What’s Good For The Goose

Posted on August 30, 2009 | 6 comments

I wanted to talk a little about in-game GM rulings, and making sure you are not unfairly disadvantaging players in the name of realism.

This was inspired by a thread on the Paizo boards about “My GM doesn’t let me move with a loaded crossbow, he says the bolt will fall out.”  But it led me to think about a lot of related rulings and general tendencies I’ve seen among GMs over time.  A desire for “realism” is admirable, but it shouldn’t be restricted to just PCs and thus discriminate against them.

Think about it from your player’s point of view.  If you:

  • make them track encumbrance minutely
  • require them to make a lot of rolls to “wake up” in a campsite combat
  • make them not carry loaded crossbows
  • make them draw their swords in the first round of every combat
  • require lots of skill checks to distinguish their ass from a hole in the ground
  • and other stuff like that

You really need to think about whether you are requiring the same of NPCs and opponents.  Because most of the time, when I as a player wander into the bad guys’ barracks, they are all up and attacking on the first round.  None are ever dozing, busy taking a dump, out of their armor, thirty feet away from their weapon, slowed by their gear, et cetera.   They are all watching the door and immediately recognize that the PCs are no one they know from their whole fortress.  (Unless it’s one of those scripted “they’re all asleep if you make Stealth checks” rooms.)  No humanoid is ever encumbered (nor, seemingly, do they carry about the food and water and supplies that they likely would need to survive if they were a PC).

Which is fine, you can decide if you want a very simulationist detail-heavy kind of game or not.  But what’s not appropriate is to make the PCs deal with the minutiae and not inflict it on the enemy.  If your PCs are having to worry about their potions breaking when they fall ten feet, or about all the arrows falling out of their quiver when they get tripped, you need to be as anal on the bad guys.

You think you don’t do that?  Well, let’s see.  Do you require a Stealth check from everyone in the party (and when rolling 6 d20s, someone’s going to roll low)  whenever they are trying to sneak up on some enemy emplacement, and if so, do you make monsters do the same thing?   There’s a very common fallacy I see all the time here – PCs are sensed, and don’t sense anything, unless they take positive action to make a skill check.  On the other hand, bad guys are never sensed, and sense everything, unless a PC specifically is actively using Spot or Stealth to thwart them.

Do your PCs always have wounds, long term ability damage, and hangovers from drinking or fatigue from not sleeping the previous night?  Well, if the bad guys are a gang of berserkers in a war zone, why are they always totally fresh and unimpaired?

I’m definitely not anti-realism.  I like a gritty “everyman” campaign from time to time.  If you want to go that route, you *can* inflict similar hindrances on your NPCs. Remember that from their point of view, it’s the PCs who are the wandering monsters.

Give your players breaks!  If the alarm hasn’t been raised and they’re sneaking around a castle, why would the off duty guardsman intent on his whittling even bother looking up when someone in armor walks into the barracks?  He has a pretty good chance of just continuing and only realizing something’s wrong when someone runs at him with a sword.  Flat-footed should be a common ailment among bad guys in a location that’s not on alert.  Some percentage of people should be asleep, depending on their sleep cycle… Even if they run watches 24×7, at least a fourth of the people/creatures in the dungeon/castle/ruin are asleep at any given time.

Do quick ad hoc rolls for “combat readiness.”  Roll one bandit as a random encounter?  Roll d20, and “1” means he left his weapon and armor back in his tent and is sprinting to the latrine because he’s vomiting (“sickened”) from too much rum.   Not only is it “cutting PCs a break” (though not really, because you probably inflict all this on them), but it makes your world seem a lot more realistic.

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Sinister Lives!

Posted on August 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

Sinister Adventures is a small RPG imprint founded by Nicolas Logue, a fan favorite adventure writer.  He contributed a bunch of Dungeon adventures back in the day, and now is probably best known for authoring the demented ogre hillbilly horror of The Hook Mountain Massacre, third in Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path and various other adventures like Crown of the Kobold King, Hangman’s Noose, and Carnival of Tears (Paizo GameMastery modules),  Edge of Anarchy (first in the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP), Blood of the Gorgon (an Open Design project), and Voyage of the Golden Dragon (an Eberron module).

Well, Sinister showed up, threw out some great ideas, awesome concept art, and some PDF products/previews for some upcoming mega-adventures – and then sank silently beneath the waves for a long time.  Like more than a year long.  Even the forums on the site broke and things went to pot.  Nick would occasionally chime in on the Paizo boards or whatnot but the upshot was that he had way too many other jobs going on.

