I actually thought the spinning ring was much cooler than the cliché flipping coin. It made me think of one of those spinning gyroscopes that symbolize a portal making machine in a scifi movie.
In my experience, my favorite solution to a "hard lock" scenario is what I've heard called "success with complications". Copper failed his roll, but that doesn't necessarily mean he failed his tracking. If there was a time crunch, maybe he took longer than he would have otherwise. Or maybe his sloppy tracking drew the attention of enemies who were also now able to find the entrance. I've found sub-optimal success to be more interesting than and nearly as punishing as straight failure.
Agreed! Just did this last night during game, and I instantly knew it was working- because the player who rolled knew it started swearing before they even knew if it succeeded. Thanks for adding this! 👍
100% - I use this with regularity. It's easy to reframe the check so it makes sense to the player. "You'll succeed at this, but roll to see if it gets more complicated."
@@charlieelding5909 Perhaps not, but you can imagine the sound it might make if such a thing were possible, and perhaps in so doing, better understand the being that is named after such an impossible sound.
It might work, assuming the physics of reality, if the Tabaxi brain interpret photons as audio. Or maybe if they’re in an environment filled with an amplifying medium, the vibrations imposed on the ice when absorbing and re-emitting the dappled moonlight, might reach their ears. It could be the result of an audio-micro«scope»-spell. Or maybe their brains have learned to read soundwaves as patterns of causality, and have become sophisticated enough to extrapolate sounds the Tabaxi have never heard directly. For example if they hear the wind blowing, they pick up a nuance in that sound, and they know the wind would sound slightly different under other weather conditions, so they can hear the presence of moonlight meeting ice, and then their brains can filter out the wind, and understand what the sound of reflected moonlight is (this is simplified, they’d have to take into account absolutely everything in their surroundings.)
@@chocolatebunnies6376 Or it's a rough translation from Tabaxi to English. Possibly with Common in between. I know they speak Common +1 RAW, but it's hard for me to believe they wouldnt have their own language.
I’m both humbled and inspired by this campaign. I’ve never played in or run anything so rich and complex as this setting and that makes me feel a little sad and inadequate as a DM. Yet, I’m so so so inspired!! Watching the world building and the campaign diaries really helps me see what’s possible and how to achieve similar levels of story richness and complexity.
The race for ringwell reminds me of the Dragons Maze from MTG with each guild sending a team to run the maze and whoever gets out first wins ultimate power
Man that entry for Judge's sword is badass. I love named weapons that have lore attached. When they were describing Leech's warlock rod idk why i thought of those daggers that lock into each other at the center to make a cylinder. A surgeon needs his scalpels after all haha.
This was such an exciting episode. The idea of a break, as you mentioned during the episode, saddens me, just because I'm so gripped with the story. Thank you!
I'm so excited for next weeks episode! However, here's my two cents on the "hard lock". How it was described in the episode was Big Cat "help"ing Copper find the path Sunlight Reflected took out of Ringwell, by picking up his scent. Cooper could have rolled with advantage and that would've had a higher chance of passing that check. I liked Tom not Tom's improvised solution, and loved how you were happy to stretch the rules as to not impede them further. Another mark as to why you're a Great DM. Keep up the great work!
I love the reality-hopping. I think its very appropriate for the last of the helltroopers, with a native of the Astral Sea and of Alloy as part of their highest ranks.
Magic items just sitting around at the end of a slog, randomly, I never found satisfying. The Ceremony for getting the demonic sword via a Celestial gift is way more epic, imho. Just GETTING it that way, gives it lore, and gravitas.
I've watched each game session from the beginning and I am totally hooked. These campaign diaries are great!! They are the perfect refresher for the previous session and fuel my excitement for the next.
"The Sun Reflecting off a Lover's Eyes" as a naming convention for the True Elves reminds me a lot of the naming conventions for the pilots/candidates/excerpts from Austin Walker/Friends at the Table's latest sci-fi tabletop series. For instance, 'Signet' who is one of these pilots has the full name of "They marked scars of light in pitch; born in fiercest purpose, and beheld as the Signet sealed upon our pact" Anyway, neat. Love these types of big long naming conventions.
