Category Archives: session summaries

Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 39 Posted

Posted on February 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

Thirty-ninth Session – It’s large scale war planning as Lucullus falls, we win at Ignatius, and a new alien spills a load of historical beans. We’re sick of always playing defense, so the Lighthouse heads out to Medurr space to get them on board one way or the other, and the B Team takes the Red Queen to go pacify some alien-collaboratin’ pirates.

We didn’t actually do all that much this session – the B Team took some autistic kid off Lucullus, and then that system promptly betrayed the Alliance.  Then we interrogated a new alien called an Evrem, and used our alien communication artifact to talk to everyone we know. More out of luck than anything we send a battle group to Ignatius and they take out an External fleet there – the aliens split their forces, bad idea for them. It was a long series of planning and events we weren’t there for.  But we’ve set the stage for violent anti-pirate combat at Ptolemy and violent diplomacy with the Medurr next time.

If we get the Medurr to chip in, and our captive kararan scientists can reverse the klick egg-bioengineering so that the klicks will turn on the i’krl, we just might have a fighting chance!

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

Posted on February 6, 2011 | 6 comments

Fifth Session (15 page pdf) – “Sex, Death, Gods, and Demons”  – [WARNING: NSFW] The PCs race to kill the last Keeper before the horror from the Dark Tapestry destroys Riddleport. But that’s not the greatest foe they face, as it turns out sex is the deadliest weapon of all.

About Adult Content, or, Love Riddleport style

No, seriously, this session is NC-17 rated (that’s X-rated for you old folks), so don’t read further if you’re easily offended.  Also, there are spoilers for Richard Pett’s adventure Carrion Hill. Below, I give you a look into the planning that went into all this. Some people think RPGs should be bowdlerized like comics were under the old Comics Code. Well, I disagree; even most classic literature revolves around “adult” real world concepts about sex, infidelity, temptation, et cetera. I believe RPGs are a serious art form and don’t have to be just escapist power fantasy – if you disagree, you’re welcome to your own game, but to me it’s like Hamlet vs. Donald Duck comics – you can enjoy the latter, but if you claim they’re the acme of literature like the former, then real people will look down on you like the punk you are.

To telegraph the inclusion of sexual content in this session to the group, I added some sexual tension with Iesha at the Gold Goblin (always do a little foreshadowing) and then because of the nature of the Tommy scene especially I just plain told all the players (and our groupie Georgina who was spectating) that this scene would be sexually explicit and they could take a powder if they were uncomfortable, but they were all down. I felt that they all (Tommy mainly in this scene, Sindawe later on, and the others in their turn) did a great job of roleplaying through all these heavy topics.  Good work guys!

About The Graphic Sex Scene with Tommy, Lil, and Seyanna

One of Tommy the halfling’s long term goals is to become a respected and feared pirate/crime lord with a hot human mistress. He’s recently taken a level of assassin and is notable for his enthusiastic torture of the captured assassin Jesswin, and the trapped tiefling prostitute Lavender Lil has been #1 on the future-mistress list. Well, recently I got Paizo’s Lords of Chaos, Book of the Damned Volume 2 and the idea of the demonic boons and whatnot were interesting, so I thought I’d see if Tommy could be tempted.  Turns out he could! You may remember Seyanna the succubus from the Riddleport Light back in Season One – she was a slave of the old sorcerer who used to keep it, Gebediah Crix. Sindawe ended up gifting her to a helpful imp. Fortunately for her, the tsunami hit the city immediately thereafter and in the chaos she managed to get the golden key that controls her away from the imp, tore him into devil bits, and went on her way.  But a good GM never tosses away an NPC! Upon reading Lords of Chaos, I realized there was a perfect fit here. Nocticula (she’s on the cover) is the demon queen of succubi, assassins, whores, and related shenanigans. An aspiring assassin not afraid of getting his hands dirty and who has a soft spot for the demon booty – well that’s something that’s going to show up on her radar. So Seyanna (who can read minds, so knows all about Tommy, and reckons he’s a good Nocticula prospect) headed over to the House of the Silken Veil to get a job. It took some doing to fool the cunning head priestess of Calistria, Shorafa Pamodae, but that’s where succubi are Vikings.  In fact, last time Tommy visited she was in the waiting room for her job interview – I gave him a Perception check to recognize the clothes she was wearing from their encounter in the lighthouse (she had changed form of course, but not clothing) but alas he failed it. So in short order she sexually enslaved Lil and laid out a high quality temptation for Tommy. In the end he accepted her dark gift. This entire scene was the most graphically sexual of the campaign, and it had to be, to reinforce the nature of these demons  – sexual, perverse, violent – and make it clear what he’s getting into. Like any good ensnarement, there was an element of threat and an element of cupidity, it works on marks every day in real life and it worked on Tommy.  It’s not clear what he plans to do now – go along with it?  Turn against Lil? Try to get the succubus somehow? And what are her plans? Help him? Hurt him? Corrupt his precious bodily fluids? We’ll see, this has provided enough plot hooks to sustain a campaign into infinity.

