Infinite Ideas: Building the Infinity Tower

Another great session with a great group of players! I came into this session with my loosest recap ever. I barely remembered where the game was the week before, which is totally my fault. I had the events, just not a concrete order of things. Something for me to work on. Once the group set out, they went to Taul'Khazad, the Dwarven city above the Kings' Crypt that they would be exploring. There was a brief interaction, during which I said to myself, 'You know what? 3 of 4 characters here speak Dwarfish. I need to solve this problem for right now.' With that, I threw in a Dwarven bard character to quickly cast Comprehend Languages. The wizard asked if he was a wizard (undoubtedly spellbook grinding). I gave a bard-ish explanation of the character's magic. The Dwarf-obsessed character's player asks if he is a bard, I say yes, she unloads a Bag of Holding full of ancient Dwarven texts. This is a ruined Dwarven city. They have only oral records of their people.

Introducing a new character into a game is a gradual process. Whatever else might be going on, it's important to give some time for the new character to be fully integrated into the group and feel like they have a stake in the narrative. We had a confluence of events this week where we reintroduced a character that had been missing for a couple of weeks and simultaneously introduced a new character. The result was that we had a very role-playing heavy session, which I was looking forward to and prepared for, to make sure the situation had some energy and depth. We set a few plot opportunities up, including the necromancer/wizard trying to find a place to put his animated corpses. There was also an upcoming festival that celebrated the cleric's god (Pelor) and the end of the harvest season moving into fall. The result was a really laid-back session where everyone got better acquainted and built better connections with one another. I think it's a great place to be before

The Infinity Tower crew grew in a really interesting way this week! We've had a recent cast change with one player stopping their time with us, but we've also had a new player agree to join our table for a while. It's been exciting waiting to see what they'll do. Now we know: our new player is playing a (CG) Necromancer. It's a really interesting character idea and set of motivations that I'm trying not to spoil or take ownership of, but I'm looking forward to seeing things develop. Additionally, spells. Arg. The downfall of every DM creature! I don't get to play D&D often, but when I do, I play a wizard. It doesn't mean I know the spells or expect certain things. We had a fight at the end of the session that I expected to be pretty brutal but instead turned out to just be a slog, going slowly through the hit points of a stone golem. There wasn't a lot of damage done per round but the creature couldn't damage the party. The culprit:

Some sessions are just for fun. A lot of times as a DM, I find myself with more details and ideas I want to share than I get to use. It was actually really surprising that in prepping for this session I went back 30 sessions to look at old notes, where I found LOTS of things I hadn't used! This fun, laid-back episode was a chance for two players that like role-play to have fun and take care of some business. With life circumstances coming up, we expected to have a smaller crew, so I prepped a few small scenes to give players something to do. It was almost all character and situation development for existing NPCs and circumstances. We had a big change for our group because one of our players is going to discontinue the game. We've really enjoyed her contributions but she has other things she wants to do and ways that she needs to use her time. I am SO impressed by the group in general- their attendance and energy has been stellar! 36 sessions out of (I think) 40 weeks since