Session 0.0 & 0.5

5/16/09
Session 0.0: Character Creation
Recap:
Five hours of character creation, and none of us were done. Epic! level is Epic!, but the maths involved is daunting. We did all get our character concepts pretty well hammered out, and finished things up during the following week, with detail work left for the next session.

5/23/09
Session 0.5: Exposition & World Building
Recap:
The first hour or so was spent tweaking our characters, with equipment, magical items, spells, etc. Important in some respects, but mostly fussy details.
After we decreed our characters ready to play, Oddysey had us participate in some joint world building. She passed out some maps she'd made, which were sketchy but got the point across, and then had us add details to each city / island round-robin style, by passing the sheets around. Some of what we came up with was rather silly (for example, someone invented fire toads, and then that island was lost to fire toad jokes. And velociraptors.) but others were quite interesting: we have one island ruled by the undead (a democracy of the undead) and have many rumors of potential odd goings-on. Also we decided that Captain Blank's hometown of Ghorzam is known for both its fine dining (rats are apparently a delicacy) and their ice skating tournament. This being a pirate town, the favorite event is of course drunk skating.
We also hashed out a fairly general timeline for the Hora Quoran empire following the events of the previous campaign. Our campaign starts in the year 22 after the rise of Xanadu.

Notes:
apparent theme of the campaign: Drugs & Fire Toads

Quotes:
"I am morally opposed to the dead having the vote." -Karl
"Really it'd only have an effect on voter turnout." -Qwerty
"...It's called voter fraud, [Qwerty]." - Artemis

"She's evil. It doesn't matter!" -maggienotmegan, regarding previous campaign's villain's (Monala's) age