Attention New DMs: Matt is an experienced DM, and he sometimes breaks the "best practices" guidelines (on purpose or by mistake) when running his game. His putting the entrance to Ringwell behind a high Survival DC check means that he is asking for trouble. When Copper failed the check, Matt and his players had to scramble for another way to find the entrance. Tom used his Ranger Class Ability "Primeval Awareness" to try and detect traces of Celestial. That ability would not have worked (according to Hoyle), but Matt decided to fudge it so that he could escape the situation. Is there a difference between fudging the DC lower and fudging how a class ability works? Other comments below describe alternate ways of interpreting a "12" result, but the best way to solve the issue is to NOT trap yourself in that situation in the first place. Don't lock your story behind a Puzzle, Secret Door, or Tracking Check unless it is an optional sub-plot. When failure is not an option, don't roll the dice. One way to handle the story progression is to have the Sapphire "information is our job/power" Club pinpoint the entrance for the PCs. Now that the Sun Elf went mad/escaped, the entrance is no longer hidden from them magically. Or, once another faction found and entered Ringwell, they detected something and they deduced the location of the entrance. This solution also would of had the side benefit of alleviating some of the apparent player frustration with the Orc scholar not being able to tell them anything about where he is asking them to go. Anna and Phil both made comments during that question/answer session about the lack of satisfactory answers. And remember, learning from other peoples mistakes is a lot less painful that learning from your own.
Me too, even though I'll have already watched the 'show' once or twice before the CD is posted I really look forward to seeing what is going on behind the scenes and what Matt and Crew thought about it.
Knightly orders, Noble houses, guild uinions and Factions are super fun elements in DND/fantasy RPGs! One of the things that make your games, Matt, enjoyable for me!
I cannot wait for tonight’s episode. This campaign has been a blast so far, and The Chain doing a dungeon crawl is going to be great. The level of role playing that the players bring I think will lend itself to a very engaging dungeon crawl. Time to start counting how many rooms they can clear.
I'm two years behind, but I had to comment when I read the pdf on Exile. That is a beastly sword. Wall of fire is a huge bonus for a sword, and a bonus 2d12 against demons is crazy good, especially if they fight as many of them as I think they're going to. Not to mention, intelligent items are always great fun.
Big fan of this stuff. That said, a note for those with less experience, Matt's tendency to multi-name things is one of those new player boogey men. Players that are new to DnD or more generally new to fantasy trip over that stuff really easily and can be really quickly agitated by it. There's a point where, even though it's entertaining to us as DMs/Writers to add verisimilitude that way, it can feel like things get needlessly complex to those who are new to keeping track.
Hearing that old player characters are now NPCs is always the coolest thing to me. My group that plays is gearing up to start a new campaign next month, and it's a continuation of a campaign we finished awhile ago that will have some overlap. I'm looking forward to that, but I'm not the DM in this case. I'd love to get to that level with a living, continuing world some day.
As far as the hard lock scenario goes I would have had them find it regardless of the check. Failing means they were beaten there by the Iron Pact. It how I handle most hard lock must pass this for the story to continue checks just fail it forward
Your elves and my custom lizardfolk race have similar naming conventions! My players recently met a reptilian named "flowing water over the stones, which in time reduces all things to the dust of the unborn and the dead."
I'm excited for tonight's episode! I'm also excited to see Ringwell. It sounds like there's a lot of neat lore attached to it, and hopefully we get to hear about it :)
I'm loving the politics that you are introducing to the campaign though I might need a flow chart to keep all the factions straight. That said I'm looking forward to a good old fashioned dungeon crawl.
I really hope you can find someone to run for you, Matt. I like seeing you as a player. One Grung Above was way to short and your character therein was very amusing.
I happened to rewatch this video and I might have just made the connection that the pharoah that Ajax took the jade hand from is or in the future will be Khorsekef the Infinite. I'd love to see that unfold, Matt. I know that while the Chain might defeat Ajax, your settings history includes eras and ages beyond the rule and fall of Ajax. So if it turns out that Ajax isn't stopped in your campaign, it could be Khorsekef that will be the end of Ajax. If the good guys don't beat big bad guy, eventually they get beaten by bigger badder guys.
FYI having a locals to the area only inn/tavern isn't as modern as you think. Up through the Renaissance serving locals and serving travelers were two separate business licenses for inns/taverns (though in period the clientele would be less residents of a separate area of a large city, more residents of outlying farms/homes in the city for business).
