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.

It’s been an unusually productive few weeks for me when it comes to blog posts and there have been some updates and social media responses, so I wanted to talk about some of those here. (this isn’t to say that I will always create a post encompassing social media replies, I think they are just especially relevant)

On the 17th I wrote a blog post comparing Game Master / Dungeon Master books across TTRPGs. There were 2 replies worth pointing out. First of all, there was a post by Shades Corvid which confirmed my assertion that Pathfinder did have the Player Core and GM Core as one book in the past, but player demand wanted them as 2 books since the combined book was so huge. Kobold Press also wanted to point out that they consider the GMG to be an optional book. We could probably quibble over the tiniest details on that point, but they aren’t entirely wrong. I would argue that Wizards of the Cost could probably say the same about their DMG. It’s really only Paizo with the history of Golarian in the GM Core that would seem to be slightly less optional for anyone who wanted to play in Golarian.

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.

The classic TTRPGs like Pathfinder and D&D (along with 5e fork Tales of the Valiant) have at least 3 main sourcebooks. (See my previous post about expanding those options) Many newer systems like Daggerheart or Cosmere have only one book that contains both player and game master sections. On the one hand, it’s nice to just have to buy one book and have everything all together - there’s often a lot of overlap in what content is for the player and what is for the GM. That said, in a previous iteration, Pathfinder had all the information in one book and people complained that the book was too massive.

I love using FoundryVTT to play TTRPGs online and I have played many game systems. Which one has the best support in FoundryVTT? Click through to watch the video and find out.

I created the video found at the end of this blog post to explore the topics of cultural appropriation, Orientalism, and a lack of Japanese creators involved in the creation of the Obojima D&D 5e campaign setting. It was inspired by a post on Bluesky which contained a link to a series of articles on the topic which I read about 2-3 months ago.