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

Posted on January 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Seventeenth Session (15 page pdf) – “Press Gang” – As usual, a little bit of time in port results in the PCs really tearing it up. A whole long session, and no real fights, but it’s not slow, with two beatings, several sexual escapades, organized crime activity, shopping, drinking, jail time…

First of all, sorry for getting behind.  Between the holidays and job hunting, I’ve been strapped.  I’ve got like four sessions of Reavers in the can as well as three of our new Jade Regent campaign.  Here’s getting to it!

Last time, everyone finally leveled to level 6.  I am all about the low level play and slow progression; they got 5th in February I believe. So they all showed up with kewl new powers to use. But as usual, we kicked right back in seconds after the last session ended.

They took the first part of the session recapping and trying to assimilate new knowledge into what the overall deal is with the Cyphergate and orichalcum and serpentmen and portals and phantom creatures. It’s inevitable that PCs get a little confused about what’s up even with reasonably simple plots because of the long time between games and the somewhat distractable nature of any given PC. So if you have orichalcum glyph pieces embedded in people and orichalcum plates taken from a portal seal, people get them confused. So I helped walk them through a solid statement of “what we know so far.”

Next, I had one of their NPCs mess with them. Last time, you will note how Pirro the pirate got the short end of the stick on healing. Well, they came away from the fight with four magical treasures, so he’s due one, right? He wakes up early, takes one of the items (a magical mithral axe), and goes down to the casino to put it on pledge to get some gamblin’ money. Naturally he loses badly (I rolled for it fair and square), and this causes the PCs a little consternation. I liked this scene because it let me reinforce that the PCs’ pirate crew are by no means mindless minions, and in fact the nature of being a pirate means they are unruly and like it that way.

Next, two things happen that deserve blog posts of their own.  The first is the unexpected and sudden “Hey, Serpent needs to get Samaritha pregnant!” plan that emerged to surprisingly unanimous support. See Pregnancy & Pirates for more. The second is the sheer impatience of Serpent wanting to get magic items sold and bought – he literally goes from place to place till 2 AM in the morning desperately trying to swing deals. More on that in Insomniac Monkeys on Crack.

What this demanded of me was a large amount of improv. Urban adventuring is challenging because it’s not like a dungeon or wilderness where there’s a limited amount of stuff that can be going on.  A big lawless city like Riddleport is guaranteed to liven up quick if you go through the wrong door at the wrong time. So they kept wandering around and I kept coming up with stuff that I hoped wouldn’t get me into real trouble.

I generally like to use the dice as a general determinant of “is this going to go real well or real badly.” For some reason the PCs were rolling really poorly this session. So when Sindawe goes to the House of the Silken Veil trying to find a Mwangi (African) hooker that might have fertility drugs or magic (I am not sure it ever occurs to the PCs to look anywhere but in bars or whorehouses for anything in this game), the roll comes up really low, so instead he gets a Garundi woman dressed up like some far northerner’s idea of a Mwangi witch doctor for the fetishist market. Heh. Also they’ve gotten on the bad side of Madame Pamodae; they are remarkably unconcerned about this given that she’s a priestess of a deity of revenge.

Then they recruit new shipmates! First it’s the traditional “set up a table in a bar” method, where they try to figure out what’s wrong with the people applying. As it’s a pirate ship, they find plenty wrong but decide”what the hell” with all of them but the last guy. This was a shout out to a previous player who was always an obstreperous muffinhead, and one day in a SF game came in with a new character that we were interviewing for a position on our tramp freighter.  Since he was a new PC we were just trying to get any kind of excuse to hire him but his response to every single question was vague “I do… things!” crap. We left him on the planet and in fact he got disinvited from the group (last straw syndrome). This explains Sindawe’s overly violent reaction. (Knowing how to push your players’ buttons and not just the characters’ is a good GM technique.) They also invite their girlfriends Samaritha and Hatshepsut and Lavender Lil along! And they shanghai the hated Bojask, a guy who works for Saul and they’ve never gotten along with.

Also, they make a couple runs at trying to extort a local new bar for protection money. They were hilariously shy about it really. I based the friendly but yelling owner/bartender off a male cheerleading coach in a horrible Comedy Central movie that was on while I was prepping that morning.

Part of this game is definitely the crew control.  I rolled for each crewmember’s shore leave. Basically 1 is something SUPER bad and 20 SUPER good; 2 means trouble the PCs can’t fix, 3 means trouble they can fix, and everything in between is general levels of doing well versus doing poorly. There were a lot of 4’s, including Pirro, which basically means “all money gone and got a good beating in the process.” The only bad result was a 3, where Goat got arrested for murder; some guys in a bar hassled him about being a tiefling and they turned up dead later. The PCs went and bailed him out in a remarkably civilized fashion; I liked their sudden realization about “Hey, wasn’t Slasher Jim washing blood off his knife back on the ship?” Turns out Slasher Jim also used to be on Morgan Baumann’s (their new quarry) crew. Big Mike got a 20 so I figured he parlayed into part ownership of the new bar – good for him, and a complication for the PCs’ protection racket!

