D&D and Tabletops RPGs V7: Yes you can talk about tabletops other than D&D - Games

Was just brainstorming some one offs/random encounters and I can help but feel like feel like I'm subconsciously ripping off some trope or other media. Basically it goes like this. Party gets caught in a storm and has to seek shelter in an old abandoned cottage/shed.They spend the night here and wake up to a kept up, non abandoned version of said cottage. Party exits cottage to find themselves in a beautiful garden in the shadow of an impressive and intricate mansion. The area is populated with a variety of NPCs happily keeping up and maintaining the property. Any attempt to leave the grounds will have the party lost in the woods and lead them right back to the grounds. Party eventually learns about and meets mysterious mistress who owns the property and "takes care" of the NPCs complete with lavish dinners and festivities to give the illusion of happiness. The mistress is especially generous and will do whatever she can to keep the party from leaving, even by force. I haven't thought of the rest much but the general idea is that the NPCs are secretly held against their will and some are possibly brainwashed. I'm thinking she'll be some kind of demon or other supernatural entity that somehow feeds off of the NPC thrall. The Party will have to band together with the NPCs or find some secret weakness to break the spell and free themselves and the NPCs and defeat the mistress. Thoughts? Is this too tropey? Am I just blatantly ripping off other stuff without realizing it?

I mean I've seen the idea a couple of times before, once in the Elder Scrolls online, fallout 3 and an old episode of Red Dwarf, so yeah it's been done before, but you have plenty of room for originality with the NPC's and the demon itself, maybe don't make it obvious which NPC is the demon and have the players try and figure out who's actually controlling the illusion or something.

Why did he trip on it?

I mean, Hotel California and all, but something being a trope isn't bad necessarily. The trick is in how you pull it off.

Some of the best scenarios are ones the audience knows and you surprise them with a big twist in. The audience loves to be pleasantly surprised or shocked and is often interested in exploring 'alternative ways that trope could play out' depending on the actors involved in the situation I find.

I DMed a session with my long time group again after a longer hiatus because real life got in the way. One player in my group is a great roleplayer with a unique character and has fun in combat with his deliberately greatly flawed and consequently underpowered character which adds a lot to battles. However he really loves arguing about anything and everything to the point where it really interferes with the flow of the session. It's always very inconsequential things like when he rolled a 1 while shooting his crossbow I decided the string snapped off and he will have to reattach it after combat. He immediately started going into a multiple minute explanation on the type of his crossbow and arguing that it could not break in the way I had said. He wasn't arguing because he wanted to keep using the crossbow in combat and was unhappy with the consequences of his critical failure, but because that small technicality was so important to him. Similar discussions happened many more times throughout the session. If they were quick like "actually my crossbow has multiple strings, it would probably loose a screw instead" "okay" I'd be fine with that, but I put a lot of work into keeping the flow going and I don't like these multiple minute interruptions and try to end them with "as the GM I already decided what happens, there's no point arguing now, let's continue actually playing. It's X's turn now" which he also doesn't like to accept. I have no idea what I should do in the future to keep these interruptions as short as possible without without interfering with his enjoyment of the game.

You need to talk to him outside the session and get him to chill out.

Or lightly beat him while intoning 'GM is god, wandering damage table is god, fair play is god' over and over

I've got a question for you all because my friend is just refusing to budge on this matter: What is a necromancer? From my understanding the primary focus of necromancers always has been raising the freaking dead. Stuff like draining health and preventing healing and communicating with the dead and such was never the main focus but a byproduct of that focus on undeath. According to him the fact that arcane necromancers no longer get spells like raise dead, talk with dead, animate dead, and resurrection (in 5e) are still in the game doesn't mean necromancers are no longer necromancers. Despite the fact arcane necromancers do not get those spells now. How can one be a necromancer if they don't practice the primary focus of necromancy? That's like a construction worker that doesn't build buildings or a cop who doesn't enforce the law. (The former of which I gave as an example and he still said they were a construction worker...)

It depends on the setting, tbh. In older D&D editions, the main focus was just raising zombies and shit. In Exalted, you can raise zombies with magic, but it isn't what the setting terms as "Necromancy"; that's a dark version of Sorcery that deals with ghosts, destroys souls, and creates giant monsters out of bone and gore. Technically, all Necromancy is, by definition, is magic relating to death.

