Notes From a D&D Game

I wrote this up as a summary and recap for the players in my ongoing D&D game. I’m trying to give hints on unfinished business and give clues and pointers to future adventures. If you’re a player in my game, first, thank you for reading my blog! and b, I’m still editing this so don’t use this as the final version.

It’s my intention to provide this as an example of campaign prep and how much information to give to players. It may or may not be helpful, but I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.

The current status quo as of the end of Season’s Turn, 502 A.C.:

In Nabalee, the mysterious Lady Etum is building the fishing village and sea port into a powerful trading center, since it sits on a deep and sheltered cove, and is a stopping point for the road north to Warjos Dos and Deception Bay, as well as the road east over the Mourner’s Mountains into the Rusva Vesta Vale and Kopno’domas.

Leads, clues, loose threads:

  • Kobolds and lizardfolk are on the move; travelers report seeing small bands of them camped out or marching through the forests.
  • Lady Etum is still searching for items recovered from shipwrecks; especially a ship’s wheel that is purported to allow travel to other planes of existence.

At Galath Ashelenor the enjoys of the Mahalaman Queen are settling in. In addition to companies of orcs and elves, there are administrators, laborers, and scholars. Regular Mahalaman patrols turn away sightseers and treasure-hunters. More Mahalaman swanships arrive as the days pass, and now a sizable fleet is anchored offshore.

Leads, clues, loose threads:

  • The elves are dredging up Grenjolm’s ship but it’s slow-going: the ship was burnt down to the timbers before it sank.
  • You didn’t hear it from me but a friend of a friend said that the Half-Elven Prince was kept in the dungeons underneath.
  • Elves are searching for some kind of magical seed. Weird, innit?

In Port Deception, there is talk of the river-pirates starting to work together, united under the leadership of a person called, variously, The Ghost, Ether Eddy, or Moonwhisper. River merchants are hiring guards, adventurers, and spell-casters to protect their cargo.

  • Some kind of spider infestation is creeping up from the south. Brass spiders! Believe me or not, my cousin got bit by one, I swear on Rhoban’s hoppy thumb.

In Warjos Dos, the Seldaline has established himself as the primary civil administrator; Emil Warjos finds himself disregarded and ignored, and splits his time between the Brewtemple and the Lighthouse. Ohtar and Maegor are the town’s watch. The former watch captains, Sevastian and Tulia, are rarely seen and may have left town. 

Leads, clues, loose threads:

  • Illbahn, the Wizard of Warjos Dos, and Emil Warjos, are organizing search parties for some kind of tomb, or vault. That might be where they sent Sevastian and Tulia.
  • This Ghost fella might have found some secret tunnel into the city, and he’s using it to move stolen goods. The elves don’t seem to care at all! Warjos woulda put a stop to it and that’s for certain.

On the far side of the Mourner’s Mountains, in Kopno’domas, the religious leaders war with the mercantile houses, each of their attention focused only on themselves and their immediate enemies. The city is both sleepy and at sword’s point. The de Agosta family, a major player in the city’s politics, have withdrawn, mourning the loss of their troubled son, Grenjolm, and House Bhorosh, whose history goes back to the Old Empire, appears to have taken advantage and are ascendant.

Leads, clues, loose threads:

  • A string of murders has got the city on edge. The victims, of all races but eladrin, are found dead, whole, exsanginated. Horrific!
  • The Azure Heart druids have been sending acolytes to Turmlina Prison, buying, or laboring, for more turmlina gems. Are they up to something?

One who shows contempt

I’ve been thinking about dragons lately. It’s for my D&D game. Dragon names, dragon titles, dragon culture and heirarchy.

In my campaign setting, there was an ancient red dragon, the most powerful mortal dragon ever, who was slain by a band of powerful heroes about two decades prior to current day of the game. The dragon’s name was Tountomos, but I always referred to her as Tountomos Perjorative, which was at first a reference and also a bit of a joke.

The reference is to the movie Dragonslayer (1981), specifically the dragon in that movie, Vermithrax Pejorative. What a terrific name! And the best movie dragon ever. That movie mostly still holds up, and they made that dragon look great before CGI.

