anyway. We've been playing for a few months now and I've started writing out and updating the logs for each adventure on my blog/website thing. The system we're using is D20 Modern with the campaign background using the Planescape setting from classic D&D. You can find more details in the links provided below.

I'll start posting links here with updates every Thursday and encourage the use of these forums for discussion and suggestion; I'm still a fairly novice GM and I'm sure some of the more experienced folks out there could have more than a few tips on hand for me.

At any rate, enjoy the adventure: we've certainly had fun playing it.

The Setting (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/03/tales-from-tabletop-setting.html)

The Cast (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/04/tales-from-tabletop-cast.html)

Adventure 1: The Wild Ones (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/04/were-in-it-for-money-wild-ones.html)

Adventure 2: Jumpin' Jack Flash (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/04/were-in-it-for-money-jumpin-jack-flash.html)

Adventure 3: Dog Soldiers (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/04/were-in-it-for-money-dog-soldiers.html#more)

Adventure 4: Do Androids Dream of Electric Dire Sheep? (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/05/were-in-it-for-money-do-androids-dream.html#more)

Adventure 5: Yippee-ki-yay (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/05/die-hard-in-spaaaace.html)

Adventure 6: Holiday of the Dead (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/06/were-in-it-for-money-holiday-of-dead.html)

Adventure 7: Through the Fire and Flames (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/07/were-in-it-for-money-through-fire-and.html)

Adventure 8: The Shawshank Damnation (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/07/were-in-it-for-money-shawshank.html)

Adventure 9: Savant Syndrome Pt. I (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/07/were-in-it-for-money-savant-syndrome.html)

Adventure 10: Savant Syndrome Pt. II (http://www.nerdwatchshow.blogspot.com/2012/08/were-in-it-for-money-savant-syndrome-pt.html)

[Kol Korran]

It's an interesting twist to Put Earth in contact with Sigil.

i'm curious about the classes: what does Fast/ Tough/ Smart hero classes mean? which system is this being played in?

[Guildenstern]

We're using the D20 Modern system, which was released by Wizards in 2002. Most of the rules are the same as 3.5 D&D, but with a few changes and additions made here and there to adjust to the modern setting (vehicular combat rules, rules about using explosive weaponry, computer hacking, etc.).

The character classes are initially more generic to accommodate the highly-adaptable nature of the game system. Everybody starts in one of six basic classes (fast, strong, tough, smart, charismatic, and dedicated) and from there they can branch out into specific advanced classes that provide more specific benefits. Each source book will generally provide more advanced classes to fit a certain setting (i.e. D20 Future offers a "xenophile" advanced class while Urban Arcana quite literally allows you to become a Technomage.) We started at second level so everybody begins in one of the more generic classes, but pretty soon people start to branch out and fill more specific roles by acquiring class-specific abilities.

[fergo]

Looks interesting :smallbiggrin:. You seem to have a knack for storytelling, which I'm sure your players will appreciate.

[Guildenstern]

Adventure 1 (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/04/were-in-it-for-money-wild-ones.html) has now been posted.

Now, our game sessions tend to last for at least six hours so the logs themselves are fairly long. If anyone doesn't want to wade through that much text at once I can split up future adventures into smaller segments and maybe post on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule. Just let me know.

[Kol Korran]

just finished reading the first session.

i like the way you write, quite humorous and nicely descriptive.
i don't quite feel the characters yet (other than Max and Norm a bit) but that might be due to the first session and all that.

it sounds SOOOO much like my shadowrun games, only less high tech, and slightly more fantasy setting. putting it in Sigil looks brilliant!

You know it's D20 when the players are acting like murdering hobbos. :smallamused:

loved the player's idea of inciting a gang war. interesting way of doing things. in short- i'll be looking forward to read more of this. :smallwink:

[Guildenstern]

i like the way you write, quite humorous and nicely descriptive.

Well, thank you kindly.


i don't quite feel the characters yet (other than Max and Norm a bit) but that might be due to the first session and all that.

