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Ryuutama RPG at DunDraCon 2020

One of our GMs, Harold, is also applying to run a game of “Ryuutama: Natural Fantasy Roleplay” (by Kotodama Heavy Industries) at the 2020 DunDraCon gaming convention. This blog entry provides details of the game schedule, an overview of the game system, and details on the scenario (as much as can be developed ahead of time). It will continue to be updated when/if the game is approved, characters are created, and finally with a game session recap after the convention if it is played.

Schedule

The 44th DunDraCon gaming convention will be held on President’s Day weekend (14 – 17 February 2020) in San Ramon, California. The web site for the convention is http://dundracon.com

Note that for next year (2021), the 45th DunDraCon will move to Santa Clara, CA. Since all of our regular players are local to Silicon Valley, we’re very excited at the prospect to have a prestigious game convention like DunDraCon in our own county, something which hasn’t happened since Origins came to San Jose in 1992!

About the game

In Ryuutama, dragons created the world and keep the universe in operation. Baby dragons are born rarely, but when they are born, they require stories for sustenance. So nurturing dragon-spirits called Ryuujin nurse baby dragons with stories to help them grow healthy and wise. The GM in the game plays a Ryuujin who is ushering a party of Travelers (the player characters) along a journey in order to create a satisfying story for a baby dragon.

Travelers are fulfilling a revered duty that all people have, to travel on such a journey once in their lives. On their journeys, they seek the sublime, either in beauty, companionship, or service.

About the scenario

The city of Villa Rosa is home to the world’s largest animal sanctuary, the General Rose Conservatory. It has also been selected as the site for this year’s World’s Art Festival. You are a Traveler heading to Villa Rosa to visit the Conservatory, take part in the Festival, or both. Don’t let the challenges of travel daunt you, for the delights of the journey are ample reward in themselves!

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Expanse RPG at DunDraCon

One of our GMs, Harold, is applying to run a game of The Expanse RPG (by Green Ronin) at the 2020 DunDraCon. This blog entry provides details on the game session, an overview of the game system, and details on the scenario. It will continue to be updated if/when the game is scheduled, characters are created, and finally with a recap after the session if it is played.

Schedule

The 44th DunDraCon gaming convention will be held in San Ramon, CA on President’s Day weekend, 14-17 February 2020. The web site for the convention is http://dundracon.com

About the game

Expanse RPG uses a SF variant of the AGE (Adventure Game Engine) system that was introduced in the Dragon Age RPG and also used in many other Green Ronin products like Titansgrave, Modern Age, and Blue Rose.

About the scenario

You and your crew have been exploring through the Rings for months, gambling on finding a valuable world, barely supporting yourselves by selling survey data to the Coalition. You finally found something on your twelfth trip, on the planet named Svadilfari: ancient alien artifacts. Every day you remained on the planet, your excitement grew: this time you really hit the jackpot, at last! The remains of alien civilizations will surely provide insight for scientists, engineers, and historians for decades to come. Many of them appear to be different kinds of spacecraft, possibly from completely different species! But then you stumbled across a less ancient artifact that was still functional. It activated, and simultaneously something blew up your ship, taking most of the crew with it. Was it a terrible accident, or the intentional hostile action of something alien? With your ship gone, you have to survive long enough to find and activate one of the alien ships to escape the planet.

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Episode 17: “When is a door not a door?” (D&D 5e Session 6)

This is the first episode taken from our sixth session, recorded on 10 March 2018.  So it’d been about four weeks since we’d all been together, and in the intervening time our only interaction was when Korben, Kaleb, Lucia, Blake, and Harold all met up at the 42nd annual DunDraCon convention (to paint minis and play D&D, mostly, though Harold ran two other games for convention attendees – one of The Taint RPG and one of Firefly RPG). So the group was a little more rambunctious than usual as we got started.

 

As we’ve explored the tunnels under Indir, we’ve been using a battlemat with markers for Harold to draw in the dungeon as the group explored. Or rather, Harold the DM drew the map first, then covered it completely with opaque squares of material that he would remove and replace as the party moved from one part of the dungeon to the next. So the party could only ever see a small part of the dungeon. As they weren’t bothering to map for themselves, they got a bit confused as to which way to go, which led to some hilarious disputes about choosing directions for travel.

 

When exploring a dungeon, how do you make sure that you don’t get lost or accidentally backtrack on yourself?

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Episode 10: “Human League” (D&D 5e Session 4)

DM Harold here. This episode begins our fourth recording session. I was mistaken before, when I said that the third session was the first session in 2018 – I was going by the time stamp on the audio files, which were updated when I opened the recording software again at the beginning of the fourth session! A rookie mistake.

 

Anyway, this actually marks the beginning of the fourth recording session and the first session in 2018…you can tell by our icebreaker question at the start, and the table’s nervous energy because it’s been weeks since we’ve all seen each other.

 

On that note, going into this session, I believed that we were going to be at least one player short due to schedule conflicts. I knew weeks in advance that we were going to be less than the full group, so I thought about how to play an interesting game that kept the players engaged but didn’t leave out the absent players. I could have prepared a one-off of a different system (and I do such things, later on in the year), but I felt like there was some fun opportunity to use the time to present some “interactive exposition:” that is, instead of just telling the players about some world background, I would have them LIVE it.

 

Well, schedules opened up at the last minute, and we ended up having our full complement of regular players. So, rather than discarding the idea, I offered the players a choice once we got started. You can hear what they chose in this episode.

 

For your entertainment, I will also be posting the players’ character sheets soon. I’ll update this post and the top page of the site when they’re available.

Rakhari-the-Kazarim

Geranda-the-Infractor