The one place where the PCs rolled well was around the House of the Silken Veil – Pamodae has it out for them once she found out they killed her pirate ally, and they went back twice; both visits were sexy and hilarious in turn but they didn’t degenerate into murder, and let’s just say that was an unlikely result. It ended with Sindawe bluffing his way past a guard by playing the race card.

And FINALLY they get on their ship and underway!  Whew!  I thought it would never happen.  I think I run pretty fun urban scenes and (properly!) depict cities as full of people and stuff and places and whatnot, so PCs seem to get drawn into doing random things there even when they planned to go do something else.

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

Posted on November 21, 2011 | 2 comments

Sixteenth Session (14 page pdf) – “The Cypher Lodge” – Looks like the phantoms have taken over the Cypher Lodge, and the PCs have to throw down with Thorgrim and some old friends.

Yep, this was a big finale boss fight. It was built in three parts. (you may want to check out Thorgrim’s character sheet).

First, they (the three PCs and Pirro, an ex-slave and one of their crew) fought a bunch of phantoms and Valgrim down  in the sand-floored fighting ring he has under the Cypher Lodge. He cast a mess of spells that were really sweet – shifting sands, hungry pit, etc. Sindawe surprised me with his ruthless innovation – Salvadora was chained over a rafter, so he leapt up and crushed her hand with a vicious blow – shattering the bones, but also immediately causing her to fall to her semi-freedom! She’s a no-nonsense half-orc so she holds no grudge whatsoever about that.

Second, once Thorgrim figures they’re a legit threat, he goes gaseous form and guards and wards kicks in and also everyone gets teleported around the Cypher Lodge – and phantom impostors get seeded into the mix.This was loosely adapted, believe it or not, from a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode where Discord causes all the ponies to turn on each other. My daughter said “you should put this into your next game!” I was looking for something interesting and interstitial to happen – in Madness in Riddleport, they had part one of a fight, then an excursion to the shadow realm, and then the second part and this session was deliberately mirroring that one (shadowy mirrored reflections being a major trope in the game). And it creates a more interesting dramatic structure than “long ass fight to the death in a single location.” So I figured, “Sure!”

The funniest part was how Serpent told Pirro “I’m out of healing!” and then proceeded to heal himself. He’s just an NPC, what does he know?

He heals Pirro to consciousness, then announces, “Pirro, I have no more healing for you.” He turns and heals himself with the last charges from the wand. Then he guzzles some healing potions. Then notices his Lesser Restoration potions at the bottom of his pack, and exclaims, “Oh hey!” He drinks those too. A large tear rolls down Pirro’s cheek.

That’s exactly how it happened; everyone was in stitches.  Paul (Serpent) was just like, “What?” Although second funniest moment was Wogan running invisibly from an impostor Samaritha just to run into another Hatshepsut and Samaritha.  Everyone enjoyed the portly cleric trying to sneak around to avoid all the potentially killer women.

Third was the big fight with Thorgrim. Thorgrim is bad ass. He is a Fighter 4/ Wizard 5/Eldritch Knight 5. He has a pair of magical axes that he throws along with a Sliding Axe Throw feat that lets him trip with them – like a machine gun. He was getting six thrown axe attacks a round. Despite there being three PCs, three PC-level NPCs, and one goon NPC, they were all unconscious or prone when Serpent had Samaritha case erase to get the rune off his forehead.

I like when the cinematic thing happens! They could have killed Thorgrim just through damage – in fact, he was down to like 21 hp or something; he might have gotten another attack routine in (certainly killing someone!) but he wasn’t unbeatable through sheer fight.  He had, however, seen what was going on when Chmetugo the shadow demon was taking control of him/seducing him via the extraplanar connection of his glyph fragment, and cast hidden knowledge – a spell that conceals information you know even from  yourself, but you can release it later. In this case he had encased more than a simple piece of information, more of a concept – his Ulfen-ness.  He comes to his senses and cries out, “I am Thorgrim, son of Halgrim, the Bloody, the berserker! We do not bend our knees to spirits! Demon, show yourself!” Thorgrim has a complicated backstory, he was an Ulfen (Viking) warrior back in the day and got turned to stone by a gorgon for 200 years and was rescued by the Cypher Lodge – he swore fealty to protect them and also learned magic there. But, in a bit of a Howardian theme, his primal, savage origin is stronger than his subsequent civilization and enchantment. (He’s actually originally from Green Ronin’s Freeport, and I expanded on him.)  Anyway, I allowed for several end states; they just about did the “fight to the end” one but Serpent put it together and went for the cool story ending instead!