Yeah, those two are probably the most expressive roleplayers at the table. Max (who's name changes every week, so that might get kinda confusing) wrote up a pretty elaborate backstory that'll come into play eventually and Norm likes to design all of his D&D characters around a central quirk and then build outward from there. The other two don't go quite as in-depth in regards to consistent character and focus more on in-the-moment response at the table. So everybody gets their moments, just in different ways.


it sounds SOOOO much like my shadowrun games, only less high tech, and slightly more fantasy setting. putting it in Sigil looks brilliant!

I'm sure if I had even a little bit of experience with Shadowrun I'd be drawing from it as a more direct influence. As it is, the individual sessions tend to draw from movies, TV, and the like while the campaign setting in general is a little more ad-hoc. I just like the d20 modern/future aspect blended with traditional D&D so I tend to use it a lot (my last campaign was a similar Urban Arcana game set during World War II). But my biggest inspiration for the setting was quite simply that I played Planescape: Torment over the summer and absolutely loved it. The game won't stick to Sigil religiously as that's what I love about Planescape: you can go virtually anywhere. So expect to see a lot of different locales over the course of this.


You know it's D20 when the players are acting like murdering hobbos. :smallamused:

No, that's just how these guys operate anyway, trust me. I tried to run a game once before that cast them as the traditional chaotic good party out to help folks and it just flat out didn't work: they didn't have enough motivation to complete the quest hooks. I've learned a bit since then.


loved the player's idea of inciting a gang war. interesting way of doing things. in short- i'll be looking forward to read more of this. :smallwink:

They tend to get somewhat... creative with their problem solving. It's sometimes difficult to keep on top of, but letting them exercise that ingenuity is part of the fun, to be sure.

[PhallicWarrior]

I'd love to see what would happen if you gave your players the Mutants & Masterminds corebook and told them to go nuts. So many possibilities; I've never managed to run a campaign without one of my players coming up with something unbalanced and campaign destroying. It's great fun, though.

[PhallicWarrior]

EDIT: Ooops. Double post.

[Guildenstern]

I'd love to see what would happen if you gave your players the Mutants & Masterminds corebook and told them to go nuts. So many possibilities; I've never managed to run a campaign without one of my players coming up with something unbalanced and campaign destroying. It's great fun, though.

I assure you, it's very, very possible to break that game like fine china dropped from orbit. I once played in a game that switched GMs halfway through and the previous GM (the one who had all the sourcebooks) joined us as a player. He promptly proceeded to exploit every cheese-able ability imaginable and ended up stronger than our muscle man, more laser-blasty than our psychic, and faster than our speedster.

We beat the big bad for the session by having Supercheese pick up an entire prison block and throw it at his head.

Then we flew to the Himalayas and had him carve a team hideout into the rock with his bare hands... in the shape of Patrick Stewart's face.

[Guildenstern]

Adventure 2 (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/04/were-in-it-for-money-jumpin-jack-flash.html) is now up.

[Guildenstern]

So, needless to say, Adventure 3 is gonna be a little late. I've been working with university stuff all week and haven't had time to write up an entry... or sleep, for that matter. I'll try and punch a hole in my schedule and have it up as soon as possible.

[Edog]

This sounds like a pretty cool game. Just picturing a bugbear in a designer suit made me laugh. Then I learned he was called Slim...

Keep up the good work!

[Guildenstern]

Hey folks, once again, sorry about skipping a week but things have been rapidly accelerating towards finals over here and I haven't had a lot of time on my hands to write much of anything (besides a stack of history papers).

But Adventure 3 (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/04/were-in-it-for-money-dog-soldiers.html#more) is now posted for those of you that haven't abandoned ship during the break.

[Guildenstern]

Adventure 4 (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/05/were-in-it-for-money-do-androids-dream.html#more) is now up, and holy crap it's actually on time! Hopefully this will set the trend from now on.

[Guildenstern]

Hopefully this will set the trend from now on.

