A month ago I posted about how TTRPG editions don’t truly die. Then I went down a Matt Coleville rabbit hole and discovered this video. I think it adds a lot of historical context to what I was writing about as a TTRPG newbie.

Matt brings a lot to the table: his great conversational style, his history with the game, his reasonable opinions. I think the fact that he’s seen this happen a few times before gives the best perspective on what it means for new D&D editions to arise.

Gameplay

Grif the Kobold from the Keeper of the Keys meets the adventures as they cross a bridge into The Smithy. He expresses happiness that they found their way to The Smithy after the attack. They give him a summary of what they did. Eventually Griff tells them he will take them to meet Kontak Tekar (head kobold mechanist of the Keepers of the Keys) to repair Ariana’s key.

As they walk around they see steam and multicolored smoke bellowing out of various workshops. They head towards the hill at the middle of the city where the Citadel of the Keys is situated. As they walk to the citadel they see mechadron caravans and celestials bargaining with fey over goods.

Gameplay

The adventurers had landed on a ship when they fell out of a portal. Captain Catapult interrogated them about where they came from and what they wanted to do. The team is able to convince him that they are from another world and need help getting back. Captain Catapult knows a powerful priest who has happened to have given him a letter to summon his friends (meta: the characters from the Dungeon in a Box campaign). The captain says she doesn’t know what they look like, only their reputation so he gives them the letter and sails them to the town of Bloom.

Gameplay

Now that Ariana has her parents’ key, the team returns to Rava’s temple and is escorted to the high priestess’ chambers. The high priestess introduces them to Griff the mechanist who examines the key. Unfortunately the key is spent, but the team is in luck as he explains he just made a new key to The Smithy yesterday. Griff explains that he is in a secretive organization called the Keeper of the Keys which is allied with the church of Rava. He puts his new key itno the air to open a portal.

The Adventure

Having resolved to take on the hill giant, the team took the wagon filled with food and started off along with Martha.

On the way to the giant the group found some traps that were too small to have been set by the giant. The adventurers went into a clearing and found a rock that had wolf fur on it. Hendrian investigated a tree and found a door in the tree. Upon opening the door, Hendrian found a preserved rabbit in the tree.

The Adventure

Since the team had been hired to look into the goblin situation in Trombei, they decided to meet up at the Horse’s Tails Tavern near The Brawls. As the team was eating a wizard walked in with a fire lizard on its shoulder. Scrabble invited him to join their group and they introduced each other.

As the team was talking to Unthar, the wizard, the captain of the guard came walking in with a Ravenfolk, Rikka the postmaster. Rikka had a job for the team. Rikka needed the mail to be delivered to Fern Wallow and their last mail carrier did not return. Rikka agreed to pay 5 silver each plus a bonus if the team found out what happened to the last mail carrier.

The Adventure

The team traveled to the Trombie region. While there, Scrabble tried to cultivate contacts in Trombei (meta: as a downtime activity). Scrabble cultivated a contact with someone in the streetsweeper’s guild in Trombei.

The team then went and stayed in Ponte Norde just north of Trombei. They were hired by the city guards to stop a weird cart that was going round and round through the square. The adventurers noticed dead animals and Scrabble said it reminded them of when they dealt with goblins before (meta: session 01).

The Adventure

Armed with knowledge of where the trinkets came from, the adventurers went to the cave to explore and investigate. As they looked around, they saw that one direction seemed to lead to spiders. Since Ghada was afraid of spiders, they went south.

There they found an underground lake and Scrabble used his unseen servant magic to bring a boat from the middle of the lake to the shore where the adventurers were waiting.

Continuing my recent spate of posts documenting my evolving thoughts on TTRPGs as I learn more about the hobby, I wanted to share my thoughts on people playing older releases of TTRPGs. As I’ve mentioned this week (and previously) I started off with D&D 5e 2014. For the beginning of my time in fandom all I ever heard was that a lot of the greybeards thought that D&D 3.5e was the last good edition and either kept playing that or moved on to Pathfinder 1e (which was based on it and has been nicknamed D&D 3.75). Tainted by thinking about this in the same way as software, I thought this was like people who were still using Windows 95 or MS Office 2003 because they refused to learn the latest interface and hated dealing with change.