Infinite Ideas: Building the Infinity Tower

A player departure. Ending a story arc. Finding new hope. So many things happened this session! First off, Kelly (@kellydoesthings) is an awesome and passionate player. She's also super busy. She has made the decision to take some pressure off of her schedule and be an occasional player on Infinity Tower. We all wish her the best and want to see her again soon! As a DM, dealing with a player departure is a sensitive subject. We went into the session knowing that Kelly wanted an exit, so I had the goal of completing this portion of the story without making Kelly wait another week. I still wanted to tell the story of the party traveling through the Dwarven ruins but I did my best to balance. I felt like things were a little more rushed, trying to pack things in, but didn't feel that the game was greatly impacted by this. There was an interesting change-up at the beginning when Kat (Aurora) decided to use her Rod of Rulership on the party. I really didn't see that coming!...

This has been a crazy terrain month on Infinity Tower! Edit: added some pieces from Session 12 on 3/28/17. The exploration of the Dwarven ruins of Taul'Khazad has led to a lot of crafting. Some highlights: A section of the bridge crossing the city A 3d map of the city of Taul'Khazad The palace, front entrance   The palace, forecourt, altar, throne The throne room Fire near in the lower crypt (may also be bacon) Upper crypts with captive salamander Upper crypt, sarcophagus and melted door Spike trap (shows our range of minis) This was just so far in March! Next post will have some 3d printed mini pictures and thoughts.

2 things stand out from this session: player absence and the difficulties with duergar. Player absence is one of the trickiest things to handle in a game in my opinion. When a player is gone for just one session due to illness, etc, it's hard to justify why they disappear or fade into the background. In some games I have had characters pass through traps or mystical portals that eliminate them for a period of time, either by jumping them forward to a new space-time coordinate (conveniently near the party) or routing the party back to the recently missing member. I find that these absences can end up being longer than expected, which may just be the universe having a sense of humor. In this case, we had a player absent and also a prepared overlay for our stream (image that takes up the blank space outside our camera views). The solution was to have a 'stand in' for our absent player. I decided that I didn't want them removed from the game for the session. I also th...

TLDR; Power Outage is a cool RPG for kids. Go get a copy for $1! http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/199558/Power-Outage-Starter-Bundle?manufacturers_id=9813 I got a copy of Power Outage (PO) through a Twitter contest run by its creator, Bebarce el-Tayib (@bebarce). I have not yet run the game but here are some highlights that I really enjoy about it:  Highlights: 1. The game is built for kids. This is something becoming popular but Power Outage addresses games for kids in a few important ways: - it gives ideas of how to play the game with kids as young as 4 years old. When I say 'ideas' I mean that PO gives you tips to remember the difficulties you may experience running games with children in each age category. - There are also tips on how to simplify the play materials (character sheet and cards) to make the game more accessible at each age category. Throughout the rulebook PO gives you ways to deal with running games across age brackets so that younger kids can play w...

10 sessions! Wow! I feel super honored and grateful that we've come this far already. My first real reflection is that there is so much work that goes into this game that isn't mine. The players all do a great job and Scooter (@Discopreacha) is an amazing host and producer. Ambient Realms always keeps us up to date on our sounds. I just love the sounds. They are so much fun! I have a bad habit of experimenting with new sounds in the middle of a session. Someday I'll learn. Arcknight has given us a bunch of stuff to use for our games and giveaways. I hope we get to do a lot more giveaways, because we're ready for them! Also, their pawns are a lot better than other leading brands. I just need about a million more. For reasons. Every GM wants to field an army, right? :) Before this particular session, I really tried to take stock of who I am and what I believe about games. The biggest change that I noticed is that with recording our game sessions I started worrying abo...

Session 9 was fun. After Session 8, there was a lot of great positive energy. The previous sessions had been a drag on character resources and their relationships with the outside world. Things were getting a little negative. There was also no clear resolution of the adventure goal. What had been billed as an A -> B mission ended up being a total detour, so the quest-givers were never satisfied. While this was part of the original design of the story arc, I still wanted the players to have fun. Session 8 had been set up to start a recharge of PC resources and player enthusiasm. I wanted to temper (as in harden and strengthen, not diminish) that with a difficult battle. The fight at the beginning of this session was just what I hoped for. It had the appearance of an impossible fight that made the players creative and scared. It showed the PCs that they were able to handle a difficult fight without help, even with their resources (no long rest, few abilities left) stretched. To me...

This was a great session! Our biggest hangup was the technical problems that Twitch as part of Amazon was experiencing. I heard about it all day at work and it followed me to the game. Our dedicated and hard-working producer Scooter(@DiscoPreacha) spent hours working on the problem and could not connect to Twitch, but some other people had no problems at all. We did manage to stream to and record video on YouTube, so it was still a great live play session. This session was all about story and DM challenges. My story-writing is always very flexible. Many sessions I run (not this game, but others) I don't prep at all. I let players show me what they want to play. This still informs a lot of the Infinity Tower story. The major example was the riddle in the game. Not to spoil it for those who might watch, but the original riddle was intended to be solved by the party going back to Bayer's Cross and speaking to the wizard they encountered in jail. That had become a problem since...