Shamefuldisplay

REST IN PIECES BLUE HELLSITE

From here on out I’ll be on my Twitter, @Shamefuldrew. Any further art, updates, commision info, etc. will be posted there, not here.

Well, there’s two major points when it comes to incorporating new characters:

The player should be willing to keep in mind that they’re being introduced part way into the story. If you’re building up to defeating the undead queen, the bard should have a strong motivation to defeat them. Maybe it’s revenge, maybe it’s heroic duty - whatever it is, it’s needs to be strong enough to get them to volunteer for this adventuring strike team.However, it’s good to keep in mind that the character should have some other motivation in addition to this, so that they have a reason to keep adventuring after the queen bites it.

If they don’t have any strong motivation for that, then the best way to incorporate them is through circumstance. If they’re attacking the queen, maybe the guy was caught in the city and is trying to survive - the only hope he has of escaping is to team up with the party, he can’t make it out on his own. Or maybe he’s a prisoner that they free, he now has a short-term motivation to take out the queen and get out.

After that first meeting/adventure it’s pretty easy to keep a character in the party. The characters have bonded through RP, jokes, and life-threatening situations. They’ve become battle-brothers. It’s mostly getting past that first hurdle.

Oh, I remember. I remember a time when web portals were the only way to find most content. My main problem with mobile design on desktop compared to the previous dumpster fire trends is that the others were ugly and cluttered, but didn’t strip away functionality.

Most “mobile-friendly” design centers around condensing as much functionality into as few buttons as possible that fill as much of the screen as possible, making you ping-pong around from link to link just to get where a single click on desktop would’ve brought you before.

I justify why they show up (though anything can boil down to just “coincidence”) - it’s up to the players to make characters that have personalities/objectives that line up with the party so that they can continue on after the first meeting/team-up.

Our new elf wizard, Priyanka, and dwarf barbarian, Hedrok, were encountered in the swamp near that magic tower. The party was pursuing the bandit (who’d made an action-movie level escape) and ran across the duo as the two were on their way east. Being good folks, they decided to help apprehend/slay the guy. In return, the party gave them a cut of the loot and traveled with them back to civilization. After that, their goals were intertwined.

The new goliath bard, Sven, arrived at the goblin caves with his other bard buddy, an NPC the party had already had a run in with, in order to help. The two were fetched by a rogue that the party had hired to disarm traps and escape - after the party trapped themselves in the tunnel, the rogue managed to get out and find the adventuring bard duo to ask for help. After all of that was sorted, the bard went off on his own business, so Sven joined up with the group to travel and collect tales.

Pretty darn long. We start at 2PM and can play until anywhere from 8PM to 9PM. Though the first 30 minutes to an hour are usually just bullshitting and chatting.

That particular encounter was because they chased an enemy of theirs into an abandoned wizard tower. Each floor had been taken over by various magical fauna. The necromantic bonfire was the entire reason the villain was there - he sacrificed one of his own dudes to kick it into overdrive. That caused any dead things in the area to be brought back as undead - right at the same time that the dragonborn was pilfering the body of the wizard.

A list of player character deaths in Shame Game:

Qindan Kelric the high elf Illusion Wizard (level 2, session 3) - Drained to death by arcane elementals when the party decided to sprint across a room full of them rather than engaging them.

Uwabami Daimon the gold dragonborn Rogue (level 2, session 3) - Killed by Qindan’s risen corpse as he tried to loot it while the rest of the party was dealing with the necromantic bonfire that was just lit.

Jakov Falbrook the human brute Fighter (level 4, session 6) - Slain via goblin ambush followed by hobgoblin decapitation when he rushed into a pitch black cave room that he knew a number of goblins were hiding in.