Category Archives: session summaries

Jade Regent – The Brinewall Legacy, Session 3

Posted on February 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Third Session (9 page pdf) – We travel across Varisia and see the sights, until we reach Brinewall.  Ameiko falls mysteriously ill and we go recon the town, which is mostly intact but abandoned. What caused its sudden abandonment? We mean to find out.

We’re still going in The Brinewall Legacy, the first chapter of the Jade Regent Adventure Path. Apparently the first major arc in and around Sandpoint isn’t even half the chapter!

As we open in Sandpoint, V’lk continues to torment the local Sczarni for no real good reason. Then we get on the road in our caravan.  We manage to avoid “caravan combat,” which is for the best, and basically just have a travelogue of Varisia for a while.

I got to roleplay Hiro’s somewhat naive side… He was raised by his strict and somewhat assholey dad and then was shipped off to Chelaxian military academy. “Dad always said that the Varisians are a dog people…”  And he’s learning the samisen from Ameiko.  Note that in our previous Rise of the Runelords campaign, fratricide Tsuto Kaijitsu went to jail and wasn’t killed, hence that reference here.

As a result of our Riddleport-based Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign I run, neither hell nor high water can convince our band of only second level adventurers to go to Riddleport. I’ve done my job as a GM; the group is sure they will all be robbed and rape-murdered if we go within 60 miles of the place.

The one downside was that the relationship rules started to get stupid. The Jade Regent Player’s Guide has these rules for relationships with the primary NPCs, with the intent that you build up point after point for a long time so that they’ll like you. (Apparently I need to “gain faction” with my own sister?) Anyway, it seems like giving gifts is the surest way to a quick +1 and so you’ll notice a couple gift buying and giving frenzies, ending up with Bjorn finally being rebuffed after buying a puppy for Shalelu.

I don’t mind relationship mechanics but I don’t like when they are too exposed – it makes the relationship between us and the NPCs forced and mechanical. I can spend an evening learning the samisen from my sister, but that doesn’t get a point, just the list of things in the ruleset… With new NPCs we meet, we have to be concerned about are they “special” NPCs we should track faction with to generate relationships or just normal NPCs we make relationships with the old fashioned way. Bah.

We finally get to Brinewall and scout the place out, it looks interesting.  Most entertaining is meeting Spivey, the “lyrakien azata” who lives in the graveyard.  She looks like a little fairy. She’s clearly a fairy.  Why would you have an outsider that just looks exactly like a fairy but it’s not because it’s from some made up outer plane? It’s just like the undead that aren’t undead because they are <some excuse here>. Anyway, she’s nice, even if the fact she’s a not-fairy is retarded.

Next time, we hit Brinewall Castle like a load of bricks!

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Jade Regent – The Brinewall Legacy, Session 2

Posted on February 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

Second Session (13 page pdf) – We unearth a lot of beached ships in the swamp, and then best a samurai skeleton warrior! We put a caravan together to go check out the lost Kaijitsu secrets in Brinewall.

Our adventures continue in The Brinewall Legacy, the first chapter of the Jade Regent Adventure Path. I sure got my money’s worth from my samurai resolve ability that lets me stay up when at negative hit points.

I was pleased with my character development in this one – besides the fact that a lot of the plot points have to do with my family, my attempt to stand alone against the skeleton warrior to get beaten down and bailed out by my comrades is helping get Yoshihiro out of “personal glory” mode into more proper “all for one and one for all” mode.  It’ll be a while  yet, but that’s my intended arc.

V’lk being mute is a continued source of difficulty and amusement. His attempts to explain to us what he’s scouted sometimes go horribly awry. And then he really did just flip out and try to kill the toughs hanging around outside the inn.  He later explained that he wasn’t paying close attention and thought we were still in the wilderness and they were being more directly threatening…

Humorously, only two of us (me and Gobo) got a relationship point with Ameiko for giving her the scroll because no one else made it out of the brothel after their baths for their own demented reasons (Jacob – bisexual threeway; V’lk – handjob and book reading, Harwynian – afraid of getting dirty again).

