Jade Regent – The Empty Throne, Session One

Posted on April 14, 2013 | 4 comments

First Session (11 page pdf) – We teleport into the capital city, Kasai, to free our thick-necked ally Hatsue and link up with the resistance. We fight the Typhoon Commander, stone tigers, long-necked freaks…  Then it goes all Japanese horror movie on us!

In D&D 3.X fashion, we glom onto the ‘scry and teleport in’ tactic as a winning combo. We port in, waste some guards, grab Hatsue, port out. They didn’t even disguise some oni as her or mentally dominate her or anything, which is pretty softball we thought. I gave her the Thundering Blade of Sugimatu so she could kick some butt, we all kinda like her.

Then we go on a rice-liberation run and fight big stone tigers with dimensional gates in their stomachs, or “tao tieh.”  I (Yoshihiro) have a pet bag of devouring. Like really – it was a cursed item I got a long time ago, I discovered it wasn’t a bag of holding when it tried to eat my arm. Since then I’ve kept it as a weird pet (Yoshihiro’s Japanese, so weird pets are de rigeur). I feed it odd pieces of loot we don’t want and talk to it. The party tolerates that well enough. But I had to sacrifice it in this fight – I was being attacked by two of these things and knew I couldn’t take all their attacks, so fed it to one of them. I reckoned that it would go bang just like when you mix bags of holding and portable holes and stuff, and I was right. But I did give a good long scream of grief and rage when it happened.  “SACKY! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” And thus did my pet bag of devouring save me from evisceration by a big stone tiger.

Then we head off to the sacred island of the emperors, which is nice and Asian fantasy chic.  We fight a freaky long-necked hag woman thing what like they have over there.

My favorite part was when we found magical instruments on a little stage on a mini-island in a decorative pond.  I proposed we all play the instruments to soothe the spirits.  We played well; it didn’t have any game effect but I could picture us all sitting there, in a pagoda with the leaves falling, playing a tune while the many spirits of the imperial island looked on…

At the end we met the ghost of Emperor Shigure, who was hard to deal with, he kept going all shaky-face-staticy on us like ghosts do in modern Japanese horror movies, which was cool. Now we’re off to recover his body from some demon chasm.

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Hero Lab For iPad!

Posted on April 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

Hero Lab, the bestest character creation software ever (and this is from someone who did some volunteer data file editing for Byakhee, the second bestest) has just released a free iPad character viewer!

It not only views, it lets you do some changes and equip gear, roll attacks/saves/skills, etc. Here’s my samurai character in it!

Hero Lab

Took me a minute to figure out how to do everything, but you can turn on/off abilities and spell enhancements and stuff – never forget the bardsong bonus again!

They’re still working on a full version, which will require a Hero Lab license, but this is a freebie – view other people’s character sheets and feel the magic! Pathfinder only so far, and takes too much memory for iPad 1’s.

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Freeport Pathfinder Kickstarter – Cool, Expensive

Posted on March 21, 2013 | 3 comments

Freeport

Freeport.  My favorite hive of scum and villainy. The very first adventure I got for D&D 3e, at Gen Con 2000 when it launched, was Green Ronin’s Death in Freeport.  Since then I’ve used Freeport or content filched from Freeport for many a game, including my current Reavers on the Seas of Fate Pathfinder game (the PCs just captured Morgan Baumann!).

Green Ronin is running a Kickstarter for a 512-page color hardback for Freeport.  Get in!  But… You’ll need $100 to get the print copy.  Sorry. [Edit – now reduced to $80!]

Let me complain a minute.  What the hell is it with these RPG kickstarters where you need $100 to get the product? I did it for Razor Coast only because I was so invested (I was a volunteer proofreader on the darn thing during the dark years when Logue punked out, and I wanted to contribute financially even though I had bought the $30 preorder years ago). I have been staring at this Freeport Kickstarter for a week now and I guess I’m going to do it but only because I have 12 years of history with Freeport. These things are turning off all but the most die-hard fans of the thing they’re Kickstarting.  And this is it for me; I can’t think of any other properties I love enough to Kickstart $100 for.

Am I going to click this $100 button?  I guess?  Green Ronin isn’t actually doing it, Fiery Dragon is, and I played NeMoren’s Vault, it was no Death in Freeport…  And I am feeling burned by the Open Design Dark Days in Freeport ransom project (started 2010) that has gone through several designers and several years itself with ongoing “no really something’s happening!” updates every couple months but nothing to show.