Luckily for you and I, that has changed, and Nick and Sinister have resurfaced, fixed their site, and are charging towards a date of Sep 1 for their first, Razor Coast, to go into layout!  Pirates, cannibal cultists, shark gods, and more tangle in a blood-soaked orgy of violence.  Many previews and blindingly beautiful art pieces are posted on their site!

And the best part, it’ll be for 3.5 and Pathfinder…  I am psyched.  I was actually getting set to run a Pathfinder Pirates campaign and was dusting off my old Freeport stuff; I had given up hope of Razor Coast ever happening.  But now, it’s on and on for soon!   I do so look forward to watching my players weep in fear.

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Fifth Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary Posted

Posted on August 26, 2009 | 1 comment

Sadly, I was out of town, but the rest of the guys seem to have had a good time in the fifth session of our Alternity campaign.  Our other “B team” characters (ambassadors and other space station hangers-on) swing into action, attending a lovely Void*Corp charity ball and hobnobbing with the rich and famous and buying them drugs.  Meanwhile, our “A team” Concord command staff characters get cut to bits by mutated alien croath thingys down on Meribel.  Then, they spread the plague up to the Lighthouse itself!

Really, a game session that has both strippers and PowerPoint presentations…  How can you resist?

Read the Full Session Summary

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Penultimate Savage Worlds “Legends of Steel” Session Summary Posted

Posted on August 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

In Legends of Steel Part VIII (10 page pdf), some wyvern-riding moo-rons show up and convince the local yokels that pass as the government in this farm town that they should hand us over to the evil empire.  In retaliation, we murder three wyverns and everyone who dares open their bitch mouth to us.  And Manoj gets a crazy psycho stalker girlfriend!

We were pretty confused and frustrated by the RP session after that.  So the hapless city, now that we’ve murdered their prospective new overlords, feels they are probably going to be razed to the ground in retaliation by the bad guys’ army.  This is probably accurate; from what we can see a bunch of Catholic schoolgirls could raze them to the ground.

So then they want someone to take a message asking for help to their King.  We volunteer, if only because it will get us out of this dunghole.  They go to have an Important Council Meeting that they try to get us to come to.  Being averse to boredom, we go get drunk instead.  Then this local elder shows up and makes the following pitch “behind the back” of the local baron.

1.  Some people don’t like kicking taxes upstairs to the king.  But everyone’s scared of acting on this.  And the Baron is scared of asking for help.

2.  So we should delay the King’s forces in getting here.

3.  Because they will then throw off the invading army by themselves, and have enough mojo left over to throw off the King’s army too.  Freedom!

4.  And we should do this because we “owe them” for provoking the bad guys’ wrath.

My rebuttal, admittedly somewhat obscenity-laced, was:

1.  “Sounds like you’re a bunch of scared motherf***ers all the
way up the chain of command. What do you need us for?”

2.  …

3.  “But your farm town here couldn’t fight off a dozen drunken goblins on a good day.  You’re asking for help to fight the one army, but now you think you can take two?”

4.  “I’m sure you mean to say there’s something else in it for us…  Because if we owe anyone for the impending violence, which you brought on yourselves in the first place, you’d think we’d owe the Baron, the actual legitimate ruler of this place, and the King.  And not some random fat f**k like you.”

But no, that was his best offer.  I tried to help what appeared to be the railroad plot out.  “If only you were to offer us positions of power in this new regime…  Or money or booze or something…”  But no.  So I told him he’s better f**k off or else he was going to get three feet of steel rammed through his guts real soon.  The rest of the players all nodded sagely in agreement. He scuttled off.

The elder, and the GM, seemed somewhat taken aback.  But we were getting grumpy and don’t like nonsensical adventure hooks – come to a party with an offer that has an up side.  If we just want to kill people there are a lot of takers – why should we kill for you?

It’s one thing if the hook is what “good” or “heroic” characters should do, which is a mistake in a game where most characters are amoral mercenaries, but in this case it isn’t even the good, or brave and glory-filled, option. It’s the craven and bad option for zero compensation. Huh?

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Fourth Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary Posted

Posted on August 24, 2009 | 1 comment

In the fourth installment of our Alternity science fiction campaign, we rescue the ground troops and sesheyan VIPs off the pirate base before the Void*Corpers pummel it into plasma, and get a turncoat spy in the bargain.