Then we wrestled with the “caravan rules” as we planned our caravan to head north.  Having a large party (plus a horse) actually turned it into quite a task to balance out space and supplies and all. Here’s the kind of stuff we had to do…

I don’t mind the logistics planning though I’m not terribly fond of additional little minigames like “caravan combat” – and I hear from the Paizo boards that the rules are crappy and unbalanced.  Paul’s doing something else in their place I believe, but it’s not defined yet so that makes us not really able to make tactical choices. So we just tossed something together and we’ll see how it goes!

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twenty-Third Session

Posted on February 15, 2012 | 2 Comments

Twenty-Third Session (23 page pdf) – “Monster Island, Part 3″ – The pirate command staff messes with an arcane Azlanti orrery. And then they go into what they are pretty sure is the bowels of some vast beast.  And Jaren the Jinx returns!

Another session of From Shore to Sea; we’re getting our money’s worth out of this one!

Our pirates bumble their way through the arcane workings of the Azlanti island. It’s an interesting challenge – the three of them don’t have a lot of book learnin’ between them, but trial and error wins the day, with a little extra slack.

They can’t read any of the Azlanti writings since they used both scrolls of comprehend languages already. I came up with a good “see the lines of magic” special effect for the Necklace of Alvis, making it more cool than “+5 to spellcraft in the orrery.”

They pretty much just investigated and intuited what to do about the orrery, even without going through all the nonsense the module says.  “Spellcraft check DC 40?” What the fuck?  Forget that. They didn’t even need to go raise dead guys in the graveyard or read the plaques.  They found some shattered crystal, saw the tower zooming by, and figured “Well of course we need a new lens and I’m sure they’re in there…” and bing bang boom they went up, got a lens, put it in, and deactivated the domination amplification rune. They didn’t know they did that, or why they needed to do it, or what it did, but by gum they did it.

Then they met Sarah, Jaren’s wife. GM rule #1, never have some unrelated hapless NPC when they can be somehow related to the PCs instead. She was all sad, but they made her come along anyway, and then once they went up the tower they all were happy they’d done something and went scurrying down – Serpent was the one who noticed Sarah wasn’t with them and turned around to see what was up. She did the classic “tell him I loved him…” I like it when I can give players those real oh-shit moments.

[P.S. Van Helsing is just the most shitful movie ever... It's playing while I write this... OMG]

A recurring theme was Gareb and Slasher Jim running to be the first to loot fallen enemies. I enjoyed how when Wogan was faced off trident-to-trident with a fish-man they stood by taking bets.  There was quite an argument when Serpent ran in and killed it; everyone in the whole discussion felt aggrieved.

Then Jaren the Jinx resurfaces.  His jinxiness is much less now – it used to turn any crit into a crit failure.  Now it just makes me draw on the fumble deck (well, I use the iPad app) whenever there’s a natural 1. This makes the party not kill him out of hand.  Surprisingly, Wogan is normally the most amiable member of the party, but he was very much in favor of killing Jaren out of hand. He gets under his skin somehow.

When they went down under the ziggurat, they were totally convinced they were headed down the gullet and into the bowels of some huge creature.  Fun stuff.

I like how my “examine the area don’t just roll” plan is making for more interesting things even during combat – in the final fight, Sindawe really did just happen across and then use that aberration bane spear without knowing what it was, and was really impressed when it wasted a cloaker out of hand!

Next time, the finale!

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twenty-Second Session

Posted on February 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Twenty-Second Session (19 page pdf) – “Monster Island, Part 2″ – It goes from bad to worse on the ruined Azlanti islands; the number of living pirates is going down while the mutations and insanities of the survivors increase. And then a huge spiderlike monstrosity appears standing right next to you.

Yet another session of From Shore To Sea. More fun with just the three PCs and two of their pirate buddies (the outgoing yet fragile Gareb and the suspected serial killer Slasher Jim). They did a good job of cutting up, despite getting increasingly mutated by the Warping effect the Azlanti island has. Though in the end, Gareb was a mess psychologically and Slasher Jim was a mess physically.

They get to fight a giant frilled lizard. After, we’ve seen trailers for “Mysterious Island 2″ where there is indeed a giant frilled lizard! Alas, a month too late for me to use it as a visual aid.

This session had lots of good classic adventuring.  Dungeon delving, cutting open felled monsters to look in their guts, etc.  With this session I tried something different – I told the players that in order to combat 3e-disease we were going to ramp back on the skill checks and do things more old school – you observe and manipulate your environment, not just “make search checks.” I think that worked well!