Well to clarify things some I mean in general more than specific settings. But if you do have to go with a particular setting then D&D would be the one to go with since that's what my friend and I had been discussing in this instance. From its inception the primary focus of necromancy in D&D had always been raising the dead from my understanding. The other stuff you could do with necromancy was never the focus in the school. And in particular it seems completely arbitrary as far as I can see to just remove the ability for arcane necromancers to create undead. (Not completely as it turns out but they made it require much higher levels for an arcane caster which still basically completely undermines the concept I was intending to use for a campaign for no reason that I'm aware of on WotC's end.)

In 5e, a single character with a bunch of minions just in general isn't something that is supported well by the system. You have to be higher level to get an undead horde so that you don't just swamp the low levels with the superior action economy of a bunch of skeletons or whatever. Even adding a single creature to the party's side can have a huge impact in the lower levels (one of the reasons they were so conservative with the power of things like Beastmaster) To note, this is all of the Necromancy spells a Wizard has access to in 5e: Chill Touch Toll the Dead Cause Fear False Life Ray of Sickness Blindness/Deafness Gentle Repose Ray of Enfeeblement Animate Dead Bestow Curse Feign Death Life Transference Vampiric Touch Blight Danse Macabre Enervation Negative Energy Flood Circle of Death Create Undead Eyebite Magic Jar Soul Cage Finger of Death Abi-Dalzim’s Horrid Wilting Clone Astral Projection Animate Dead, Danse Macabre, and Create Undead being spells that actually raise the dead into undead minions (Finger of Death can do it on a kill, as well). At spell levels 3, 5, and 6, respectively, so you can start raising some undead by 5th level, but Create Undead is the real staple powerful undead minion creator, you have to wait for 11th level for that, whichs seems reasonable to me.

Main problem for necromancers in DnD is that summons and allies break the action economy and they are a bitch to balance so you can't really give players easy access to the classic zombie/skeleton hordes that necromancers are usually known for.

I'm gonna be running my first one-shot in a few weeks and it's gonna be my first time DM-ing ever. Any tips? It's a sort of spiritual successor to a one-off 5e campaign a friend of mine ran about a month ago; we all made Drow characters, siblings in the royal family with a secret plot to depose our mother and help our sister usurp the throne. We ended up on an adventure to the surface, chasing after a bunch of defectors who spirited away Drow secrets and holed up in a fort. Long story short, the place was crawling with undead and the culprit was revealed to be our father, hoping to overthrow our mother with a horde of zombies and assorted abominations, ending the Drow matriarchy once and for all. So we killed him and continued scheming against the Queen. For my campaign, everyone who played the Drow Squad will be joining in (including the DM, who hasn't been able to actually play a game in a good long while, on account of his DM-ing) and I'm having them all make Deuregars, the rough story being that the Royal Family has been murdered and the princess has been spirited away by a warlock. So the regent summons the players to go retrieve her. Cue more adventures in the Underdark, only for them to learn that the princess was in on it all along; she willingly eloped with the warlock so that he would teach her dark magic and make her taller. Final boss fight is against the warlock and the princess, who I think I'll have turn into some gigantic shambling homunculus. The part I'm really excited about is a kind of post-credits scene I have planned, where we learn that the warlock was working for the Drow Queen all along, in hopes that she could use his union with the princess to unite the Drow and Deuregar kingdoms and march on the surface. Assuming that my players pull through and succeed in their quest, it'll end with the Drow Queen summoning our characters from the aforementioned Drow campaign, telling them that she has more work for them to do. It's gonna be a real "I'd like to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative" moment and I can't wait to see how it turns out. But any advice for a first time DM would be very much appreciated.