The joke, I think, is that I always thought the word “pejorative” meant a curse word. When I would see it used is in place of words or phrases like “fuck off” or “god damn”. Which I guess is true? So Vermithrax’s name was a curse word. When I used it for my big bad dragon, I was paying homage to Vermithrax, and I thought of it like a title, or an epithet. A dragon so bad their name itself was a curse.

But the actual definition of pejorative is “a word expressing contempt or disapproval”. Which doesn’t quite seem strong enough for the worst dragon in the world, right?

I’ve been expanding the titles, though. Since I use Latin as the stand-in for the language spoken by the Old Empire, I’ve been finding terms I can use for titles for the evil dragons in my world, and then translating them into Latin for that added touch of antiquity and class. Words like Descrare (desecrator), Praenuntia (harbinger), Deceptor (deceiver), Occultare (concealer.)

But I couldn’t recall or find through regular Google searches a term that would mean “one who shows contempt or disapproval.” Contemptor? That… doesn’t appear to be a dictionary word, although it’s meaning is obvious from the useage. I wanted to know if there was an existing dictionary word (I keep wanting to type “real word” but since I’m more of a descriptivist than a prescripitivist when it comes to language, “real word” doesn’t mean much to me.)

Exhausting my google-fu I turned to ChatGPT. Could it help me find the word I was looking for? Or would it just make something up, like it’s done for me in the past?

I asked it to tell me the word for someone who shows contempt and it came back with “misanthrope.” No, that’s a label someone else would put on someone, and it’s too human-centric. I pushed back and it tried to tell me “misogynist” or “misandrist” but I said no, not gender-specific. I kept pushing and it came back with “scoffer”, which is far too mild, and “cynic” which is far too passive.

So I gave it the examples above (desecrator, harbinger, deceiver) and… holy shit it came back with contemner, which I first thought was it pulling something out of its ass again; but, no, a Google search showed it was a real word, although generally applied in legal contexts.

Screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT:

OK maybe this is going around in circles so let me give you similar examples. A harbinger is someone who brings doom. A desecrator is one who desecrates. A murderer is someone who brings murder. In this vein, what would someone who brings scorn be?

ChatGPT
Ah, I see what you're getting at now. In that case, a suitable term might be "contemner." This word refers to someone who holds others in contempt or disdain.

You
Holy shit that's perfect and you've taught me a new word

Holy shit, ChatGPT taught me a new word! It took some back-and-forth but it got there. I then plugged “contemner” into the Latin translator and it spat back… contemptor. Contemptor is the Latin word for “one who shows contempt.” LOL. LMAO. OK, fine, language wins this round.

Wasteland SCIENCE!

Scheduled my next live-stream of Fallout 3: 4 PM Pacific on Wednesday 1 May 2024. Click the link and the bell to get a notification!

And I’m sharing this thumbnail because I’m ridiculously excited how well my in-game toon looks!

Screenshot from Fallout 3 of a bespectacled brown-haired white young man in an armored Vault Suit with a 10mm pistol, with a blasted desolate wasteland behind him. Words superimposed: Lunar Obverse Part 2: Wasteland SCIENCE!
Join me on YouTube – 4 PM Pacific Wednesday 1 May 2024

Currently trying to find royalty-free music so I can listen to Three Dog on-stream without getting my video hit by the Gods of Copyright. Should be able to pull something together. Found a mod that lets me replace the music which helps a lot!

Fresh from the Vault

Had a successful Fallout 3 stream today! Was super nervous all day, but my morning was taken up by getting dad to the airport for his vacation. I love my dad, and I’m happy I’ve been able to help him out while his living space is rebuilt/repaired, and it’s been great having him around… I do look forward to having some time and space to myself after a month. Maskin’ ain’t easy, and yes, I mask even around close family like dad.

After I dropped him off, though, I headed back to the house and tried to arrange everything for the stream. OBS kept locking up and crashing on me, which was frustrating, but I didn’t have a lot of mental energy to troubleshoot it. It seemed to happen when I was changing scenes, though, so I just decided I would avoid doing that as much as I could. I got my countdown set up, I got some music playing for the countdown – I wanted to play the classic Fallout Galaxy News Network songs, those old-timey showtunes and such, but after a quick google realized that those are still covered by copyright laws and could lead to my stream being demonetized.