Then the space station command staff, in true Star Trek fashion,  heads to Meribel to investigate a murder at a terraforming outpost, which goes all District 9 on us real quick.  A mad doctor in a big ol’ diving suit gives us problems until we run 1.21 gigawatts through him.  Then, the alien plague!!!

Read the full session summary!

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Indie RPG Awards Are In!

Posted on August 20, 2009 | 3 comments

The yearly Indie RPG Awards have been announced.  I like these awards; you get to learn about  a lot of fringe stuff you may not have heard of, and a lot of it’s free.  I like the way they run the awards, too, they have a judge point system and they list the points each nominee gets so you can see who came in first, second, third, etc. and by how wide a margin.  Here’s the rundown:

Indie Game of the Year

  • Mouse Guard, by Luke Crane and David Petersen.  No huge surprise, this won three ENnies and at Origins!  Burning Wheel mechanics plus licensed comic plus lil’ mice equals goodness.
  • 3:16 Carnage Among The Stars, by Gregor Hutton, also an ENnie nominee, came in second.

Indie Supplement of the Year

  • Don’t Lose Your Mind, by Benjamin Baugh, for Don’t Rest Your Head comes in first.  They got the silver ENnie for writing as well.
  • Magic Burner, by Luke Crane, for Burning Wheel is a very narrow second.

Best Free Game

Best Support

  • Uncoincidentally, two of the award winners in other categories win here.  Mouse Guard comes in first and Don’t Lose Your Mind comes in second.

Best Production

  • The 900 pound gorilla, Mouse Guard, comes in first.
  • 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars comes in second.

Most Innovative Game

  • Being “Most Innovative” in the indie crowd means your game is probably weird enough to give D&D players hives.  That makes me happy.  The winner is Sweet Agatha, by Kevin Allen Jr.  No dice or anything, it’s a story creation game where the players cut up the game book/investigative journal.
  • In second is In a Wicked Age: sword & sorcery roleplaying by Vincent Baker.  Kind of a negotiating player conflict game like Amber.

Congrats to all!

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Cthulhu Resurgent?

Posted on August 17, 2009 | 10 comments

I’m a long time fan of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, owning 62 various products in the line by my count, and have several Cthulhu Master’s tournaments under my belt to prove it.  But pretty much the line has been lagging for a long time.  The last “big thing” that shook it up was the release of Delta Green, back in 1997.  (The 2001 release of d20 Cthulhu sank beneath the waters without a trace.)  Other than that, it’s been a bit of a litany of republishing all the same damn stuff, lightly reworked, as “Dreamlands v7.8” and the like.  Chaosium just about went down for good for a while there and is only barely starting to get back in the saddle.

However, there has been a burst of activity lately, and I find it odd I haven’t heard much about it.  First, there’s the “variant” Cthulhu games, like the True20 Shadows of Cthulhu, the GUMSHOE-based Trail of Cthulhu, and the ENnie-winning CthulhuTech.

But besides that, I was surprised to see actual new third-party classic CoC modules in my FLGS.  Looks like more people are getting into the licensed supplement biz.  Goodman Games has put out Death in Luxor and Madness in London Town.  John Wick has written Curse of the Yellow Sign, Act 1: Digging for a Dead God.  Pagan Publishing, long time licensee, has released The Mysteries of Mesoamerica and plans to release an adventure anthology, Bumps In The Night, this year.  Super Genius Games has Midnight Harvest, The Doom From Below, and Murder of Crows out already and has The Horror At Red Hook, A Peculiar Pentad, and October Surprise in the pipeline.  Even Chaosium got out Terrors from Beyond and appears to be set to release new products, including Cthulhu Invictus (Romans!) and Secrets of New Orleans (THAT’S NOT GUMBO!!!).

This is kinda exciting.  The BRP system used for Cthulhu, being straight percentile, has its flaws but it’s super fast for anyone to pick up; it makes a great con game.  For gamers and genre folks, Cthulhu has become like ninjas, pirates, or sexual repression, a ubiquitous trope shoved into everything.  But the original game was really quite good, and it’s nice to see activity and new products so a new generation of gamers can discover the thrill of being held helpless by cannibals, or shooting an invincible cackling wizard, or going nuts and cutting up your friends…

So yay!  If you haven’t ever tried Call of Cthulhu, pick it up – version 6 is the newest but to be honest every version is mostly the same.  Get whatever your FLGS has and try one of these new adventures!  If you need some investigators generated real quick – well,  you can always use my favorite batch of  CoC characters, the Scooby Doo crew!

Is anyone out there playing some real CoC these days?  Report in here!