About the Asylum

This was the climax to Carrion Hill – what is essentially a Spawn of Yog-Sothoth from Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” is loose in Riddleport and they are trying to get rid of it, starting with killing its summoners so it can’t kill them itself and take their power.  The last Keeper runs an asylum, of course. You should have seen the dismayed looks on the faces of the players, they knew it was going to be Real Messed Up ™. Richard Pett did a good job on this adventure adding all kinds of cool setpieces and Lovecraftian horror tropes.

In the end the PCs couldn’t quite kill the Keeper before he ran away and loosed the resident chaos beast – and then as they slew him, the Spawn showed up. I was liberally adding Will saves to prevent Wisdom damage as a stand-in for Sanity mechanics. The best part of this was when everyone managed to get clear (well, Wogan just about didn’t, but Sindawe helped him out) and ran off as the chaos beast and the Spawn met.  Everyone, that is, except the curious Serpent, who stayed behind, peering at the meeting out of curiosity.  Would they fight?  Is one the other’s baby or something? Would they mate? Well, he’ll never know, because he rolled a natural 1 on his Will save and went completely insane – temporarily (mostly), but his mind blanked out and he came shrieking and gibbering out of the asylum behind the others.

I let them get away with just “blowing up the gas lines” in classic Call of Cthulhu fashion instead of fighting the spawn. They were all beat to hell and were clever slash lucky enough to get the spawn and the chaos beast to meet (that was a pretty low percentage play). And then they were like “Oh, the gas lines!  All that leaking dwarven gas line stuff during the flood was foreshadowing!” And I was like “Uhhh… Yes!  Yes it was!”  So they gleefully wandered away from a burning asylum as many insane people burned to death screaming.  Shadow Riddleport will be quite lively if anyone visits again! And the spawn might be dead.  Maybe.  Or maybe it’s a big ass chaos beast.  Or maybe it’s napping. No hints from me!

About the Guns

We changed our gun rules for this game – we had been using these rules I put together, but Paizo has their new gun rules from the upcoming Ultimate Combat out for playtest so we thought we’d use them. We like using period-appropriate guns especially in a pirate game of this sort, so slow to load black powder wheellock pistols and muskets are in the hands of some of the local guards, and our cleric of Gozreh, Wogan, has a soft spot for them. They’re expensive, but he’s managed to get a small collection.

We had mixed results on the rules. These new guns perform a touch attack at short range, which was a nice boost and let him actually hit things. But damage was just too small (1d12 musket/1d8 pistol). Since you have to reload for a long time, you can’t get in a lot of attacks and certainly can’t get the rapid shot/multishot/iterative attack kinds of things every bowman has. So someone with a bow can pop off 2 or more arrows a round for 1d8 + STR damage each even at low level, but with a pistol you can fire once every other round for 1d8, not easily enhanceable. I’m going to boost damage significantly (2d6 for pistols, 3d6 for muskets) – guns are expensive and require a special feat and are slow, so there needs to be compensation.

About Sindawe and Hatshepsut

I hadn’t been planning on doing this in the same session as the succubus thing, but that’s how it ended up happening. Anyway, you may remember that back in Season One, Sindawe ended up making love to an avatar or something of voodoo goddess Mama Watanna, after which she blessed him but warned him he had to be faithful to her and keep it secret. I basically ripped off RL African deity Mami Wata for this bit. To quote the relevant bit from Wikipedia, “Mami Wata’s association with sex and lust is somewhat paradoxically linked to one with fidelity. According to a Nigerian tradition, male followers may encounter the spirit in the guise of a beautiful, sexually promiscuous woman, such as a prostitute. In Nigerian popular stories, Mami Wata may seduce a favoured male devotee and then show herself to him following coitus. She then demands his complete sexual faithfulness and secrecy about the matter. Acceptance means wealth and fortune; rejection spells the ruin of his family, finances, and job.” And that’s what happened. Anyway, Sindawe got a CHA boost out of the gig and has been faithful so far.