I've literally never even heard of danse macabre and didn't know that about finger of death so that's good to know. For reference the debate here was actually centered around enemies and not the players. The setting for this region of our campaign world (this is the second campaign we have in this world with the other one being set somewhere else) is that the campaign's region is a fairly isolated and extremely religious society. In the past they had some serious undead pandemics and as a result banned arcane spellcasting in general. The main logic being that the necromancers were arcane casters and the region had a fairly low arcane spellcasting populace to begin with. The player I've been arguing with has seemingly been trying to catch me in a gotcha due to 5e changing things up so much in order to force me to unban arcane spellcasting in this region despite the fact he's known all along that I had this rule in place. ---- To expand on the setting though if that helps people understand: The region is, like I previously mentioned, heavily isolated from other areas. It's one large island surrounded by a bunch of smaller ones hundreds of miles from the nearest other country. The nation itself is themed after Mayan, Aztec, Incan, and other similar Central American civilizations. It's a highly religious civilization with a bit of a unique take on gods that's particular to this specific region where since most of their deities would end up being animals I settled on them being actual living creatures which were originally basically paragon examples of their species which became worshiped as gods and going by the general logic from 3.5e's Divine Deities & Demigods book I think it was called would make them become more divine. At some point centuries before the campaign starts, the region started having issues with undead. Some priests went rogue, either on their own or prompted by being shown necromancy, and started going wild with necromancy backed up by arcane casters. The rulers (it's a sort of tribal monarchy with heavy influence from the priesthood) ended up settling on a blanket ban of arcane magic (and necromancy in general) since banning magic altogether was infeasible due to the priesthood. The start of the campaign is centered around undead starting to become an issue again and the players are tasked with looking into things and trying to solve it. So if 5e has gutted arcane necromancy as badly as it seemed like they have then it's a fairly large issue for the entire setting of this campaign.

Oh, you can just do whatever you want with your setting and NPCs. I have NPC necromancers raise permanent undead minions all the time in ways that PC Necromancers certainly can't.

N O T H I N G is going to go to plan. That whole thing you wrote? Yeah be prepared to throw it to the side about 5 minutes in, because PLAYERS are a group of fucking disaster children kleptomaniacs that would rather burn down a city than talk to the wizard spouting plot. Make sure you can still continue a story through improv and that is the DM's biggest ally. A 7 hour walk will take 5mins A 5 minute battle will take 7 hours Oh and when describing something, be prepared to be disappointed in YOURSELF. Every day I plan out locations and backstory for my towns and villages In my notes I could tell you exactly who laid that particular brick in the church 1400 years ago along with that person's entire life story. But when DMing it's like the brain shuts down, and you stumble on everything "You enter into BIG TOWN" "cool what's it like?" "Like A TOWN , PLease no ask questions, make the BrAin do tHe hurting" And if your players actually do want to know about descriptions, they won't fucking remember it. It's a thankless job Stick it out. You'll fucking love it.

Retain flavor, lose the first perspective. meticulously plan the very beginning, the very end, and nothing else because if your players are worth a shit at all they will immediately go off rails and start sniffing every available butt and digging in every trash can, and you'll need to flesh that stuff out without overdetailing or skimping on going to flavortown when it's contextually called for. Don't be afraid to cheat to keep things entertaining. For them, not you. Don't depend on woobies or heroes to consistently bail them out, let them fight or flight or trap or trick, as long they're up to the challenge. Speaking of challenge, set up non-confrontational challenges before pointy bit ones so you can glean how much you want combat to center or not center as a means of problem solving. Populate your locales with interesting people, but again don't rely on them to carry your narrative any more than the players will allow them to. Have one completely absurd background encounter like a cockatrice farm run by Kuo-Toa or Trogs in reflective suits, or seeing a painting or hearing a ballad of Dizz't the Burden famous drow bard that plays two lutes at once and supposedly even a flute at the same time or something that will catch the players flat but also be memorable well after the adventure is over, while avoiding making it a meme, just enough for tastiness and atmosphere. Don't worry about winning or losing, just getting them to enjoy what's going on. Rely on feedback but try not create a loop where the players end up leading you around by the nose because of it.

