Summer has finally arrived. Its warm, the sun is shining, and it seems I’m busier than ever with work and campaigns. What little free time is left is taken up by other, more traditional summer activities, like festivals and drinking beer. The summer role-playing campaigns are also a bit more laid back than ordinary home games, meaning beer & pretzel style gaming with less emphasis on character and plot, and more on die rolling.
My home game, Darkmoon Vale, is on summer hiatus. It’s been replaced by NiTessine’s Legacy of Fire, which is going strong with weekly sessions and a lot of monster mayhem. The Pathfinder Society is still active, but has also slowed down a bit, presumably because of summer. I’ve managed to recruit a few new players, both of them role-playing veterans, but new to the 3.5 system. One of the players is French, so we ran a game session in English, which proved quite interesting. Using English wasn’t a problem for any of the Finnish players. In fact, it seemed to me that using a non-native language actually cut down on the non-game-related chatter, allowing me to concentrate more on the narrative.
My own summer campaign is based on Paizo’s Pathfinder Adventure Path Second Darkness. We’ve only played three game sessions so far, but it shows a lot of promise. Its shaping up to be a Goodfellows-style fantasy mafia game with pirates, crimelords, a lot of cloak & dagger activity, and lots of cool character immersion and narrative. All of the player characters are elves working for a mysterious elven organization with a stated goal of rooting out corruption in the ranks of the elven nation. The characters don’t know who the real bad guys are (yet), but since they’re pictured on all the book covers it won’t come as any kind of surprise to the players. That’s right, you guessed it: The drow are making a first appearance in Golarion. Gotta love them black-skinned white-haired, demon-worshiping sons-(and daughters)-a-bitches. At the moment the campaign is running at “half-speed”, since one of the players is spending most of summer in Iceland, but I’m sure we’ll have this baby up and running full-time come August.
Blowing smoke 