We take a break from all the talk of Carls and Donuts to talk about giant Squids, and squid faced enemies.
Tomorrow is the culmination of our groups run thru of the 3rd party module “Call from the Deep” by JVP Parry. You can find it’s official page right over here. We’ve been playing for a couple years now, slowly going thru at a pace of one to two sessions a month. But we’re not playing as written anymore, and I thought it interesting enough to write a post about.
I decided to run the 3rd party module a few months after the OGL scandal in 2023. My players still wanted D&D, and I wanted to support independent creators. So I went looking for the best rated one I thought they might enjoy. And I found one with Pirates, Elder things, undead, sea battles – everything that ticked a box in my players interests. And we started playing- and had a blast. But why am I re-writing the last chapters?
“Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time” ~Mike Tyson.
I wouldn’t say I got punched in the face. More that the plans of the author got punched many times by my players. And that is ok. my job at the table is to facilitate fun, while having fun myself. So when a player see’s the writing on the wall and says “We’re not doing that, Moonbeam as the ship rolls thru” – you have a couple options. One right, and one wrong in my opinion. You can let them do what they want, making them roll and letting the dice decide (fairly) their fate, or you can hard line and determine it fails, cause the ship needs to get further inland.
So I let them take a mini boss encounter and nuke it from orbit early on. One that they tried a few times to recreate to varying success. And that was ok. I got to the point where I thought “Wonder what they’re going to do with this fight”. I even find myself now wondering that, as I prep stat lines for tomorrow.
And that’s exciting.
Don’t rob yourself as a DM of a fun story to
Someone elses yum can be your yuck. And that’s ok.
To be fair, they did warn us at the beginning of a certain chapter that there was questionable content. And we all went in with the “Yeah, we’ve seen it all”. Until it came to child sacrifices. Made some sense in the context, but I haven’t seen players recoiled so much at a main story beat, even for the bad guys. It triggers something in the mind of the players that makes it go from “We want to know the mystery” to “I don’t care what the mystery is anymore, the all gotta go. And that leads to speed running toward the big bad.
Baldurs Gate 3 did it.
This game lives in a weird space. It was published while BG3 was in Beta, so I can’t for certain say it’s NOT based on early releases of the game, but they share a lot of plot. It’s far from a 1 to 1, but Elder Brain, attacks on baldurs gate, dragons, Gith – when a major release comes out and does it better and more visual, and everyone at your table has played it, you start injecting some other things to liven it up for them.
The players love the injections more than the planned stuff.
This is the final and main reason. They’re asking questions on the NPC’s and the plot points I added in more than what the book did. They aren’t un-interested in the plot, but the best reactions I got were from some adlibbed tomfoolery, not the major plot.
So where does that leave us? Well, after some scheduling conflicts that involved GenCon and some illnesses, we are getting together tomorrow to fight the big bad. We may continue after this, but I will leave that to them. I’ve seeded enough things that they could go on and play to level 20 if their hearts so desired, or we can jump to a new game. Either way, I have an epic encounter prepped for tomorrow, and will take plenty of pictures to share on here.