And then they all leveled!  I’m doing XP by fiat in this campaign, and it’s been a long time since 5th (there’s just so much fun to do in the low/mid levels) so they were psyched.  Level 6 is where you become independently dangerous in Pathfinder, so it’s a benchmark level.

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Making Wilderness Travel Matter

Posted on October 15, 2011 | 5 comments

I wrote up such a long answer to this question on RPG Stack Exchange I figured I’d repurpose it into a proper blog post about how I use overland travel through the wilderness in my D&D games!

Wilderness Travel Is Awesome!

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it. ~Don Williams, Jr.

Far from being something to “skip over,” wilderness travel is an interesting part of a story and forms a large part of many narratives, from Lord of the Rings to Star Trek to many Cormac McCarthy novels. Hell, about 70% of the Song of Ice and Fire series falls into the category of overland travel/wilderness survival. People who contend travel is not “interesting” or “heroic” need to read a fricking book.

From the 1e Wilderness Survival Guide to the more specialized 3e books like Stormwrack and Sandstorm, there is a lot of material to draw on in order to make wilderness travel more arduous and interesting.

For inspiration, I like reading historical travel narratives – ones that go through the jungles of Africa are especially juicy when it comes to ideas of how the landscape can terrorize the unwary traveler. Just this year I’ve read the Horatio Hornblower series (sea travel, fictional but good), some Thor Heyerdahl, Lost City of Z, Into Africa, and various other travel writing.

So what do I put into wilderness travel to serve both realism (wilderness travel is an arduous enterprise) and the game (serve the story and characters)?

Weather

The rain falls upon the just/And also on the unjust fellas/But mostly it falls upon the just/Cause the unjust have the just’s umbrellas ~Cormac McCarthy

It’s simple, but get a random weather table and generate weather each day. (Obvious corollary – have seasons!) Climate holds more than enough perils for most wilderness travellers in the real world! In my current piracy-based Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign, there’s a lot of sea travel.  Wind strength and direction can speed them on their way or stop them in their tracks; storms can provide vigorous skill challenges to a ship’s crew! Getting wet, getting cold, getting overheated, getting fatigued all contribute to the wilderness travel feel, and give real bonuses and penalties the PCs can’t ignore in combat. Have a combat in high wind or a rainstorm and apply the rules for it; it’s quite a change of pace! And besides that, it is probably the single biggest addition to the sense of realism, to have variation going on independent of the PCs’ actions and desires. Makes the world seem bigger than you are.

Two tricks here: one, crib random tables (I mash up some from Stormwrack and various 3pp naval supplements); two, use an almanac!  An almanac has day by day weather historically.  Pick a place that you think is representative, choose a random year, and lo and behold… If in your campaign world it’s Fantasy August 5th, and you’re in a place on say a mid northern sea coat, then today the weather is… Quite pleasant, 70’s, no rain, gentle breeze. And for those PCs trying to use their skills to predict the weather, tomorrow’s much the same but with increased winds, perhaps cloudier (visibility goes down).

Survival

My time in the Boy Scouts taught me that Nature has but one goal – to kill you. ~Me

To get along in the wilderness, you need food, water, and gear.  If you’re not familiar with the land, you will end up having to backtrack around (or walk into if you’re really dense) rivers, ravines, animal/monster lairs…  More esoteric threats like quicksand also dot the landscape. Disease is always a threat as well. Insects plague people (and bring more disease) in many different terrains and seasons.

This is a great opportunity for those Survival and relevant skills to come into use.  I prepare lists of “random encounters” that are more mundane than monster stuff and make them (and monster encounters) dependent on Survival checks. Skilled woodsmen don’t walk into an owlbear’s territory or drink too much from water in a cave. Rather than use flat “8% chance of random encounter,” I use a table with mundane and animal and monster stuff and use the PCs’ wilderness survival abilities to see how much they run afoul of it.

Often on long journeys I’ll mix the two – maybe there’s a 1 in 20 chance something bad will happen to a given character per day, but they can bypass it with a relevant check – often Survival, sometimes something else (e.g. one guy rolls a 1, off a list I roll or select “step in gopher hole and wrench leg, 5 foot penalty to movement, Survival DC 10 avoids”).

Getting Lost

Not all those who wander are lost.  ~J.R.R. Tolkien

You also need maps or guides – besides avoiding trouble spots, it’s really quite difficult to find your way across trackless wilderness.  Plenty of people get lost on reasonably well blazed hiking trails in the modern day, and having a map (and a compass, and other stuff) in no way guarantees you can’t get lost. Time for Survival again!

