The New Librarian
My Fey Team D&D campaign has been going well. I'm going to indulge myself with a full write-up or two sometime in the near future--Let Me Tell You About Our Characters. But for now I'll keep it semi- short. Our last session was unlike the others; we had a special guest star. Wil Wheaton was in town visiting Penny Arcade, so Mike Fehlauer invited Wil along to a game of Fey Team. I shifted gears from running the first evening of a multi-session Chaos dungeon to running a self-contained episode. Wil needed a character and it seemed like I should give him something meaty to chew on, so I came up with a plan that would allow him to do improv.
The ziggurat's Librarian had suffered a messy and utterly unexpected (as in, against the odds, not the direction I thought the plot was going) death inside a force sphere fighting an enemy sorcerer the previous session. With the PCs about to plunge through a rift to track down the traitorous assistant librarian and recover the key books she'd stolen, I introduced Wil's character the moment I said that the ziggurat's master needed to invest the junior librarian with the full power of the Library, so that there would be a Librarian along on the mission to recognize and control the booby-trapped and magically potent books. As a place of high fey magic, the Library looks like a forest, a twining organic mix of trees where messenger snakes track down books, volumes swing down on vines or float in on magical winds. The contents of the Library manifested on Wil's character, who he would only call 'The New Librarian,' as a blizzard of leaves. When he wanted to create a magical effect, he could pluck a leaf off his body, tell everyone what the book was that he held in his hands, tell me what he wanted to accomplish with its magic, and I'd wing the magic's effects, no prob.
Wil read the leaves beautifully. The session kicked all manner of emotional buttons, since the New Librarian had been lovers with the assistant who had betrayed her people. But the story of the books Wil plucked and invoked against the beholders can wait until a full writeup, where I'll be sure to use the cut feature to avoid GiGanTic posting.
For now I wanted to mention the night's comedic theme. Wil plays, or played, an avenger in the Penny Arcade podcast games. He's into the Avenger ethos. Midway through the big fight, Wil noticed that the party's avenger, played by Mark Jessup, hadn't sworn an oath of enmity. "You haven't sworn an oath of enmity? Do you just not feel like it? Are you not in the mood? Is this battle just not real enough? You're not feeling it? What kind of avenger are you?"
Mark hardly-never plays the straight man. Mark is the guy who likes to zing in the one-liners. But with Wil riding him, Mark sank to the occasion. "Um, I'm the forgiving avenger? The kind of avenger who thinks hey, everyone deserves a second chance?"
Wil harangued Mark and Mark's avenger both in and out of character. When Mark finally did swear an oath, he did it to such a barrage of invective from Wil that Mark had to say, "Well, let's not be hasty. It's not really an oath of enmity. It's more a recommendation. Of enmity."
"Worst. Avenger. Ever," said Wil, as we all stored this precious moment to memory, Mark's precious avenger being psyche-slammed all over the table.
A wonderful session of D&D. And a few days later I got to see Wil's perspective on the game, which turned out to include an amusing surprise. He blogged about it at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2010/02/roughly-three-days-in-roughly-500-words.html
The ziggurat's Librarian had suffered a messy and utterly unexpected (as in, against the odds, not the direction I thought the plot was going) death inside a force sphere fighting an enemy sorcerer the previous session. With the PCs about to plunge through a rift to track down the traitorous assistant librarian and recover the key books she'd stolen, I introduced Wil's character the moment I said that the ziggurat's master needed to invest the junior librarian with the full power of the Library, so that there would be a Librarian along on the mission to recognize and control the booby-trapped and magically potent books. As a place of high fey magic, the Library looks like a forest, a twining organic mix of trees where messenger snakes track down books, volumes swing down on vines or float in on magical winds. The contents of the Library manifested on Wil's character, who he would only call 'The New Librarian,' as a blizzard of leaves. When he wanted to create a magical effect, he could pluck a leaf off his body, tell everyone what the book was that he held in his hands, tell me what he wanted to accomplish with its magic, and I'd wing the magic's effects, no prob.
Wil read the leaves beautifully. The session kicked all manner of emotional buttons, since the New Librarian had been lovers with the assistant who had betrayed her people. But the story of the books Wil plucked and invoked against the beholders can wait until a full writeup, where I'll be sure to use the cut feature to avoid GiGanTic posting.
For now I wanted to mention the night's comedic theme. Wil plays, or played, an avenger in the Penny Arcade podcast games. He's into the Avenger ethos. Midway through the big fight, Wil noticed that the party's avenger, played by Mark Jessup, hadn't sworn an oath of enmity. "You haven't sworn an oath of enmity? Do you just not feel like it? Are you not in the mood? Is this battle just not real enough? You're not feeling it? What kind of avenger are you?"
Mark hardly-never plays the straight man. Mark is the guy who likes to zing in the one-liners. But with Wil riding him, Mark sank to the occasion. "Um, I'm the forgiving avenger? The kind of avenger who thinks hey, everyone deserves a second chance?"
Wil harangued Mark and Mark's avenger both in and out of character. When Mark finally did swear an oath, he did it to such a barrage of invective from Wil that Mark had to say, "Well, let's not be hasty. It's not really an oath of enmity. It's more a recommendation. Of enmity."
"Worst. Avenger. Ever," said Wil, as we all stored this precious moment to memory, Mark's precious avenger being psyche-slammed all over the table.
A wonderful session of D&D. And a few days later I got to see Wil's perspective on the game, which turned out to include an amusing surprise. He blogged about it at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2010/02/roughly-three-days-in-roughly-500-words.html