Oh, wait – they listened to feedback and added a $80 option for just the book and not the other cruft.  Ok, deal!  It is a huge 512-page book after all… It better rock!  I have the previous Freeport stuff (including the Pathfinder Companion) so I needs it to add some value.  Come join in, now I need this thing to make another $23k to fund!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 6

Posted on February 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

master ninjaSixth Session (10 page pdf) – The Master Ninja comes for us but goes down fast. Then our armies go to confront the Jade Regents’ and we defend a fortress from an oni attack.  Now to the offensive!

Well, the master ninja with the ninja artifact coin that’s hunting us showed up. He was clever in posing as a normal commoner and got in his death attack on me, but I made the save and then, somewhat regrettably, as he leapt away V’lk hit him with a flask of burning oil as a target designator and I put one full attack worth of arrows with my samurai challenge into him and that was it.  With this magical bow that lets me put my challenge on arrow damage I do an embarrassing amount of DPR; I actually feel a bit bad about it as I try to avoid min-maxing. Some of this is just normal higher level Pathfinder “glass cannon” syndrome though.

Then it’s shopping and crafting and planning, leading up to our armies intercepting the Jade Regent’s army and us teleporting to the fortress to fight some oni! It was a tougher fight than the ninja but not too bad, most of the damage was from people hitting guys with fire shield on them 😛

Next we hit Chapter Six; we’re taking Ameiko to a shrine in the capital to get blessed (and ideally rescuing our helpful farmer lady spy in the bargain).

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Geek Book Review: The Big Book Of Adventure Stories

Posted on February 13, 2013 | 2 comments

Big Book of Adventure StoriesI was in the library and saw the lurid cover to the left and figured what the heck, there might be something in there good for a laugh.

What I found was awesome.  It’s like a Penguin book of pulp classics, if Penguin wasn’t so stuck up that they didn’t have such a thing!  This massive 874-page tome contains everything from stories I read in high school English like “The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Soul of a Regiment,” “To Serve Man,” Jack London’s “The White Silence,” and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” to representative stories from just about every pulp property you’ve ever heard of, from Tarzan to Zorro to Sheena to Buck Rogers! It’s a complete canon of pulp adventure fiction.

I’m not well versed in the pulps and so had never read the original stories for many of these – some yes, but others I know know through movies or general cultural osmosis. You have in one volume Lady Fulvia, Conan the Barbarian, Khlit the Cossack, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Peter the Brazen, The Spider, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Wandering Smith, Singapore Sammy, Beau Geste, Zorro, Hopalong Cassidy, Buck Rogers, The Cisco Kid, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, King Kong, Bulldog Drummond, Aubrey St. John Major, Allan Quartermain, and more! Plus stories by Clark Ashton Smith, H.G. Wells, O’Henry, Philip Jose Farmer, Sax Rohmer, and various other luminaries. Great, great stuff.

This is an awesome collection.  I may have to find and buy a copy; I already have recommended it to friends who have bought copies. I owe my library so much in fines now, it took me a good while to churn through this – it’s big and in small print.

It’s funny, the presentation is really over-lurid – the cover above, and it’s broken up into internal sections like “Future Shock,” “Yellow Peril,” and “Megalomania Rules”… I mean, perhaps it’s against their spirit to take pulps too seriously and present it like it’s a Penguin book but I really didn’t expect the sheer amount of truly great writing this book was going to contain from its cover. Otto Penzler did a great job with this too – it’s not all the “most famous” of each author’s works; there’s a generous selection of “never published before” in here too.  I am going to have to check out more anthologies this guy’s edited because he knows what the hell he’s doing for sure.

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 5

Posted on February 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

Fifth Session (15 page pdf) – It’s time to fight a whole mess of samurai! We go to Shirio Onsen, a hot spring lodge, to kill Daimyo Sikutsu Sennaka. It’s pretty much one big ol’ tactical combat, battle mat pictures are in the summary!

13-assassins-movie-image-03First we head out to the lodge and get the “Nine Pawns,” a bunch of ronin, to go hold off the mass of the daimyo’s retainers while we bust in on him and his elite bodyguard. Despite our attempt at stealthily infiltrating the onsen, they bum rush us. You know, when you have six characters all of which have to roll Stealth or else you’re detected, you may as well not bother rolling; the laws of probability indicate someone’s going to bork the roll.