Bethesda, however, has very generous terms for fans using the soundtrack music or other visual assets, so I just streamed the Fallout 3 game soundtrack, by composer Inon Zur, on shuffle, for the 15 minutes before go time. That worked!

I also set up an in-game overlay of a headshot of myself as a teenager, one that I had punched up using AI image enhancement, to show folks watching what I was aiming for in creating my character. The conceit is that I would be playing as myself as much as possible, something I did years ago when I streamed and played Fallout 4. For the record, here’s a screenshot of my character from the stream:

Screenshot from the game Fallout 3. A young brown-haired white man stands on a ledge overlooking a desolate ruin. He holds a 10mm pistol up with both hands and is wearing an armored Vault Suit.
Meet Brian, an intelligent, lucky, idealist, raised in Vault 101.

And for my S.P.E.C.I.A.L:

  • Strength: 3
  • Perception: 4
  • Endurance: 6
  • Charisma: 5
  • Intelligence: 9
  • Agility: 5
  • Luck: 8

Some of those numbers are aspirational. Also, I know, I know, Charisma should be a dump stat, but I just didn’t have it in me to make it 1 for optimal gameplay. I’m not going for optimal, I want to be me, as if I had been raised in the vault.

I played through character creation, my 10th birthday party (I ate the sweetroll immediately and told Butch to back off), taking the G.O.A.T. (and beating the snot out of Butch for threatening Amata), taking the tagged skills Science, Lockpicking, and Repair. I can improve other skills but I wanted the best chance of getting through the vault escape without bloodshed. Which, um, I wasn’t able to do. Had to kill a couple of cops, I mean security, but it was in self-defense; they were going to beat me to death like they did Jonas. I did spare the Overseer, although I do not trust his promise to leave Amata alone. And instead of shooting it out with security at the Vault door, I just ran.

Several friends showed up in chat and I even had to ask their advice at some points. It was fun!

A note about guns: personally, I have made a vow to never touch a gun again in my life. I did that after the Sandy Hook shooting. Even if the revolution comes, I will support it with my other skills: troubleshooting, documentation, computer support, mechanical support. But when I did that, I also allowed myself an exception: in the event of an apocalypse, be it nuclear, zombie, or alien invasion, I will allow myself to use a gun. The Capital Wasteland is not just one of those, it’s all three, in one way or another. Also, it’s a game. But I do intend to try to solve things with words first, before violence, on this playthrough.

Will be continuing the stream on either Wednesdays (Wasteland Wednesday) or Friday (Fallout Friday.) Want to keep a regular schedule. Watch here for updates!

The Stealthy Boot

Short one tonight. Got to play some Dungeons & Dragons tonight with my group. I’m normally the DM but another player has been running a short adventure the past couple of sessions because there’s a narrative break in my game. He’s doing a great job! It’s a lot of fun. We had some technical issues, but those are not anyone’s fault.

The technical part is because we play online, through Discord, and using D&D Beyond for character sheets and Owlbear Rodeo for maps and pictures. First issue was, I couldn’t connect to voice and video chat in Discord, even though everythine else network-wise worked. I could chat in Discord, MS Teams worked for video (I had a job interview earlier in the day using Teams, worked great.) The Discord error is “RTC connecting” and “No route” over and over again. Same issue if I’m on my home network, regardless of the computer or operating system. Rebooted everyting (Discord, my computers, my router), no joy. Phone works on the cellular network fine, but not on my home network (Xfinity.) Uninstalled Discord (using Revo Uninstaller) and reinstalled; no joy.

Temporary fix is using VPN software, which absolutely 100% points to it being a problem with Xfinity. Joy. I’ll deal with them tomorrow.

Other technical issues included problems using commands in Avrae, the D&D combat bot. Again, just minor issues.

Overall, our group (five 2nd level 5E characters) managed to take down a cloaker at full strength, and my gothy warlock got the killing blow! And then we explored the upper levels of a sunken citadel, found a ghostly librarian, and successfully answered three riddles to get a piece of the amulet we need to lift a curse. It’s kind of a whole thing, y’know?