Well, clearly that didn't work out. Sorry, this week's update took a bit longer to complete than I expected (the whole thing ended up being about 20 pages within the word document) and combined with the semester transition I had a lot on my plate. I'll also be in the process of moving over the next week or so, but hopefully I'll be able to get some writing done.

Anyway, sorry to keep you waiting, but here's Adventure 5 (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/05/die-hard-in-spaaaace.html). As I said, it's a long one so be prepared to crawl through a lot of text. That said, my players seemed to enjoy this session the most out of all the ones we'd done previously (and perhaps since) so take that as you will.

[DabblerWizard]

Guildenstern, thanks so much for posting your campaign journal. The adventure, and your ability to convey events from that adventure, are both exciting and well done!

[Guildenstern]

Guildenstern, thanks so much for posting your campaign journal. The adventure, and your ability to convey events from that adventure, are both exciting and well done!

Well, thank you kindly. I've always liked reading about other people's adventures so I figured I'd throw ours into the pot. Glad to know there's folks enjoying it.

[Guildenstern]

Hey all, sorry I kinda dropped off the face of the earth for a while there. A heavier batch of work than I anticipated came my way, I had a few things to work out for an intern position I'll be starting in about a week, and I've been helping a friend work out a Mass Effect D20 conversion for initial playtesting (anyone who's interested can find more information on that project here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=245546)), so I've been a little swamped as of late.

So despite my very (very) late return, I have nonetheless returned. And I come bearing Adventure 6 (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/06/were-in-it-for-money-holiday-of-dead.html). For those of you still interested in checking up on the antics of the oh-so-wily Gillespie and Haggard Active Consulting Agency, I apologize for the late entry but hope you'll enjoy what we have for you. We're a little over halfway done with the campaign at this point, so there's still a few more adventures to come.

[Guildenstern]

Yikes, I keep this pace up and I'm gonna be accused of thread necromancy.

Once again, sorry for the delays, but the seventh adventure (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/07/were-in-it-for-money-through-fire-and.html) is now up on the site, in which our intrepid heroes (protagonists? players.) journey to another exotic locale on the Great Wheel of the planes.

And probably try to kill most of its inhabitants.

[Guildenstern]

Well, I managed to post the adventure on time, but I forgot to update the thread to actually tell you about it.

This is what happens when you work 14 hour days.

So despite my senility, here's adventure 8. (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/07/were-in-it-for-money-shawshank.html)

Spoiler alert: the players do something morally questionable.

EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that parts of my posts have started showing random bits of white highlighting in them, making text difficult to read or otherwise annoying. It seems that my blog hosting client has been glitching out and doing this lately and there isn't a fix out yet. I can fix it manually by deleting the corresponding html tags for the highlighting, but it'll take some time as there's roughly 200 instances of this bug in each post. Sorry for the annoyance and hopefully they'll roll out a fix for this soon.

[Guildenstern]

I'm getting on this a bit earlier today as tonight marks both the premiere of the Dark Knight Rises and my 21st birthday. So in order to ensure that this thread gets updated at all I'm posting from work a bit earlier than usual.

We're accelerating towards the end of our 10-part series, and today's adventure (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/07/were-in-it-for-money-savant-syndrome.html) marks the penultimate entry and the beginning of a two-part "episode" that will run up through our grand finale.

Be forewarned, things get a bit crazy.

[Axinian]

That's... certainly an interesting situation. I don't know if I would've shifted the entire party's alignment to evil. Namely, I think Gorak deserved to stay neutral given his reaction to everything. I wasn't there though, so I obviously don't have all the details.

[Guildenstern]

No, that's a good point and I should have elaborated more. Gorak actually did remain neutral with even a slight push towards good seeing as he tried to fix everything. His unofficial catch phrase for the night was "I was just trying to do the right thing".

