Save Me From Myself
At or around XMAS 2025, Kera and I made a decision to buy all of the new Dungeons and Dragons books, known as 2024 before they finally became officially known as Dungeons and Dragons 5.5. For various reasons, which I don’t have sufficient time or interest in including here, I have been away from miniature painting and Warhammer as a whole for months. And I was totally aligned with that fact.
Edit – Actually: You know what, instead of a whole article later, here is the condensed version: I had not played a game of Heresy in a very long time. Having not used the models as intended in forever, I struggled to care about painting more Marines. What made it worse was that, while I wanted to paint one army, I chose to paint a small collection “real quick” with the thought that I could be done it fast and not worry about it later. I never finished that little project, because ever so quickly it began to feel like work. Not hobby. So I started playing video games again. And reading. I read a lot of books last year and finishing books made me wanna finish more books, so, those evenings that I would have hid in the hobby room were instead spent on the recliner with a book, a drink, and (because I am getting old) my fuckin readers.
The wife and I were looking for something un-warhammer to do together. But why D&D? It had been nearly 20 years since I had run tabletop roleplaying games when I began running a Pathfinder game. We had started with Pathfinder because it was the continuation of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons and 3.5 D&D was literally my favorite. As I have spoken of before, I wrote a 3rd Ed Campaign Setting known as Autonoma while in College and ran games within that world for years. I could, at the time, literally knew the game front and back.
So I ran a Pathfinder 2.0 game for my wife Kera, plus my buddies Nate and Ryan, whom, if you have seen my old videos, you have already met. Quite a few of those adventures were chronicled in the Game Night articles that I have now retroactively titled Season One: I never wrote them all up. Honestly, I thought I wrote more articles, but, most had more than one game session described within. We finished the First Act of the campaign, coming to a mid-story conclusion that was satisfying while leaving enough story open to continue at a later date. Spoiler Alert: we never went back to it. What started as a short-term adventure arc to learn the rules turned into a game that we got enjoyment out of while exploring an old version of Raidethe.
We had fun, but the games were far from my best. It was more railroad-y than I would like despite the fact that I put effort into running different types of encounters, within different styles of games. I put effort into running dungeons, cities, chases and high-society gatherings. I included encounters with tons of easy opponents, opposing teams, big-ass boss fights and literal war-scenes. We set up shop in a not-so-well-off town, spent money on defense, built up a home base, and even found second characters to bounce between two different teams based out of the same location, culminating in an all-out battle as our town burned to defeat the first big-bad of the four listed out for the campaign. It was awesome, then it was over.
With my game temporarily done, Ryan voiced interest in running a game himself. He wanted to run a game more or less based around the first Baldur’s Gate video game from 1990-whatever: I certainly owned it, but, I had no attention span for finishing games back then. So I was excited, and while discussing the idea of running the game during a hobby evening while we were working on his Steel Legion tanks, Ian expressed both interest and a love for the game. So, he joined our game as well.
My game was over, Ryan had started his and I was painting Iron Hands Heresy miniatures and needed something to entertain me while I painted. I started watching Youtube, a lot of Youtube actually. I had half-assed my way through my first campaign in literally forever, but watching Dungeontube showed me that my DMing skills had been severely compromised in the intervening years: I should have expected as much, but I found running a game both easy and enjoyable for so long that I presumed it would just be the same after so many years. I was wrong. Dead fuckin wrong.
I really attached to the Mystic Arts channel, which really reminded me what I used to do without thinking about it. It was a bit painful to find that I had forgotten so much in those years. The more I watched, the more I wanted to run games again. I decided it was time. I would resurrect an idea from my creative past. I had built a campaign setting out of few ideas that I strung together when my high school best friend Isaac had visited while I lived outside Boston shortly after college. It was titled Raidethe the Broken World. Along with Kera, we would take some of the basic ideas from the genesis of Raidethe and made something new with it. We both created some starting locations, and found they worked well together and the rest is history. We put the up all the Raidethe stuff here on the website.
So I dedicated all of my free time and worked on Raidethe. I ran some games for Kera, some games for Kera, Cliff and Allison. I also ran a fateful game for Kera, Ryan and Ian when Nate was unavailable to play on a day we expected to play. I ran a fucking fun game with a town that had a goose for a Mayor, his name was Elected Mayor Bimblebottom and had the most fun running a game that I could remember. I rolled worse on a Charisma save: The goose bit me.
This became the Goose game. AKA: Critical Honk!
