Yeah, 2.5 came before 2. Don’t @ me.

In the first adventure there was a gate that led to the Dusklands. The players had an arrow fired at them and shut the gate. In that time, I wrote out the adventure using my Trophy Gold Incursion format.

I wrote notes and really the most interesting bits came from decisions that weren’t on the page. Could very well be that having those notes gave me the peace of mind to make up the cool shit that made the game go because I didn’t have to think about the stuff I had outlined. Or the outline just wasn’t good (not the format, just my work within it) and so I fell back on old GMing instincts that have been getting me out of trouble for most of my life. I think it served me well; one of the players mentioned the details as being helpful during our post-game talk.

For whatever reason, I decided the Dooskalfs did not speak any language the players could understand. But their art and runes are so good that they can convey complicated stories and points of view by sharing this art. It was fun to convey lore and background through alien art.

I’m not going to get into specifics of the adventure but I’ll say that the players made smart decisions that kept them away from violence. Whenever possible, they reached out peacefully. I had an oathstone in my notes and this became the crux of the adventure as Marcus Guilder, one of the player characters, swore an oath that drove the rest of the game.

The game branched out and has demanded a future foray through this gate and into the Dusklands to loot a necromancer’s tower and a delve into the Herald’s Tomb, to return a Dooskalf’s remains to their comrades so that the prisoner in their tower might get an easier judgment from their Elders.

This trio of players gelled quickly. I’ve been playing lots of games with people from different parts of my life and this group had chemistry that I don’t often seen. It wasn’t anything any one of them did, just something about the four of us all together.

We did Stars and Wishes after the game, a tradition I will continue moving forward.

We discussed the need for our characters to be able to share delve reports with one another. I reckon we’ll do so through Google Docs.

There were no fights and only a few saves here and there. Guy’s player, when I asked them if they spoke Dooksalf, decided to let it be decided by a roll, a roll that really decided the vibe of the rest of the game. The roll failed; Guy had not paid attention in his Otherworldly Linguistics class. In other news, Bastion University has an Otherworldly Linguistics class.

The other roll I remember is also Guy, who was making a map and I wanted to know if it was a good map that could help future delvers and/or help them get through the Pentacle Valley in a hurry if they needed to hoof it back to the gate home. The map was excellent.

Into the Odd helped by allowing one of the new players to make a character in a few minutes with enough there to offer a vivid character but not so much that the character’s death would offer any real problems.

I have a FB group of about 144 friends who are either games or nerd-adjacent. I asked if they’d like to use the community to plan a few Into the Odd games a month and this game was born of that.