"Unite the king's forces and turn them into an army" Does that seem like the most obvious thing? Idk. But at some point, maybe when they were first learning about how the Prince's forces are scattered, that's what I wanted to happen and my resolve was only strengthened after meeting the Red Falcons.
Oh baby, looking forward to this! The Chain is now my new Game of Thrones... well at least seasons 1-6... :D Your world building is fantastic Matt... but the drama, diplomacy and politiking is EPIC!
I love that there's a police captain named Zarok. Do dwarves pick aspirational names, or is this an example of someone being named after Zarok the Law-giver and deciding "Welp. Guess I better go into criminal justice."
You mentioned that Judge had the idea to do a perception check because you asked how devil sight works. Just as a heads up if you don't want to ruin the surprise later, advantage in 5e gives +5 to passive perception checks. You can probably tweak it and makes it a +2 or a +8 if you feel that's more appropriate, but the idea is that a passive check should be... Well, passive.
The sound of the Star-elf (wet finger on a wine glass) is called a Glass Harmonica. Gaetano Donizetti used it in the original score of his opera "Lucia di Lammermoor" during the Mad Scene (soprano & glass harmonica) right after she goes crazy and murders her brand new husband on their wedding night. Check it out on TH-cam!
They could make a Yawning Portal kind of local, but private, that´d be cool, a place where all the Chain hangs around between missions, protecting the place that can grant them the advantage and the chance to defeat Ajax.
I kinda like the War College/War Academy. It mimics those weird rivalries with similar names in the real world. Perfect to have the characters make mistakes.
Going to be interesting to see how you can balance the war in capital and the pcs, and the fight against Ajax (which they seem much more interested in at the moment especially Lars)... I think I'd make that blue dragon knight in league with Ajax to serve as a sub villain
Honestly, I'd be tempted to make him a virulent anti-Ajaxer so the PCs have to grit their teeth and work with this asshole for the "greater good." Then, just to be amusing, have him actually die heroically in the big fight with Ajax's forces, preferably saving that lady knight cop he whacked so everyone is confused. :P
Keeping involved in the city could be running a retainer game while the main party is in Ringwell. It could be Angel and his chosen few tackling Capital problems.
Ah great, Matt: I've seen the stream, but your summary distracts me from grading final Shakespeare papers for a few precious minutes. Loved your first chapter of Fighter, by the way - most dramatic! Look forward to the stream tomorrow, peace ... out!
I was so upset they didn't ask about what Nails said about the gods. Honestly I think they were a little overwhelmed with people who just want to do "Good" and oppose Ajax. "We are not used to paying people to do the right thing." Suggests to me, that they have little experience dealing with people outside of their insular community. (Also that they may be strangely naive.)
When it comes to visiting lots of pocket dimensions and other planets that you only do one thing in, the notion of these other places being other worlds rather than just pocket dimensions or even just other parts of the same world become meaningless. To use TV Tropes terms, if you only go to one planet once and only visit a volcano, it might as well be a Single Biome Planet, even if it isn't. (And it's the reason Single Biome Planets exist - only one small patch of forest is used from the planet, so Endor is ALL forest.) Going to another world becomes indistinguishable from just teleporting to another part of the same world unless there's a marked difference in the (meta-)physics of the world. It's not wrong to do something like that, of course, but it kind of undersells the value of traveling to different worlds if they don't really seem different. (I'm thinking in particular about old video games like Bard's Tale where they advertised how the first game was just one town, but by the third game, you're hopping dimensions... but the first game's town's wine cellars were larger than the whole explorable area of a whole planet in those later games.) If it's only meant to be a pocket dimension (or functional equivalent), that's fine, but it's not really a *world* until you can go through a significant amount of terrain in it, and that means players visiting it more than once and going off the beaten track instead of just going once on a relatively linear path through it. (As in, anything the players/audience don't see doesn't exist.) That said, you could certainly make a world where traveling between dimensions is easier than getting to the other end of a city by walking just as a way of creating a truly alien vibe to the place. That's what made Sigil work so well.
Learning that O’D reads the story of the Chain to his kids has added several years to my lifespan.
I actually thought the spinning ring was much cooler than the cliché flipping coin.
It made me think of one of those spinning gyroscopes that symbolize a portal making machine in a scifi movie.