Was it more fun because I was just kinda winging it? Was it more fun because I didn’t feel like I had to perform the perfect fucking game because it was just a one-off and just for fun that evening? Ryan made a comment about how it was clear that I enjoyed myself. Kera mentioned that it was fun to play and I clearly had a fun time running the game. All I know is that I wanted more.
I wanted to run more games.
One of the things that helped a lot was D&D Beyond. The website was great for getting going. I started with the free rules and a ran a couple games with the wife to make sure I actually wanted to do it, then, you can probably guess, I went all in. Like all the fuckin way. Then I subscribed and bought my books from them so I would have them both physically and digitally. With the digital version, I was able to link shit into the prep document I was making on this website. Life got easier, which meant I had a better time running a game since I had to put less time into needless prep and could adjust to what my wacky and wonderful players chose to do on the fly easier than ever before. Oh, Shit, I need a whatever-the-fuck: just search and boom, there it is, with all the stats and abilities I need to use it quite easily.
So I put more and more time into crafting a world to run my games in. I wanted to create more and more. Kera and I started by creating a few low level starting locations that were were able to link up on the map next to each other. Then I started forming the neighboring towns, cities and landscape. Then the history of the world pressed through the wrinkles in my brain and onto the screen. It was fun and I was spending hours staring at the same screen I am currently looking at.
All was great…
Until it wasn’t.
Leaning Over the Precipice
I quickly came to a conclusion. A conclusion that was formed in my head thanks to Bobby. Fuckin fuck. That guy knows me so well. Knowing how obsessive I am, a character flaw that not only can I not deny, but that I kinda embrace, for better or worst. He warned me. Warned me not to go too nuts. Well, at that point, I was working on four simultaneous campaigns:
One – Legend of Thornbeak: Kera and I alone. She had bought me a birthday present of one of those Adult Couple D&D games and we were ganna set it in my world with her Druid, my ranger and the Owlbear cub we had saved. named Thornbeak, or just Beaky.
Two – Kill, Kliky, Kill: My hometown game where Kera and I drove home to Maine to run a game for Cliff and Allison, in which we started an adventure, found a Kobold companion named Kliky that casually became the focus of the adventure series. Honestly, he was the best, finishing off so many of the mini-bosses and bosses in the game, the story slowly became about him and the PCs were his companions.
Three – Critical Honk: the random Goose Game was so much fun I wanted to run more, and Ryan came up with the moniker “Critical Honk” while making an AI assisted poster to post on the Discord server.
Four – Prisoner Dilemma: I was working on another game to play on alternating weeks from Ryan’s game, and the Critical Honk game, which would take over for a while after Ryan’s Baldur’s Gate game concluded.
Yeah. What could I say? I had gone full-retard just as Bobby had warned me about. I was working on stuff no one else would ever read and I wasn’t enjoying my other hobbies that I had resumed since exorcising Warhammer.
It was vacation time. March vacation is when I normally paint an entire fucking Warhammer army or some shit like that. The thing is, I have been away from painting minis. So far away that I have only applied paint to miniatures twice in the past few months, both times along with Ryan in my aptly-named hobby room: a room that I have barely used in months. What was I ganna do? Well, my plan was to play video games and work on Raidethe.
Due to vacation, I had a weekend off, and that’s a big deal since I have only a few of those a year, namely, during paid time off. Having had such a good time running the Goose Game, aka Critical Honk! I inquired into whether my friends were free at some point over that weekend. Turns out the answer was yes. So I got to planning for the game.
It was a terrible fucking experience. I cannot even determine why with relative certainty. I had some idea. There was a sandbox of locations and a handful of adventure ideas that I had put a modicum of thought into to allow the players agency over what we did. I had the town of Mistpoint in my head and the nearby city of Keatonborough thought through enough to bullshit my way through it and there was a bit of a lake in-between. but the hours I spent inventing towns and interesting shit kinda hurt my care for making a story. Story is why we play games, especially a fucking tabletop roleplaying game: I had been putting all my brain-power into making a setting, a place to play, but not a fucking thing to play within it, which, in reality, was the important part.
No one, not a single fucking living human being other than myself was ever going to give a shit enough to read the website that I was overpopulating with Raidethe ideas. I was so unimpressed with my creation for the day, that I literally lost sleep over it. I had three friends visiting for an entire afternoon in addition to my wife, and I was on a collision course with mediocrity.
I was so disinterested in my own game that I made with my own limited brain capacity that, well, instead I suggested that we soft reset and play within the Forgotten Realms.
So, we did.
I guess we’ll get to that next time…
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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man
