A New Adventure Begins ...

A new adventure begins today!

Mmmm. That new adventure smell. There’s nothing like it. 

Today I’m launching two new adventures, so to speak. One is my play-through of the Pathfinder Second Edition Adventure Path “Quest for the Frozen Flame,” where four friends who I hang out with on the Internet will pretend to be scouts for the fledgling Broken Tusk clan. They’ll race for survival across the foreboding primordial tundra of the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, rolling digital dice to determine whether their characters can overcome all manner of megafauna and murderous rivals and dragons.

Yep, in the spirit of any good D&D-style adventure, they’re going to have to defeat an evil dragon controlled by me, the Game Master. Fact: every adventure is better when you get to fight a dragon.

My other new adventure is this thing you’re reading right now. A newsletter called Ambush Tactics. It’s … well, I’m not exactly sure what it is yet. Right now it’s a mostly barren tundra where I can jot down ideas about Pathfinder, which is a tabletop roleplaying game that I really, really enjoy.

Maybe it’ll become a place where I can share some of the tweaks and tricks I’ve honed over nearly a decade as a player and GM to make game nights memorable and fun. Perhaps it’ll become a place where I can record for posterity the awesome and totally ridiculous plan my players came up with to trounce my monster before it even had a chance to unleash its Thundering Charge ability.

And with any luck, a few of these ideas will reach a few fellow Pathfinders who find them useful, or illuminating, or so profound that it melts their brain like some esoteric Cthulhian manifesto.

Here’s what I think, and as with everything you’ll ever read in this newsletter, it’s just one writer’s opinion: I think the thing about a new adventure that makes it so exciting and also a little terrifying is the limitless range of possibilities it lays out ahead of you.

It’s like when you’re traveling to your first semester of college: you still have no idea what sorts of friends you might make, or what clubs you might get sucked into, or what classes you’ll flunk. (Spoiler alert: I’m also currently playing in a Pathfinder Adventure Path where our characters are students at a famous magic school, and my barbarian is … not thriving.)

Still, it’s the best time because the opportunities in front of you to evolve and change as a person (or a gnome, or a half-orc, or a weird leshy) feel unlimited.

Will your kobold witch cast the perfect hex at the crucial moment to turn the evil dragon’s face inside-out a split-second before it was going to bite the sweet, innocent frost fey in two? Maybe!

Will Ambush Tactics attract ten million subscribers from 50 countries overnight and shortly thereafter appear on the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List? Sure, why not!

My Frozen Flame players keep asking me, “When are we starting?!” They’re raring to go. They’ve built characters — a half-elf ex-crusader, an accursed goblin pyromaniac, a human longbow ranger, and an elf mastermind rogue. They’ve selected artwork. They’ve written backstories. They’re ready to set down the path.

In many ways, it’ll never feel more exciting than this. I don’t mean to say that every adventure naturally offers diminishing returns. There’ll be twists and turns they never saw coming, and epic battles where their characters teeter on the knife’s edge of life and death, and unbearably sweet moments of courage and cooperation and shared triumph.

Stepping out the door of a warm tavern, or leaving home to become a famous necromancer with the college credits to prove it, is tough. Once you set off, your infinite scope of possibility narrows with each stride down the path. And this narrowing quickly forces you to kiss those dreams of making Divination Dean’s List goodbye.

But here’s the good news: when the initial excitement ebbs, that’s when you discover the deep enjoyment of settling into a well-worn groove.

There’s a comfort that comes when your adventuring party starts to gel, and to develop in-jokes, and to rehash the legend of that one time when your halfling bard dragged you outside in the middle of a blizzard to throw eggs at the clubhouse of those dumb ogres who didn’t enjoy his lovely lute playing. You all level up together, and that’s a really cool thing.  

I’d like for this new adventure — my Pathfinder newsletter — to offer readers something they can actually use in their own games. So here’s today’s offering: 

It’s fun to sit around the table with your pals discussing plans for the upcoming siege, or heist, or ambush. But at some point, you need to throw caution to the wind and say, “Enough planning. Here’s what we do next.”

It’s time to go. Let’s roll some dice. Adventure!