At least it is now – because Paizo and Steve Jackson Games have joined forces to create Munchkin Pathfinder! Munchkin is, of course, the comedic card game of adventuring which has come to all major gaming genres – and now to Pathfinder’s Golarion. That’s hilarious and awesome. I love how Paizo is such a community player and helps build other companies up – they earn their leadership role in the industry by really leading. I can’t wait for this one!
Check out this trailer for a new in-progress documentary about D&D, courtesy Topless Robot. I am ambivalent, since we’ve already progressed from documentaries to satire documentaries as the main mode of discourse on gaming, but good luck to them…
Third Session (11 page pdf) – We head to a tower in the Arctic that is making naughty storms and sweep and clear it. It might be a spaceship or something. We’re not sure. We kill them all and let the DM sort it out. Enjoy our continued journey through the Jade Regent Adventure Path!
Pretty much we spend the entire session in the Storm Tower. We were playing pretty smart. We roped ourselves together going across the bridge in (saving lives), I as Yoshihiro used my see invisible to tag invisible opponents with dye arrows (saving lives), and Bjorn bull rushed many an undead off the top of the tower (saving lives). Sadly I missed the final battle as I had to catch a plane that evening. Like many boss fights it had a lot of back and forth buffing and dispelling. Jacob piles on the frontal damage and then V’lk spikes her from behind. Bing bang boom, we do it by the book.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged adventure path, arctic, asian, D&D, jade regent, Paizo, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs, session summary, story hour
There I was about to go to bed when I decided to check up on the latest gaming news. Well, in a bizarre 1-2 punch,
Oh, snap! Wizards has been promising a VTT since the beginning of 4e and has had infinite trouble in delivering. But check out the news on Paizo’s! Runs in a Web browser and is totally cross-platform; will have content from the Adventure Paths and all; and will be free (you’ll pay for some kind of extras). It doesn’t try to enforce rules (which is great), it just does tokens and map and initiative tracker duty.
I tell you what… Everything I hear about the PF MMO makes me think it’s going to suck, but since they are doing EVERY OTHER THING perfectly, it’s making me doubt myself – maybe it will rule too!
Posted in talk
Tagged D&D, fatality, flawless victory, Paizo, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs, wotc
Second Session (15 page pdf) – We go mano-a-mano with a white dragon! And our caravan nearly gets murderized by ice trolls. Then we go to hungry storm undead haunted spires and hack undead like there’s no tomorrow! And since we’re near the North Pole, tomorrow is a long time coming.
Well, our dragon hunting nearly backfired – the dragon hit us while we were trying to rappel down an ice crevasse and before we’d buffed. The fight was interestingly three-dimensional; here’s one of the cell phone camera shots of the whiteboard we took to send to Bruce (he Skypes in):
You can see V’lk and Spivey trying to flee by spider climbing up the wall of ice as the rest of us come down to help. The “I like cake” guy is our local guide Tiktik who went into that special form of NPC stasis as soon as the action started. It was a tough and interesting fight and Jacob kept trying to commit suicide during it but once we finally cornered the thing, I spiked it through its brain-pan with my katana.
My favorite line comes from later in the session, though:
They tell him that the Snowcaster elves live up on the High Ice. They are pale-skinned and very mysterious. They might make toys and love snow-cones. They are gruff towards outsiders, but respect shows of force. “I think we can arrange that,” says Yoshihiro.
With that we wander the arctic ice some more, nearly get wiped out by ice trolls and paralyzing undead and other such random encounters.
Posted in talk
Tagged adventure path, arctic, asian, D&D, jade regent, Paizo, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs, session summary, story hour
We’ve moved into the third chapter of the Jade Regent adventure path and it’s chilly Arctic action all the way!
First Session (14 page pdf) – We fight snow chimeras and Wilford Brimley the Eskimo Shaman. Real world arctic survival tip – you can’t eat the liver of a polar bear, it has so much vitamin A that it’s poisonous, but the rest is OK.
As we travelled across the Crown of the World, we get a lot of nice picaresque encounters. First was the hideous hag Arnalaak, who had stolen all of a village’s children and transformed them into water monsters. We solved that by marrying Jacob off to her; sadly, it didn’t take.
Then we fought a chimera with the heads of a dragon, walrus, and polar bear that we dubbed a cryomera. My character Yoshihiro is coming along well as an archer; one three-arrow full attack from me got it hurt bad and Harwynian finished it off with Magic Missiles. Similarly, the next encounter with a giant pike (which tried to eat Harwynian) took a lot of magic missile and arrow damage.