In my pirate campaign, I require a whole lot of navigation rolls to find things, even when on a chart. It’s very not simple. And when you get lost, you run into other stuff, you take more time to get there, you get more wear and tear, you use more provisions (and potentially run out)…

Fatigue

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. ~Paul Theroux

Wilderness travel is tiring and wearing, and not just to the people, but to gear as well. If they spend a lot of time out in the elements (and especially if they ignore rain, bogs, etc.) then their gear will degrade.

But mainly people get tired.  Some of it is from the elements and disease, above (note that in 3e, a lot of the heat and cold stuff ends up imposing the fatigued condition). I’d consider giving nonlethal damage or even ability score damage from some of the natural threats from the “Survival” section above. “Stinging gnats – Survival DC 15 or 1 point of CHA damage.”

Then, finding safe places to hole up and rest can provide mini-adventures of their own.

Inhabitants

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.  ~Mason Cooley

Depending on the region, someone or something lives there.  If it’s free of people, it’s probably large herds of animals of various sorts that definitely provide obstacles and threats. But usually it’s people.  Many of these people don’t like visitors and may attack, or demand tribute to pass.  Or they do like them, and insist they come, eat, interact, get hit up for various stuff (and if rejected, get hostile). And you’re a lot more likely to come across inhabitants than just as “wandering monsters” – the more-hospitable points of the terrain you’ll want to travel through, camp in, get fresh water from, etc. will be hot spots for the locals too. And word spreads; if you slaughter/give syphilis to/give loads of money to any given village, the ones nearby will find out quick. Local culture is as much part of the landscape of a trip as the real terrain features, and should be memorable.

I fondly remember the Night Below game I ran where the PCs stayed the night with some friendly gnomes in their burrow. Their elder told them a chilling story about the legendary dark elves, and mentioned that their caverns once extended to below *this very burrow*…  When a dark form broke through the dirt wall of their room that night, the wizard freaked out and Color Sprayed the party fighter into a coma. Of course it was just a puppet on the end of a broomstick being pushed through by giggling gnomes in the next room. I’m pretty sure that the players as well as the characters still have the emotional scars from that session.

Roleplaying

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.  ~Mark Twain

I still remember the 2e game where the PCs holed up in a rural inn for two days waiting for a big rainstorm to let up; as the stir craziness set in they got up to shenanigans more interesting and memorable than the adventure at hand. Not quite the Donner Party, but getting there.

Travel is often an opportunity to slow the pace and have PCs interact with each other (assuming you’re one of those weirdos that does such things instead of just slaying monsters). Once you hit cities it’s intrigue central; once you hit the dungeon it’s hardcore killing action. It’s during the journey that you can get PCs to take the time to develop themselves by talking with others.

And it’s just gold if there are regular NPCs with the party – this is the time for their personalities to develop, for drama and seduction and all that Real World/Survivor/Insert Your Favorite Reality Show Here kind of stuff.

Combat

Unless you know the mountains and forests, the defiles and impasses, and the lay of the marshes and swamps, you cannot maneuver with an armed force. unless you use local guides, you cannot get the advantage of the land. ~Sun Tzu

If a fight happens, don’t let them forget where they are. In the wilderness, nice level stable footing is the exception not the rule. Maybe it’s raining, maybe they’re on a riverbank, maybe it’s 8 PM and it’s twilight, maybe they’re in a marsh, maybe there’s hanging vines everywhere.  Once it goes all combat encounter, you should under no circumstances have everything morph into a featureless battlemat. If you do not weave the description of the surroundings into your GM descriptions at least once per round, you’re not doing it right.

And keep in mind the locals know the terrain and will use it to their advantage whenever possible when engaging the PCs! There are probably a lot of rules in your relevant core rulebook about terrain that you ignore 99% of the time unless some specially constructed combat uses them – use them routinely.

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

Posted on September 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Fifteenth Session (13 page pdf) – “Shadows Over Riddleport” – The PCs get back to Riddleport at long last with their new ship and spoils, but it’s not all booze and broads – the phantoms from the Devil’s Elbow are here too!

Welcome to Riddleport!

It’s the Teeth of Araska’s first time into port under their new charter, so there was a lot of fiddling around with how to calculate treasure shares and when to pay out what amount and the like. Chris and Paul spent a good part of the first hour of the session cross-checking their cargo lists against each other, valuating the goods, etc.

Prepping a session like this now requires me to bring a metric ass-ton of materials to the game. They can go anywhere in Riddleport, which I have cobbled together from Riddleport and Freeport materials; vex me with questions about past and future adventures that I need to look up, and you never know what high level NPC it’ll enter their mind to try to kill. I had a duffel bag full of books, another full of papers, and a computer will all past session summaries and other notes in it.