We found an amazing sword and a magic book nobody can read. Also there was a lot of banter. I particularly liked when the barbarian kicked down a door so hard it flew across the room and it exploded into spliters (that’s not the fun part) and claimed he was being stealthy (that was the fun part.)

I’m so glad for my D&D group. So much fun to play with, and in D&D, problems are fairly easily solved. Unlike, say, real life. Haha sigh.

The Power of the Atom – Installing and Modding Fallout 3 in 2024

As a funny follow-up to my post a couple of days ago, Saturday morning I woke up and decided to install, patch, and mod Fallout 3 to make it somewhat stable, look better, and be a bit more modernized, in anticipation of streaming a playthrough of the game at some point in the near future.

And so did apparently everyone else.

The primary site for downloading mods for games like all of the Fallout games, as well as many others, is Nexus Mods. And on Saturday morning, Pacific time, by the time I got going, it was struggling. I kept seeing Cloudflare checks to prove I was human; a tactic to slow down high levels of use for websites. And sometimes, even then, the pages I was trying to reach did not load, and required refreshing. It was frustrating but also a little hilarious.

I am glad that there is interest in the Fallout games. I’ve said this before; I love the universe and the lore and the games, so having more people playing and learning about the world is amazing. You will never catch me gatekeeping people being excited about something cool.

I didn’t do a lot of mods; I think my list stands at 22 or so. Heck, for the record, here are the mods I installed:

I have a hankering to write up a current How To for this. The list above is sorted alphabetically and doesn’t reflect the install order or the load order. Let me know if you think that would be useful; I was going by my own experience and a lot of google searching for best mods and order. And most of the how-tos I found were for Mod Organizer or NexusModManager, not the newer Vortex, which is what I used.

There are more than enough gotchas in there to trip someone up. I can confirm that; I was that someone and I got tripped up several times. Had to wipe, uninstall, and start over at least twice.

Some tips for anyone trying this themselves:

Get a nice clean install of the base game first. Open the launcher, let it auto-detect your graphics settings, launch the game and let the opening title cards play, maybe start a New game, then exit. That creates the base files.

Install Vortex from Nexus Mods. You’ll install most (haha, no, not all) of the mods through here.

If you’re installing from Steam, it has an update that removes Games for Windows Live, which is broken since it was intended for WinXP, and Fallout Script Extender doesn’t work with that version (1.7.0.4). You’ll want to downgrade the game to 1.7.0.3. Luckily, the community has provided a patcher that will downgrade Fallout 3, as well as patch it to use more than 2 GB of RAM, and other helpful things. Download and manually run the Fallout Anniversary Patcher first before anything else.

Next thing you want to install is Fallout Script Extender. Don’t use the button in Vortex; manually download it and manually install it.

At this point, you can start installing other mods. You can use my list above as a starting point. My philosophy was – I wanted lore-friendly stuff, no major changes or new questlines, bug fixes and modernization, and just a hint of upgrades for modern graphics and displays. I did succumb to the temptation of making the 2008 Bethesda faces look a little better, but I did not install any body mods or new weapon or armor textures. I might, still, but for now I’m fine with it looking the way it did back in the day. And I am experimenting with re-done NPC animations.

I may still tweak or remove the persistent green tint in favor of third-party lighting and colors through the use of an ENB, or I might not. Again, part of the reason I want to play this is nostalgia. The look and feel of original Fallout 3 is a majority of the charm, to me.

It’s worth it, though, to have a clean, pretty game to play. And my computer, while it hasn’t been top-of-the-line for a good while, is still plenty powerful enough to run this game at 1080p and 60 frames per second. I’m looking forward to revisiting the Capital Wasteland.

Comment or contact me if you’d be interested in a full How-To write up. And stay tuned if you want to see me stream my playthroughs. That is definitely coming soon.

Big Iron on our hips

With the release of Fallout on Prime, the new TV show set in the Fallout universe, interest in the post-post-apocalypse wasteland has never been higher. I mean me, my interest, mostly. I want to reinstall and play all the games, now. And I have at least reinstalled several of them (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 76) but haven’t yet found the time to start a new journey in that wild far future.

