I got my pound of candy (licorice of course) in the mail while I was away. I got it in trade for a gmail account.
While I was away I did a lot of writing. I worked on the girly D&D campaign a lot. For a recap, the storyline is basically thus:
-PC’s (Player Character’s) wizard mentor has a prophetic dream of the apocalypse.
-Mentor sends PCs into woods to find old oracle/ranger friend to see confirm omen reliability
-While on quest group is underground in grimlock caves (grimlocks are the D&D version of morlocks)
-PCs come above ground to find the land has been afflicted by an aurora that causes blindness. During this aurora invaders from another dimension have taken over major cities and the cleric’s god has been killed.
-Home town has been evacuated, mentor and townsfolk migrated to bigger city through mountains, PCs follow trail.
-In mountains PCs meet old wizard who scries (scrying is looking through a crystal ball, basically) to find out much of what’s going on. He explains how Demon Lord of Undead (Orcus) and his new bride (Queen from alien dimension) are working on conquering the realm. This info ties in with mentor’s omen.
-Wizard (“The Hyrkanian”) sends them on mission to safeguard evil Queen’s little sister so she can return to her home dimension and possibly undo some damage.
That’s pretty much where we are now. Over the week I’ve been working on backstory and come up with some pretty interesting things for the near and far future. I would say that we’re about 2/5 of the way through the campaign, and that the group is slightly higher level than I anticipated they would be, even though I’ve been pretty stingy with the XP to hold them back to be in line with the advancement of the scenarios. Considering I’ve never DM’d a really long campaign where I had to plot out at what level the group would have to be to coincide with a given “module’s” recommended level several adventures ahead (this campaign is mostly a group of pre-published adventures that I’m stringing together with one common thread), it’s working out not too badly. No major hiccups.
I have also been working on a script for a tangentially Lovecraftian short film. I’m not ready to divulge any more info on that at this time though.
The new D&D advances characters very quickly. You might want to consider figuring out at what point you want the PC’s level to be. I find that is easier and more controlable. My first few campaigns I found players were suddenly 7th level by 4th session. We had a lot of fights and if you hand out xp as recommended, the PC’s rocket through the first few levels. while it sucks to be 1st level for a long time, it is the lower levels where characters are more concerned about possessions, money and living. where they feel threatened. i like those levels a lot more than higher ones.