Play-By-Blog #0: The Isle by Luke Gearing
Let's try something out. I am going to do weekly play-by-post style posts here on Tumblr where you, my dear readers, get to act as my players via polls. I'll roll dice and act as a referee as needed, but the core choices will be up to you! Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure blog but with a bit more TTRPG backend on my part. Let's see how it goes! If you are interested in this, please vote in the poll below!
I'll be running Luke Gearing's The Isle which is wonderfully written, mysterious, strange, and honestly quite grotesque so be ready for a wild ride!
The Isle is tiny, a mere 40 acres of forbidding rock and low grasses. Seen from the sea, the monastery buildings stand adjacent to the peak of the isle, lit by a fire atop a tower. The monks never let the fire go out.
Cliffs rise above the bitter sea, mauled by waves and weather. Fallen stones jut like Frisian horses, big enough to skewer whales. The abbot knows this, because he has seen it.
First, character creation! We'll be sticking to some version of Jared Sinclair's The Vanilla Game (a streamlined old DnD-like core this adventure was written for). The biggest decision is as follows:
After this poll expires, I'll roll up a character randomly for you all to collectively inhabit as we venture deep into the dirty depths of The Isle, starting next week!
EDIT: Play-By-Blog #1 can be found HERE!
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Play-By-Blog #1: The Isle by Luke Gearing
Welcome to my large-scale play-by-post of The Isle by Luke Gearing! We are playing this adventure with its original system, The Vanilla Game (although this will likely be adjusted somewhat to fit the Play-By-Blog format). This is the first proper entry, but you can check out PBB #0 to get a feel for the ideas behind this play-by-blog concept and at character creation. For now, let's lay some groundwork.
How Play-By-Blog works:
I write up the situation, NPCs, and more, just like a DM.
You vote in the poll to help decide the character's course of action.
I roll the dice, resolve actions, and write them up next week.
So on and so forth for the rest of the adventure!
Notation:
[Text in brackets is out-of-character text!]
"Non-italicized quotes denote text from the original adventure!"
"Italicized quotations denotes NPC dialogue."
Last week, LOADS of you (over 150 people) voted for our character's class and Magic-User won in a landslide. Using that, I randomly rolled a character (using this Vanilla Game character generator). Let's get to know them a bit before we dive in.
The Player Character: Medon Girdou - Magic Cutpurse
Medon Girdou, a cutpurse turned unlikely wizard, is in a bad way. You don't stage a solo raid on a place like the isle if things are going well. Somewhere back out in the world, there are forces calling for Medon - calling on their debts, calling for their death, or calling them home (when they'd rather be anywhere else). Now, the chance of riches, enough to possibly settle the score, has brought them here to the isle.
[Because Medon is braving The Isle alone, they are coming in at Level 3 to help turn the odds very slightly in their favor. This isn't their first raid.]
[We'll let any background and whatnot build out during play. Feel free to propose your own ideas about what kind of person Medon is and what may have come before but remember, Medon's true character will come out during play and be determined by the actions they take!]
With their katana in one hand, spellbook in the other, and a pocket full of cheese and lead figurines, they step onto...
THE ISLE
"The isle is tiny, a mere 40 acres of forbidding rock and low grasses. Seen from the sea, the monastery buildings stand adjacent to the peak of the isle, lit by a fire atop a tower. The monks never let the fire go out.
"Cliffs rise above the bitter sea, mauled by waves and weather. Fallen stones jut like Frisian horses, big enough to skewer whales. The abbot knows this, because he has seen it."
You've convinced Cioran, a local fisherman, to grant you passage to the island, claiming to be a pilgrim in search of your god. Once a month, he delivers supplies to the monks on the isle out of some sense of obligation you can't quite place. You watched him sit and listen to the sea in the dark of night for hours aboard the boat.
Cioran drops you at a small cove on the island's eastern side [C], wanting to see you on your way before sailing around the island to the main jetty. He's not sure how the monks would take to an unexpected visitor on his boat, even if you are a pilgrim. He'll check this cove again in a month, if you are looking to return to the mainland. His ship slides away quietly around the northern cliffs.
You are alone.
A bloated corpse, fought over by a dozen or so gulls, is bobbing facedown in the water of a small, rocky alcove.
A stone-carved staircase leads up out of the cove, coated in wet, slimy moss fed by the ever-humid conditions. [Saving Throw to not fall down the stairs and take damage: Success!] Taking your time, you manage to safely climb to the top and look out across the rest of the isle.
[You can see out to 3, 4, 5, and 6. 2 and 1 are partially obscured.]
To the north [3], you see a squat formation of man-made stone some 30 or more feet high, scars and bird shit marring the surface.
To the northwest [4], you see a collapsed building of some sort, a loose pile of rubble.
To the southwest [5], you see a scenic view of the western sea atop of an hill topped with an outcropping of rocks.
To the south [6], you see the Monastery, the reason you came to this place. The supposed home to a number of riches, meant to bring glory to a god but that do little more than languish here in obscurity when they could change everything for you, if only you can get to them.
Beyond these places, you can make out a partial view of a sizeable collection of graves to the far north [1] and the upper branches of a large tree to the northwest [2], past the collapsed building.
The choice now, of course, is...
You can now read PBB #2 HERE.
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