The Story

Time elapsed so far in campaign at start of this adventure: 30 days

Summary

During the downtime weeks Sam and Valery worked in the shop and were able to sell the Geode and the fish.

Still Unsold

• Mosquito in Amber
• Crab Meat
• Ashes of Corrupted Pixie

From the money made so far, Valery sent back 15 GP to her parents.

I backed the Kobold Press Kickstarter for the Player’s Guide 2 as well as a few add-on items. I created this video to talk about them.

Topics & Links:

• Player’s Guide 2
• Kobold Press Character Journal
• 1985 Games DM Journal Set
• 1985 Games Hero Journal Set
• Beadle and Grimm’s Player’s Journal
• Bag of Luck Tokens - Not on the store as of the time I’m writing this

Story

The party locks all the doors and chances a long rest. The group went into the westmost door after Flint picked the lock. Within the room were a bunch of dead bodies that look drained of all life with looks of horror on their faces. They also look like they’ve been frozen for a long time.

The party begins moving bodies to get up the stairs.

Scrabble asks Miralou if there are customs we should follow with the bodies. They don’t have enough scrub to burn the bodies in a funeral pyre but perhaps later they can deal with them. Miralou can say a prayer over them, but that won’t prevent them from being raised.

The Story

Time elapsed so far in campaign at start of this adventure: 15 days

Summary

In the 2 weeks that elapsed since last time Beatrice found out what her new ring does. (It protects her from mind control AND it stores her soul if she dies) She also got some pricing for the items she nicked from the house they were investigating:

Ok, now it’s time to see what Valery and her new companions do after their first fight together. They agreed to join up and they found a quest on the quest board. Will things go according to plan for these newbies?

The Story

Split into 3 audio files this time because I had to take a few breaks to deal with some bread I was baking. The audio is much better. I have to think about what I might do to get it that extra mile over.

2025 was the year I leveled up my TTRPG skills (no pun intended). It started off with my participation in New Game Master Month in February. Kobold Press was a sponsor and had a coupon for the core books so I moved off the free rules and onto the main, published rules. I consumed lots of TTRPG content on YouTube, reddit, and enworld - lots of it focused on being a better GM or a more creative GM. This may have come out already if I published the other end of year blog posts before this one, but TTRPGs ended up eating up a lot of free time and reducing the time I spent on reading, video games, and programming as the year progressed.

We have begun our second Tales of the Valiant home game campaign. Since everyone was trying out new classes they’d never played before, I decided to do a Session 0 scenario (something I learned about in the last few months). That is, “everyone” knows about session 0 to set expectations, see how the characters know each other, etc - but this is using session 0 as a way to try out the characters and be able to change things up without penalty.

Sam wanted to draw me a picture of Scrabble, my kobold bard from The Pyros and The Flying Harpy campaigns.

Story

Continuing on from last time…

Ghada comes into the Tavern the next morning as Treb and Scrabble are having breakfast. Recognizing his old adventuring partner, Scrabble says “hi” and introduces Treb to Ghada. Aghell, a giantkin (that’s the ToV term - goliath in D&D) walks in, stubs his toe and everyone in the bar notices him, but as he goes to the bar to get a drink, Ghada, Treb, and Scrabble play a game of dice rather than interacting.

For people who are new to TTRPGs (especially d20 games like D&D, Pathfinder, or Tales of the Valiant), it’s hard to know how long a story, or campaign, should be. Newbies only have two examples: Actual Plays on YouTube and Twitch or the campaign books published by Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and Kobold Press. Campaigns published for 5e tend to be (in my experience) 8-12 adventures long. The time required for any given tale to finish a campaign depends on how long each session is. (At the fastest - one session per adventure you’re looking at about a year to finish the campaign) Alternatively, looking to Critical Role as an example finds the gang playing campaigns (Vox Machina, Mighty Nein, Bells Hells) that are years long each. This is why I subtitled the post “A Different Kind of Mercer Effect” (in reference to the original Mercer effect - where inexperienced GMs try to mimic his voices, accents, and GM style) I do know that there are other campaigns that go for a long time - including the GRRM campaign that led to Wild Cards, but most new TTRPG players and GMs will have more of a chance of having come to the game after having seen Critical Role vs those other examples.