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2009 ENnies Winners – Questionable At Best

Posted on August 15, 2009 | 50 comments

The winners for the 2009 ENnies, the yearly RPG awards, have been announced at Gen Con.  Let’s review and see how that stacks up to my picks.

Best Cover Art:

  • Gold: CthulhuTech, Catalyst Game Labs
  • Silver: Pathfinder #19: Howl of the Carrion King, Paizo Publishing

I had picked 3:16 for the win, though the CT art is nice enough.  There were a lot of good covers this year.

Best Interior Art

  • Gold: Dark Heresy, Fantasy Flight Games
  • Silver: Mouse Guard, Kinoichi / Archaia Studio Press

I had actually picked CthulhuTech for this category instead.  I feel like the winners for interior art, cover art, and production values are just assigned at random from the “pretty games,” not sure people really distinguish correctly.  In this case I like Dark Heresy’s production values, but the interior art is sparse enough I don’t think it deserves a win for this subcategory specifically.  What art there is splits between good and “black blob style.”  The good ones are really really good but… Gold is a stretch.

Best Cartography

  • Gold: Pathfinder Chronicles Second Darkness Map Folio, Paizo Publishing
  • Silver: Star Wars: Scum and Villainy, Wizards of the Coast

Exactly my picks in that order.

Best Writing

  • Gold: Kobold Quarterly, Open Design
  • Silver: Don’t Lose Your Mind, Evil Hat Productions

I had picked Don’t Lose Your Mind for the gold.  Nothing against KQ, it’s serviceable writing equivalent to Dragon Magazine of times of yore, but this is an instance where the “D&D popularity” factor overwhelms actually artistically superior work.

Best Production Values

  • Gold: Dark Heresy, Fantasy Flight Games
  • Silver: Mouse Guard, Kinoichi / Archaia Studios Press

Though all pretty, I thought the game Anima was actually higher in this all around area.  But it was a very tight field this year with many very deserving contestants.  Yay to everyone.

Best Rules

  • Gold: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook, Wizards of the Coast
  • Silver: A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, Green Ronin Publishing

I had picked Dark Heresy for best rules.  Though it’s pretty, I don’t think its art should have won over other contenders, but its rules really are better than 4e’s.  “Of course I hate 4e so I’d say that.”  I like Green Ronin but don’t find the SIFRPG rules really that awe-inspiring; they seem more servicable as the line is more about the setting.

Best Adventure

  • Gold: Pathfinder #19: Howl of the Carrion King, Paizo Publishing
  • Silver: P1 King of the Trollhaunts Warrens, Wizards of the Coast

Of course Pathfinder for the gold, they make the best adventures hands down.  Not familiar with “Trollhaunts Warrens” but I never hear anyone talking about it online (while they do talk about Shadowfell Keep, etc.) so I’m suspicious on that count.

Best Monster Supplement

  • Gold: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Monster Manual, Wizards of the Coast
  • Silver: Dark Heresy Creatures Anathema, Fantasy Flight Games

Oh, major boner here in leaving out Freedom’s Most Wanted for Mutants & Masterminds.  And the MM has been one of the least well received 4e books, definitely no brilliant new monsters that will be part of everyday RPG conversation.  Well, the ENnies got their start coattailing on the 3e release so I reckon you can’t criticize them for sticking close to their roots.

Best Setting

  • Gold: Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, Paizo Publishing
  • Silver: Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, Atomic Sock Monkey / Evil Hat Productions

Golarion, the setting of the Pathfinder Chronicles, is the new Greyhawk.  It’s the clear winner, which is a little bit of a shame since the rest of the field is very innovative too – Hot War and Candlewick Manor I wouldn’t have minded seeing in a three way tie for second…  Setting and production values had a lot of very qualified nominees this year.

Best Supplement

  • Gold: CthulhuTech Vade Mecum, Catalyst Game Labs
  • Silver: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Wizards of the Coast

I had picked Clone Wars, definitely.  Good for Cthulhutech for grabbing the gold.  I just can’t get into the game, and this is from someone who has a huge shelf of Call of Cthulhu stuff. And I’m an Evangelion fan to boot.  You think those two would combine to make me love it but it just doesn’t grab me.  But I don’t begrudge it a win.

Best Aid or Accessory

  • Gold: D&D Insider, Wizards of the Coast
  • Silver: Kobold Quarterly, Open Design

Spare me.  The most delayed, incomplete, incompetent item on the list gets the gold?  Let’s give Boston’s Big Dig awards for engineering too!   (Well, people have in that case as well…)  I am willing to say maybe the 4e rules could win best rules but Insider is one of the worst things WotC has failed to deliver on.  They still haven’t delivered the stuff they said would be part of it at 4e launch!  You only have to visit any online forum to see people unhappy with their current functionality as well.

