Introduction

Many of today’s gamers, especially those with young families, can’t make every session of a weekly, multi-year roleplaying campaign.  I find it much easier to keep up with and interested in a campaign if a fellow player or the DM posts a recap on a wiki, a bulletin board, or even sends out a summary via email.  In addition to keeping players in the loop, these recaps provide players with a chance to digest the session’s material and to prepare for the upcoming session.  Furthermore, session recaps provide a more in-depth description of events, allowing the players to add the richness of the story, either in character or taking their turn as the narrator.

I find these journals, logs, and correspondences to be great time capsules of the campaign and memory logs when remembering adventures with friends. These annals provide additional flavor to the campaign world, and add perspective.  After all, no fun roleplaying world is purely the thought of one individual.

Unfortunately, in most campaigns, not every session is logged, transcribed, or otherwise captured by the DM or players.  DMs are often swamped making sense of dice rolls and character actions, while planning the next moves of the challengers in a given encounter.

Here are a few methods and ideas for inspiring players and DMs that you game with to keep an ongoing log of the adventure.

• Set up a blog, wiki, or bulletin board (or all three!) and make sure your players have accounts and tutorials.
• Take turns acting in the role of scribe of the session, ensuring that the key moments are covered.  Different players will cover the events differently, and this is fun to see play out.   Players may even challenge one-another to come up with increasingly creative and interesting session recaps.  Offer XP, perhaps even on a per-word or per-ten-words basis, to dispel the curse of writer’s block.
• Players playing characters who are bards, historians, politicians, or others of the “literate class” of the campaign world have a natural stake in ensuring that the story is correctly told.  These players make natural scribes, allowing their characters to use these opportunities to feed back into the history of the world and potentially affect change by increasing the popularity of the party, or by casting the ruler of a land as a tyrant, etc.  This provides another avenue of agency.

My favorite session recaps are those written in character, or with the constraints, openness, and information dissemination methods of the campaign world in mind.

Thanks to all who entered or contest, and congratulations to those selected to appear in the collection.

The adventure also ships with five 15th-level false heroes to serve as the party’s nemeses.

From the Introduction:

This is a continuation of a story starring the False Heroes the nemesis and your players’ party of 15th-level adventurers as the heroes. In Stealing Moments, a unique artifact known as the Silver Orb of the Ages was unleashed from the bottom of a mountain cave, carried forth by the False Heroes.

These False Heroes have traveled the land, burning villages and causing trouble.   In time, and as covered in the concluding module, Time Out of Mind, the party will chase the False Heroes to the Dream Plane, the only place where time is relative and thus out of reach of the power of the Orb.

But first, the party needs to learn more about the Orb. In this module, they will follow a trail of clues into the Plane of Knowledge and then track down a collection of tomes, through which they will become informed of the history of the Orb.  However, the since the Plane of Knowledge is a sprawling library of endless passageways and sections devoted to obscure subject matter, it is full of peril in every section.

The False Heroes are comprised of a collection of characters of a similar makeup as the party.  They have taken on the party’s persona and have made their way across the world, using the Silver Orb of the Ages to wreak havoc on the many peoples, and have brought shame to the party’s name.  This has forced the party to travel in secret, following the many tales of the False Heroes’ exploits, keeping abreast of the local bardic lore, and have hunted them down throughout the multiverse.

Recently, they have heard a bard’s tale that the False Heroes have been sighted in the merchant quarter of the large port city of Chaurille. Upon visiting the quarter, they locate a bookstore, where they learn that a rare book collector as been inquiring about a book describing a silver orb.

This is where the action picks up!

Buy the PDF for $2.99 at rpgnow.

We are hard at work on pulling together a book of short haiku-inspired poetry by Phoenix-based Carolyn Hinderliter and a book of fast-paced hacker flash fiction by San Francisco-based J.M. Hacknee.  These two writers couldn’t be further apart in their styles, but they both fit the inverspace mould because we can’t seem to find an easy way to categorize their work.  Hinderliter is known to work space themes into her poetry, and Hacknee drops references and wordplay like a 21st-century Joyce.

Kristin Harrison is working on a collection of speculative fiction, and S.D. Hilderbrand is completing Tales Alone, a 150-page collection of ten short stories in the speculative vein.

Follow our progress as we release these exciting new works in 2012!

Inverspace Press is proud to announce the release of another role playing adventure, S.D. Hilderbrand’s What’s Mine’s Yours.

What’s Mine’s Yours is a 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure for 1st level characters.  This adventure begins in the marketplace in the town of Fort Wood, where the players are approached by representatives of the Guild, a Merchant collective heavily invested in mining operations.