Well, he’d developed this friendship with Hatshepsut, monk and priestess of a lost civilization they thawed out back in Viperwall. At first, it was just “let’s not murder her” when Serpent wanted to just murder her… But then he stepped in to help since she doesn’t speak Common and sometimes axe kicks people who violate her weird ancient customs.  And Sindawe wanted to learn Aklo from her to have a secret party language.  As they are both monks they ended up fighting together a lot, and saving each others’ lives from time to time – Sindawe has even spent his precious Infamy Points to help her out.

I wondered how he’d respond to a spark; I just needed the right time.  Hatshepsut got hit by the chaos beast’s attack during the run on the asylum and nearly got mutated. She puts up a stern front but the whole “guess what it’s hundreds of years later and your gods and people are all dead and you’re a hobo now” thing is tough on her, and the chaos thing really shook her. Buty she has her pride. So in Red Sonja fashion, she challenged Sindawe to spar, and when he won, she offered herself to him. And he decided, “OK, let’s do this.”  I knew some random hottie wouldn’t be tempting to him, but a reliable comrade, that’s a different thing.

So what will happen with an irate water goddess?  I guess we’ll see! One PC uses sex to get into bed with a higher power, and one uses it to get out. Interesting times.

Was it sex-drenched?  Yes.  And that’s how you do it!  As a result we have personal investment and drama!  Roleplaying isn’t dead yet. Stay tuned for next time, when we kick the second major campaign plot arc into high gear.

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

Posted on January 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Fourth Session (10 page pdf) – “The Rotgut Ripper” – When strange and virulent diseases affect the PCs, their hunt becomes more deadly as it becomes clear their quarry is hunting them in turn. Will they be added to the Rotgut Ripper’s sick collection of trophies, or is an even worse fate incubating under the Stink?

In this episode, we finish out Dungeon #105’s “The Stink,” which I’ve slotted into the plot of Richard Pett’s Pathfinder module Carrion Hill, and then livened up by adding in a crazy bad ass serial killer. Hyram Crooge is mentioned as the guy who runs the junkyard and is secretly both a bugbear and a serial killer in the Riddleport material, but that’s all there is on him. I decided to make him a demented follower of Urgathoa, goddess of disease, who kills women and defaces them to resemble the goddess. He has killed a lot of people – the dead bodies ascribed to him by the locals are actually just the rejects, people he kills and then decides are not worthy (elves and effeminate male prostitutes especially sometimes get killed before he realizes they’re not women – to bugbears, humans all kinda look alike). Eventually some ghouls found him and they started incubating some hellish super-diseases. This plan was somewhat cut short by the tsunami that inundated Riddleport and its dump and generally messed things up. He was participating in the main Carrion Hill plot as a random cultist seeking forbidden knowledge, those guys always smell each other out. Crooge is a creeper, and so in his garbagey lair, he stalked the PCs looking for ways to kill them once they made their presence known.

This was a design challenge for me as a DM.  I don’t like to cheat/fudge especially in situations like this where it’s frustrating for the players anyway, so I didn’t want to just do a bunch of fiatting of how this guy could evade the PCs. Solo rogues are often meat for the beast anyway.

Here’s Hyram Crooge’s character sheet as the Rotgut Ripper. I did two things – one is really maximize stealth, with a +18 Stealth, Camouflage and Fast Stealth rogue abilities.  That worked out pretty well, he’d attack from a distance and as soon as he could move into concealment (which, as they were in caves made of garbage, was practically ubiquitous) he could stealth again.

