I am a huge fan of tabletop rpgs, especially of the indie variety (PBTA et al.). I think it's one of the highest forms of gaming since it is so responsive to a particular group of people and the stories they want to tell, which creates a lot of potential for cool leftist gaming experiences and stories. However, I haven't been able to find time to run a game for a few years (and I struggle playing solo rpgs since it's basically just creative writing) so I wanted to hear from chapos that are (or have been) in a campaign so I can live vicariously through you.

What game are you playing? What's your character (or favourite NPC) like? Any highlights from your campaign? Are you living out a revolutionary power fantasy or playing a chill "beer and pretzels" type game?

  • roseateOculi [she/her,none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Im currently in the last three sessions of a 5e campaign not DMed by me, but as soon as we finish we're gonna start a Starfinder game that I DM.

    The 5e campaign is a rather traditional narrative. A squad of adventurers goes out to kill an evil lich before he kills cthulu and replaces him as the prime eldritch god. Though the narrative is rather straightforward, the party cast has been very good and the DM has facilitated us well. I play as a divination wizard who fell into a vat of what is essentially wizard drugs at one of the taverns in the main wizarding stronghold and now she is plagued by visions of alternate timelines, constantly trying to reach the best one. We also have a dragonborn barbarian who, though various comical and highly unlikely rolls, became a chef so good even the celestials and fey (who dont eat) respect his food. Theres also a gnome artificer who is smart but extremely socially inept, leading to lots of interesting social encounters where we sometimes end up digging ourselves a hole so deep we come out the other side and actually succeed. In addition, we have another dragonborn, but this time a sorcerer. Despite being a copper dragonborn, he is OBSESSED with fire and burning, leading to him being wanted in most major kingdoms. We had to fake his death multiple times while attempting to get bounty hunters off our back. Finally, an aarokokra paladin rounds out the party. He worships the aarokokran goddess, meaning that anyone who isnt an aaeokokra is fine by him, but he kills any aarokokra that doesnt follow his religion. Kind of a "Knight Templar" thing. Normally I would have tried to stop this, however at one point all of our party members except for him died and he made a religion check to see if his goddess would help us. He rolled a nat 20, so my DM told him to roll a d100 and see how successful his prayer was, and he then rolled a 100, reviving the whole party. Ever since my character decided to not mess with her.

    As for the campaign Im going to run, its set about 4000 years in the future. About 1000 years prior to the campaign, a white hole opened up near earth and released a large galaxy that consumed not only the milky way, but the Andromeda galaxy as well. Now theyre all one big cluster of stars that a multitude of interplanetary governments rule. Highlights include the Ultrademocratic Solar Systems of America, essentially a rightwing hellscape where people use votes as currency and elections are continuous, meaning whoever has the most votes at any given time is their leader. Theres also the New Oceania Republic, which basically is the wild west of space since its on the outer edges of colonized areas. A solarpunk ancomm collective also exists in a nearby solar system where the whole planet runs off the energy produced by the binary star at the center of their system. The basic plot of the campaign is that the players all work for an unscrupulous delivery company and they have to complete various jobs around the galaxy in order to make a living. As they slowly get deeper and deeper into the criminal underworld of this new galaxy, they eventually get tangled up in a massive conspiracy to hide whats at the center of the newly-appeared galaxy: a mysterious being of seeming omnipotence. They learn that this being came out of the last remaining black hole in a dead universe that succumbed to heat death, and all matter from that universe became collected into one form that somehow gained consciousness. The white hole that appeared all those years ago released it onto the current, still existing universe. Having experienced everything that one could experience, this being has decided that it wants to die. Now the party is caught between two scenarios: it either condenses itself down becomes the next supermassive blackhole to consume the universe in billions of years, or it could destroy everything in the known universe through vacuum decay. The party's task is to somehow stop their universe from dying instantly at the whim of this superbeing. Convoluted, I know, but I think itll be fun!