On the Lack of Being Prolific

Short and to the point today – How do you other bloggers out there keep a constant stream of writing? I’m speaking specifically to people like Ravyn at Exchange of Realities, Greywulf at his Lair, Uncle Bear, and many many others who seem to always have something useful to say?

Recently I had a wedding to attend and perform at, and the following week I injured by back and was out of commission for several days. It gave me plenty of time to come up with some great ideas for upcoming articles, but now I’m having inspirational problems with putting the pen to paper (so to speak). How do you keep it going? What do you do to get inspired? With almost twenty half-written articles just waiting for me to get off my butt and finish, I could use a swift kick, if you know what I mean…

 

Thaelavan, the Hell Shark

In response to Uncle Bear’s“Dire Shark Week” currently taking place, I decided to up the ante a bit and go with something a little more dire than “dire” (not to mention, this is not poetry, as he was looking for on the first day, but hey, I’m no poet). I should first say that the entirety of Thaelavan, the Hell Shark, was inspired by the artwork below, originally found on the WotC Art boards. I do not know the name of the original artist, but his original name for the piece was “hell-squid-shark,” and he also had several other pieces that I have on my computer called, “Hellish_Aspect_of_Sekolah,” “Hellish_Hord_of_Sekolah,” and “Hellish_Deep_Cursed,” (he had a fascination with “hellish”) all of which were drawn in a similar style. If anyone knows this artist’s name, or his web site, I would like to place a link to it, because he does quite fantastic work. With that aside, I would like to present to you:

Thaelavan, the Hell Shark

Thaelavan is one of the duragni in Memory Fading, a group of creatures who were brought into the world of Ord eons ago by powerful sorcerers, but could never be controlled. Alongside Thaelavan came the duragni Imetraz, a giant arachnid with claw-like pincers, Cirooz, a giant flying serpent with a hundred human hands, and Beorkul, a castle-sized bear-like monstrosity with eight legs and spider-like mandibles. Of these, only Thaelavan has ever been confronted in any sort of battle. During the White Wars just thirty years ago, Thaelavan was spotted by Khandians in the Sapphire Sea several times destroying ships, and was fought by several Khandian channelers before retreating to its watery depths.

Thaelavan is fully three hundred feet long from the tip of its snout to the extended length of its man-eating tentacles. Each of the tentacles is as large around as a small house, and all flay viciously whenever the behemoth is in battle. Its massive maw can consume small boats in a split second, and its powerful jaws can break battleships in half as though they were kindling. During one of the battles in the White Wars, the creature was literally seen jumping from the water to capture a massive boat in its mouth, and taking the entire ship down beneath the sea with it, causing a surge of water that capsized four other ships.

None know the intelligence or true origin of the beast, but Khandians were able to figure out what caused the beast enough pain to retreat – intense heat. Fireballs thrown by the wizards did some damage, but it was when the combined might of nine channelers were able to harness a beam of concentrated energy from the sun that the beast, blistering and roaring with rage, swam beneath the depths and did not arise again during the war. Scholars are certain the creature is not dead, and will rise again someday. In fact, an entire Hithan ship went missing last year, and the blame is being put at Thaelavan’s mouth.

 

The Giant TICK

The Horror! Could anything be worse than a combination of arachnid and vampire? How about an arachnid/vampire amalgamation the size of a large dog?? I submit that literally nothing could be more terrible, and I dare you prove me wrong.

This post was inspired by a recent post at Jeff’s Gameblog, in which Jeff found an old encounter sheet where a GM had scratched off the creatures on the sheet and provided his own (See the encounter sheet and blog here). There were a few comical entries, such as the random chicken on dungeon level 1, and the purple pigs on level two, but horrifyingly, on level three, one has an 8.5% chance (1 out of 12) of running into a “Giant Tick.” If you are not suitably terrified yet, allow me to continue. Also worth mentioning, Mike Mearls was inspired as well and wrote up some 4E Stats on a Giant Tick. Definitely worth reading that to use in your game.

What scares human beings more than anything? I submit, that often (but not always), it is the sense of alien and unknown. Unknown in the sense of non-mammalian is what I’m speaking of. Why do dogs, cows, horses, pigs, and other such four-legged creatures not terrify us as human beings? It’s because of their reasonable similarities to us as humans. They have four limbs (just like us), are warm-blooded, and have been proven to be domesticable (sometimes). Sure, we get worried when we see a dog foaming at the lips, a horse going crazy and bucking all around, or a giant jaguar staring us in the eyes (what, that’s never happened to you?), but it’s worry based around our uncertainty and the animals’ unpredictability. It’s the logical worry that “this creature may hurt us if we’re not careful and sensible in our next actions.” Why then, knowing that it can’t possibly hurt us, do humans run screaming at granddaddy long-legs creeping up our arms, or get literal shivers of despair when looking into the cold, calculating (and presumably malicious?) eyes of a giant octopus at the local aquarium? Why do horror authors use arachnids, cephalopods, and even reptiles and bivalves to terrify us in their stories? It’s because these creatures are inherently and obviously not like us. There are at least 1 (starfish), but in the upwards of hundreds (millipedes and some jellyfish) of extra appendages that we don’t know what they do! Combine that with the knowledge that the brains within these creatures (large or small) thinks and rationalizes in no way that we can comprehend as humans, and it leads to some terrifying perceptions.

