The Incubi Darkness Incident

It is once again raining in Pittsburgh.

I sit down at my craft table thinking I could get a lot done today. There's nothing on the roster. No games to prep immediately. No adventure demanding that I figure out what happens if the players decide to befriend the monster instead of fighting it.

This is the perfect paint day.

I've already started painting hex tiles for Defiance.

Today, I'm working on a test version of the central tile, which includes a castle.

The castle needs to be dark.

Not evil castle looming on the horizon dark, necessarily. Just a good, deep foundation that I can build stone colors on top of later.

So I turn to my paint wall.

Yes, I have a paint wall.

After exploring the increasingly unreasonable number of options I've accumulated, I pull out a pot of Citadel Incubi Darkness.

It looks promising, but I'm not ready to commit it to the castle yet. Fortunately, I have an entire pile of miniatures waiting to be painted, so I grab a myconid and test it there.

Perfect.

Appropriately Castle Wall Dark.

Building Defiance Between Games

This is one of the things I've been discovering about running Defiance: a surprising amount of the campaign gets built when nobody is actually playing it.

Defiance exists in my notes. It exists in LegendKeeper. It exists in the NPCs, mysteries, rumors, and increasingly complicated consequences of things my players have done.

But I also want it to exist on the table.

So I've been experimenting with hex tiles, painting miniatures, and figuring out how much physical terrain I want to incorporate into the campaign. I'm testing techniques. I'm learning what works. I'm discovering what absolutely does not work.

This particular castle tile is part of that process.

It's a test tile and will not appear in the Defiance tile setting.

Yet.

So I start layering Incubi Darkness onto the castle.

And it's working.

Until my brush catches the edge of the paint pot.

The Incident

The pot tips.

It falls off the edge of my craft desk.

And lands directly on a plush cat bed.

Not near the cat bed.

Not on the floor beside the cat bed.

On the cat bed.

This is one of the beds where my boys regularly curl up while I'm painting.

Thankfully, none of them were in it this morning.

The cat bed, however, is now considerably more Incubi Darkness than it was when the day began.

I still don't know whether I'm going to attempt to wash it or throw it out.

This Is Apparently Professional DMing

When I started running games professionally, I thought a lot about the obvious parts of the job: learning rules, managing a table, creating memorable NPCs, and figuring out how to give players enough freedom to completely derail whatever I prepared.

I've since discovered there are a lot of other parts.

There are websites and ticket sales. Venue relationships and marketing. Player surveys and onboarding emails. Campaign documentation. Miniatures. Terrain. Paint.

So much paint.

And then there are days like today.

No players at the table. No dice rolling. No dramatic character moments.

Just a rainy Pittsburgh afternoon, a half-painted castle, a sacrificial myconid, and a plush cat bed that may never be the same.

But this is part of building the game too.

And that's really what I want Behind the Screen to be about.

I spend an unreasonable number of hours thinking about games: running them, building them, trying things, analyzing what happened afterward, and figuring out what I want to do differently the next time. And I want to share some of that with all of you here in this blog.

Some of those experiments turn into better games.

And apparently some turn into The Incubi Darkness Incident.

At least the cats are fine.