The octopus fight was epic. I about had some player revolt due to the annoying rules of fighting underwater/through water… By the rules, attacking that octopus in a floating muddy water ball is like -8 to hit, 50% miss chance. I let Wogan’s purify food and water get rid of all of it.

They were grim when they found their ship and the whole crew slaving away digging some kind of canal for the fish-men. Correctly divining that the big orrery in the observatory on the top of the island was a key point, they went and started to mess around with it, starting a really fun fight with a couple of phase spiders!  Gareb got hit by a stray effect from the thing, blurring him, which made him able to see them. The resultant combat really hinged around blink and blur and a variety of effects that interact with ethereal creatures.

Read on, there’s more coming up!

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Alternity Campaign Retrospective

Posted on February 6, 2012 | 1 Comment

Well, we finished out our long term Alternity campaign, The Lighthouse. Set on the eponymous space station in the Star*Drive setting, each player had two characters – one on the Concord command staff and one who was a diplomat, rogue, or wanderer of some sort.  Very Babylon 5.

You can and should go read all our session summaries!

I asked the GM and players about their favorite memories of the 57-session long campaign, and they were many.  Here’s a list!

From Chris (Ten-zil Kem the playboy, Rokk Tressor the undercover spy, Drest Talorgin the Pict warchief):

  • The outrageous swimsuits worn by the players the first time they vacationed on Bluefall.  The funniest was Dr Zelnaga’s “Borat thong one-piece.”
  • Angela Quinn, who went from naked volleyball player to Bluefall intelligence to CIB deep cover agent. I’m just sad she didn’t appear in the finale.
  • The Red Queen, the crazy alien AI who was stalking Ten-zil Kem, in her diminished but crazier “Alice” version.
  • Ten-zil Kem declaring, “Those cute, cuddly bear creatures are going to go mad and rip us to shreds!”  And they did!
  • Ten-zil Kem ordering a whore (dressed as “that hot Mafia security chick”) on Penates and nearly blowing the mission.
  • Lambert Fulson getting ko’ed 3 game sessions in a row.  I was being to think the GM hated him.
  • Captain Takashi’s hatred of the “donut priests” (Hatire mind knights with a donut tattooed on their hands) and their on-board pope.
  • Taveer’s unnaturally close relationship to MINA the AI.
  • The early bruiser duo of Markus and Haggernak.
  • Finding out Lenny the t’sa is also an intergalactic cat burglar.
  • Dr Zelnaga’s ability to set fires with his mind being purchased at the cost of his medical skills, giving him a Dr Zoidberg-like reputation in the medical bay.
  • Finally destroying an enemy fleet.  It was the Klicks above Meribel.
  • The dhros were a plot twist that got a lot of mileage:  loldhros, dropping them off in enemy vessels, dropping them off in the Thuldan research ship, putting cameras on them as way to watch the Lighthouse for weirdness our own security was missing… I’m betting the last one netted us lots of footage of dhros drinking out of toilets and eating garbage and little useful intel.
  • The t’sa grenades activated by licking. Plus Lenny’s wide-eyed belief that that was completely normal… And that the way human grenades activated was completely crazy.
  • ” I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”

From Bruce (Taveer the freaky mechalus, Banoor the slightly less freaky mechalus, Lambert Fulson the guido):

  • Captain Takashi’s steadfast refusal to sign off Taveer’s purchase requests.
  • Taveer’s whole relationship with MINA, from the beginning right until the big bang at the end.
  • The great juxtaposition of Ten-zil Kem as ambassador of VoidCorp, but also a dissipated hustler on the make.
  • Poor Martin St. John, the “pilot”, who had so few official responsibilities at the start that Captain Takashi had no concerns of sending him into ventilation ducts to hunt dhros.
  • Gerard Peppin in his role as Cancer Jesus with a Space God in his Head.
  • The ongoing notion that Peppin (for all of his weird appearance and weirder behavior) was constantly followed by a film crew for a program incredibly popular back in Old Space.
  • The Kadarens, spastic science roach men aliens (“Be careful with these guys – they Ice 9′d their homeworld due to a mathematical error…”).
  • The great mystery attached to the nature of the I-krl and the entire Externals threat – it took us an awful lot of time to figure out what they really wanted…
  • Haggernak, playing “Show me far…”
  • The slow development of Lambert Fulson into a slimy Jerseyite who ran a rattletrap flotilla of least-common-denominator cargo ships.
  • Ten-zil Kem’s performance at the VoidCorp presentation, early on – he did a remarkably good job of improvising to a sequence of random images.

