18.10.2021 - Dev Journal and "Fun"
18.10.21
Finished off the Summer Quarter with a makeshift temple mined out by the cultist; a sign that they have been working and adhering to their faith, despite the 400ish years, and developed a dangerous zealotry due to the constant echo-chamber of faith. I want to tell the story of their belief structure and culture organically through architecture, religious practices, and art items that you can spy on and stumble across through your exploration. Akin to walking through an ancient and still functioning building complex.
Started work on the Fall Quarter next, an area filled with wandering monsters, the occasional trapper and the mournful spirits of those trapped within.
86 rooms bulleted so far.
Keeping it “Fun” – I will credit Dwarf Fortress for introducing the phrase “fun” into my lexicon. “Fun” being the weird, stressful, but ultimately interesting aspects of a game that can be exploited by players or lead to their downfall. I used it twice when doing bullet points for the rooms today and had to kinda meditate on what “fun” would be in this context.
The first bit of “fun” involves an encounter/mini-boss of two special guards. As much as I love big brutes in armor, just making them a “number sink” (difficult by virtue of high stats or damage) is “not fun” in most ttrpg contexts. I opted instead to make them split apart into smaller guards (turns out they’re actually a series of coordinated hag-fish gremlins) posing a challenge that will either break the players or provide them an avenue of exploiting the enemy with an as-of-yet unnamed weakness.
The second mention of “fun” involves a magic item, a ritual wheat sickle. Instead of providing a bonus it only damages one specific enemy at a time (the harm against one transferring to the named enemy), once again being either problematic or a dangerous tool in the right player’s hands.
Trying to keep items and encounters away from numbers and more on overcoming weird situations. “Fun” for me, hopefully others.
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That you are meditating on "fun" is the important thing.
In a Frog God Games Organized Play (PF 1e campaign branch) this past spring, "Mountains of Madness," the GM thought it would be fun for the enemies in a mine (hobgoblins?) to alert the entire chain of command, including a shaman with a Hold Person wand (with enough charges contained for the full party) and his undead along with elite units, to the arrival of our third-level party. We all died fighting with the exception of our rogue, who managed to hide in shadows long enough for the couple units pincering us from behind to pass him so that he had a chance to flee in order to bring another party to the gristmill to face our undead corpses.
I'm not sure whether this combat was as described in the book of the same title. The GM did do some foreshadowing as he described movements of enemies that we couldn't see, which I pretty much ignored since my character would have no idea what was going on elsewhere in the lair. It was a fun battle, but I was attached to my campaign character. That would not have kept me from playing more (I did consider it), but I ended up being too busy to commit to the current sessions.