To readers of my blog, here is the reason for the lack of posts. I have been spending all of my gaming time on this amazing project as a patron.
Confessions of a Patron Player #BROvenloft
I woke up today a little groggy. Groggy form the dense, intense, patron level campaign play that has been going on in the #BROvenloft campaign for the last week. For those not in the know the quick and dirty of it is that Brovenloft is a live 1:1 time always on campaign based off of all the classic horror tropes found in the original Ravenloft module, showing how that concept is so much more innovative and fun when viewed through the lens of patron play. The game is largely taking place over Twitter, but Discord has also been vital. But I guess what I want to do here with this writing is to give my full perspective on where I am today, and how I got started in this world of online patron play, and why it’s so amazing and potentially addictive.
Right now I’m feeling grateful that several people involved with this game have recently posted online to all of us involved that we shouldn’t forget to get outside, exercise, enjoy life, and not live on our devices playing a silly game. I’m definitely guilty of being on my phone and laptop or with my nose in an AD&D book WAY too much this week, and I know I need to back off a bit. But here I am Monday morning, and I’m dealing with the excitement and wreckage of last night's PC session where we did something that started out very silly, then got very serious, then potentially did a game altering thing. A thing that resulted in the death of a few very well played and loved PCs, all kind of from a silly whim. That’s both cool and crushing, losing a long played PC, but also being excited that his death got to tell a cool campaign altering story. Couple this to a Saturday afternoon where I got pulled into a discord chat to resolve a very brutal sneak attack that left me literally adrenaline fatigued and exhilarated at my super close escape from death at the last second. Then add in all the guilt and time management stress of playing this game super hardcore, but still managing family and work responsibilities and you can hopefully appreciate the feeling of fatigue i’m feeling. Is it worth it? Absolutely, but ONLY IN MODERATION. I think it's brilliant that Brovenloft was intentionally planned to last only a month. It’s too intense for anything else. It’s only 10 days in and people are already checking in to make sure no one's going all Mazes and Monsters. I could not last more than a month. I can only imagine how much herculean effort our mighty DM is putting in. This is intense, elite level gaming. I never really understood what that meant, I thought it was just pro wrestling grandiosity.
But I came into this community last winter by way of this awesome youtube channel called The Joy of Wargaming who was doing these amazing videos on how you can have great, living wargaming campaigns all from the core AD&D books and he showed you step by step how to do it. From there I became aware of the BROSR community on twitter and really got their use of kayfabe to troll the greater twitter gaming community. Then I found Jeffro’s blog and was really enjoying his session reports, when I commented and asked how I could get involved with 1:1 Brosr games. He immediately screenshotted my post and put it up on twitter and literally within 3 hours I had like 4 offers of games and I ended up joining up with the Red Frontier campaign who accepted me with open arms, the short lived Aegyptus Campaign, the Blackbird campaign as a patron, and a patron in Dill’s game Mentlegen and Wagons. Though I really enjoyed all of those games, being in live online sessions of Red Frontier has been great. I highly recommend anyone who doesn’t already know it to check out session reports and join a game or two, it’s super fun, well-run games. From Red Frontier my wizard tried to do a sacrificial thing he thought would save Red Frontier from a big problem, and he ended up in Brovenloft as a minor patron, unprepared and unaware. I’ve had to really scrimp and scrape for everything I acquired in Brovenloft, I’m kind of a minor leaguer who got called up to Brovenloft and is now playing with super stars. It’s been very challenging and fun, getting to meet all these characters from the Brosr, and match wits or share wits. This truly is elite level gaming and only a very few gamers are currently experiencing what we get to experience. I salute my fellow players, and all who are enjoying the incredible banter and storytelling that is happening on twitter #BROvenloft. It is must view content.
