The Bleak + The Pearl Intermission #5: A { Short | Mid | Longish | Un- } Hiatus from the Mainline Plot [Shadowdark + SoloDark] [Meta]

Above is a glimpse into how this campaign started six months ago. Dyson Logos maps (or dice drop point crawls) imported as backgrounds on Google Presentations; John Kapsalis art (almost always, with some games-icon icons when nothing else made sense) made into tokens using GIMP; map adjustments and such typed directly as text fields on the map; and a few notes and details typed into a couple pages of a Google Doc file. This still persisted until the Monolith got going enough it was easier to switch the whole campaign to Theater of Mind and blog-format first.

Bonus: You can see which Kapsalis heroes and monsters I picked to represent our main four heroes. Spotted Tom was just one of the goblins that caught my eye. Rance was a contemplative blue mage (maybe an elf, don't recall) token originally used as Haig Raven in my Barston Bakersfield campaign. Inar is a silly little hafling with a staff (he wears pretty sturdy armor in the main campaign and has a crimson-red mace). And Grusk was depicted as shirtless and got his signature axe because his token had one. With the exception of Tom, the other three names were from when I tried to make the campaign in Roll20 to start and I just literally used the default random names generated. I actually kind of forgot that's what the characters looked like. 

Too Long; Didn't Read Summary

In short, the campaign started as my "just dungeon, don't story" campaign and got immensely Doug-ified on the way so now requires pages of lore and while it still has some fun, usually quite short "dungeon" dives it has lost a lot of its initial anti-campaign focus (the exactly opposite of that, really). Since there are possibly months of main storyline left, using a natural break in the storyline coming up to go ahead and declare it time for a couple of months of side-quests and introduce several (at least six) new characters to make a kind of second team that will join the main one here or there in various ways. Will eventually shift back into the main storyline after everyone gets a few levels higher and we can move into the higher level, more domain-level of play. 

Or, How a Campaign Changed Over Time

According to my notes, I launched this campaign, The Bleak + The Pearl, around the middle of June 2024. At the time, there were only a few basic lore truths:

• There were two vast islands that combined were a complete continent.
• The western island was "The Bleak" and was dark and foggy and grimy and full of ruins. This island was originally Barthus and for centuries had been the site of a great kingdom but now was mostly just skeletons of old buildings and smaller settlements. It was to be the setting of the more "grim" sessions.
• The eastern island was "The Pearl" which was a wild and green place with huge mountains, ancient barbarian keeps, dragons, and much more of a "large scale, mid-magic fighters-in-leathers tackling giants" kind of vibe. This was "The Silt" and was the place the ex-Barthics took refuge. This was to be the more "Frontiers of Adventure" style setting with less undead and more, you know, dinosaurs.
• The islands are separated by a five to twenty miles of ocean called "the Gray Channel". Whatever caused "The Bleak" has yet to find a way to cross it.
• The initial heroes were refugees raised in The Pearl who are now going back to The Bleak because one of them keeps having dreams about a light fading, darkness spreading, and things getting worse.

There was, effectively, two meta-truths:

• This campaign was going to be dedicated to pretty much straight dungeon delving and hex crawling with a few interrupt "city/society" scenes to act very nearly purely as dressing. 
• Around half of the sessions would be played in pre-existing maps while the other half would either take Dyson Logos (etc) maps or just do a dice drop and use existing tables to find out content as I went.

It was the second (not posted to this blog) session where a drunken night turned into meeting Cal Grunkheart and deciding to help the Lighthouse Keepers which ended up becoming the meta-reason behind the campaign. This part is fine. It was initially going to be a mini-arc of sorts but over time morphed into a much bigger part of the campaign. Still fine.

As the mini-arc took over, there showed up a a mini-mega dungeon that was the cornerstone of this part of the campaign and a series of quests to the other dungeons and sites were going to be required to fix it up. This was fine. The "about 10 sessions to complete" was a lie but that's ok. We were still playing. 

Prior to even starting to make the dungeon, I ran a couple of sessions in a pre-existing map, The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, tweaked to have elements from the campaign. Almost an entire month later, after spending way too long semi-agonizing on how to blend the more meta-elements with that initial intention we got the first entry into the Monolith. 

Over the next few weeks, I entered into an era I've talked about before but it represented me dealing with the stresses of solo-play. It felt less and less like fun and more and more like a difficult puzzle to solve. On the positive side, this led me to work out my more multi-phase style that is a staple for this blog (see: The GLOW for perhaps the most elaborate variation of it). I've seen other solo players do similar things but the distinct GM-phases where I build up information and player-phases where I test and break down that information (along with lore, interjections, and other elements) is a fairly Doug-Unique style of solo-play, one that has influenced even the play I do off this blog.

However, on the more negative-or-at-least-neutral side, I essentially lost the ability to sit down and play with a couple of colorful tokens and some varied dice rolls and had to spend increasing amount of times fact checking and considering long term impact of any and every decision.

Around three weeks from the start of retooling this campaign more and more into "Save the Lighthouse, Save the World," I got to an encounter that effectively derailed and forever altered the entire The Bleak + The Pearl: The Grunkheart Golem. I had one room left off the starter/main branch of my dungeon and when I rolled the contents I got a boss monster. I suck at the sort of OSR-style play where rooms next to each other to have completely different contents/encounters so I wanted to come up with a reason a boss-level monster could be a few feet from the main entrance. The Golem was a solution to this and it changed quite a bit. 

