Campaign Chronicles

For your consideration... The Teddy Bear Picnic is the "domesticated" version of the Wild Rumpus. Once a year, on Midsummer's night, teddy bears and other stuffed toys come to life. Fur and claws, stitched smiles and button eyes, all come together in a fireside dance beneath the trees. An enormous moon shines down from above, bathing the world in silvery light. Drums and horns echo through the night - the rhythm becoming more frenzied, more feral with each passing hour. The Teddy Bears become larger and wilder, growing until they tower over their young wards, having become the Wild Things. Children who stumble upon the celebration are rarely harmed but are never the same afterward. They return to their homes, older, wiser, perhaps a bit more wild. They share stories that nobody believes. Those stories have some of the more fantastical elements edited out and are set to music, a nursery rhyme that becomes a song. The child, or children, are drawn into the Feywild. They be...

Normally, this would be the type of thing that makes it into an " Odds and Ends " post but since I have neither enough " Odds " nor " Ends " to make one, here we go... For the  eating contest my playes participated in, I determined the results of the contest with a series of Constitution checks, adding up the results as I went. Any contestant who failed would either get sick, choke, or pass out and would then be eliminated. The second contest was an event they were meant to observe and  judge . And that's fine because it is relatively safe to say that Competive Eating rarely comes into play in most D&D, or any other game, campaigns. But what if it did? What if a player wanted his character to make his living by traveling from town to town, engaging in eating contests as a way of life? What if the summer camp they are attending is having a competition against the fancier, more-upscale camp on the other side of the lake and you have to rally an ecl...

I t started out as an idea for a quick, hopefully humorous one-shot. Over the course of the last year as other, similar material became available, it has grown into a short, but full-blown campaign. Based on the one-page RPGs " Pride and Extreme Prejudice " and " Trapped in a Cabin with Lord Byron " combined with " Sentai & Sensibility " and a smattering of the " d20 Anime " by Guardians of Order and d20 Paragon , I find myself continuing to expand on what was supposed to be a bit of a spoof set during the Napoleonic War. The party, based on the quartet of sisters from P&EP, hail from the Campbell family. Borrowing from Sentai, I think I have settled on the Mecha to be magically powered, summoned by magical combs the girls have, each linked to an iconic British animal - Bull, Raven, Boar, and Stag. By activating their magical focus, they first transform into superhuman warriors, armed with powerful melee weapons and armored in distincti...

Bear with me for a moment. I'd like to run a game title past you just to get some feedback. Classic Tabletop Role-Playing Games, and fictional works referencing them often fall under the alliterative convention pioneered by Dungeons & Dragons. For example, Castles & Crusades, Bunnies & Burrows, Trolls & Tunnels, Mazes & Monsters, Houses & Humans, amd the list goes on and on appearing in everything from "Bob's Burgers" to "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and "Borderlands 2". So.... what about "Cattle Mutilations & Crop Circles?" The characters are Martians or Wookies or whatever species E.T.'s race was and their goal is to carry out the aforementioned activities, abductions, probes, and so on while evading the government, UFOlogists, the staff of the National Enquirer, and other interested parties. (I think we all know what happens next - credit to original artist, whoever they may be) Update #1: This morning, one o...

Background: The party had left Tsuragol and were headed east. A storm sprung up and the group took shelter in an abandoned roadside temple dedicated to Talos. The events that followed would launch them from the familiar environs of their own world into a foreign and hostile land. The Temple:   Originally built nearly fifty years ago, this temple has been abandoned for almost a decade after the worshippers were slain by members of a nearby druidic circle. An unsettling aura of evil still hangs over the ruin, almost as if the very stones used in the temple's construction remember the foul rites that were once performed here.  The temple was built along the western shore of the Easting Reach to take advantage of a naturally occurring weather phenomenon: tornadoes and thunderstorms.  Cold dry air sweeping down from the Earthspur and Galena Mountain range collide with warm humid air from the Sea of Fallen Stars to generate powerful storms. A series of metal rods in the t...