My D&D group celebrates Fake New Year’s Eve because we usually have other things we want to do on actual New Year’s Eve. Here’s what I did this year!

I went up to Chico to visit some friends and go to a club.

My wife has kept in touch with one of her best friends from college. She’s moved to Chico where her fiance is going to college.

We’ve visited them before and its a lot of fun. Even more this time because we went clubbing on New Year’s! My wife and I are far too insular to usually go clubbing even though we like it a lot.

We got to their apartment around noon and we did not immediately go to the club. We instead immediately went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant.

After that we went on a walk downtown to a comic and game shop, but didn’t get anything (They didn’t have what we wanted). We did look at all the Munchkin sets they had though. I learned that my wife’s friend’s fiance plays Munchkin, but just like me, can’t find people to play with him!

We got back to the house and the girls went to go gossip while the fiance showed me the popular game, Binding of Isaac. I’d heard about it before and always get excited about it because my name is Isaac too.

I knew it was a old school style game, kind of like Zelda. There are rooms in a dungeon and each room has its own set of monsters. You have bombs and ranged weapons and special items and all sorts of stuff.

I never really understood the plot of the game before. There isn’t much, but basically Isaac’s mom wants to sacrifice him to the Devil. This causes Isaac to cry (his tears are his weapons) and he fights back to escape her clutches and those of the Devil.

We watched the awesome Disney movie, Brother Bear, sometime before dinner, which was pasta and garlic bread.

Then we went out to the Beach!

The Beach is a pretty typical club. Cover fee to get in, tons of drinks to choose from if you want to wait forever in line, and a dance floor that hardly anyone was dancing in when we got there at 10:40. My wife and I were some of the first people to get on the dance floor and we pretty much stayed there until midnight.

The party heated up around 11:00 as more people got on the dance floor. The DJ didn’t seem to understand how slow songs fit into his mix, but was pretty good otherwise. Never lingered too long on a song, so if you liked it you got enough of it, but if you didn’t it was gone quickly.

My wife wore a sparkly gold sequin shirt that other girl’s occasionally got their hair caught in. There was a roudy guy that jumped all over the floor that the fiance and I both got to shove away from our group.

At midnight my wife and I got to kiss and a bunch of balloons dropped on the floor. The sound of popping balloons filled the air and we left the club because we were pretty tired.

The four block walk to the car was hard for my wife because she only had the heels (uncomfortable) and didn’t bring a jacket for the freezing weather. We made it and she got under the blanket we’d thought to bring ahead of time.

We fell asleep back at the apartment and left in the morning after a nice breakfast of tater tots and waffles. All in all a great start to the New Year!

-Mister Ed

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I’m Isaac

Welcome to the GoCorral website! I’m Isaac Shaker and this is a place for me to write about D&D and occasionally other topics. I host a podcast called Setting the Stage that interviews different DMs about their campaigns. I’m currently focused on completing the Cimmeria campaign setting and turning it into a book.

Setting the Stage Podcast

83 – Call of Cthulhu's Garden (Hem and The Sprouting) Setting the Stage, Campaigns for D&D and Other RPGs

Hem tells us about their actual play campaign, The Sprouting. Within the world of The Sprouting, Earth's history diverged during the 1800s when an eldritch horror was summoned into our reality. The horror lay in wait for centuries, building up a secret army of plant monsters. In 2020, the plant monsters struck, ruining infrastructure and attacking population centers across the world. One hundred years have passed and our heroes learn that the next stage of the plant apocalypse has begun…We also discussed some of the difficulties and pleasures of actual play podcasts and how the RPG community varies internationally (Hem is in Iceland).If you want to try listening to The Sprouting its available on all major podcast platforms. You can learn more on The Sprouting's website.For other shows produced by Hem check out Blighthouse Studio's website.Hem mentioned The Lucky Die actual play show of theirs several times which used D&D 5e.And the broader network of Fable and Folly has their website too.Check out the Setting the Stage website!Want to be on the show? Fill out this survey.Join our Discord!Support Setting the Stageon Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
  1. 83 – Call of Cthulhu's Garden (Hem and The Sprouting)
  2. 82 – Tarot Ghosts (George and Fears & Fortunes)
  3. 81 – Biopunk 2287 RPG (Seiya and Synesthesia Synthetica)
  4. 80 – Dynamic RPG Countries (Travis and Tetara)
  5. 79 – Dragon Age Degenerates (Zoe from Degenerates with Dice)