I had picked KQ for the win, as a post-rant aside.

Best Miniatures Product

  • Gold: Game Mastery Flip-mat: Waterfront Tavern, Paizo Publishing
  • Silver: DU1 Halls of the Giant Kings Dungeon Tiles, Wizards of the Coast

I gave silver to the Tavern but the E-Z Terrain cliffs are so much neater than both these 2d tiles!

Best Regalia

  • Gold: Battletech: The Corps, Catalyst Game Labs
  • Silver: Art of Exalted, White Wolf Publishing

I refused to pick a winner here because “Regalia” is a totally stupid category that’s a mishmash of totally unrelated products.  (I’m surprised the Gygax posthumous novel didn’t win out of sheer Gygaxity though.)

Best Electronic Book

  • Gold: Collection of Horrors: Razor Kids, White Wolf Publishing
  • Silver: Tales of Zobek: An Anthology of Urban Adventures, Open Design

I liked the other Open Design entry better since it’s by Nick Logue, but different strokes.

Best Free Product

  • Gold: Song of Ice and Fire Quickstart, Green Ronin Publishing
  • Silver: Swords and Wizardry, Mythmere Games

Sad.  There was actually a movement generated by this category; many of the entries were quickstart rules, which should not be in this category.  A company can spend their loads of money developing a game and them at no cost to them clip part of it out and release a “quickstart”.  This category should be only for “real” free games that are full games released for free, not advertising teasers.  The ENnie judges apparently don’t see the wisdom in that even though a lot of the community does.

I like Green Ronin but they don’t deserve a win in this category for this reason.  I had picked S&W for the win.

Best Website

  • Gold: Obsidian Portal
  • Silver: Kobold Quarterly

I like Mad Brew Labs more but these are great sites too.

Best Podcast

  • Gold:  All Games Considered
  • Silver:  Order 66

I don’t listen to podcasts, so have no opinion.

Best Game

  • Gold: Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, Wizards of the Coast
  • Silver: Dark Heresy, Fantasy Flight Games

Dark Heresy was my pick here!  (I am disregarding 4e because it’s a plant, see below.)

Product of the Year

  • Gold: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook, Wizards of the Coast
  • Silver: Mouse Guard, Kinoichi / Archaia Studios Press

Mouse Guard was my pick here!  (I am disregarding 4e because it’s a plant, see below.)  But this one is even more egregious.  Mouse Guard is a) a complete game, b) uses innovative rules, c) merges with a rich licensed setting…  The D&D PHB, even if you like 4e, is just player rules and is nowhere near a complete game.

Best Publisher

  • Gold:  Wizards of The Coast
  • Silver:  Paizo Publishing

And this boils down the suck-up nature of the ENnies to a clear point.  The company that bungled the 4e launch, failed to deliver on D&D Insider, pulled all their PDF products off  the market permanently, alienated the industry with the GSL and the fans with website shutdowns and failure (till after voting) to deliver a fansite policy – they’re “best publisher?”  It’s OK to like 4e, but to pretend that WotC has done anything but fuck one thing after another up this year – this ENnie is like Pres. Bush giving the Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, or passing up Metallica for Foghat [edit: Jethro Tull] for a Grammy, it simply degrades the award’s worth in the future.

Conclusion – 2 Strikes For The ENnies

ENnies – you are on warning.  Two strikes this year – allowing quickstarts to win in the Free Games category and in blindly allowing WotC/4e to win categories that they are clearly not contenders in (electronic product, best publisher especially).   How is someone else supposed to feel good about their award when it’s clear so many of the decisions reward the *antithesis* of the award category?

Again, sure, maybe the 4e PHB wins best rules.  But the across the board 4e/WotC wins in clearly laughable categories?  What’s up with that?

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Open Gaming FTW! Pathfinder SRD Already Up

Posted on August 14, 2009 | 4 comments

In all the release hullabaloo it’s easy to miss, but Paizo shows how committed they are to open gaming by putting the Pathfinder RPG System Reference Document (or PRD) up the very same day the game released!

Be warned, it’s really slooooooow right now ass hordes of people are paying their $10 to download the whole 500+ page PDF from the Paizo site.  But if you’re just dying to see how Combat Maneuver Bonus is calculated in the final, it’s there in the Combat section!