In my experience, my favorite solution to a "hard lock" scenario is what I've heard called "success with complications". Copper failed his roll, but that doesn't necessarily mean he failed his tracking. If there was a time crunch, maybe he took longer than he would have otherwise. Or maybe his sloppy tracking drew the attention of enemies who were also now able to find the entrance. I've found sub-optimal success to be more interesting than and nearly as punishing as straight failure.
Agreed! Just did this last night during game, and I instantly knew it was working- because the player who rolled knew it started swearing before they even knew if it succeeded. Thanks for adding this! 👍
It's why I love the Edge of the Empire dice rules more than the standard D20 rules
100% - I use this with regularity. It's easy to reframe the check so it makes sense to the player. "You'll succeed at this, but roll to see if it gets more complicated."
Hah! Your Elves name themselves the same way my Tabaxi do. Sound of Dappled Moonlight Reflecting off a Frozen Pool says "Hi."
Scott Palmer I swear that wouldn’t make a sound?
@@charlieelding5909 perhaps not a sound you're capable of hearing.
@@charlieelding5909 Perhaps not, but you can imagine the sound it might make if such a thing were possible, and perhaps in so doing, better understand the being that is named after such an impossible sound.
It might work, assuming the physics of reality, if the Tabaxi brain interpret photons as audio. Or maybe if they’re in an environment filled with an amplifying medium, the vibrations imposed on the ice when absorbing and re-emitting the dappled moonlight, might reach their ears. It could be the result of an audio-micro«scope»-spell. Or maybe their brains have learned to read soundwaves as patterns of causality, and have become sophisticated enough to extrapolate sounds the Tabaxi have never heard directly. For example if they hear the wind blowing, they pick up a nuance in that sound, and they know the wind would sound slightly different under other weather conditions, so they can hear the presence of moonlight meeting ice, and then their brains can filter out the wind, and understand what the sound of reflected moonlight is (this is simplified, they’d have to take into account absolutely everything in their surroundings.)
@@chocolatebunnies6376 Or it's a rough translation from Tabaxi to English. Possibly with Common in between. I know they speak Common +1 RAW, but it's hard for me to believe they wouldnt have their own language.
*Matt throws in the celestial's voice sound beat* :0
I love you MCDM. You're my favorite group of people who play D&D and post it online.
Phat Kid agreed!! I check out critical role every once in awhile but it doesn't seem to hook me
Hah, defintitely on the "list of phrases never thought I'd hear"
@@markselorio5837 "Local man is surprised that people like different things"
The rebellion against Ajax begins here! Go-go Hell-troopers!
Ajax is off conquering the world and King is just over here like “Anyone seen Francis!?!”
I’m both humbled and inspired by this campaign. I’ve never played in or run anything so rich and complex as this setting and that makes me feel a little sad and inadequate as a DM. Yet, I’m so so so inspired!! Watching the world building and the campaign diaries really helps me see what’s possible and how to achieve similar levels of story richness and complexity.
You know what would be funny? If the Ilithids follow the Chain into Ringwell as an unknown 3rd faction
wild card baby hahaha
Yes, the Old Ones
He reads The Chain to his kids??? Makes OD even more adorable!
I suppose it is only natural that the knights of the prince would one day move on to be the knights of King...
if only it were so easy...
The race for ringwell reminds me of the Dragons Maze from MTG with each guild sending a team to run the maze and whoever gets out first wins ultimate power
Man that entry for Judge's sword is badass. I love named weapons that have lore attached. When they were describing Leech's warlock rod idk why i thought of those daggers that lock into each other at the center to make a cylinder. A surgeon needs his scalpels after all haha.
This was such an exciting episode. The idea of a break, as you mentioned during the episode, saddens me, just because I'm so gripped with the story. Thank you!
I'm so excited for next weeks episode! However, here's my two cents on the "hard lock". How it was described in the episode was Big Cat "help"ing Copper find the path Sunlight Reflected took out of Ringwell, by picking up his scent. Cooper could have rolled with advantage and that would've had a higher chance of passing that check. I liked Tom not Tom's improvised solution, and loved how you were happy to stretch the rules as to not impede them further. Another mark as to why you're a Great DM. Keep up the great work!
I love the reality-hopping. I think its very appropriate for the last of the helltroopers, with a native of the Astral Sea and of Alloy as part of their highest ranks.
Oh man. Exile is amazing. I love imagery of an exiled demon wielding holy power. I'm super pumped to see its personality and how Anna deals with it.
Magic items just sitting around at the end of a slog, randomly, I never found satisfying.