Tim (Haggernak the weren security chief, Gerard Peppin the dissipated academic):

  • Everyone wearing “I survived the thunder hole!” t-shirts in reference to the place Rokk Tressor died.
  • The psychic dhros.
  • The tribe of seshayans living in conference room B.
  • Takashi opening his fridge and asking “Zuul?” after alien agent Alex Racine appeared and disappeared in his kitchen.
  • Lenny’s reptilian flirting rituals (“licks his eyeball seductively”).
  • The donut monks.
  • Threatening the kadarens with boredom.
  • Finally seeing the ship that had been lost in drivespace.
  • Figuring out what had happened to the populace of Bluefall.
  • Re-purposing the assassin ship as Peppin’s replacement pleasure yacht.

Me (Captain Takashi, Markus Orozlan the warlion bartender):

  • Takashi’s nighttime hobby of making “loldhros” pictures of the station dhros and posting them anonymously on the Grid.
  • Insisting that the gardh’yi are “space vampires” based on their illustration looking like something from Warhammer 40k.
  • Ten-zil Kem’s great Tony Stark impression. And that his name changed spelling all the time.
  • “Taveer isn’t a member of the Concord Military, so he can’t be awarded a medal, but he isn’t forgotten. Captain Takashi sends a recommendation through channels to the Administrator hierarchy about his valiant acts. They award him with a “STAR Award” and a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant of his choice. He discovers this when a Concord HR administrator shows up at his cube and drops off the certificate and a nice plaque made out to “Thomas”.”
  • Markus being Pict king for a week after killing King Steel.
  • Markus shouting out, “Alien collaborator says what?” and flinging a pulse grenade into the midst of a bridge full of bad guys. Bang!
  • Peppin dressing up like the Miner ’49′er and phasing through the wall into a mining exhibit completely by chance, terrifying the intruder there, who “hadn’t eaten solid food in a long time.” Ha!
  • The little nervous Medurr groundhog slave race with exploding collars.
  • Our squad of Concord Recon Marine helpers, Sgt “Animal Mother”, Cpl “Klinger”, LCpl Wierzbowski, Pfc “Ludafisk”, and Pfc “Motorhead”.  Hoo-ah!
  • Takashi writing out a formal promotion for Martin St. John to be Captain of the Lighthouse.
  • Takashi getting to declare VoidCorp “enemies of humanity.”
  • Drest talking to a Concord Marine, saying “I sense the war is winding down. The I’krl are hunkering down in their stolen systems building their strength back up. The ambassadors are talking. Planetary populations feel safe. But we haven’t killed enough of them to fill our Hell and their Tentacle Heaven. God loves us when we send him fresh souls. We need the political will for the next war.” “Amen.”
  • Finding out the Ancients were a bunch of stoner mollusks.
  • Our main boss foes falling to Markus’ chainsword.
  • Takashi getting to yell “Prepare to fire the primary weapon!” and using the Lighthouse’s doomsday device.
  • Admiral Takashi’s memoirs, “Space Vampires and Donut Priests – Or, How Everything In The Verge Tried To Kill Me“

All well done, and thanks to our GM Paul!

Two bonus links:

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twenty-First Session

Posted on February 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

Twenty-First Session (18 page pdf) – “Monster Island” – Their ship missing in action, the crew heads to the nearby island of Nal-Kashel, which bears Azlanti ruins of the “demented World of Warcraft” design school. Then the mutation comes.

This was our new year’s day session! Another year, more Reavers. They really didn’t want to go to “Monster Island,” as they have named it, but in the end they decided that their ship and loot and girlfriends and all were worth the danger. (They had to think about it, though!)

Sindawe cuts to the chase and beats, strips, and interrogates a local, finding out that they have the “Innsmouth look” for a reason – that they are all part fish-man. So then it’s off the the island!