To prioritize the extra work required to get this out “the day of” the RPG and PDF release (and Gen Con) is an amazing statement about their dedication to open gaming.   Heck, many OGL games leave it to the fans to create the SRD, or do it months-to-years after they release the game.  It’s great to see that Paizo doesn’t hold any archaic notions of how that will “inhibit their sales.”  They are releasing a free SRD, a $10 PDF, and a $50 book on the same day; the first print run of the book is already sold out and a mob of people at Gen Con are surrounding a huge stack of books trying to get theirs.  Congratulations to Paizo for understanding at a deep level that the open model is not “charity” or a detriment to sales, but in fact is a force multiplier that will bring you even more success!

Somebody give me a “Hell yeah!”

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Pathfinder Hits The Street!

Posted on August 13, 2009 | 1 comment

The final version of the Pathfinder RPG is out!  Some of the people in our gaming group got those via mail order or FLGS today, and the $10 PDF version has been released on the Paizo site.  There’s even errata already (for the print, incorporated into the PDF).

Mine isn’t here yet since I went on the cheap and got it through Amazon for the discount 😛

But everyone says it looks great and is eagerly reading through it.  So far, general consensus is that this is the Dungeons & Dragons we want to play!   Our loosely affiliated and overlapping subgroups are now warring for the rights to run Council of Thieves, the first Pathfinder-rules Adventure Path (also hitting streets right now).

If you didn’t preorder, you may not be getting a copy in the first frenzied rush on the stores.  But don’t be sad, more will come, and the PDF is cheap (though there’s a run on that right now too and the usually-sparky Paizo site is way overloaded; they’ve even turned the forums off).

So you can get the game, start getting an AP (the Council of  Thieves Player’s Guide is a free download, check it out) or just try the Crypt of the Everflame, the first Pathfinder module.   There’s also a free Bonus Bestiary download to get started with some monsters; the monster book comes out soon and there’s a free preview of it!  There’s a free 3.5->Pathfinder conversion guide but I don’t know why you’d need it, we ran a 3.5e AP under Pathfinder Beta just off the cuff.

There’s also third party products coming already; I count five on DTRPG including the Tome of Secrets, an accessory by Adamant Entertainment.  And Clinton Boomer’s patronage project is out soon.  And if that worthless sod Nick Logue ever finishes Razor Coast, he says it’s coming out for 3.5e but followed almost immediately by a Pathfinder version.  Not only can you use your old 3.5e stuff, there’s more a’coming!

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Curse of the Crimson Throne Finale

Posted on August 8, 2009 | 4 comments

Crown of Fangs Part III is the campaign finale for the Curse of the Crimson Throne.  Annata, Malcolm, Thorndyke, and Cayen have to depose the evil queen and then stop her weird blood ritual from killing everyone in Korvosa.

For nine months (realtime and, approximately, game time) we’ve been working towards this moment.  Over many battles we’ve learned our own powers and how to work together as a team in perfect concert.  And it all pays off.  We storm Castle Korvosa and liberate it, only to discover the real Queen has already left for an ancient Thassilonian site for her blood ritual.  But the hounds of war have been loosed and distance and sorcery do not deter us from the pursuit of justice.

When everything has settled, we get the rarest of rare things – a real storybook ending.  You’ll have to read the full session summary for the details!

I personally enjoyed this campaign the most of all the ones you see here, and I think the other guys feel the same way.   Using the Pathfinder beta rules, we didn’t have much in the way of rule frustration that mars some of our other games, and the mix of solid roleplaying along with interesting NPCs, sweet locations, and demented foes came out as a totally solid mix.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our tale of the Curse of the Crimson Throne.  Check out our continuing adventures for more fun!

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Alternity “Lighthouse” Session Summaries Posted

Posted on August 7, 2009 | 4 comments

We’ve completed two more sessions of our space opera Alternity Star*Drive campaign!

Second Session – After warming up with a bar fight against Old Series Klingons (aka Scotsmen) we misjump into a system right as a VoidCorp warship shows up.  Tense diplomacy ensues as they have been “requested” to come quell some local “pirates”.  We send some destroyers with them, and the more scurrilous characters sneak aboard the pirates’ space station to steal things and get glory for their nations!

Third Session – Sadly, I missed this one, but Bruce made it and did a session summary. The party engages in an exciting parallel space combat (with one set of characters) and ground combat on the space station (with the other set).  Without their resident warlion and Thuldan, the guys on the ground are really bad off, but the space combat went really well!

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