The Ceremony for getting the demonic sword via a Celestial gift is way more epic, imho. Just GETTING it that way, gives it lore, and gravitas.
Aw, I’m gonna miss Nero too. Maybe he’s been reassigned to follow The Chain specifically so he can be a recurring character?
All I want is for Angel to end up running a spy network through the facade of a butcher shop.
I've watched each game session from the beginning and I am totally hooked. These campaign diaries are great!! They are the perfect refresher for the previous session and fuel my excitement for the next.
20:55 apparently celestial sounds amazing.
I still think when Matt mentioned the evil items that Anna looked like she was plotting a way to somehow keep them for Judge lol
I enjoy the excitement in your descriptions of tangential information.
"The Sun Reflecting off a Lover's Eyes" as a naming convention for the True Elves reminds me a lot of the naming conventions for the pilots/candidates/excerpts from Austin Walker/Friends at the Table's latest sci-fi tabletop series. For instance, 'Signet' who is one of these pilots has the full name of "They marked scars of light in pitch; born in fiercest purpose, and beheld as the Signet sealed upon our pact"
Anyway, neat. Love these types of big long naming conventions.
The sound effect for the moon elfs voice freaked me out. I'm sitting in my car at work and I thought it was a distant loud noise.
Attention New DMs:
Matt is an experienced DM, and he sometimes breaks the "best practices" guidelines (on purpose or by mistake) when running his game. His putting the entrance to Ringwell behind a high Survival DC check means that he is asking for trouble. When Copper failed the check, Matt and his players had to scramble for another way to find the entrance. Tom used his Ranger Class Ability "Primeval Awareness" to try and detect traces of Celestial. That ability would not have worked (according to Hoyle), but Matt decided to fudge it so that he could escape the situation. Is there a difference between fudging the DC lower and fudging how a class ability works?
Other comments below describe alternate ways of interpreting a "12" result, but the best way to solve the issue is to NOT trap yourself in that situation in the first place. Don't lock your story behind a Puzzle, Secret Door, or Tracking Check unless it is an optional sub-plot. When failure is not an option, don't roll the dice.
One way to handle the story progression is to have the Sapphire "information is our job/power" Club pinpoint the entrance for the PCs. Now that the Sun Elf went mad/escaped, the entrance is no longer hidden from them magically. Or, once another faction found and entered Ringwell, they detected something and they deduced the location of the entrance. This solution also would of had the side benefit of alleviating some of the apparent player frustration with the Orc scholar not being able to tell them anything about where he is asking them to go. Anna and Phil both made comments during that question/answer session about the lack of satisfactory answers.
And remember, learning from other peoples mistakes is a lot less painful that learning from your own.
I love these Campaign Diaries.
Me too, even though I'll have already watched the 'show' once or twice before the CD is posted I really look forward to seeing what is going on behind the scenes and what Matt and Crew thought about it.
@@mandodelorian4668 It's inspired me to start my own, which is great because tomorrow is session 1 of the new season for my campaign.
Matt I absolutely love the world you’ve created , thank you !
I was thinking Leech could use the sin metal to make a parasol and use it as a weapon.
Can’t wait to see Ringwell. Super hype for tonight. Good luck Matt
Knightly orders, Noble houses, guild uinions and Factions are super fun elements in DND/fantasy RPGs!
One of the things that make your games, Matt, enjoyable for me!
I cannot wait for tonight’s episode. This campaign has been a blast so far, and The Chain doing a dungeon crawl is going to be great. The level of role playing that the players bring I think will lend itself to a very engaging dungeon crawl. Time to start counting how many rooms they can clear.
I'm two years behind, but I had to comment when I read the pdf on Exile. That is a beastly sword. Wall of fire is a huge bonus for a sword, and a bonus 2d12 against demons is crazy good, especially if they fight as many of them as I think they're going to. Not to mention, intelligent items are always great fun.
Big fan of this stuff. That said, a note for those with less experience, Matt's tendency to multi-name things is one of those new player boogey men. Players that are new to DnD or more generally new to fantasy trip over that stuff really easily and can be really quickly agitated by it. There's a point where, even though it's entertaining to us as DMs/Writers to add verisimilitude that way, it can feel like things get needlessly complex to those who are new to keeping track.
Watching your game and your journals are extremely inspiring. Not to mention your world building series!