And I'll even fully confess to not being the best GM in this instance (remember, this is my first continuing game I've ever run). While I think there's a fair amount of justification for them shifting alignment as the murder of an unarmed archaeologist who as far as they knew was just trying to uncover some history is a pretty darn big deal, especially when compiled with some of their previous actions. But even so, I may have been a bit hasty in my declaration since I was getting a little tired of the "let's kill people we don't agree with" approach. That's on me. Luckily it didn't really change anything from a functional perspective as they pretty much continued along like they had been anyway.

[Axinian]

Actually I think you handled it rather well, all things considered. That could have easily turned into an OOC conflict as well as an IC one.

[Guildenstern]

Eh, we never really escalated to that level. We've got a pretty darn good group of players and they know how to keep things in-character and how to chill for a minute when it's time to order pizza. So in a weird way, despite acting with rather chaotic murderous intent you have to commend them on their civility.

D&D is a weird game, man.

[DabblerWizard]

Eh, we never really escalated to that level. We've got a pretty darn good group of players and they know how to keep things in-character and how to chill for a minute when it's time to order pizza. So in a weird way, despite acting with rather chaotic murderous intent you have to commend them on their civility.

D&D is a weird game, man.

Your alignment decision makes sense, Guildenstern. In fact, I might have shifted the PCs' alignments sooner.

I look forward to reading the last segment of the story.

[Guildenstern]

Alright guys, while I've already missed one deadline so close to the end, I figure that I'd better step in and give you an update.

The update is I'm going to miss another deadline.

I hate leaving these long stretches between posts, especially now at the end of the whole thing, but I'm in the middle of a pretty serious crunch at work and need to get a pitch finished for a client by next Wednesday. As such, virtually all of my time is dedicated to this project and that which is leftover goes toward trying to catch some sleep. It might be another two weeks before I find the time to devote to writing, so I apologize again for the delays but work has to come first right now.

Rest assured, though, I'm not done here yet and the final chapter in our little saga will come to a close... soon-ish. Thank you all for your patience as I continue to bumble my way through this log in roughly three times the amount of time it should have taken a regular person.

[only1doug]

Thanks for the update, I hope work goes well.

When you find time to finish the story I'd love to know how it all turned out.

[Guildenstern]

Well folks, this is it: the last adventure. The semester ended shortly after this game and several of our players graduated so this is well and truly the final chapter of the Gillespie and Haggard Active Consulting Agency. Once again, it's a long one, and it comes with all the balls-out craziness that accompanies a newly evil party in what they know to be their last session of a campaign. So with that said, I give you the grand finale: Savant Syndrome: Pt. II (http://www.nerdwatchshow.com/2012/08/were-in-it-for-money-savant-syndrome-pt.html)

I'd like to apologize again for the late nature of this final entry, but as I stated earlier, work had me swamped and I didn't have time to do much of anything. For those of you that have stuck around through all of my late postings, excuses, and experimental musings: thank you. It's taken a while to get here, but I appreciate everyone's continued interest in the campaign and I've enjoyed being able to tell the story here.

By all means, if anyone still has any further questions or comments for me or the other players, continue to ask them and we'll see if we can accommodate. I'll also be starting up another game in a few days, this time as a player and I'd be curious to see if anyone would want to see another campaign log presented from the perspective of one not behind the GM screen. I'll admit, these logs have really taken it out of me (there's over 200 pages, all told in this entire campaign) but if the interest is there to see another one, then I'd certainly consider obliging.

Anyway, it's been fun guys, and I hope you've enjoyed this little show that we've put on for you here. Thanks for reading.

[Ironlion45]

Read the start of Adventure 1, I've got to tell you for a few moments I was distinctly reminded of reading some of the latter Discworld novels.

You have a knack for story telling.

[Guildenstern]

Read the start of Adventure 1, I've got to tell you for a few moments I was distinctly reminded of reading some of the latter Discworld novels.

That might be one of the greatest compliments I've ever received. Thank you, sir.

[Cheers]

Just finished reading the campaign, and I loved it greatly.
Congratulations to you and your players for an amazing story.

And thanks for sharing it.