Anyway, after briefly contemplating murdering their hostage, they dock and take the traditional pirate crew’s pilgrimage to the temple of Besmara. All pirate crews go there and toss a coin per man into the beast-haunted pool before doing anything else to thank her for a safe return. They run into friends new and old, but it’s not long before the gendarmerie shows up and tells them the Overlord wants to see them. Apparently the All Due Restraint’s absence has been noted and all pirate captains who dock are being hauled in for questioning.

Along the way, another squad of gendarmes turns out to be phantoms in disguise! The characters’ sigils warn them by flashing with pain at their approach.  Once revealed, they float about with shadowy bodies, have broad sword-blades for arms, and impassive white masks for faces. “Very anime,” noted Paul. And they seem to absorb blood at a frightening rate. They kill all but one of the gendarmes before the PCs manage to defeat them with their orichalcum weapons. (Wogan healed the head gendarme, which is the only reason he survived.) Which was a bit of a disappointment, I had hoped they’d kill all the gendarmes – let the PCs try to talk their way out of that! “Oh, it was disappearing monsters that killed all those cops that were taking you in last time they were seen? Sure it was…”

The PCs manage to parlay their questionable decision to retain the corpses of the dwarves from the drifting All Due Restraint into a full pardon for past crimes from the Overlord, once he is convinced they had no hand in it. So despite two cunning plans to entrap them, they come out smelling like roses! Ah well, I’m sure they’ll do something demented in the future where I can get them all on the run and underground.

Speaking of that, then they wander by the Cypher Lodge looking for boots and poontang (no, really, pretty much) and discover the place is mostly abandoned and really creepy and Thorgrim, who was there when they fought atop the Riddleport Light, is in charge now and has portraits of himself hanging everywhere. They poke around until they find some trouble, and we left it at a cliffhanger – hey, why is half-orc God Squad member Salvadora Beckett hanging from shackles in Thorgrim’s battle circle?  Why are our sigils burning?  Why are the shadows moving? “I CAST THINGS” cried all the PCs at once, and I said “And that’s where we’ll pick it up next time…” Always leave them wanting more!

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

Posted on September 12, 2011 | Leave a comment

Fourteenth Session (11 page pdf) – “Return to Riddleport” – Extracting the Teeth of Araska from its precarious harbor at Shatterhull Island is difficult, and becomes more difficult when some merrow show up to the party.

Shatterhull Island

The first part of the session was the PCs sweeping and clearing the hags’ lair looking for treasure. But quickly they had to turn their attention  to getting  their ship out of its dangerous perch surrounded by rocky spurs.

This wasn’t a trivial maneuver and proved to be the action setpiece of the session.  It actually got a lot worse by dumb luck – I was rolling random encounters by the hour and three sea ogres showed up first thing in the morning, which was when they decided to try to extract the Teeth of Araska. So what I figured would be an important but minor part of the session turned into most of the session!

Maneuvering a large sailing ship is very imprecise work. They wisely decided to try to tow it out with the longboats.  This is safe if arduous in open water, but in the swells that near the island it was extremely dangerous. The first critical step was swinging the ship’s prow around to point away from the island. Sindawe and Serpent each led a longboat and Wogan and Tommy kept order on the ship. Many Profession: Sailor checks were made and they got the ship reoriented OK (though Serpent’s launch was bashed against underwater rocks enough that it was starting to leak). And then the sea ogres attacked.  Dude, the saltwater ones are fricking huge!

This was complicated for me, the beleaguered DM. The PCs had a crew of twenty diverse crewmen (some pirates, some ex-slaves) I was handling, along with the merrow and the forces of nature. There was fighting, sailing, paddling, shooting of cannon, falling overboard… My goal with this game is to make the naval stuff not just “color” but to make the sea, and the ship, important characters of their own and I think it was a success.

Then they loaded on the cargo from the island and headed out. They came across the Riddleport ship that left the Devil’s Elbow before them, the All Due Restraint.  All the gendarmes had been killed and were missing; all the dwarves had been killed and hung by ropes off the ship so that sharks and whatnot would eat their lower halves. This caused a lot of debate amongst the PCs. Bringing in or trying to claim the ship would almost certainly get them hung for piracy against Riddleport. They made the somewhat questionable decision to leave the ship, but take all the dwarves with them, stuffed into barrels in the hold. The crew was so not happy about that. The PCs, ever frugal, seriously asked “Can’t we fit more than one dwarf per barrel?” “Fuck you, man,” was the general tenor of the response to that. Then Wogan spent a lot of time down in the hold muttering to the barrels. This revealed that Morgan Baumann of the Kraken’s Claw took the ship, and further convinced the crew of the monstrousness of their new officers.