It depends on the necromancer. There's a 2e splat called the Complete Necromancer which talks about the varieties of necromancers as well as the different focuses. The overall focus is on the dead and undeath (speak with dead, animate dead, protection from the undead) but also includes a variety of curses and curse such as bone blight (which makes your living bones rot and crumble inside of you) and Reincarnate. Necromancy was the ONLY way for an arcane caster to bring the dead spirits back to life via that spell as anything BUT shambling monstrosities. Animate Dead was, in fact, a MUCH higher and harder to reach spell level for an arcane caster than a divine caster AND they could animate far less than their divine counterparts (as they lacked Rebuke Undead). White Necromancy would include spells that repel or destroy the undead, as well as protection spells; Locate Remains finds a specific corpse, Living Link connects you to another living creature, letting you gather their sensory information (sight, sound, touch, ect) and can be done on unwilling and unaware targets (there's also Corpse Link which does the same but with the dead or undead), Detect Undead does the obvious within a cone of vision (useful if you're expecting them to be hiding), Spirit Armor creates a field of force the equivalent of plate mail around you at the cost of some health, Force Shapechange causes shapeshifters to either revert to their normal form or, in the case of lycanthropes, to convert to one of their animal or monstrous forms. Black Necromancy focuses on raising and controlling the undead, as well as curses and offensive magic. Exterminate destroys all minor forms of life in a large area (bugs, mice, rats, ect), Chill Touch drains strength from the living and causes undead to flee, vampiric touch drains the life from a touched target, Animate Dead does the obvious but is honestly superseded by the superior Summon Shadow which conjures a shadow but has no limits on HD that I remember, Magic Jar (again, same level as Animate Dead) places your soul into a receptacle of your choice from which you may attempt to possess or permanently steal the body of another (the big shit, a way to achieve immortality even while seeming to be slain by heroes as the confused spirit of whoever you bodysnatched struggles in vain in your old, withered body), Summon Lycanthrope conjures a chosen form of lycanthrope from the area: can only be cast on a full moon or the day before or after it, and the conjured being is trapped in your summoning circle. As you can see, just from a very small sample, you can get away with never ever using a single animated corpse, or even giving much of a shit about them, based on your spell choices. Corpse Visage, a level 1 spell, is a great alternative to Sleep as it causes enemies to run in fear (though has friendly fire on allies), Spectral Hand, a level 2 spell, lets you deliver touch spells via a ghostly appendage, Feign Death, a level 3 spell, lets you put yourself or another creature into a catatonic state of stasis that means they suffer half damage, poison is held, and they are protected from energy drain among other things. There's lots of spells each level with a wide variety of options! I had an idea for a game I was going to run involving a necromancer using a lighthouse of some isolated fishing village as his tower. His primary minions were conjured and enthralled weresharks (via curses rather than enchantments as necromancers can't use enchantment) as well as shadows. The gemstone he used as the lighthouse source had continual light cast on it, and served as his Magic Jar target, so he could cause the captain or navigator of the vessel to be possessed by him and ram them into the rocks before retreating to his own body again. Once the ship crashed, he had his lycanthropes finish off or infect any survivors as well as bring in the loot. Most of the fishing village was simply cover for his minions in case of any inspection by land.

Never, EVER say "only if your roll a Nat 20" because you have now invoked the mirth of the trickster dice god, who will guide that d20 into a perfect position to ruin your perfectly crafted encounters. Source: Me

Cael already covered the 5e spell list for wizards pretty well but you both seem pretty off base. In AD&D yes, the only necromantic spells a magic-user got were Feign Death, Animate Dead, Reincarnation, and Clone. In all of the odd-numbered editions (I don't know 2e or 4e sorry) arcane casters have never had access to speaking with the dead, raising the dead to anything but unlife, or the ability to resurrect people. They have had and still do have Animate Dead though, which I personally is rather nifty in how 5e implements it. Setting aside the fact that you were both mistaken and a necromancer in 5e can still very much create undead (the wizard school class feature even has a whole level-up dedicate to ensuring you have Animate Dead and making you better at casting it), calling all the other things that necromancy does as 'secondary' is a bit of an odd take. In the 3.5 PHB there are 41 spells of the necromancy school that wizards and sorcerers have access to. Of those only three of them involve the creation of undead, five of them involve controlling or messing with undead, and the last is gentle repose. I wouldn't call almost 80% of the spells available- curses, effects targeting the soul and life force and so on without involving undeath- a byproduct. But yeah even if we ignore all that then between 3.5 core and 5e core wizards only lost create greater undead as far as their 'spells that raise the freaking dead' go. You can make skeletons and zombies and ghouls and ghasts and wights and mummies, just no more mohrgs/shadows/wraiths/spectres/devourers.