They are escorted to a courtyard at the Guild headquarters in Fort Wood, where they are provided with the setting. Kobolds have taken control of a mine of great importance to the Guild.  Their task is to free the mine of the kobolds.

The party travels to the mine, where they take stock of the situation from afar. It appears the kobolds have taken control of the mine. However, once the party encounters the kobolds, they discover there is a more sinister story surrounding the Guild’s doings in the mine. This adventure easily serves as the first adventure undertaken by a new party of 1st level characters.

Download for just $1.99 from rpgnow.

Future adventures from Inverspace Press will provide follow-on adventures to this introductory adventure.

Carrying only some belongings, an STD, and a credit card. Our “hero” embarks upon a journey through America, searching for answers but doesn’t like what he finds. Going from misadventure to misadventure, he takes a trip of deconstruction in hope of finding a place where he can reconstruct his identity.

Order a paperback copy for the low cost of $8.99 or download a PDF version for $2.99 from Lulu: Chasing Kerouac With My Credit Card.  Look for more of Edward Austin Robertson’s work in his other collections and in issues of Inverspace Quarterly.

Edward Austin Robertson works with the nation’s youth in Tulsa, OK, and travels to give poetry readings nationwide. His two acclaimed collections of poems, Supplication and Masturbation and Instant Exchange of Recognition are available from Inverspace Press, and his upcoming book, Blooming Bursting and Burning with Color is due out later this year. Chasing Kerouac With My Credit Card is Edward Austin Robertson’s most recent book of poetry.

Inverspace Press is pleased to begin bringing you role playing games and supplements starting in 2011 with the release of S.D. Hilderbrand’s High Water Marks, a 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons session delve for 5th-level characters.  From the introduction:

EXILE ON MAIN STREET

The party saw the newly-carved sign when they first entered the mundane village of Riverfork – “No magicks allowed.” Something strange was clearly afoot; arcane power preceded them too the town and was not welcome.

Two brothers, Herman and Franz Finn, have been exiled from the village, after they were caught practicing the dark arts. They have since holed up in a cave upriver, where they stumbled upon an ancient shrine to Tharizdun.

Corrupted by their dark worship of Tharizdun, they have since taken on the identities of Germ and Vras Vrimm, and have recently conscripted a tribe of local bullywugs to build a dam to control Riverfork’s water supply. With the bullywugs’assistance, they have been engaged in systematically poisoning the village’s water supply and causing shortages and floods to exact revenge on their exile.

This work has pleased Tharizdun, who has sent them a Barlgura to assist them in their efforts of chaos and evil. They are currently recruiting more bullywugs and other forces with the intent of razing the village in the name of their dark god.

Check back for more releases, and keep up with related role playing developments at clawclawbite.com.

Many gamers, especially those with families, can’t make every session of a role playing campaign.  I find it much easier to keep up with a campaign if a fellow player or the DM posts a recap on a wiki, a bulletin board, or even email.  In addition to keeping players in the loop, these recaps provide players with a chance to digest the session’s material and provide a more in-depth description of events, either in character or taking their turn as the narrator.  I find these to be great time capsules of the adventure and memory logs when remembering campaigns.  These annals provide additional flavor to the campaign world.

We’re working with Claw/Claw/Bite to collect creative session recaps from gamers across the web in include in a special publication called The Art of the Session Recap.  We are currently accepting 250-2500 word submissions for this collection.  So send us your favorite session recaps by August 1st!  The more creative, the better! Accompanying images also encouraged.

Here is a sample session recap that we expect to include in the collection.

Cover • <<,,Red Mars Redemption’’>> • NASA • photo
2 • From Mars • Carolyn M. Hinterliter • fiction
3 • Night Sky Sketches • Ben Dare • drawings
4 • Meniscus • Brett Macey • fiction
5 • !Words • Ben Dare • drawing
6 • Page 6 • You • decide
6 • Mars • NASA • satellite imagery
7 • My Buddy Paul Was • Edward Austin Robertson • poem
7 • Oblivion • Edward Austin Robertson • poem
8 • Some Thing in the Walls [part 2] • S.D. Hilderbrand • fiction excerpt
11 • Mars Canals •  Ben Dare • lithograph
12 • Bogman • C. William Hinterliter • poem
12 • Legacy • C. William Hinterliter • poem
12 • Apollo’s Offspring • Edward Austin Robertson • poem
12 • Grimy • Edward Austin Robertson • poem
12 • Obscure Orbital Concentrics • Ben Dare • drawing
13 • Cash only from here on out • Larrance Weldon • flash
13 • Woman’n’change • Ben Dare • photo
14 • Issue 6 Crew Manifest • authors • bios
14 • Apollo Command and Service Modules and Launch Escape System • NASA • technical document image

Download the issue in PDF format here.