13-assassins-movie-image-01Then we fight our way through a bunch of tengu samurai and normal samurai with some snappy tactics. They got us in a pincer. Gobo and Jacob got caught on the end of the left flank and I figured our little blind gnome oracle was toast, but he has a nice sparkly 30 AC from his magics so he tanked better than the rest of us. I protected Harwynian and shot the samurai up while he fended them off with a Forceful Hand and crowd control including a Persistent Slow. V’lk cast an illusion of the Nine Pawns and that kept the right flank partially protected for a long time. Gobo got a little lucky, but we really clicked tactically and did a great job IMHO.

13-assassins-movie-image-02And finally I got to duel the Daimyo, glass cannon on glass cannon. I almost murderized him in one round (only his samurai resolve saved him – in fact, the GM thought he was dead outright until he realized he was looking at the wrong guy’s hp total), and a dragon breath from Jacob finished him off. His plump ogre mage buddy wasn’t much work. Then it’s all over but the looting.  We even raised the two dead Nine Pawns and gave them all magical katanas.

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 4

Posted on February 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

ManananggalFourth Session (9 page pdf) – Special musical episode! Minkaian pop punk samisen-playing band “Hi Hi Puffy Osayumi” is briefly in effect. And when we’re attacked by manananggals, every time the GM says the word “manananggal” we are all compelled to respond “Do doo, do doo doo!” Then we drink tea and hang out with ninjas.

The helpful housekeepers from the manor house were actually horrid undead called manananggals, which are like the penanggalan all us 1e’ers are familiar with but instead of just a woman with a detachable head it’s a woman with a whole detachable torso. They definitely got their surprise licks in before we overcame them. V’lk went to loot their chambers, and we speculated that the real treasure he was looking for (and found) was four womens’ bodies only intact from the waist down. What he also found was that they had mended his pants before coming to kill us! “That’s the best treasure I’ve gotten in a long time,” he noted. We speculated that they are of the obsessive-compulsive sort of undead and they can’t help finishing their domestic tasks before trying to feed on the – whatever – of the living. Subsequent research revealed they mostly attack pregnant women, which led to a bit of a witch hunt among the group to determine if any of us were indeed a pregnant woman.  My money was on Harwynian.

We then got a couple more semi-artifact magic items, a samisen that casts divinations and a tea set that basically lets us put greater heroism on ourselves before a mission!

Then we go to meet with the “Three Monkeys,” the heads of various ninja clans. After some folderol we have a sitdown with them and they tell us they can’t help us because there’s a contract out on us – luckily, not with them. “A problem murder can solve!” we exult. As the meeting wound up I realized I still had one of the ninja fugitive grenades (smoke bombs with a rope trick in it) and it struck me how hilarious it would be to end a meeting with three ninja clan leaders by tossing down a smoke bomb and disappearing ourselves. So hilarious, I had to exercise all of my self control not to do it. We imagined it would go something like this…

“Peace out!” <BAM!>
“this way guys…” <shuffle, shuffle>
<bonk>  “Ow!”
<door slams>
<heard clearly through the paper wall> “Woot! Who’s the ninjas now!” <high fiving all around>

And now, we’re all level 12!

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 3

Posted on February 5, 2013 | 3 comments

geishaThird Session (12 page pdf) – Ah, home invasion, the bread and butter of adventuring parties everywhere.  We look to liberate a captured psychic geisha from a big freak, and our Aliens-driven policy of “nobody touch nothing” pays off!

Much of the session was navigating the shadow maze under the mansion, which was pretty cool. We had one false start on the premise that maybe the geisha’s clues were approximate and not super specific – turns out they were super specific. We kill the wizard, free the geisha.  Details in the summary!

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Warning, Don’t Update Your Hero Lab Yet

Posted on February 2, 2013 | 1 comment

Flash traffic – the new Hero Lab updates for Pathfinder will crash your Hero Lab  if you are on Windows XP, Vista, and maybe other platforms.  Don’t update.  If you have already updated and are crashing, there is a Lone Wolf forums messageboard thread with details and a workaround which is to download the older Pathfinder datafile and import it.