That actually works out perfectly, since that's about all I've got planned out currently plot-wise So should I then just come up with a few different modular locales/encounters I can just sort of lay down in front of them, regardless of what they choose to do? I feel like the middle part (i.e. the bit between "this guy is giving you a quest" and "conglaturation, you win") is going to involve a lot of improv and making shit up as I go along.

and it will. One method that tend to use a lot is NPC Verisimilitudinal Insertion which a batshit way of saying 'living world'. Have NPCs essentially doing their thing, and have points where the players can go in and sandbox or inject themselves without exploding your brain or theirs. Since you guys were already doing this stuff, I'm assuming you'll already have a feel for how time and energy to expend fleshing that stuff out. And yes, you will be Supreme Master Captain of the USS MakeShitUp and her continuing mission to waste an entire evening over kobold mud wrestling.

This is key. My local group has a legendary anecdote called "GO TO THE CABIN!" created when one of our friends tried GMing for the first time. Essentially, the players encountered a "impassable" chasm and cabin sitting on their side. Ignoring the cabin, they proceed to come up with a variety of ways of crossing the chasm, I think finally settling upon using a fly spell on one person to carry a rope to the other side so they can shimmy across. During all this, the increasingly frustrated GM kept pointing the cabin out and suggesting they go there, culminating in coming up with asspulls to thwart their chasm bypasses and demanding that they just GO TO THE CABIN. Relenting, his players finally went to the cabin, whereupon they encountered a witch who conjured a bridge for them across the chasm. DON'T DO THIS

My group has what we referred to as "The bridge." which is very similar to yours. Large broken bridge, 30ft gap, 90ft drop, below, muddy poisonous swamp, venomous snakes. 3 hours later, they still failed. It's now the anecdote we use to emphasise that this should have been SO MUCH EASIER than it's turning out to be.