• Ancient Technology was actually some blend of high, science fiction technology with a much more refined magical system.
• After the Ancient society collapsed, there were hundreds of years before Barthus showed up and established itself in the ruins.
• Jonias had a more extensive appreciation for Ancient Tech than thought and had not died but instead went off to a lab in something called "The Everburning Forest" and not returned (I mean, he might have also died, we still don't know at this time).

These seeds grew and sprouted a bit. After one intermission where I came  up with a general layout map of the forest, I had another intermission that finally sat down and figured out what the Bleak and the Pearl were. No longer just the name of two different fantasy tropes, The Bleak was a corruption of some primal energy inherit in the western island (in the Ancient tongue, it was The Becoming). Ancients had used it as part of their vast engines (along with The Pearl's "Being"). The fall of the Ancients was basically due to them using up too much energy and draining it. Now, several centuries later, it has returned and it is changing people and causing buildings and landscapes to mutate though there are "shallows" where it has little to no impact and many settlements drifted into those shallows while traveling between them is basically an invitation to body horror. 

This led to a fight with a fight with an oddly mutated cyclops around two weeks later and then a full month after that I finally hit a stride with playing as the entered into the forest and encounters and mechanics were a lot more normal. Over the past couple of months they have pushed through the forest, found the old lab, and realized things are a lot weirder. 

While all of these shifts and dynamics have been broadly fine it still is a much different campaign than intended. For one, there has not been a pre-built dungeon/adventure since June (6 months). For two, roughly half of the session time has been dedicated to building up the world and establishing dozens of new World Truths. 

I adore the four core characters. I love Cal Grunkheart and his doomed mission that might just succeed. I like the whole trope of science-fiction world becomes high-fantasy world becomes weird body horror world. 

BUT, this was meant to be the campaign where I did not have to spend quite so long building up dungeons and where I could spend a lot of time just flipping through shopping lists and throwing a few fun monsters at people while checking for random encounters. It is just very hard to swap back to that without there being the sense that I am giving up on a lore I have spent four months honing and perfecting. 

To sum up some changes: A simple world to allow both "grim" and "dark" styles of fantasy play with only a vague storyline to justify it >> a "short" meta-quest that requires some more storyline >> the storyline becomes entirely about the meta-quest which starts dictating exactly which kind of adventures can be played >> dungeon delves start taking a backseat to more complex encounters >> virtually every post is as much about lore building and campaign design than any sort of proper dice rolling >> where we are now. 

Taking a Hiatus from the Mainline "Jonias Grunkheart Legacy" Quest

That's why I am going to take advantage of plot developments in the world where it will take months of in-game time for Cal and his crew to move into the lab, learn the Ancient language more completely, and just get out and do some dungeon delves with pre-built or quick-built dungeons. 

The "main four" will still be part of this. However, I am about to introduce a "second six." There were Five Great Families that came together to build the Lighthouse. The plan is to have a member from all five families join in. Some of the second six will be a tad weirder than the "four default" classes. A bard and a ranger. A pirate of some sort. A dragonborn pit fighter. A tiefling witch. I also have a silly idea for a turtle monk. The ranger will be second level and a character already met in the campaign. The other five will all be brand spanking new. 

This allows a few things. First, I can a couple of low level adventures again and those are always good fun. Second, it gives me a chance to build up a few back-up characters just in case one of the mains gets taken out or needs to spend months crafting spells or running a kingdom, etc. Third, it gives me a chance to build up a few alternate parties and combinations since those can be fun. Fourth, it just allows me to use a lot of supplements and zines I have paid good money for and I am itching to see how other classes and races work. 

Finally, it gives me a chance to go back for a bit to the OG campaign design: dungeon delves with minimal story requirements. An anti-campaign again, only this time backed with months of story that shapes some truths. 

Folks show up at a dungeon entrances, they go and grab treasure and experience, and then get drunk afterward. 

Being Spoiled for Choices and Return to Recap

Part of this is just because I currently have three very "talky" campaigns: The GLOW (which has at least two more mini-arcs I'd like to do, and it will likely spawn more), The Bloody Hands (the Stone Crack'd mini-arc likely has four to five more sessions at least, and a lot of world building is going down there, and I want to run another mini-arc soonish dealing with one character's hidden illness and a hidden benefactor plotline from near the start), and Eustace Delmont (which is on pause, technically, because I have no time to play). There are also a few one-shots and playtests brewing or on-going. All told, I spend between eight and twelve hours a week playing these solo campaigns. I get lots of NPC interactions and world building time. 

I like the idea of taking a few maps, importing them into Google Drive, playing with some digital tokens and spreadsheets, then spending maybe half an hour a week writing up some of the fun things I did. This new arc will be back in recap style with a more OSR-style balance and less seriousness. A lot more braindead than I tend to solo-play. In balance is joy...

The "side-line quests" [I'll call it something like The Gathering of the Families and Sundry Adventures] are a way for me to play with some of my absolute favorite solo characters, add in some more funky folk that will either be fun to play or get kicked off the team, and reduce lore from multi-paragraph continuations to maybe a short passage about why an Inn is called "The Screeching Duck" or something equally silly and funny (to me). Eventually Cal will have deciphered some stuff and we'll be ready to get back into the main questline again. The Bleak is still there so hex crawls can have unexpected results, for sure. 

In fact, a couple/three of the planned adventures are actually going to be from the original story bank of adventures intended to tie into the Monolith (though now low enough level I would have had to redesign them or tweak them a bit for balance and content only now I can just drop a newbie team into them and play as is). The very first one I plan to play will be a different crew going after one of the fuelstone relics. Maybe also the second. So it's less a hiatus as a bunch of side-quests presented in a different way until I feel like it is time to get back into the deep lore and two pages of conversation again.