Then we find the Arataki (aka Inuit aka Eskimo) village and return their kids, but a shaman who looks like Wilford Brimley has it in for us.
I don’t know what I would have done in this campaign without Suishen, the magical katana. See invisible, wind walk, and protection from cold pretty much convert most of the impossible challenges in the AP to possible. In this case, I saw the invisible Wilford Brimley skulk off and we trailed him directly to his lair. He attacked us with a host of frozen undead, and used a gust of wind to blow me around a lot, but I used my ever-popular dye arrow trick to highlight him (since I can see invis and I’m the archer, I bought dye arrows to mark sneaky BBEGs for party destruction).
Next time, we go dragon hunting!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged adventure path, arctic, asian, D&D, jade regent, Paizo, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs, session summary, story hour
Why is the preeminent fantasy franchise, Dungeons & Dragons, doomed to horrible movies? The first one with the Wayans brother and Ewok village was godawful and I didn’t see the second. This trailer for the third, which allegedly even Syfy won’t air because it’s unwatchable. Just the trailer makes my colon spasm. Awful dialogue, acting, CGI…
What were Jonathan Tweet and Robin Laws doing back in the ’90’s before they became RPG superstars? They wrote Over the Edge, a rules light game of surreal conspiracy set on the fictional Mediterranean island of Al Amarja. It was a, perhaps the, seminal indie game. Sadly they stopped supporting it a decade ago.
Why is this not just a historical note? Well, for its 20th anniversary, Atlas Games is not only releasing a limited edition special copy of OTE second edition, but they have also open sourced the OTE rules under the Open Gaming License as the WARP (Wanton Roleplaying) System. They als0 have an open call for Over the Edge adventures for a new anthology – you have a month to get ’em done!
I personally loved Over the Edge. I never got to play it, but it was the first real rules light game I ever saw, after D&D and Star Frontiers and all the other late ’80’s/early ’90’s games and it opened my eyes to how you could do that. When I got In Nomine the amount of rules annoyed me and I thought “I could do that in OtE… And maybe all the angels think that Al Amarja is the one place on Earth out of the direct sight of God, so if they want to do something they’d otherwise get fallen for, they can do it there…” And it doesn’t have the annoying immersion-breaking nonsense a lot of the narrative games nowadays do. Check it out!
I got a question in a post comment recently asking if the stuff on this Geek Related site was also me – it is, it’s my old Mindspring site from before I started the blog. There’s some stuff you may find of interest there:
The Official Death To Jar Jar Binks Website – ah, youth. Not really RPG related but the day after Phantom Menace came out I slapped the site together. It got featured on Salon and ZDTV among other media outlets. For the last like ten years I still get emails from people demanding “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?!?” like I’ve even touched the site in a decade.
The Way, The Truth, and the Dice – I was publisher for the e-zine of the Christian Gamers Guild for a couple years. There’s some good stuff in these mags (especially the realistic combat and friction rules); sadly it all fell apart due to infighting (they eventually put out a fourth issue some 5 years later with content we’d gathered, but nothing since then).
Scooby Doo Cthulhu – Almost as popular as the Jar Jar page, this is the Scooby crew statted for traditional (BRP) Call of Cthulhu. Used in about a billion con games. “Julianus” did them, I just hosted them. I especially liked using them with the various “Blood Brothers” CoC adventures.
The Monk – I redid the monk class for AD&D 2e based on a more supernatural, free-wheeling style as I was watching a lot of HK movies and playing Feng Shui. They totally stole my approach for Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords and then D&D 4e. I made up custom monastic orders for Greyhawk too, partially based on on some of Erik Mona’s Oerth Journal work (“Baklunish Delights”).
Horror in Roleplaying – probably one of the most lasting of my game essays, I did a lot of horror gaming back in the day and wrote extensively on how to do it. Nothing from the entire storygame movement has caused me to think any of it should be changed.
Classless Skills and Powers – I really enjoyed AD&D Second Edition and when the Skills & Powers supplements came out I wanted to like them – they let you do more of a custom character generation – but they were deeply, profoundly flawed. I figured I’d fully GURPS them up and turn D&D classless. This worked great, we ran several campaigns with these rules (sometimes mixing in non-S&P characters for those who didn’t want to go to the trouble). 3e ended up solving a lot of this in a simpler way so I left this behind when I upgraded, but for 2e OSR fans it could be useful!
Children of the Seed – Feng Shui is one of the best RPGs ever. And it was powered high enough I thought it would make an even better anime game than a HK action game. I was a fan of the anime series Blue Seed and so I wrote characters and a con-ready adventure to that end!