The other was to try to maximize the Intimidate chain. He had +18 Intimidate, Intimidating Prowess (+STR to Intimidate), Cornugon Smash (free Intimidate on a Power Attack hit), Scent of Fear (special bugbear feat from Classic Monsters Revisited, which was worthless), and Frightening (up the number of rounds of shaken, and escalate to frightened). The plan was to scare people off to avoid being trapped into melee. This worked kinda OK, but not super – he really needed Dazzling Display so he could Intimidate more than one person at a time, but that requires Weapon Focus so however you slice it he comes out one feat short. Of course, Intimidate works a little too easily in Pathfinder so that could have made it too overpowering (and frustrating!).

And in the end, I know that in this adventure the PCs are racing the clock and have to face a bunch of foes without rest, so I didn’t want him to be too high a CR. On his home ground, playing him cleverly, he got a lot more done than he would otherwise against a whole party of fifth level folks. He’d make an awesome foe stalking a smaller number of PCs, so feel free and unleash him on your own groups.

After Crooge, I put in a Daughter of Urgathoa from “Seven Days to the Grave,” part of the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP. She had a big ol’ bucket of hit points and towards the end, she got lucky – down to 2 hp, she lasted 2 additional rounds due to bad dice luck on the PCs’ part.

Next time, we finish up Carrion Hill!  I suspect portions of the next session will be X-rated, so be warned.

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 38 Posted

Posted on January 23, 2011 | 5 comments

Thirty-eighth Session – The B team hunts dinosaurs and fights a pretty large number of draconic centaur Klingon type aliens.  We hit them until they like us. Diplomacy is just like dating!

We had a lot of fun this session. The dinosaur hunt was entertaining.  Peppin missed the whole attack by the Medurr assassins, but he was having fun trying to ride around on a riding dino. Markus always shines in the more savage locales – intrigue on the space station is challenging for him, but as a genetically engineered shock trooper, if a situation calls for beating the living crap out of something, he is the man to do it.  Lenny got to be referred to as ‘our female’ all the time – the Medurr are matriarchal and we figured that we’d get more cred if we claimed Lenny was our female (he’s a lizardlike alien called a T’sa, and we figure there’s no way they can tell one way or the other).  Lenny wasn’t consulted on this plan, which was hatched by a throwaway line last session, so he protested every time it happened, but no one paid that any mind. Lambert, Ten-zil, and Peppin all got to shoot up the landscape a lot. Ten-zil especially had some great additions to our tactical plans.

Markus got a lot of screen time since, as the most violent, the Medurr considered him the person to talk to. I felt bad that our ambassador didn’t have much to do, but Tim spent a lot of the time cutting up with Georgina anyway, so that worked out fine. I especially liked the scene after we fought off the assassins that had lured us in with a trapped dinosaur – Markus stalked over, terminated the dinosaur with a sabot pistol round point blank to its head, and whipped out his knife and carved a huge “IX” in its side to mark the spot. I was happy that Chris got the reference (Markus was in the Thuldan Empire’s IX Legion and has a big IX tattoo, I try to mention it from time to time).  Bruce was all “what the hell” when it happened but Chris explained it to him.  I like when everyone’s into it enough that they remember stuff like that about each others’ characters. Then later when Stykor asked Markus his “clan” I was momentarily at a loss, and Chris suggested “Clan Nine,” and that was a marvelous idea.

There were a lot of little jokes that didn’t make it into the summary but we were all in rare form. Having the entire group there was nice.  Next time, Bruce is going to try to Skype in rather than driving from Dallas, we’ll see how well that works out, it’s an interesting idea if the tech is up to the execution.

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 37 Posted

Posted on January 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Thirty-seventh Session (9 page pdf) – The B team goes to make contact with some new aliens, potential allies who really like and respect violence. If they like violence, they’re going to love us!

Bruce and Patrick were out, so there were just three of us to handle the diplomatic mission to the Medurr, a new alien race of matriarchal warlike draco-centaurs. Tim ran Ambassador Peppin, the Borealin dissipation-friendly academic, and Chris ran Ten-zil Kem, the dissipation-friendly VoidCorp exec. I ran Markus, the only sober member of the party.

It was an interesting session.  There was the expected fight with the Medurr to prove we weren’t wusses – and Markus was firing on all cylinders.  I beat the entire squad of Medurr down in two rounds (with some help from Peppin and Ten-zil).