And then finally, Riddleport hove into sight! R&R at long last?  Fie on that!

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Free Ropecon Adventures

Posted on August 8, 2011 | 2 comments

Courtesy our fine Finnish friends that put on Ropecon last weekend, a bunch of free adventures!  They had an adventure writing contest and have posted all the entries – D&D 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, and even OSR stuff like Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords & Wizardry.  Go get them for free! And raise a “Kippis” to NiTessine and his con co-c0ordinators for sharing.

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

Posted on August 4, 2011 | 4 comments

Thirteenth Session (16 page pdf) – “Shatterhull Island” – The PCs follow a treasure map to the wreck of the Sandspider. But who will plunder who’s booty? Only time will tell…

Welcome back to Reavers on the Seas of Fate!  Long hiatus due to summer vacation. But we’re back and played an extra long session to get going again.

Our PCs have ownership of a pirate ship and a crew (half pirates and half escaped Chelish slaves) and Sindawe had a treasure map that’s been burning a hole in his pocket.  Serpent really wanted to go back to Riddleport and get the magic boots he’s had being made there for like four months, but he got outvoted due to the lure of TREASURE!

Early on in the session, they joked that maybe someone was sending out loads of maps to the wreck. I have a good poker face, thankfully, because that was the exact setup.  I adapted “Shatterhull Island,” a mini-adventure from the D&D 3.5e Stormwrack supplement.It was a hag coven that sent out magicked maps, and used their coven powers like vision and dream to lure people in.  One hag appeared in Sindawe’s dream as Mama Watanna a couple times.

When they approached the island, the hags used illusion to obscure the sharp rocks to the south of the island.  Only Wogan making a DC30+ skill check let him see there was something wrong with the wave patterns and make a Will save. The ship managed to avoid being shattered on the rocks due to quick action with an anchor feather token, but was in a bad spot.

Cue the hot woman, Amber, running from ogres! The PCs were of course suspicious of this.  But she had a mantis tattoo, and Mama Watanna had a mantis with her in the dream… And Sindawe is never one to resist sexual advances too much, so they banged in the wreck of the Sandspider while the rest of the group cooled their heels. “She’s so strong,” he noted.

Then a hag attacked the ship to lure the PCs off and more ogres “kidnapped” Amber. The hags knew they needed to all be together to use their uber powers. The PCs dutifully went up to the cave lair and fought the cool, weird zombie ogres – the hags believe a creature’s strength is in its hair, so they shave the corpses and make hair ropes to bind driftwood to their limbs and sew their mouths shut.  The PCs kept collecting the gemstones from their eye sockets, never figuring out they were hag’s eyes. It took them a bit to realize there was more than one hag.

There were gold coins (Infamy points) spent… They forcecaged Sindawe but Wogan spent a coin to let him avoid it. Alas. I would have been content to keep them all in a cage with the hags charming them to love them up while they dined on their crew. I’ve been reading a lot of A Song of Ice and Fire so don’t think I wouldn’t do it… But they managed to hack down one hag, and once one goes down and all the Super Coven Powers go away, they are meat for the beast.

Although it’s funny, Ambraga (Amber) was a low level witch, and when Granny went down she got her back up with a Cure Light Wounds – Serpent freaked out and was giving up; he was sure that they were just all immortal or something.  It’s funny the little things that can demoralize even experienced players.

They are about done with the island; they just have treasure and intel to gather up and then figure out some way of getting their ship out of the rocks safely. Then it’s back to Riddleport! And Tommy should be rejoining us next time (the player’s been on hiatus so it’s really just been Wogan, Sindawe, and Serpent with souls for the last bit).

We all had fun; we played extra long, like 8 hours, but we got the whole adventure done in one session – I’ve got a bad habit of letting them really stretch out.

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Buccaneers!

Posted on July 8, 2011 | 2 comments

Interested in pirate gaming?  Looking forward to Paizo’s new pirate AP, Skull and Shackles? Enjoy following our Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign?

Well, happy news.  Green Ronin has just released a Web enhancement to their Buccaneers of Freeport book with stats for many pirate captains! It’s available in 3.5e and True20 variants.

Buccaneers of Freeport and Cults of Freeport were odd book choices – they were statless.  This was during the Mass D&D Confusion around the 4e launch.  For Cults, that was kinda OK, but with Buccaneers it really hurt- character backdrops for a bunch of cool pirate captains, but no stats.  Well, they have now published the stats, for free! Oh, and the stats for Cults, earlier on.