It makes sense that there would be so much “dimension traveling”. The Chain has done this regularly in the past.
Agreed, if there has ever been a campaign where plane hopping is suitable this is it!
Hearing that old player characters are now NPCs is always the coolest thing to me. My group that plays is gearing up to start a new campaign next month, and it's a continuation of a campaign we finished awhile ago that will have some overlap. I'm looking forward to that, but I'm not the DM in this case. I'd love to get to that level with a living, continuing world some day.
As far as the hard lock scenario goes I would have had them find it regardless of the check. Failing means they were beaten there by the Iron Pact. It how I handle most hard lock must pass this for the story to continue checks just fail it forward
Your elves and my custom lizardfolk race have similar naming conventions! My players recently met a reptilian named "flowing water over the stones, which in time reduces all things to the dust of the unborn and the dead."
I'm excited for tonight's episode! I'm also excited to see Ringwell. It sounds like there's a lot of neat lore attached to it, and hopefully we get to hear about it :)
No no no!! I’m caught up now. I love binging this story! And the dm talk is helping so much
Man this campaign is so cool! I wish I was playing in it. But you inspired me to run my own campaign and session zero is this Saturday!
Matt, it would be extremely difficult to overestimate how much you have influenced the way I run d&d. Thank you.
I love that in 37 minutes we get a full 3 hrs. or gameplay! Way to pack in the information!
Just got the hard copy of strongholds and followers. Thank you so much I'm really excited!!!
I'm loving the politics that you are introducing to the campaign though I might need a flow chart to keep all the factions straight. That said I'm looking forward to a good old fashioned dungeon crawl.
I really enjoy the way your mind works Matt.
The intro really warms any d&d players heart.
Capital: City of Doors.
I really hope you can find someone to run for you, Matt. I like seeing you as a player. One Grung Above was way to short and your character therein was very amusing.
Literally finised watched that stream-vod and got the notification
I happened to rewatch this video and I might have just made the connection that the pharoah that Ajax took the jade hand from is or in the future will be Khorsekef the Infinite. I'd love to see that unfold, Matt. I know that while the Chain might defeat Ajax, your settings history includes eras and ages beyond the rule and fall of Ajax. So if it turns out that Ajax isn't stopped in your campaign, it could be Khorsekef that will be the end of Ajax. If the good guys don't beat big bad guy, eventually they get beaten by bigger badder guys.
FYI having a locals to the area only inn/tavern isn't as modern as you think. Up through the Renaissance serving locals and serving travelers were two separate business licenses for inns/taverns (though in period the clientele would be less residents of a separate area of a large city, more residents of outlying farms/homes in the city for business).
The sound effect was really cool
Oh wow. Early in the day campaign diary! :D
I'm loving the lighting of this video.
Ajax and the Chain cannot coexist. Let the war begin!
I love these videos, thanks for doing them Matt!
"Unite the king's forces and turn them into an army" Does that seem like the most obvious thing? Idk. But at some point, maybe when they were first learning about how the Prince's forces are scattered, that's what I wanted to happen and my resolve was only strengthened after meeting the Red Falcons.
Thanks for doing these vids, I don't have time to watch the game but enjoy watching these!
Oh baby, looking forward to this!
The Chain is now my new Game of Thrones... well at least seasons 1-6... :D
Your world building is fantastic Matt... but the drama, diplomacy and politiking is EPIC!
haha ... Epic
I love that there's a police captain named Zarok. Do dwarves pick aspirational names, or is this an example of someone being named after Zarok the Law-giver and deciding "Welp. Guess I better go into criminal justice."
You mentioned that Judge had the idea to do a perception check because you asked how devil sight works. Just as a heads up if you don't want to ruin the surprise later, advantage in 5e gives +5 to passive perception checks. You can probably tweak it and makes it a +2 or a +8 if you feel that's more appropriate, but the idea is that a passive check should be... Well, passive.
Really enjoying this run and the diaries - very cool/inspiring ;)
I don’t watch Matt much any more but this thumbnail brought me back
Many codices in ringwell I think
Three dislikes are followers of Ajax.
The sound of the Star-elf (wet finger on a wine glass) is called a Glass Harmonica. Gaetano Donizetti used it in the original score of his opera "Lucia di Lammermoor" during the Mad Scene (soprano & glass harmonica) right after she goes crazy and murders her brand new husband on their wedding night. Check it out on TH-cam!