And boy it’s demented.  This is still from the From Shore To Sea adventure. The island is surrounded by the Cliffs of Insanity and has an Azlanti city that was all cool but now it’s degenerating and there’s weird magical stuff going on, like ripped-off tops of towers swooshing around in the air and intelligent will-o-the-wisp powered floating streetlights. The PCs even ended up talking to them! Investing in learning Aklo from Samaritha and Hatshepsut has really opened up new worlds for the otherwise non-intellectual group.

I had fun playing the pirates. It’s harder when they are shipboard – there’s a lot of NPCs for me to juggle and there’s usually work to be done. Once pirates get out on trips like this, though, their more chaotic nature comes out. They screw around a lot.  Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s dangerous, but it’s never quiet!

They lost another crewman, though, and they have all started to get mutated by something going on with the island. Alas! Will they figure out the island’s ancient secrets? Tune in next time…

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Jade Regent Chapter 1, The Brinewall Legacy, Session 1

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

Welcome to the first chapter of our Jade Regent campaign, The Brinewall Legacy! Our neophyte adventurers in Sandpoint are drawn into long-hidden secrets by their friends, relatives, and loved ones, all linked to Sandpoint inn-owner Ameiko Kaijitsu.

That’s right, it’s a new adventure path! Paul is GMing, having just finished GMing a couple-year-long Alternity Star*Drive based campaign. We have six players – Tim, Matt, Patrick, Chris, Bruce, and myself. Matt has been in the other games our large loosely affiliated group runs but hasn’t gamed with us on the Sunday games since a Savage Worlds campaign in 2009.

First Session (14 page pdf) – We meet our intrepid crew of adventurers, and are immediately dispatched to the swamp to fight goblins.  Oh, joy. We run right into the Licktoad Goblin village and carnage erupts.

It was a charge starting out in Sandpoint, because that’s where we started our Rise of the Runelords campaign (most of the same players, also run by Paul) so we had a lot of familiarity with the place. And of course they used one of Paizo’s signature monsters, the wildly popular insane goblins.

My idea for my character Hiro’s arc is for him to be a glory-seeking cavalier who over time realizes the true calling of service and becomes a samurai. That was off to a rollicking start as he charged his horse right into the goblin encampment and into a big mud pit that the others had to haul him ingloriously out of. There were plenty of hooks; as Ameiko Kaijitsu’s little brother all the Kaijitsu family historical secrets made motivation a no-brainer.

Also, Hiro was trained as a cavalier in Cheliax.  I liked how the halfling swamp guy got all offended when Hiro called him “peasant” or “farmer”; Hiro thought he was paying the guy a complement – a farmer’s a much higher status job than “dumbass living in a swamp” in Cheliax at least.

And we got two badges, the Halfling Rescuer badge (optional, though we never can pass up a home invasion) and the Goblin Killer badge (fairly required, I think, or else no pointer to the next part…).

Then there was some confusion that we use as an in-joke in many later sessions.  There was a shack in the swamp, with a shed outside it.  We were trying to investigate both as rat-creatures came from each. Paul kept mixing up the two words to the point where we kept thinking we were near the shack but were near the shed, or the squeaking was coming from the shed but we thought it was coming from the shack (which got me enveloped in a rat swarm, so it wasn’t that entertaining initially).  So now whenever a shack or a shed is encountered ever after we say “Wait… Is it a shack, or is it a shed?” Perhaps we should nickname Paul “Two Sheds” as a multi-level homage.

We got a lot done, and a lot of role-playing, it was a very long first session and we were going on all cylinders.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Twentieth Session

Posted on January 28, 2012 | 3 Comments

Twentieth Session (18 page pdf) – “From Shore To Sea” – The crew drops into the village of Blackcove to check in on their old buddy Jaren the Jinx. Apparently his jinxiness has gone nuclear as tentacle horror erupts shortly after they arrive.

We had fun with Sindawe’s plan to land an “away team” posing as an adventuring party to scout out good marks. We basically dressed each member like one of the Paizo iconic PCs, which is to say they all look like murder-strippers.

It’s funny that since they are pirates, not adventurers, their opinion of adventurers is mixed contempt and pity.

After a little more random shipboard encounters and weather, they get to Blackcove! Which is basically like Innsmouth. Now we begin the Paizo/Open Design module From Shore To Sea!

