Salutations, my curious congregation. Getting back into the swing of things, I want to take a minute to talk about what's going on in my home game. I'm not the dungeon master right now, Josh is, and we've been spotty about meeting up recently but we're still playing. And this, at least partially, the same group we played Horde of the Dragon Queen with.
TWs: Shenanigans and irreverence. Frostbite. A "horror" campaign. Spoilers for Rime of the Frostmaiden Ahead.
Alright, so we're several sessions in at this point. And this is our first campaign without a Stalkurn (Patrick took off and got married, grats dude!) so things have been pretty different in terms of party dynamics. We don't have a rogue right now because we're so used to it being covered that none of us really thought to do it.
Dramatis Personae
Thaleador Arthainas - Nicophel and Sylthiel's older brother. He's a pallock, oath of the ancients and archfey patron. He's really full of himself and not remotely sorry for it.
Terra - Dwarven artificer. She's a local, has worked on a lot of ships and has a personal stake in making sure this eternal winter thing gets resolved.
Shark Bait (hoo ha ha) - Dhampir barbarian. I think his name is actually Birley but we've called him by his nickname the entire time. He's a pirate. One of our two party members that eats people.
Ahmon - Lizardfolk paladin/druid. He's albino, and prefers to be paid in meat. He also does an absolute metric buttload of damage.
Okay so listen, here's the thing. Rime of the Frostmaiden says it's a horror game on every label but honestly it's...not. It seems like the end of almost every quest we've taken has been a joke.
Dangerous clan of goblins off in the mountains that keeps waylaying travelers? Oh, they're being led by a goofy gnome in a costume.
Prepared for an actual fight with some real mindflayers off on the tundra? Just kidding, they're more like curious gnomes.
I could go on. It seems like more often than not we find out what's actually going on, and it's something stupid. And don't get me wrong, a little bit of humor is important to occasionally puncture the tension in a long campaign. Strahd was incredibly oppressive the whole way through and there were a lot of reasons that didn't work, but Rime works worse.
We haven't had time to build any tension. It feels like the story keeps telling us how serious this is but every time it has the chance to prove it, instead it's like 'oh but just kidding, here is what you get instead'. And it's actually kind of funny because the entire party is prone to groaning about that.
Aside from all that, though, it's been really fun so far. Thale and Shark Bait sort of flux between rolling eyes at one another because their priorities are so different but also being really good friends, and some of the NPCs are truly fun to interact with. A lot of the threats in play right now are very intense ones and in spite of everything I really do believe in them. It's far from just Auril, she's like almost the small potatoes problem compared to the Arcane Brotherhood and the dwarves we're going to have to deal with.
So I think I'd like to start doing a campaign log for this as we play from this point in the game on.
Fortune Favors,
Robin the Red
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