Then we do a little clandestine research on them mainly with some of their many slave races – some cute little groundhog guys with exploding collars, mainly good for smacking around and getting you drinks, and the octopus people, who seem to have all the marketable skills but a fatalistic outlook that keeps them from rebelling.  The Medurr seem like they can be a great ally against the Klicks and i’krl but there’s a high chance that like, say, every single Central American and Middle Eastern country, that if we arm them and train them too much we’ll just be fighting them in ten years. So we’re trying to strike a deal while planting seeds for future destabilization.

Funny note, with the D&D 4e lameness that is the Dragonborn in mind, we asked whether the female Medurr have breasts – they don’t.  We were relieved.  But then there was a picture of the octopus people and they are quite busty.  We laughed sadly.

Next time, we go on a dinosaur hunt!  Markus always welcomes an opportunity to generate some maximum overkill.

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 36 Posted

Posted on January 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Thirty-sixth Session (8 page pdf) – We sweep and clear the alien lab ship and take loads of freakydeak alien prisoners, and recover the Admiral, or at least his brain in a jar. Concord Marines FTW!

The External War is in full swing as our Alternity StarDrive campaign The Lighthouse enters its second year.

Sadly, I missed this session due to Christmas break. It’s funny that I had already posited that the Admiral would be just a brain in a jar by the time we rescued him.  Turns out that’s exactly the case.  I have Detect Plot Point as a supernatural ability.

I don’t have much else to say, except that our squads of Concord Marines come in real handy in these kinds of situations – we have a couple combat-monster characters but the rest really aren’t up to much alien shooting.

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

Posted on January 10, 2011 | 1 comment

Third Session (9 page pdf) – “The Stink” – As they seek the cultists who summoned the creature, the PCs head into the city’s garbage dump, freshly stirred by the tsunami, and discover some wonderful smells, as well as a friendly neighborhood serial killer!

I went onto the Paizo boards asking for good adventures to do a “Katrina horror” kind of scenario with, and both Greg Vaughan and Richard Pett checked in with some recommendations.  As a result, I am combining the Pathfinder module Carrion Hill with the Dungeon Magazine #105 “The Stink.”  That whole run of Dungeon mags was gold.

Kevin, Tommy’s player, was out sick.  Which was fine, because his character was also afflicted with disease, one of the themes of the day.  To tie it all together and fit it into larger campaign events, I retrofitted The Stink substantially.  It was easy to inject by just making Riddleport’s junkyard man slash serial killer, Hyrum Crooge, one of the Keepers from Carrion Hill, and then make him the principal of The Stink. The Stink suffered from not having a strong villain anyway.  I changed the bad guy mobs to ghasts that spread the six new plagues in the adventure – in the original a lot of text was spent on those diseases but chances to contract them were few and far between.  I remedied that by making the ghasts’ bite transmit one at random. (Or, conversely, biting a ghoul, which unfortunately meant that Serpent’s pet snake has like two different diseases now.) Two of the party members being monks means that’s not as bad as it could be.

I like how when the players invest in the game world it pays off.  They found the desecrated statue of Sarenrae and Paul (Serpent) immediately put two and two together – undead, disease, females desecrated from the waist down – and determined that the dark goddess Urgathoa was involved. Then, something started toying with them, attacking from the dark and melting away when they investigated… And left them a present, a female corpse mutilated to resemble the goddess.  For anyone with a good bit of Knowledge: Local, the inevitable conclusion is that the victims of the Rotgut Ripper that have been found – usually effeminate men or elves left disembowled – are actually just this killer’s rejects; the good ones he brings home and treats real nice…

I think it came across well; our gamer groupie Georgina was in attendance and she declared it “creepy.”

Next time, more Stink, and then we recur back up a level to Carrion Hill for the finale!  Then, on with Second Darkness.

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Dungeonbattle Brooklyn!

Posted on December 26, 2010 | 4 comments

I ran my first game of XCrawl today, and here’s the play report.  Our normal gaming fell through since so many people were out of town, but I had a pick-up crew of three people come over and they were jonesing for some roleplaying, so I thought, “Well, what can I throw together real fast?” I had just bought a bunch of XCrawl supplements in the Paizo Black Friday sale and then coincidentally found the corebook at Half Price Books right after, so it was all in my recent-acquisition pile. I grabbed it and ran the first level adventure, Dungeonbattle: Brooklyn.