The Yeomanry page is down forever, sadly, and Bruce’s session summary page died with Onramp and he’s being a slack about getting it going again.
The great thing about all of these is that I had a lot of spare time back in the day and took all this real seriously – so this has all been playtested in campaigns and/or many con games, there’s bunches of sample characters and whatnot… About as complete as you could hope house rules and whatnot to be.
So poke around and let me know what you find interesting!
I just came across this cool contest, the “one page dungeon.” (Courtesy Zak.) Check out some of these, they are great handouts!
Like Rough Night at the Dog and Bastard – it’s not a classic dungeon, it’s a (very prettily done) relationship map. Or Operation Eagle Eye, an espionage dossier. I like Old Bastard’s Barrens as a great example of old school hexcrawl with a new school almost Wired magazine-esque presentation.
They have the winners listed but you can download a big ol’ zip of all 81 MB of them!
Fifth Session (10 page pdf) – We kill Thorborg the oni and make a bunch of new friends in preparation for our journey north. Plus we have to fight BLINDHEIMS!
Well, both Tim and Matt showed up late, but luckily walked in by the time we opened the door to the boss’ lair and went inside. Things started out well – I used Suishen’s wind walk and see invisible to get up in the air and see the oni and I shot her with an outsider bane arrow. And then she shot a spear-sized arrow right into me with a crit and down I went in one shot. I’m not really made of hit points, it’s why I want to become an archer eventually.
V’lk then saved the day with an obscuring mist – cancels ninja backstabs and also made the oni have to move out of the mist and then attack. Gobo pumped a couple cure light wounds into me by then the rest of the party was still screwing around down with the ninjas in the mist so I had to charge her again. But in a spate of good luck, V’lk poisoned her and I hit her, she missed me, and I hit her again taking her down – I maxed out all my stuff to do it. She fell to the ground and got scorching rayed in the face as a coup de grace.
Afterwards when we’re opening cells, we get flash-blinded by froglike critters – I recognized them immediately from my old Fiend Folio days.
Yep, it was blindheims. A blast from the past. We killed ’em. After handing Ravenscraeg over to Longthews (if only he would be a useful ally in the future, but thrall-raping seems to be the extent of his mens’ skills) and headed north in our caravan.
Soon we got attacked by a frost giant raider who put a whupping on me till everyone woke up and got their act together. Jacob is part frost giant or something so now we’re keeping him as a guide to “teach him their ways.” Apparently that’s horse thieving, but I guess he’s dressing it up a little more mystical than that.
That’s all we did; between travel and treasure distribution and a bad case of “everyone not paying a lot of attention” we chewed through the session hours pretty rapidly.
Oh, and we leveled to sixth. Woot! Didn’t get much, but more hit points is always welcome. New character sheets as I get them are uploaded to the main campaign page.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged adventure path, asian, brinewall, D&D, jade regent, linnorm, ninja, Paizo, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs, session summary, story hour, viking
Tracking treasure and its distribution has always been a bit of a pain. How much loot has been lost because it got tossed in a bag “for distribution later” and then forgotten?
For our Jade Regent campaign, I got tired of it (and of how much time we spent on doing distributions) so I came up with this Excel spreadsheet format. Warning: It has all our treasure in it, so there’s spoilers for the first two chapters of the Jade Regent Adventure Path.
We keep the spreadsheet on a common Dropbox so all of us can get to it at the game and at home. Whenever we get stuff it immediately goes onto the Party Treasure tab. We note where it’s from so that when we ask our DM two sessions later about identifying or pricing “that toad statue” we can help him figure out where the heck it came from.
Once we pause and do a distribution, all distributed items go to the Distributed Treasure tab. Some of our players aren’t real sharp about writing things down, which is fine if it’s just them sucking due to not keeping their stuff straight but some items are plot related. Also sometimes we have to do distributions when someone’s not there, so this way they know what stuff we gave them last session.
Then there’s a separate Coinage tab for raw cash with a running total of “party funds” and once it gets high enough we dole out shares.
Since this is Jade Regent our caravan has a separate economy of its own, and we track that on the Caravan tab.
We’ve found it very helpful. I don’t like clotting up the session summaries with loot lists (though I’m having trouble breaking Bruce of doing so) and too often it’s one guy who writes it all down in pencil and then loses the list between sessions. Welcome to TECHNOLOGY! Feel free and download it and use it yourself, just tell them Geek Related sent you!
Geek Related 