The error for Google reference is:

ACCESS VIOLATION
Address: 0x005ab17d
Type: bad read

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Jade Regent – Tide of Honor, Session 2

Posted on February 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

Second Session (11 page pdf) – Murder spree number one garners us our first set of allies, a batch of ronin, so we set about murder spree number two. This one promises to get us a batch of geishas. We’re business in the front, party in the back!

Yes, we’re still playing, I’m just a little behind on posting the summaries. I missed this session due to holiday plans. But the guys finish off a druid and a weretiger to put the kibosh on the bandit threat, and then get a weird riddle-filled quest to go save a kidnapped geisha, upon which they embark with a startling dearth of “love you long time” jokes. Other than that, you’ll just have to read the summary!

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Every D&D Edition For Sale!

Posted on January 28, 2013 | Leave a comment

In case you’re one of the few who missed it, Wizards of the Coast has finally joined the Information Age and decided to make all old D&D editions available for sale electronically at D&D Classics. (It’s a white label DriveThruRPG/RPGNow site.) B1: In Search Of The Unknown is free for their launch week!

They have loads of the classic modules up already and they say they plan to get everything up there eventually.  Good on them!

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Razor Coast Kickstarter

Posted on January 5, 2013 | 5 comments
Bethany Razor Works It

Bethany Razor Works It

Razor Coast, the mega-adventure by Paizo fan favorite author Nick Logue, has had a long and checkered past. But Frog God Games has it now and is running a Kickstarter to get it out the door finally! It’s in Pathfinder, but they also have Frank Mentzer (Red Box, fools!) himself working on delivering it for Swords & Wizardry too at the same time.

Razor Coast is set on an untamed coastline, with home base being a colonial power’s city and it surrounding plantations. Just on the land you have slavery, hostile natives, crocodile men, volcanoes, and monster-infested jungle to contend with. But Razor Coast, like Skull & Shackles, has a strong nautical component too.  Ply the waves and fight pirates, or be a pirate and fight the navy – plus weresharks and sahuagin and other demented denizens of the deep! (You can get a sneak preview of the maps for RC on Sean MacDonald’s site!) It wouldn’t be Nick Logue if it didn’t reveal the worst side of human nature and end up in various shrieking bloodbaths.

Pele, Goddess of Fire and Wrack

Pele, Goddess of Fire and Wrack

The good news is that the content is pretty much all done.  I was a volunteer editor originally and still am; this adventure (and all the related Indulgences and extras and whatnot) are in the can and just being fine-tuned.  I just finished another round of editing the various Indulgences to make them even better. So there’s not much standing between this and release, unlike other Kickstarters that are being done completely from scratch.

Yes, it’s pricey.  The hardback level is $110, but you are getting a huge tome and a lot of extras for that.  Lou Agresta explains the value and all what you get on the Paizo boards if you’re interested. FGG uses a very high quality textbook printer, made in the USA, so you are paying more but get a book that won’t fall apart and whose binding isn’t mixed with the tears of child laborers. Check out the higher Kickstarter levels too, they have sweet ship models and other cool swag. They’re 2/3 of their way to goal with 19 days left, now’s the time to get in on it! If you preordered back in the day from Sinister, they’ll honor that preorder, so no worries there. You can pledge some to get other bennies though.

Dajobas, Devourer of Worlds

Dajobas, Devourer of Worlds

I’m going to be running Razor Coast as part of my Pathfinder pirate campaign (“Reavers on the Seas of Fate“) soon! Actually, I already ran one of the Indulgences that were available back originally to kick off the campaign, and you can read the extended session summary here to get a feel for the kind of adventure we’re looking at!  (Well… I did zazz it up a bit myself.) I’ll be setting it south of the Shackles with Port Shaw as a Sargavan expansion port.

Do note that you don’t have to be  a pirate for Razor Coast, unlike with Skull & Shackles – it works for good parties as well. In fact, it starts at level 5 (and goes up through 12+), you could capture and impress your PCs with the first chapter of Skull & Shackles and if they end up being goody-goody and don’t want to go pirate, they could flee to Port Shaw and slot right into Razor Coast!  I actually used the first two chapters of Second Darkness to start my Reavers campaign and went pirate from there, out to Azlant and now to the Razor!

Maybe my PCs will see you there… Kickstart now to become on of their many victims!

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