XCrawl, for the uninitiated, is standard D&D 3.5e rules set in a variant modern day setting, where magic is real and the Roman Empire never really fell, basically resulting in a “world much like our own, but more entertaining.”  The North American Empire is still top of the world, ruled by Emperor Ronald I – so it’s like if the 1980s and the Romans had a love child.  The hot new televised bloodsport is called XCrawl, a live action dungeon crawl equal parts American Gladiators, The Running Man, and Rollerball.  It mixes dungeon crawling, professional wrestling, and sports franchise management to good effect; besides the actual fighting you have to worry about grandstanding, sponsors, etc.

Our new aspiring team was dubbed the Terrible Triad (“Really?  Which one of you hunts Blaculas?”), consisting of three new first level XCrawlers trying to graduate from the Division IV “boffer leagues” to the big leagues.  The twist is that this year, the DivIV finals are Full Lethal, just like Division III and up! A dungeon design contest was held, and new DJ (Dungeon Judge) Seymour Blood designed the day’s festivities, held in an athletic center in Brooklyn. Our aspiring athletes were (we used Pathfinder for the characters, since 3e/3.5e/PFRPG are pretty much run-off-the-cuff compatible):

  • Kanaan “The Krusher,” a barbarian from Siberia (Kevin)
  • Shamus, elven Irish rogue (Patrick)
  • Bal Shem Tove, cleric of Apollo from Texas (Sam)

Sadly, they didn’t make it too far.  After their pre-game interview, they bested the first major room, a Ninja Warrior style obstacle course with some goblins shooting a tennis ball cannon at them, easily.  But then the second room was a surprise attack on five orcs – the orcs were watching the door, but the players come in through a trap door in the floor and have a chance to ambush them. They all snuck in, and the rogue even found the passage out in one of the four cages in the room (the other three held cheerleader “captives”). But sadly our dungeon crawlers hadn’t quite brought their A game – they futzed about a little about what to do and then just attacked en masse, with surprise but no real clever tactics. Then the rogue and cleric rolled natural 1’s during the surprise round. The barbarian managed to kill one of the orcs but the other four were unscathed and commenced a baseball-bat beatdown on the Triad.  Krusher killed another with his greatsword but he and the rogue were forced to spend a round drinking healing potions and during that the priest went down, and then the orcs just pummeled the other two PCs unconscious.

Post-game analysis: The priest’s player was used to 3.5e and not Pathfinder, so he didn’t channel heals, and the loss of a full round to potion drinking really hurt the Triad’s action economy. Also, it was bad luck with all the natural ones.  I could have removed one or two of the orcs since it was only a three character party, but we’ve all seen three first level PCs trounce five orcs (especially with surprise and free attacks on their side). They didn’t use the room to their advantage  – the priest could have locked himself in one of the cages and spammed heals, or they could have otherwise used the surprise round to try to make it so the orcs couldn’t attack effectively.  And when the priest went down, they didn’t try to get a healing potion in him, and instead just kept swinging.  So the game was called and the paramedics carted the players off to Brooklyn Memorial twenty rounds in.  Alas.

I enjoyed it.  I used a referee’s whistle from my daughter’s soccer team as a prop, whenever a ref told them they were go for a new room I let loose on it.  They didn’t use grandstanding or mugging for the camera (XCrawl rules additions), but to be fair they  didn’t have much chance to.  And their Mojo pool (teamwork bonuses) started out small and didn’t get a chance to build before they got iced.  We didn’t use minis or mats, though in retrospect using a whiteboard with X’s and O’s football style would have been awesome.

It was nice not having to worry in the back of my mind about repercussions of the PCs losing. It’s a competitive sport, and someone’s gotta lose!  They did get some lovely parting gifts.  And the “contrived” nature of the event means that you can put goofy Gygaxian crap into dungeon rooms and not have your sense of realism cringe – Tomb of Horrors would be a great Division 1 Finals event!  In general it seems to me that it would be pretty easy to convert a lot of lame dungeons over to fun XCrawl sessions with minimal reskinning.

And it would be tremendous for convention/Organized Play kinds of things – when I helped run the FORGE we did a lot of “Adventurer Olympics” type of events using straight D&D; when you’re not sure how many players will show up to a large event and want to spur some competitiveness among strangers, it’s a good format.