After dealing with some locals and a spooky mostly abandoned town, it’s tentacle attack time while holed up in a lighthouse in a storm at night. They were having a hard time of it and Sindawe was getting sick of the locals being in the way, so for a while he started throwing townsfolk to the tentacles hoping that perhaps they had a preset kill limit.

When the storm cleared – the Teeth of Araska was nowhere to be found. What to do? Surely there’s somewhere to go other than the nearby “Monster Island…”

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 57 – Campaign Finale!

Posted on January 23, 2012 | 1 Comment

Fifty-Seventh Session - It’s time to end this. We get some reinforcements from Old Space, and decide to lure the External fleet to Bluefall and wipe their bitch asses out in one fell swoop. Does it work? Who dies? Want to know? Well, then grab hold of your socks and read on, Joel Robinson! I won’t spoil the ending here, but Admiral Takashi finally gets to utter the signature phrase on his character sheet, “Prepare to fire the primary weapon!“

The Lighthouse campaign started May 30, 2009 and is only coming to a close now, October 30, 2011! Just about two and a half years of science fiction goodness. 57 sessions of an entire every-other-Sunday afternoon, all documented for your reading pleasure. Thanks to Paul for his yeoman’s work in running it and to the rest of the crew for making it a fun ride!  And thanks to the Alternity designers, it really is a nice little sci-fi game – could stand a cleaned up version 2 but then again what couldn’t.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Nineteenth Session

Posted on January 21, 2012 | 2 Comments

Nineteenth Session (27 page pdf) – “A Pirate’s Life For Me” – More time at sea; the crew gets into the pirate spirit and wavecrawls the hell out of the region. Vikings! Whales! Dead Vikings! Dead whales! Mass hysteria!

We started with role-play.  Sindawe caught a case of the Lawful Goods during the first part of the session, confusing his comrades.  He gives money to the ex-slave family trying to make it in Riddleport, and then has management interventions with the crew over Slasher Jim killing too much and Tommy sexing too much. Eventually the other PCs were like “this is a pirate ship! Come on now!” I thought it was interesting because Sindawe is clearly wrestling with how to perceive himself as a “good guy” while being a pirate and also with the burden of leadership.

Then we got to sea and I started up the random encounters. Man, if anything my “Today at Sea” encounter list was shorter than last time. But it sure expanded out! This session summary is 27 pages long.

First there was an Ulfen longship and a Mordant Spire elf skimmer fighting. This could have been 5 minutes if the PCs bypassed it, but they first threw in with the Ulfen and fought the elves and then fought the Ulfen. And then took Ulfen prisoners, etc. This was a livelier naval combat than usual; it’s the first time they’ve had significant amounts of magic used against them in an engagement.

We find a great deal of hilarity in the fact that Serpent and Wogan always seem to roll 1′s (or at least very low) on Spellcraft and Knowledge: Religion checks.  They are good sports about coming  up with super ignorant incorrect things they believe as a result. In this case, Serpent saw the elven command crew gathering up as their ship was overrun and teleporting out, but with his 1 he interpreted it as some mass disintegration suicide ritual.

I’m not really sure they intended to fight the Ulfen initially, but basically they had their blood up and decided to kill till there was no opposition. Wogan luckily saved all the crew from dying – I need to come up with a better mechanic hooked to my mass combat system to figure out who snuffs it.  I’ve been letting him make a Heal check with his healing burst to see how many downed crewmen he can save and he’s rolled very, very high each time so they haven’t lost anyone in action yet. They end it all up with a new crewman, an Ulfen barbarian named Olgvik.

Then the PCs were confronted with the sad fact that sailors refuse to eat fish! They got some from the fishing ship last time and a bunch of pickled herring from the Ulfen ship, but as in RL Europe, all red blooded sailors eat fish as only a last resort, and feel themselves ill used if they must.

Then over the course of the week, the ship is attacked by an angry whale, then meets the same whale again but it’s undead. (This is from the random encounters; of course as the GM if one day says angry whale and then two days later there’s an undead whale, if they aren’t linked somehow you suck.) Then a homunculus came by. The PCs were horrified and intrigued when it simply gathered information from them about the whale like a modern telephone survey taker. “On a scale of one to five, how terrifying was the whale both before and after it was dead?” This is a good example of how linking some simple random encounters on the fly, you create what seems to be a hideous master plan going on in the world with absolutely no relation to the PCs. Makes the world seem real.