Was watching a campaign and was amazed at how one critical check can completely upend a DM's campaign. So, the party is tasked by a sentient magical tree to recover a tablet from a place called "The Spire of the Black Dragon" which the party realizes a bit after they get there that it's an evil temple built on top of a fucking huge sleeping dragon. The party enters the temple where they meet the evil priests butler, who's in a room covered floor to ceiling in blood with people actively being mutilated by machines so their blood can be collected. After a silly conversation the butler is like "Here I'll take you to my master". So off they go and meet the guy, who is behind a magic shield in the middle of a blood ritual, of course, so he ignores the party. Eventually they get his attention and start conversing with him. So one thing to know is that this party never has a plan, they just think shit up on the spot and do it without thinking too much. So, eventually their conversation with the evil priest gets to a point where a member of the party asks: Party Member: "Can you tell us where the Tablet is? Evil Priest: "Now why would I do that when we're gonna use it to destroy the world?" Party Member: "Cuz we're nice people." *A second of stunned silence followed by the DM and players dying laughing* *player rolls a nat 20 with a +14 for Diplomacy* Evil Priest: "You know, I like something about you. I'll show where the tablet is if you agree to start the first part of the ritual." Most of the party agrees and so the evil priest leads them to the room where the tablets are stored. At this point the party's cleric of Pelor starts going "The fuck guys I'm cleric of Pelor are we really doin this cus if we are then I'm gonna have to intervene!". And so the squishy cleric tries to stop the MinMaxed Barbarian, who has a kill count in the mid double digits, from opening the door to where the tablet is stored. So naturally the barbarian knocks him the fuck out with like 100 points of subdual damage. While this is going on the Evil Priest is standing around watching this all happen completely stunned at the shit going on before him. Anyway, once the barbarian has all the tablets, turns out there was actually 3 of them, it's at this point the party fucking jumps the priest and gut him before he has a chance to even blink. After that fiasco the party begins to explore the rest of the temple when they happen upon a seemingly empty hallway behind a hidden door. So in their infinite wisdom instead of doing any checks the Barbarian wastes no time in declaring "There has to be a door here! I attack the the wall in front of me.". He naturally does a an absurd amount of damage and the DM says "You attack the wall and hear a load roar as the temple begins to shake violently.". Stunned, the party NOPE'S out of the temple because they know they just woke up the dragon. And so the Dragon, who is so big that when it moves the earth around it for miles moves, gets up and fly's away in the general direction of the city where the party needs to take the tablets. This is after they make a daring escape off the dragon's thigh by rappelling off of it using an endless rope. And so after returning to the magic tree the party is informed that they fucked up and made everything worse and now need to clean up their own mess. This campaign has so much ridiculous shit in it because of the party's actions including but not limited to: A player having acquired tattoos on their arms that let them open portals to a hell dimension where all the living creatures are skeletons, a dimension filled with Cthulhu squid monsters, and when both portals are combined opens a portal to fuckin Io floating around in space. Goat Hitler and his goat army that the players created after sending a regular goat they had a drunken bender with to the skeleton dimension after making it drink some ale that was made in the skeleton dimension they brought back. Recruiting Goat Hitler to kill the Black Dragon they unleashed upon the world by promising to open a portal to the squid dimension so goat Hitler can invade and acquire fresh water because the water in the skeleton dimension is actually sludge. After the battle between the dragon and the goats, the goats win by the way, the players discover that the battle caused a huge crack in a fuck huge obelisk containing the tainted Tree of Life and in begins leaking corrupting mist upon the land. The party's solution? Fill the crack with Papier-mâché and magic that creates stone while one member of the party goes off to find a selfless holy priest they can sacrifice to permanently fix the obelisk. This actually works. A town with people that had ghost limbs and bodies that were created for them by a mage because the mage was ordering unstable grenades as part of a big scheme to get cheap labor. The party kills him and of course all the ghost limbs and bodies disappear and it throws the town into chaos. Once the party meet the Magical Sentient Tree they ask him if he can do anything for them and he's like "Well, I can create new limbs for them made out of trees! They'll be like normal body parts except they have a kinda treeish look.". The party agrees to this solution without hesitation and then promptly agree never to mention the place ever again. The Barbarian hulking out and enlarging himself so much he is able to lift the 15,000lb home of the magical sentient tree and carry it across the continent to the Big Bad's lair in a single day so they can sacrifice him to the Big Bad they made a blood Pact with and take the trees soul. And that's all before they travel to a new continent and wreak havoc.

In my defense I hadn't actually looked heavily into necromancy in 5e yet so I was assuming he knew what he was talking about since he's had the 5e rulebooks since they came out while I've only had access to them since August and have only read in-depth on the parts that had been relevant to making my character (who isn't a sorcerer) for our other campaign. Amount of spells doesn't really mean anything though. When I call them secondary I mean they're not the primary focus of necromancy. Many of those other spells usually lead into creating or controlling the undead in some fashion, even if in a tangential manner. As a bit of an oddball example: Debugging makes up a lot of programming but that doesn't mean it's the primary focus of the field. It's a process that leads into the main focus of creating working programs. For people who play D&D and such the results seem to be mixed (with about half saying it focuses on creating undead and the others acknowledging that and saying it focuses on stuff like communicating with the undead as well) but I asked a number of people I know who don't play D&D and they universally were of the idea that necromancy was about creating undead.