I’ll probably try to get people to play a bit more XCrawl, and it would be great to see it adapted for Pathfinder!  Or even Fourth Edition…  It’s a gonzo setting so it’s possible that a lot of the things I hate about 4e might be virtues for XCrawl… Maybe.  Hmm, well, with the super long combats maybe not…  Anyway, I really enjoyed XCrawl, give it a shot if you come across it!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 35 Posted

Posted on December 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

Thirty-fifth Session – It’s silent running in Hammer’s Star until we get wind that Admiral Rastad might still be alive aboard a lab ship. Then we reconnaissance in force that mother!

The entire session was us infiltrating the External ship and laying waste to the aliens in it. We successfully mixed stealth with ultraviolence and so have avoided bringing down the wrath of the entire ship on us, but haven’t found the Admiral yet.

Not much else to say that isn’t in the summary; we were on task and things were going by the numbers. Read on!

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 34 Posted

Posted on December 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Thirty-fourth Session – We bring our new klick buddy back to the Lighthouse, and get the third degree from our other set of characters. Then we are off to recon the alien-conquered Hammer’s Star system! All this and more, in the latest installment of our Alternity campaign, The Lighthouse.

One of the weirder things about this campaign, where we are playing “A Team” station command staff characters and “B Team” ambassadors, criminals, and other unaligned folks, is that we often have arguments with ourselves.  This time, the B Team sneaks an alien on board the station, which gets them all detained and TSAed out the yinyang by the A Team. But it’s all in good fun.

The whole part where Peppin’s cousin somehow got in good with the Picts and then ran the Corner casino out of cash and arm wrestled his cousin using his won FSM powers for the ambassadorship was a lot longer and more in depth.  But really many of the details ended up not being important enough to bother typing in, so it seems pretty short. We tried a whole bunch of jockeying with the Picts and Tanya Taneer but none of that went anywhere.

Then we finally played the A Team a little while!  They’re like 2 levels lower than the B Team by now.  We went on a boomer-style mission to Hammer’s Star; we did a lot of plotting strategy.

Next summary is mostly done and going up ASAP too!

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

Posted on December 13, 2010 | 5 comments

Second Session (11 page pdf) – “Carrion Hill” – The PCs discover that a cult seeking forbidden knowledge from beyond got more than they bargained for and have unleashed eldritch horror upon Riddleport.  It’s a race through the flooded streets of Riddleport to see who can murder everyone involved first!

In this episode, I’m using the Richard Pett adventure Carrion Hill, transplanted from its setting in Ustalav to Riddleport. With, of course, my own special touch.

Hatshepsut is getting some more character development, which is good.  It’s a little tough on me when there’s always like two (or more!) NPCs along with the party, but it also adds an additional dynamic I like.

The PCs are good and into the post-disaster devastation of Riddleport, it seems like I’ve successfully activated their imagination as to what a tsunami-ruined city is like.

Some DVD extras for you…

Paul (Serpent) was very unhappy about the high burst DC of doors and stuff. He’s a big strong Viking and yet can’t ever bust open doors.  Sure enough, the burst DC for a “strong wooden” item (like the concealed shutters on the tannery) is 25, which is impossible even for someone with an 18 STR to make. It’s a fair point. It did allow Tommy to make about a dozen jokes at his expense over the course of the session, though.  Oddly, Paul didn’t write any of those down in the session summary!

Wogan earned an Infamy Point for the extreme overkill of using Call Lightning to rid a tavern of a half dozen CR 1/2 giant cockroaches. After frying all the fleeing cockroaches, he and Sindawe wondered if the displaced locals would fall upon them as a tasty new food source. “The tsunami was only 24 hours ago, the populace is not quite to the point of gnawing on electrified giant bugs,” I informed the disappointed pair.

