Week Off Recap

I was off this past week from my day job and as a result, I was able to squeeze in some gaming related activity. 

Most of the gaming was centered around a mega-dungeon campaign I've been running for my son, off and on, since July of 2023. His party is on their way to the regional capital to deliver a letter they discovered that hints of an invasion and at his request, he wants to see the villages and towns along the way.

As I had never intended for him to leave the tiny area I had mapped out around the dungeon originally, some time was spent generating a map (I make it sound tedious but it was fun - I used an old copy of Hexographer), identifying the villages and their names (most of them are based on towns from the Let's Game It Out YouTube channel that we used to watch religiously, but the capital is Capital City per The Simpsons), and then importantly what published modules, adventures, encounters, etc. I would put in or near each stop along the route.

His first side-quest was fighting a devil his party had accidentally freed when they were but level 3 or less (they are now level 6-7 - which might sound like a lot of gain for old school play, but we have had a *lot* of sessions, since it's just him and me it's easy to get the whole group together!). He appreciated the call back - and in the very brief fight where he sent the devil back to Hell, he learned that Geryon (arch-devil) is concerned about his party rising in power. It came out in role-play and was completely unscripted, but he's super excited about it, so now I have that thread/threat I can work in now and again.

As a point of interest, I used ChatGPT to generate a 5-room "dungeon" (really wilderness encounter areas) featuring said devil, set in a swamp. With a little tweaking it ended up being a great little 2+ hour session with a satisfying story arc and interesting puzzles. I'll probably do this for some other small area encounters along the route.

The party is currently in the Tower of the Stargazer (James Raggi's module for Lamentations of the Flame Princess). He will be there a bit - although he's already found and gotten the big treasure I think (the module is not written for characters of 6th level or higher, so he had some advantages and got a boon when he passed what would be a difficult saving throw for a 1st level character, which he cashed in for the key to the puzzle protecting the treasure - I'm OK with this. At his characters' levels, the treasure amounts to a pittance towards the XP for the next level - and he still hast to get it back to the village for it to count as XP anyway and it's more than they can carry). 

He's on summer break, so we'll play on weeknights as well as weekends until school starts again.

My big miniatures accomplishment was finishing the last three Novokh Dynasty Necrons. 

The gang's all here.

This puts me at twenty-five Warhammer 40K miniatures painted this year - not earth shattering, but on pace to get everything painted before the end of the year. Up next, when I get to it, I'll probably start assembling the first Tyranids. I think they are pretty great, so I'm looking forward to it, even though I have like 23 to paint or some ridiculous number.

I got in a second game of Fire Team - Necrons lost again, and in a big way. I definitely made some tactical errors when I was controlling them. I made some notes to apply next time.

The same can be said for my Nurgle Rotters who had their second game ever, and lost, in Blitz Bowl - this time against the Reichland Reavers (humans). They are just so slow. I think I need to goal tend with most of the team, most of the time.

Other than D&D, I'm not sure when I'll get to work on anything else gaming related - I'm putting together a bunch of YouTube content for guitar (song walk throughs for Sisters of Mercy, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and similar, as well as general guitar content, etc) and I 'll need time to shoot and edit it in between day job, D&D, Lone Warrior stuff, and teaching! (Overextended? Me?)