Just wanted to mention that the story I shared came from this campaign: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpM13B_BZQRm1RymYVqw0CH8MFg4SPQxu Got some more batshit moments from that campaign actually. So continuing on from my last post kinda, the party is tasked by the Big Bad to collect 7 "powerful" souls and capture them in some Elder Scrolls soul gems. They decide it'd be a good idea to go back to the city they started their adventure at and find some souls and do some shopping, and by shopping I mean robbing the magic shops blind, who they've also terrorized before this and as such have Fort Knox like security systems installed now. So they get there and their plan is to find as many powerful souls in the city as possible so they don't have to run around the continent looking for people because they're lazy. So the party's Vampire Druid goes around town asking guards if they know of any powerful people because fuck it I guess since his diplomacy and bluff are off the charts as a vampire. A guard tells him that the have a new special forces unit that was formed after an event that took place early in the campaign involving the party, an evil Cthulhu monster, and the blocking up of the sewer filled with shit causing it to back up into city causing mass panic. So the plan becomes to challenge them all to "a friendly spar" then knock them out and abduct them into a pocket dimension the party's mage can conjure and capture their souls in the pocket dimension so there's no evidence. So eventually they get to the fight and it turns out that the special forces are actually kinda badass and can phase between planes or something allowing them to phase around the battlefield and they also have smoke bombs. Out of the five special forces units they fight and want to abduct, they knock one out, another botches planting an explosive and blows himself up killing him instantly, and the 3 left alive run the fuck away because they aren't dumb and know they got no chance at winning. So basically the plan was mostly a big failure and as a result the party's like "Fuck this place we're leaving!" and so the new plan is to leave the continent and go to a new one in search of 6 more souls. And so they pay for a ride on a boat that leaves in a week and in the meantime the vampire decides to try and find the Syndicate in an attempt to capture their leader and sacrifice them. He heads off alone and tracks one of them down to a posh rich district and is blocked by a locked gate. Without bothering to look around he turns to gas to bypass it and is immediately spotted by a small child who runs off in terror and naturally our vampire chases him down and caves in the kids head with his staff and hides the body on the roof of one of the houses. Now, or child murdering druid didn't think very far ahead because he forgot that as a vampire he has to be invited into the house he's trying to get into otherwise he can't enter it. His solution? light the dead kids body on fire and drop it down the chimney to smoke everyone out. This works although unfortunately for him of the people he captures, a rotund chef with a butcher knife, he still can't get in the house since the chef isn't the lord of the manor. Out of annoyance the druid punches him which drops him to negative levels which means in a week he'll return as a thrall but since that would attract attention our druid decides to kill him by chopping off the chefs head with his own butcher knife and then putting the body on top of a roof and dropping the head down the chimney and running away having accomplished nothing. The next event happens a bit after they arrive on the new continent which is MUCH larger than the one they left. Our group of murders and odd balls eventually end up at a place called "The Kings Burial Ground" where they encounter and get into a fight with the "King" who is fuckin bamf and has 20 levels over the party, they're only level 8. Now normally this would be a issue for any other group but not this one because the Barbarian has been taking all the feats and all the gear he can find that allow him to grow huge and carry heavy shit and the resident mage also has some 'Enlarge Person' spells. Thus after the the mage enlarges the barbarian doubling his size the barbarian then uses "Psionic Expansion" to enlarge himself by two size categories so now he's basically a fuckin colossus. After this the barbarian grapples one of the kings large minions, sprouts 4 additional arms and proceeds to deal 1201.5 points of damage crushing it into meat chunks. The enemy did have an on death last resort attack but the barbarian was saved from possession by a botch on a +30 Will save. Later on in the fight our barbarian pal whips out his adamantium greatsword and asks the mage to cast 'Expand Object' on it. This cause the sword to become "one size larger" which at this point means it colossal +2 in size which in terms of the game means it's the size of a small continent. I should note that realistically the sword became 7 times the diameter of the Earth. Anyway, the barbarian proceeds to obliterate the King, and much of the surrounding area, with 1666 points of damage. As a result of this fight the temple they were in was destroyed and the barbarian sliced a chasm into the world so large and deep that it's essentially bottomless, this naturally comes back to bite them in the ass later on in the campaign. I should also mention that, in the same session, after that earth rending event our lovable bringers of the Apocalypse find themselves captured and on a prison train. Of course they try to find a way to escape and the plan they go with is to open a portal. The result of this course of action is a spectacular train crash. Why is it spectacular? Well unbeknownst to them the train was traveling at Mach 2.6 and when they opened the portal it bisected the train causing them all to be ejected from the wreckage at Mach 2.6. This results in two members of the party failing the reflex check needed to not die and as a result they are essentially atomized and become part of the surrounding environment as a fine mist. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/58263/77bcb773-6018-48f0-af1b-bc49bc794fc1/Annotation 2019-01-16 194821.png Couldn't agree more!

Anyone got any tips for organizing world notes? I have plenty of ideas but as soon as I try writing anything down I get overwhelmed. How do you guys approach it?

I'd also appreciate if anyone had any notes on the kinds of things I should DEFINITELY have behind my DM screen for quick access (NPCs, encounters, rule reference notes, etc.)