Download the stats, then consider getting Buccaneers and Cults as they are fine books (and often quite on sale…).  Get cranked up for the pirate holocaust that will come soon with the S&S AP!  All the Freeport stuff is great to mix with Golarion, in Reavers I used the entire Freeport Trilogy mashed up with Second Darkness to good effect.

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Minimalist D&D 5e?

Posted on July 6, 2011 | 17 comments

Mike Mearls makes another good Legends & Lore post, in which he discusses a stripped-down D&D that just uses the ability scores and doesn’t fret with as many other mechanics. It’s interesting reading especially given the obvious lead-up to a D&D 5e in the offing.

I laud thinking about stripping down D&D more.  3.5e/Pathfinder is too complex IMO. The more books they put out for it the more disgruntled I get, especially as a DM. And 4e sucks; they tried to fix the problems in the exact wrong way. I keep going back to 2e as the happy medium between the more rules light like Basic and the later stuff.  Even 3e with just the PHB/DMG was OK, but it went crazy fast. And yeah, a lot of it was going to the open ended “infinite plusses vs a DC” model rather than the closed “stat rolls against itself” model.

The only problem with his pure-stats approach, though, is that ability scores are one of the most min-maxable attributes out there.  In early D&D, ability scores didn’t mean much, so everyone just rolled them.  As they got more and more of a part of the action – that high STR doubles your damage now instead of just adding 10% – we went to point buy and stat fiddling became de rigeur.  Going to “all stat,” unless it’s joined to “pure rolling” (which I wouldn’t mind, it’s retro) or “standard array” (which is unacceptable, but I fear would be the 4e+ way) will result in more of the colossal min-maxing we see today.

Maybe.  I mean, it does work for GURPS and such, but they have more careful stat balancing in general and tend to not promote “all combat monsters” as characters.  With D&D, now that everyone has to be a damage dealer (so the game theory goes) it becomes an exercise in high STR, except for the one guy with the abusively high CHA who automatically gets 40+ Bluff checks…

I’m not against the concept of getting rid of a lot of the rules cruft and just using stats as the base – but I have trouble believing they’d implement that right.  The temptation to layer yet more cruft on top in the new computer-gamer-uber-power world is too much.  Oh sure, I just roll DEX for archery or to avoid a fireball… But I add my level and half my buddy’s aura and feat bonuses and synergy and +2 for my class and +1 from magic and and…  Even if you managed to go back and limit stats to 3-18 instead of to 362 or whatever they go to nowadays (and then how do you reflect giants etc…?), then a simple +2 in cheese bonuses makes you auto succeed right? You would have to be very, very disciplined about removing nearly all bonuses and not letting things stack.  GURPS has this discipline – see my high level duelist character, he is very very experienced and very focused on fencing but a 16 is the very best he can do on an attack roll ever. Can D&D have this discipline, when everyone’s used to the “+3 sword?” Unlikely.

I would like to see a simple, OPEN, stripped down D&D core that removes a lot of the pain that 3e/4e have given us. Rules Cyclopedia/2e level of complexity max. That’d get me into a 5e…

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WTF, D&D!?

Posted on June 11, 2011 | 3 comments

In case you haven’t read it, wanted to turn you on to the Something Awful comedy “blog” series WTF, D&D!?. I read some of the early ones but didn’t realize they were going to keep up momentum with regular posting! Zack Parsons and Steve “Malak” Sumner review, walk through, or run through a variety of RPG materials – mostly D&D with some Rifts and Vampire and stuff, but some newer items like Lamentations of the Flame Princess – and about every other article, I find myself laughing so hard that I’m crying.

So if you haven’t seen it, go check out WTF, D&D!? and start with some of the Monster Manual type readthroughs – OMG, LOL!  (Normally I’d never say that but the abbreviations, you see, it’s like the column name… Never mind.)

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

Posted on June 6, 2011 | 3 comments

Twelfth Session (12 page pdf) – “Water Stop 2” – In our first sequel, the PCs need crew for their new ship, and remember the island of freed slaves from Water Stop (Season One, Third Session). They head there to recruit! Naturally, it’s not that easy.

This session took a whole lot of work on my part. I think it might be interesting to see how another GM does this stuf fin detail, so here’s a bit of a blow by blow about how I prepped and conducted the session.

As prep, I needed to generate eleven fully realized pirate crewmen and a dozen freed slaves for the PCs to interact with. Eek!  I used some of my favorite random generators, but wasn’t thrilled with most of what came out of them, so mainly made it up myself. And it worked!  The PCs were fascinated by the crew: Seven, Stoke, Orgon One-ear, Dum-dum, Tanned Hank, Little Mike, Big Mike, Mano, Gareb, Goat, and Slasher Jim.