An arachnid is bad enough, but an arachnid that drinks blood? Is there any other form of behavior that can be more dehumanizing to us? Blood is our life force, and in many mythologies, it is literally the physical manifestation of our soul. Without it, we simply cannot survive. You can take our limbs, you can even take some of our organs, but if you take our blood, we die. That’s it. Game over. Vampires have taken a much different role in our culture in recent years – we have a fascination with their thoughts, with their evil agendas, with their goth parties, but it’s because we know that, even as undead creatures of unadulterated evil, they still rationalize. They still think. Hell, in some modern interpretations, they don’t even have to be evil. Sometimes their rewards are not based on the pure sustenance of that which would kill us – sometimes they want money, fame, power, and all the other things that humans are greedy for. Vampires also have weaknesses. If a vampire is coming at you, you can throw up a silver cross, toss some garlic over your shoulder, run across a moving body of water, or just get inside a house in which they’re not invited, and you’re safe! All those failing, you may could at least convince said vampire that your friend’s blood is much tastier than yours, giving yourself an opportunity to escape while the vampire hunts down poor Billy. I challenge you to bandy words with a tick. I challenge you to come up with any way to rationalize what a tick is doing, other than your blood sustains it, and it’ll be damned if it’s going to die without getting a good bite in on you first.

Now, taking that cold, calculating, alien rationalizing arachnid that craves for nothing so much as your very essence, and multiply its size to something that you can’t just stomp on or pinch between your fingers. A tick the size of a rottweiler, eight legs scrambling up the frakkin walls, pinchers snapping, the blood of its last victim still dripping from its mouth. A tick that still has the mind of an insect, has no ambitions of power and glory with which it can be dissuaded, and that is hungry for your blood. Man, I’ve got to stop now before…

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Minutes after posting this entry, Ishmayl was found on the ground in his office in a fetal position, sucking his thumb. We were advised to warn you that everything he spoke of in this article is fictional – we The People do not acknowledge the existence of vampires, reasoning cephalopods, or giant ticks. Thank you.

 

Giving the Players a Reason to Enjoy the Campaign

Over at the Campaign Builders’ Guild, a regular recurring discussion is on the very nature of why we build campaigns, and what is in it for us as builders. The answers vary – it is an art form that we are perfecting, it is a way to write down ideas without pretending to be writing a novel, it is a way to write down ideas for a novel, it is for an ongoing (or soon-to-be going) campaign, it is for publishing and making money, yadda, yadda, yadda. However, a question that seems very rarely (if ever) to be answered is “what is in it for the players?” This question presumes, of course, that the campaign you are building is for a game that is actually being played.

And really, that shouldn’t be that difficult a question to answer, right? I mean, what do players want other than loot, high levels, and a vague sense of accomplishment? They never care about all the ridiculous amounts of work you’ve put into your setting, and those tiny details that you believe makes your setting unique often get trampled on while the players are trying to find the next bard handing out quests. How do you get the players to care about the life blood of your imagination and creativity?

In the Memory Fading campaign I recently began with three friends, I did something I have never done before as the players were creating their characters. Taking cues from my brother in Asheville, who just had a phenomenally successful campaign, the four of us got together over coffee and worked together to hash out the characters’ backgrounds, motivations, and general purpose. When I say “got together,” I mean it. Each player (with me watching) created his character in terms of stats, feats, skills, abilities, and equipment. Then I had a small 10-question form that each player answered about his character.

1. Where was your character born?
2. Who are your character’s parents?
3. What were your character’s parents’ professions?
4. Are the parents still alive?
5. Where do they currently live?
6. Does your character have any other immediate living family?
7. Why does your character adventure? (money, power, knowledge, etc)
8. How does your character hope to accomplish his goals?
9. Give the name, location, and profession of three allies/friends/informants that your character has met that he still has contact with.
10. Give the name, last known location, and motivations of one person who your character is at odds with/is enemies with/has fought against but still lives.

You can probably see where I’m going with this, but I wasn’t quite done with it at this point. After each player finished filling out this little information sheet, without me looking at them, they passed the sheet to their immediate left, thus giving this knowledge to another player. Then, I gave each of them a second, shorter questionnaire.

• Using the answer to question #9, give an explanation for why one of the three NPCs may have some sort of grudge against the player, or why one of the three NPCs may currently be seeking out the player.
• Using the answer to question #10, give the current location of this NPC (it may be the last known location), and what this NPC has been up to for the last three months.
• Give one reason your character may have heard of or has reason to adventure with the character you are writing about.

Then, after these were done (and the players wrote a great amount of detail for me on these), I collected these second questionnaires (to be my personal secrets), each player passed the character information sheet to their left one more time, and I gave them a last sheet to fill out.

• Using the answers to questions #7 and #8, as well as the info sheet I gave you on Ordanth, please write the reason that this character has made his way to Ordanth, and how he plans on using this location to meet his goals.
• Explain how your character first met this character, under what circumstances, and how long the two characters have known each other (even as just acquaintances).

This particular sheet got passed back to the original player, along with his character’s information sheet, so that it would be in his knowledge.

This process, which took about 1.5 hours, served a three-fold purpose. Firstly, it allowed the players to each have a hand in their group’s history, giving them more of a “stake” in the group’s progress. Secondly, it gave them a vested interest in the setting, the locales, and the NPCs of the area. Finally, it gave me potential story lines to work with for the setting in such a way that would (hopefully) always make the games interesting for each player. With the characters having the connections that they have with each other, as well as family and NPCs in the area, it creates a network that I can exploit as a GM to fully delve into the world with these characters.

How have you as a GM gone out of your way to really get the players – and characters, let’s not forget them – interested in the campaign that you have created?