Primevil Awareness is a Ranger Ability, not technically a spell but I'm just being pedantic
The Dancing Minstrel has a minstrel who doesn't dance? :o
Oh that's awesome with the music and the language. You should do that in the game, that is amazing :). Excited for Ringwell for tonight!
"There is in fact a minstrel here. But he's not dancing.". That's false advertising right there, Matt.
They could make a Yawning Portal kind of local, but private, that´d be cool, a place where all the Chain hangs around between missions, protecting the place that can grant them the advantage and the chance to defeat Ajax.
Love this! Thanks for your efforts.
I see what you're doing with that background lighting
I kinda like the War College/War Academy. It mimics those weird rivalries with similar names in the real world. Perfect to have the characters make mistakes.
Love these campaign diaries!
Going to be interesting to see how you can balance the war in capital and the pcs, and the fight against Ajax (which they seem much more interested in at the moment especially Lars)... I think I'd make that blue dragon knight in league with Ajax to serve as a sub villain
Honestly, I'd be tempted to make him a virulent anti-Ajaxer so the PCs have to grit their teeth and work with this asshole for the "greater good." Then, just to be amusing, have him actually die heroically in the big fight with Ajax's forces, preferably saving that lady knight cop he whacked so everyone is confused. :P
Keeping involved in the city could be running a retainer game while the main party is in Ringwell. It could be Angel and his chosen few tackling Capital problems.
Ah great, Matt: I've seen the stream, but your summary distracts me from grading final Shakespeare papers for a few precious minutes. Loved your first chapter of Fighter, by the way - most dramatic! Look forward to the stream tomorrow, peace ... out!
can’t track? primevil awareness.
can’t pick the lock? misty step.
can’t find the assassian? farie fire.
spells fix everything.
this butcher shop will become the yawning portal of matt world :D
Seems like the warlock could easily turn in their iron rod for a rod of the pact keeper.
I was so upset they didn't ask about what Nails said about the gods. Honestly I think they were a little overwhelmed with people who just want to do "Good" and oppose Ajax. "We are not used to paying people to do the right thing." Suggests to me, that they have little experience dealing with people outside of their insular community. (Also that they may be strangely naive.)
When it comes to visiting lots of pocket dimensions and other planets that you only do one thing in, the notion of these other places being other worlds rather than just pocket dimensions or even just other parts of the same world become meaningless. To use TV Tropes terms, if you only go to one planet once and only visit a volcano, it might as well be a Single Biome Planet, even if it isn't. (And it's the reason Single Biome Planets exist - only one small patch of forest is used from the planet, so Endor is ALL forest.) Going to another world becomes indistinguishable from just teleporting to another part of the same world unless there's a marked difference in the (meta-)physics of the world.
It's not wrong to do something like that, of course, but it kind of undersells the value of traveling to different worlds if they don't really seem different. (I'm thinking in particular about old video games like Bard's Tale where they advertised how the first game was just one town, but by the third game, you're hopping dimensions... but the first game's town's wine cellars were larger than the whole explorable area of a whole planet in those later games.) If it's only meant to be a pocket dimension (or functional equivalent), that's fine, but it's not really a *world* until you can go through a significant amount of terrain in it, and that means players visiting it more than once and going off the beaten track instead of just going once on a relatively linear path through it. (As in, anything the players/audience don't see doesn't exist.)
That said, you could certainly make a world where traveling between dimensions is easier than getting to the other end of a city by walking just as a way of creating a truly alien vibe to the place. That's what made Sigil work so well.
Knights of the Golden Cross is an AWESOME name. I was just thinking about hell cool it was before you mention that you didn't like it
I don't watch the Chain vids, but I very much enjoy the Campaign Diary vids.
Are they gonna get some Scrolls of Town Portal?
Dwarves are short Klingons! LMAO! I love it!
Thanks for the inspiration!
Your best diary so far!!!
That’s a good idea about the eyes. I should steal that.
I love these videos please keep it up.
THE CHAIN OF ACHERON WILL PREVAIL
You can DEFINITELY be a player in my game. Your advice has made me the DM I am today haha
Yes!!! The waiting was killing me
The celestial's voice is much lower pitched than I imagined. I thought of a high-pitched whine, like a wine glass player.
Yeah Jerry added that sound effect and I didn’t have time to correct it.
I'm so fucking stoked, guys.