Step 1.) Get armed

Step 2.) Get trained

Step 3.) Repeat steps 1 and 2 for your entire local community

The caves are alive and have developed a taste for poor John. They yearn to feed, and their howls sound through the night like gusts of wind through the trees.

John knows the hopelessness of inevitability. Some day, they will find him. Some day, he will wake up deep in the bowels of the caves, and his cries will add to the howls of the caves on the wind.

It is a great deal of fun and tremendously addictive.

It really does, and there are always some loose dissapear into the weave over the course of a campaign, but there is a huge high from pulling years of work into a final epic encounter and conclusion.

Plus, the debrief at the end where players can ask all the questions about loot they missed and which characters were actually doppelgangers is always fun.

I recently joined a second game with a different group as a player, so I still get my individual play time. Some of my players will also likely run one shots or small adventures in the interim while I do the next campaign prep, but they are adamant that they don’t want to run any long form stories.

I can relate to that so much. Switching gears from GM to player is a real struggle for me at times.

The way the party kind of adopted the recurring mini BBEG. He was designed to be a recurring villain , showing up near the end of act 1, and was supposed to be the final boss in act two.

He had done some truly vile things to various members of the party, but apologized for them each time, spoke to them as equals, and was overall a fairly amicable person, at least if you can discount the kidnapping and torture on one players father, and the murders of another character’s entire tribe.

Late in act 2, they discovered that he was under a compulsion to serve the whims of the big bad, and I had assumed it was going to lead to a confrontation where they killed him, then went after the BBEG. Instead, they went on a whole redemption arc for the mini BBEG, found a way to break his compulsion, and went on a long quest to free him from the control of the BBEG.

It was kinda inspiring, again except for the multiple murders and other truly vile things this guy did. It was certainly not the outcome I was expecting in a campaign specifically bent to focus on moral grey areas.

I am something of an over planner, but it took me probably 40 hours to get the themes and major plot points nailed down for all three acts. Then, probably another 40 to flesh out act 1 to the point I was ready to bring the players into the sandbox.

For the first year, I was then spending about 3 hours of prep time per session to tie in all the character backgrounds and weave them into the narrative. After the first year, it was down to probably an hour of prep per session unless they were about to transition between acts, or a major character story was happening.

This was my immediate thought.

*this is not a medical diagnosis and the person posting this recommends seeking the opinion of a medical professional.

I agree, and I once dated a cosmetologist.

Let’s be honest, “signals” mean exactly two things. Jack and shit. A viable progressive is just not gonna appear on thoughts and prayers because someone signals hard enough. The only way to move the needle is by choosing the viable party that doesn’t actively campaign on the notion of eradicating “vermin”.

In a functional society, we would have options like ranked choice, but functional is not a great word to explain the current situation in the U.S. So you bite the bullet, and make the less evil choice. Then you do it over and over again until the party that is actively trying to destroy democracy no longer exists, and you can potentially make effective voting reform.

There are two ways to fix this, slowly with every election over potentially decades, or quickly. And doing it quickly almost certainly involves people in the streets and ugliness on a scale you really cannot comprehend. But no amount of “signaling” is gonna work because honestly close to half the electorate just doesn’t fucking care.