Snowflake Challenge #8

[cinefarious]

Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying)


I'm currently participating in candyheartsex. It's past nominations and assignments, but if anyone is looking to write treats for their favorite fandoms, it's still early enough to jump in and have a good time.

Other than that, the only proper project I'm working on is my dnd campaign. We've spent the last five sessions in one desert city and it's surrounding magical wilderness, but I've got three major cities to work on from here, and I'm looking forward to filling them with intriguing characters and side stories. Especially given one has a big crime boss to deal with. It promises to be a high stakes and fun part of their journey.

Comments

[nonesensed]

Always great to see active fandom exchanges! 💗

Yay for cool D&D cities and adventures in the wilderness both 😃 I'm curious about EVERYTHING about these cities of yours (but I'm guessing you don't want to post any future-possible-spoilers here publicly online, so I'll rein in my curiosity 😁) 💖💖💖 What have the party been up to in the city you're currently hanging out in?

[cinefarious]

I can do broad strokes! Or try XD I'm bad about talking about my stuff.

The next closest desert city is a heavily dwarven populated city on the river that's most known for their glasswork. The entire city is predominantly made of stained glass, colorful and used as the main format for storytelling and design.

Across the river is another city called Dragon's Breath Basin that is uninhabitable by your average citizen. It's built on top of an area full of volcanic magma lakes and sulphur pits so it's mostly inhabited by fire genasi and tieflings. It's also the home turf of the criminal organization that causes terror across the desert.

And on the far other end on the coast is the capital of the desert lands where a major magical academy, air ship port, and ship trade port all reside. It's also home to an ancient archaeological monument/landmark significant to the story.

I'm mostly excited to start fleshing out the super fun stained glass city and all the artists and artisans that reside there. <3

[nonesensed]

Based on what you've written thus far, I think you're great at it! Very clear and intriguing 💖

Oooh, stain glass city, A++++, would love to visit 🤩🤩🤩🤩 Do they have, like, huge glass murals for story telling or is the story telling in glass kept to smaller frames? Or some other format?

A very reasonable place for a crime organization to hang out - some place few people can visit. Do you have a way for the player characters to safely visit it or are they going to be at heat exhaustion risk if they decide to visit?

Yessss, airship! I also include airships in my worlds whenever I'm given the chance 😁 Oooh, and now I'm curious about this landmark~!

I bet! Do you already have a solid idea for an NPC or two, or do you create NPCs with broad strokes and then flesh out whichever ones your player latch on to? I've tried both ways and both can be a lot of fun 😊

[cinefarious]

I envisioned the stained glass to be part of the architecture. Whole buildings made of it and magically reinforced community/city walls, that sort of thing. So the historical or fantasy murals would be everywhere. I imagine historical city tours would be hella fun ;]

As far as their travel in the area, I definitely enforce exhaustion risks in the desert, and it'll probably go double in that area thanks to the gaseous air. They have heat/fire resistant items and plenty of other resistance potions though so they'd be fine. I'm er, definitely a little too magic item heavy >.> I like to hand out shiny things.

When it comes to creating npcs I would say both! The few npcs that the party has adopted, I've definitely fleshed them out more than their original backstory for sure. There are just so many npcs that I couldn't imagine putting that level of thought into every one of them x_x But I have favorites that tend to get more love than others XP

What about you? I take it that you do both, but I'm curious how many npcs you tend to have how fleshed out they are! And your method of fleshing them out.

[nonesensed]

Whole buildings made of reinforced stained glass sounds gorgeous!! And with the murals included I'm sure the city tours are utterly jaw-dropping 🤩

Oh I hear you on the "here's another magical item, team!"-issue 😆 I've had to escalate the threats in more than one of my campaigns because I've realized I've given the party too many powerful toys 😅 But balancing that with environmental hazards is an excellent way to keep the game fun and challenging!

Yeah, it's impossible to flesh out all necessary NPCs. You'd never get anything else done if every darn urchin or mill worker the party ran across had a whole prepared life-story! Has your party ever glomped on to an NPC you didn't expect them to enjoy that much, or do they tended to go for the NPCs you've prepped an extra bit? My parties tend to surprise me at times with who they get emotionally invested in 😆💖

When I start out plotting a campaign, I tend to make a few key NPCs and then focus on having different 'fractions' aka groups that have goals within the campaign that will affect the plot and the party's journey somehow. That way, even the most central NPCs tend to start out more as functions rather then fleshed out people, but I do flesh them out as the campaign goes on. If I know the party is about to run into a character who will have an important role to play, I put time aside to focus on fleshing that person out in detail, if I haven't established their personality beyond being "part of faction X".

And sometimes the party surprises me by deciding to seek out a magic shop in a town that shouldn't, reasonably, have one - which leads to me on the fly creating one and justifying to myself why it would be there and who owns it, because that's more fun that saying "No magic shops here" and OF COURSE those are the NPCs the party decide to dedicate their lives too 😆 One of my parties once took a break from stopping the end of the world to make sure two magic shop owners didn't get divorced because of a domino effect they accidentally caused. Oh, and one time they started a campaign by adopting a random kid they'd saved in a side-mission. So yeah, some NPCs are planned and some a thrust upon me by my players, 'cause they think they're shiny~