#miscellanium

man why you so mysterious ? ? ? ? ? what are you even....!!!!

Not the beginning of the setting in an origin myth sense (because, honestly, I'm stealing 4th editions' "gods did a light colonialism on the primordials" thing), but how this setting started in the real world.

The blame falls on Jeff Rients (who is also on tumblr but I can't find the name right now)

back in 2017-ish, Jeff was running a dungeon-crawl game on Google+, where any adherent of the Flailsnails Conventions could turn up and take part. Living in Australia, in a household that would not support me playing D&D at 3am, I could not take part, but I read the blog posts and watched from afar with envy as Jeff's multitudionous players got up to shenanigans in the dungeons, and traded, competed and organized when outside of it (the fact that the players founded a wizard library entirely off their own initiative was particularly cool to me).

Then I got a place to live that was back near the university where I had studied. The university with RPG club I had accidentally acquired a lifetime membership of. The RPG club that was starting new games in February. The new games that always needed more GMs.

AND the place was near a bar that hosted D&D on weekends.

So I decided that if I couldn't join Jeff's game, I would make my own with blackjack and hookers with a newer ruleset.

I had liked hearing about the wild variety of characters Jeff had seen due to allowing multiple different retroclones rulesets for character creation - but knowing that none of my players were interested in OSR stuff at the time, I determined that the best way to achieve this was to allow anything actively published by Wizards of the Coast. Any books, any unearthed arcana, anything (I later walked that back a little bit - no Ravnica backgrounds and NO MYSTICS JFC)

I cobbled together a couple of levels of dungeon and a vague reason why the dungeon content was so wildly varied, named the town above the dungeon Miscellanium both in honour to Jeff's Miscellanium of Cinder and the fact it a good Roman-sounding name for a place full of diverse weridos, worked out how to use a Facebook group to keep all the people involved up to date, and got going.

============

it was amazing.

The wednesday and saturday groups were, initially, mostly seperate. They would sometimes stumble on what each other had been doing, and would vaguely be aware of each others actions - I gave out XP for after-action reports, in-character being the result of adventurers bragging in the tavern between delves. Eventually as the dungeon sprawled out to the point where many players had only seen a small portion of it, resulting in one of my fondest memories:

P1: "Right, we're going to explore past the mushroom chamber [the chamber that, on the map, looks mushroom shaped], so we should go left" P2: "No, the mushroom chamber [the chamber full of mushrooms] is straight ahead!" P3: "You're both idiots, the mushroom chamber [the SECOND chamber full of mushrooms] is to the right!"

15 minutes, much laughter on my part, and much waving around of maps on the players part, later I pointed out to them that there might in fact be multiple chambers that could be described as "the mushroom chamber". After that, the two groups started sharing their maps.

In september, 7 months (both real and game world time) after the first discovery of the dungeon, the players collected together to create the Miscellanium Adventurers' Guild. They had argued about buying property in the city above the dungeon, until my lovely and very smart partner pointed out that they had de-monstered several city blocks of real estate down in the dungeon, and with enough magic and barricades, could claim more space than the guild would ever need. Watching the players work together to set that up was great, and it was even more awesome months later when the Guild was briefly beseiged by constructs from the deep levels.

Eventually, I ran out of content ideas, and the party found the bottom of the dungeon. I made up a bullshit magic excuse for running the same boss fight twice (so I wouldn't have to have 12 players in the one fight), and they slew the demigod-dragon-devil that the dungeon had been dreamed up to contain. At that point the game had run for 18 months, and 151 sessions, and the dungeon had felt the tread of more than 30 characters.

I'd had a lot of fun, but I hadn't done a huge amount of worldbuilding, except by implication: the game had only ever taken the PCs to the dungeon and the town above it, but there had been reference to an Empire, a very-recently-turned-Matriarchal orc state, somewhere with a lot of tieflings (so many tiefling PCs!), a fallen elven Kingdom with lots of missing princesses, and mistakes made by gods in older times.

oh yeah here's that miscellanium ref sheet in case you're wondering quite detailed I know :]

so for context someone in the livestream asked what a nonmiscellany miscellanium would look like and I said "I think he would fit as those funny little, um… as one of those little funny flipnote monopedal guys, ya know"

this anon Knew! what I meant and asked "oh like oFTo cats" and sent this drawing to clarify

it varies a bit depending on how you view it! there are a few cattos of mine with huge tails but in different ways. off the top of my head...

Chester's (blue) is massive, though I interpret the tail as being a little dense—like a pillow. Linda's (pink) is smaller, but still on the larger side

Miscellanium's is large (close to Chester's), but due to the no lore rule, how fluffy it truly is comes down to your own interpretation and preference

for the LARGEST one, Sauce sweeps the competition with his. it's unfortunately the least fluffy since it's all a gelatinous material but you can squeeze and stretch it instead as a bonus

for the FLUFFIEST one, Kim is your best choice for Everywhere on him! there's also the added benefit of his fur being extremely omniphobic, making it perpetually clean and smooth