It’s been fun going through the process of getting a nice clean install, patching the older games to run on modern hardware and software, and picking out a few good mods to make it more stable, improve the graphics and gameplay, and fix the more egregious bugs. OK, again, that’s probably just my own quirky tech-focused kind of fun; your mileage may vary. For Fallout 3, it took maybe an hour’s worth of googling, downloading, and a scosche of trial-and-error. But I got it all running.

Stay tuned to this channel for the possiblity of me streaming a playthrough of Fallout 3, playing as myself… I’m working up the nerve to try it.

Screenshot from the game Fallout 3, opening credits: an old TV test pattern in black and green saying "Please Stand By" in retro-futuristic text and graphics.
Coming soon: me making a fool of myself in the Capital Wasteland

That being said, my nephew also wants to play some Fallout, excited by the new show and especially for it being set in the game’s continuity, being a true follow-on to the game chronology. Max and I have been texting each other questions, theories, and memes about Fallout since the show dropped. This is actually fun for lots of people, not just computer geeks like me! Surely anyone reading this has one or several friends they share memes with, right? Not just me? It’s a universal thing these days?

The other day, though, he sent me a link to a Steam Community guide about how to install and run Fallout: New Vegas and asked me if it was a good how-to. I took a look and it seemed pretty comprehensive, and offered to help him out if he ran into any troubless. I felt a bit of a duty; I had helped him build his current computer a couple of years ago. Mostly though I’m excited to see him play and happy to help him get the most out of his rig. He’s been mainly a console player; mods aren’t a normal part of his gaming experience; whereas I’ve been modding games since Skyrim. I may not be an expert but I would consider myself a competent modder.

He started to get it going the other day but I didn’t hear anything more. When I pinged him to ask how it went, he said he got distracted, totally understandable. Today, though, he had the energy to get it going, and I was able to screenshare with him and walk him through the trickier parts, like making sure to back up the default files and folders before messing with them, which saved us in at least one instance. The instructions for the mod that enables scripting support, NVSE, said to copy the entire contents of its mod to the main game folder, it wanted to overwrite the Data folder already there. I backed him out of that, had him rename the old folder, and then copy everything.

Once we got the mods installed, though, the game crashed to desktop on launch, throwing the error “missing masters.” When I had Max launch the game normally, it didn’t appear any of the DLC was available; turns out they all lived in the old, renamed Data folder. Copying them to the new modded Data folder fixed the issue.

Then I spent over an hour watching him start a new playthrough, MST3K-ing and joking and googling things for him (like what is a hot plate used for, anyway? And did the Brotherhood try to take over Hoover Dam (they got distracted by Father Elijah’s fixation on HELIOS-1)). Fun times!

I’ve spent so much time in these worlds, playing, learning the characters, maps, and lore. Even making up my own wasteland lore (which has yet to be contradicted by the official material, yay!) Fun times, indeed. And I’m so glad that non-gamers are learning how rich and weird the Fallout universe is. I welcome new fans with open arms.

Feel free to ask me any questions. Love to help.

Fallout is not a cartoon

A squad of Brotherhood of Steel knights in T-60 power armor approaches the camera.

Credit: Courtesy of Prime Video

This isn’t a spoiler but a funny story I wanted to share. My dad has been staying with me since his apartment got flooded and they found asbestos. His normal TV viewing is procedurals like NCIS or The Rookie, or westerns.

When Fallout on Amazon Prime came out earlier this week, I showed him the trailer to see if it’s something he’d like to watch and his response was “I’m not a big fan of cartoons.” He is entirely unfamiliar with the games.

So I started watching it anyway and now, three episodes in, he’s just as hooked as I am. I think he likes the dark humor and ultraviolence.

That being said, I, too, like the tone of the show as well as the fact that they’ve spared no expense in making the digital world of recent Fallout games into real actual props. Seeing T-60 power armor in action is amazing. There’s a scene near the end of the first episode where someone is being interrogated and they just have the power armor pacing back and forth menacingly. You don’t even see the whole thing, just what passes behind the person being questioned, and the sound effects. Just amazing. Yeah, I imagine that would be intimidating as fuck.

I’ll write a fuller review when I’ve finished it but so far it’s great. I hear the people who whine about things whining about this and The Lore but fuck ’em. I’m not a slave to the lore and neither is Bethesda. Just tell a fun story, that’s all I ask.