None of the PCs have much in the way of Knowledge skills, which makes for some hilarious discussions about religion, disease, and other subjects.  They toss in what they think and make some Knowledge rolls, which usually go badly, and I give them information (or disinformation, depending on the check results) then we all toss in random other thoughts into the mix.  Here’s an example of when they were all fascinated by Sindawe’s bout of diarrhea…

“Maybe it’s ghoul fever!”
“No, ghoul fever is a myth.”
<One PC rolls a Heal check>
“I think he just can’t hold his liquor.”
“He’s drunk way more than that before, I’ve seen it…”
“Well, this time he was drinking rag squeezin’s at the Dead Duck.”
“Fair point.”
“Maybe it’s cholera. Disaster area and all.”
<Another PC rolls a Heal check>
“I think it’s being caused by miasma.  He needs to get some clean air.”
“So get out of Riddleport, you mean.”
“Do you have a fever? I check him for fever.”
“Is he flushed?”
“Uh, I don’t know, he’s black. How do I tell?”
“Can we stop talking about my poo issues now? I feel fine to go on, really…”

 

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

Posted on November 19, 2010 | 1 comment

First Session (14 page pdf) – “After the Flood” – Riddleport is rocked by a tsunami and the PCs find love and danger in the aftermath.  And then there’s unexplained murders and Salvadora of the God Squad calls in her marker for the PCs to help investigate.  It’s Katrina horror time in the kickoff of our second season of Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

Well, we finished out the first huge year-long plot arc of Reavers last time, a mashup of the Freeport Trilogy, Second Darkness: Shadow In The Sky, and a raft of good 3e/3.5e adventures.  Everyone agreed to re-up for another run, so Season Two has begun!

When we last left our PCs, a tsunami had hit Riddleport.  In Second Darkness, this is mostly brushed off as color and it’s on with the story.  I wanted to dwell on it more.  Coming from the Gulf Coast originally, natural disasters like Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans and Galveston’s regular destruction by hurricanes are real threats and I wanted to reflect that in game.

I did some description of the aftermath, but the players filled in a lot for me.  They really got into the spirit of it.  There were exchanges like “I bet it smells like that time my apartment’s parking lot flooded and water got into my car and the carpet molded.”  “Ewwww!” It worked out pretty well and added a definite feel to the session.

Then it was time to meet up with all the people they left behind.  They were clearly considering just up and killing Saul for hanging them out to dry, but no one acted on it. The rest of the Gold Goblin crew was in evidence too.  And they went to rescue Lixy from her collapsed apartment, through the sewer grate she nearly threw Wogan’s gun down back in the day.  There was a lot of stuff that recurred from previous sessions. They even got to talk with Clegg Zincher.  Believe it or not, I didn’t realize what I was doing – Clegg owns this big coliseum and it made sense to me that they would put injured and homeless there, and then someone said “Oh, it’s the Superdome!”  I actually wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought of that analogy just because it was a little too-Katrina.

And then it was time for girlfriend visits.  Tommy’s visit to Lavender Lil was as usual intrigue and sex-soaked.  And then Serpent went looking for Samaritha.  That was more unexpected.  He has always been a little ambivalent about her, and was really irate once it turned out she was a serpent person; I personally wasn’t sure if he’d just forget about her, or try to kill her, or what. I thought it was brilliant how he got drunk and decided to go tell her off.  His interaction with the gendarmes guarding the Cypher Lodge was really funny. For some reason he kept rolling natural 1’s this session, but it wasn’t ever really dangerous, just funny.  After the gendarmes turned him away he wanted to sneak in, but rolled a 1, so he did the drunk-guy thing of wandering ten feet off and then trying to just walk by them again.  Then he tried to climb up to her window and fell off the building.He wasn’t playing it for laughs, and that made it even funnier but also more real.

I was pretty proud of the role-playing.  I know the player is somewhat uncomfortable with RPing relationships, and it wasn’t any more easy with the rest of the group kibitzing him (they were all really into this scene).  When he got in her window, he declared, “I unload all over her!” Everyone collapsed in gales of laughter.  “Uh… Physically, verbally, or sexually?” I inquired.  “No, I mean I really let her have it!”  More laughter.  “Again, physically, verbally, or sexually?” Then he tried talking with her.  It was tough, she was sure he would hate her and either Serpent or the player wasn’t letting much tenderness seep through, and so she was hard to convince.  He rolled a couple Diplomacy checks that didn’t go anywhere.  “You’re going to have to use the ‘L’ word!” the rest of the group advised him.  He finally showed a little bit of intimacy and that convinced her; she was really looking hard for anything to prove he did like her, and it took him a while but he came through.

And then it’s off with Salvadora to investigate some weird problem.  And with that we segue into the Richard Pett horror special, Carrion Hill.  Mmmwah hah hah haaaaaa! Pucker factor is high!

 

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