Finally, they take a prize – a small spice merchant. They take his cargo and money but leave him his ship, wife, and life. (The cook’s resultant experiment with “cinnamon eggs” was disgusting.) They enjoyed finding a book of tiefling pornography entitled “Fiend Folio.”

I’ve done a lot of reading up on historical pirates and it’s odd – same captain and crew, sometimes they’ll let someone go, sometimes they’ll sink a perfectly good ship, sometimes they’ll kill everyone with little provocation, sometimes they’ll do some of both! “Took three ships, sank two, killed some of the crew, let the rest get in the third ship and leave.” Not always explainable rhyme or reason to it (the drinking probably helps) but it’s interesting how our PC pirates are kinda turning out the same way.

Lots of great roleplaying fleshed this session out even more – good PC-to-PC interaction and also with various members of the crew.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Eighteenth Session

Posted on January 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

Eighteenth Session (12 page pdf) – “The Fishwife’s Lament” – The motley crew of the Teeth of Araska heads to sea, and immediately decides that they are on a search and destroy mission for every random encounter ever! And then, they meet the dreaded fishwife.

I didn’t really expect this leg of the voyage to take a whole (long) session.  Behold the power of the random generator. I was using Zak from D&D With Porn Stars‘ Wavecrawl Kit, specifically as administered by the great “Today at Sea” random generator on Abulafia.

Here’s what turned into six hours of gaming, once roleplay and PC initiative was added in… Randomly generated plus a preening pass from me.

  1. Annoying weather. Make a control roll. Failure results in… Amid the ship’s tossing and confusion on deck, someone slips over the rails. Man overboard! Determine who it is randomly.
  2. Annoying weather. Make a control roll. Failure results in… Some miscellaneous marine leviathan has crashed into the hull in its sleep, starting planks all along one side before plunging down into the depths in its startlement. The ship is leaking badly, gaining on the pumps by 2d6 inches per hour, and will eventually founder unless something is done to alleviate the situation.
  3. Giant seasnake
  4. A small (if appropriate to type of vessel) passing ship is sighted. What is it?
    Fishing boat (probably lots of food on board).
  5. Bad weather–Make 12 control or piloting rolls to avoid damage to the ship. Failure results in…
    Something caught in the rudder–someone needs to climb down there and get it.
  6. Dead calm sea (lose a day of movement)
  7. A medium-sized passing ship is sighted. What is it? A fishwife sailing the seas in a waterlogged cog, seeking a husband. She sends her harpies to go fetch a pretty one.
  8. A quiet day at sea

They tried hard to get their money’s worth from each encounter – like they were determined to take that “small fishing boat” back to its home port and then work it over.  I rolled randomly and the place was just Godawful. I find visiting some places like that make PCs feel validated in their choice of being wandering adventurers, as they pity the poor local bastards in their squalor.

And I got to use pretty much all of our add-on rulesets this session.  First it was sailing in general, and having storms and other problems requiring various ship control rolls to overcome.  Then, when they were becalmed and bored, Captain Sindawe set up a melee between two halves of the crew, which used my quickie mass combat rules. And finally, when the fishwife tried to escape they used my naval combat rules (a mix of my chase rules and cannon rules). But it wasn’t all rules minigames, there were also more developments in the Serpent/Samaritha pregnancy drama.

They got to fight a fishwife – also courtesy Zak. This definitely got their juices going!

Once they got to Sandpoint they wanted to investigate Sandpoint, which was easy enough since I had both the old (Rise of the Runelords) and new (Jade Regent) versions in Paizo AP installments. In fact, it was a little entertaining because our brand new PCs were just leaving Sandpoint in our other Jade Regent campaign, so we put some easter eggs in both ways (the Teeth of Araska sold its old dragon figurehead to the Rusty Dragon, for example).

Easter egg – the orichalcum statue of Shelyn that Wogan buys is directly inspired by the Macguffin in the first season of the anime series Slayers. The fishwife had reminded me of Noonsa, the Flaming Fish-man, from that same series, so I riffed on it.

Also, I roll reactions routinely when meeting NPCs; Lavender Lil and Ameiko Kaijitsu rolled 1′s against each other and everyone enjoyed the not unfamiliar sight of two women deciding to hate each other at first sight for no reason anyone else can fathom.

And then unexpectedly they wanted to go to Magnimar to shop.  Realizing that at this rate such a side trek might take two more weeks, I told them we had to handle it in “montage” fashion. This allowed us to get through it in reasonably short order; they got their must-haves done and I think it went OK.  This group kinda tripped out at a similar narrativist insertion back in my Redeemers campaign but this one went fine.

Next time – more random encounters!!!

 

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Insomniac Monkeys On Crack

Posted on January 9, 2012 | 3 Comments

Another issue came up in the last session of my Pathfinder campaign – chronic PC impatience.

It happens especially when they go to cities and between adventures. They go into a frenzy of trying to buy and sell and talk to everyone and do everything to the point where I have to start enforcing fatigue rules to get them to stop pounding on people’s doors at 3 AM demanding magic item sales.  Sometimes there is plot related time pressure but often there’s not.

In this campaign, I knew it was happening a lot. Heck, the last huge multisession fight they got into was initiated with Serpent going to visit the Cypher Lodge in the middle of the night and waking people up to demand magic item sales (with no idea that it had been taken over by the forces of evil… He found out quick though). So I tried to give them an out, a friendly (as such things go) local crime figure they’re aligned with (Saul Vancaskerkin from the Second Darkness Adventure Path) offered to take care of buying and selling and whatnot for them.  I reckoned that would get it off our play session plates and let us get to adventure. “Sure!” they said. And then they immediately went out to do it some more! They literally made that deal with Saul at 3 AM, went to bed, woke up, and then demanded of him immediately whether he’d gotten everything on their wishlists yet. When he hadn’t, it was out to kick down doors.

Serpent, and his player really, was getting frustrated. He keeps wanting to sell and or buy his stuff NOW.  Well, I run a fairly realistic game world.  If you want to sell something like that in a four hour span, then like in the real world you’re going to get pawn shop prices. And if you want some specific magic item, you’re not going to be able to find it in that span – especially if you have shitty Diplomacy/Knowledge: Local skills.  I also run fairly low magic so there’s not “magic shops”. I try to reward their persistence with some randomly generated magic stuff that some decent scavenging lets them find some gypsy selling or whatever, but this doesn’t sate their desire for to-spec items. It’s not just buying and selling, it’s anything they end up wanting to do in a city (Get information! Build a criminal empire!), but that’s a handy example I have that shows the syndrome. PC impatience vs. the realistic pace of the world.

Am I being hard-headed? I guess I feel like a lot of this, and I’ve said this out loud to the players, can be elided easily.  Say you are looking for X, let’s all say you loiter around in town for a week, and it’ll probably show up. It doesn’t have to take GAME time, it can be over with in one sentence. But for whatever reason, they don’t want to “let time pass” – every waking hour is spent in high activity mode. And in cases like this, it ends up making things take a lot more game time than a more relaxed approach would.

I understand that’s easy to do in a game – it’s why in many computer games we set our character to “run” by default, why would you want to go somewhere slowly? But it does stretch my (and NPCs’, in my world) patience when the group is a nonstop tornado – trouble in any 24 hour period is practically guaranteed.

It’s not just this group either.  I always laugh when I see con game adventures that are time-based – the PCs arrive at the inn at 5:00, then dinner is at 6:00, the body is discovered at 6:30, and then this big list of things that are supposed to happen after the next 24 hours.  Here’s what really happens: from 6:30 to 7:00 the PCs (insisting on being in combat round time the whole time so that they get the most out of their buff spells) beat, intimidate, interrogate, tie up and/or kill everyone in the whole inn. That’s if they’re good characters and a murder is needed to provoke them of course; otherwise that happens from 5:00 to 5:30 instead.

Of course maybe I’m worrying about it too much – if they didn’t want to waste game screen time on it, they wouldn’t; they’re adults and I’ve explained all the above to them explicitly. And heck, I can’t really claim it’s unrealistic – adventurers in town is just like sailors or cowboys or whatnot; they have a short time to play hard before they head back out on the sea/trail/etc. But it seems to frustrate the players (well, especially the one) because he seems to think it’s unreasonable that he can’t get what he wants quickly.

Comments or ideas? I also posted this as a question on RPG Stack Exchange to see if it garners any good answers.

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