I believe strongly in random generation at sea.  Random weather, random encounters… I eyeballed Zak’s Wavecrawl Kit, pulled random weather tables together from Stormwrack and other sources, and random encounter tables from everywhere they are hidden in Pathfinder stuff (Note to Paizo, I’d pay good money for a big book of random encounter tables by Inner Sea area.  I needed Gulf of Varisia area open ocean and beach/coastal encounters.

So they get going, and I roll some weather up, a snowstorm.  Just a minor one, but it gets them back used to making their Profession: Sailor checks. Sindawe was captain and Serpent was master on the helm; the snowstorm was an assisted check with Sindawe leading and Serpent assisting. They didn’t have any trouble.

Day two, the 8% chance of random encounter triggers.  Roll the dice – 00.  When you roll percentiles and get a 00 you always know something’s going to get fucked up.  I scan down the ocean table in the Bestiary and see 00 – Shoggoth.  CR 19.

Well now some GMs would puss out and say that’s too much for a fifth level party to handle. But not me. Shoggoth it is!  Hey, what’s that ahead, a giant field of sargasso seaweed?  Let’s go around. Why is it starting to come towards us?

They started to put on speed.  I used the naval version of my chase rules this time with Serpent the helmsman leading. On the fly I was assessing penalties for the ship’s skeleton crew (-4) and rolling for how hard the wind is blowing (lightly, -3). It works a lot like the foot chase rules, each side rolls Movement checks and moves up or down a range band from each other.

It was pretty cool.  They didn’t know what it was, and it was gaining on them (shoggoths swim at like 50′). Serpent/Paul joked about “it could be a shoggoth! There would be piping and stuff!” As it drew closer they heard the piping. He was deeply unhappy. He had the presence of mind to order Orgon to go get wax to stopper the crews’ ears (earning an additional -4 on Sindawe’s captaining rolls, sadly, but preventing them all from going insane).

They kept not doing real well in terms of making speed and the shoggoth kept rolling 15+. Sindawe was getting desperate and scanned the horizon with a spyglass for something, anything…  I rolled on Zak’s Wavecrawl “Random Event” table, which can be “nothing.” I got a random ship, table says merchants, d4 for size… A big fat Chelish merchantman! Sindawe rolled a 30+ Perception and saw a chance. They headed straight for it. Wogan and a gun crew had loaded a cannon on the off chance it would be useful against the shoggoth, but now they ran to the other side and loaded one with chain shot. The other ship didn’t spot them till they were barreling down on it. The shoggoth closed to close contact with the PCs’ ship and began ripping holes in it. Serpent crossed the T behind the merchantman and they shot a load into its rigging. The Teeth of Araska sailed away as the shoggoth engulfed the huge ship. They were extremely sobered by this encounter, as well they might be!

That could have been pretty bad, but I have confidence in my PCs. They could have gotten away through sheer speed, but that didn’t work, but they came up with a plan B and executed on it with precision. And that’s the kind of response really being in danger of complete extinction drives!

But we were only 1/3 done with the session by this point, that was supposed to just be a warmup random encounter! The PCs got to the island. What the heck had happened to the slaves?

Well, ahead of time I decided I’d roll 1d20 for each slave. 2-5 they died, 6-10 they were sick, 11-15 they were OK, 16-19 they were great and had leveled. 20 was “special good” and 1 was “special bad.” I got only 1 dead, but one special good and one special bad, and the main 3 slaves from their previous appearance were sick.  I brainstormed and decided that some of the rats that escaped the sinking goblin pirate ship the Sable Drake got onto the island and multiplied and have become a main food source – and one spread the lycanthropy that Captain Naki, wererat goblin captain of the ship, had. One of the slaves got bit, and changed.  Which was fine, but when he was too forward with Sevgi the ex-harem slave and she rejected him, he became forceful and the other two lead slaves had to get firm with him. Looking for revenge, he infected all three with filth fever and was waiting for Sevgi to get sick enough that a) she’s be sure to succumb to lycanthropy when he bit her and b) that she’d thank him for saving her and be hers forever! The PCs’ intervention interrupted this little love story, resulting in his attack on Sindawe.

I didn’t have a huge amount of inspiration for the ‘good special’ so I just had the cook have made some mango wine, resulting in quite a party. The PCs did good in only allowing a small number of the pirates on shore; I had been envisioning a big drunken pirate fight, especially as one of the slaves was trading sexual favors for supplies… Alas, it was kept more bottled up than that. The real challenge in this whole session was personnel management – can you get through this not just without killing a large number of the pirates and/or slaves, but can you make them into an effective crew that likes and/or fears you enough to not mutiny?

Speaking of revenge and sex, Captain Treeg’s woman and cleric of Calistria Ishana had been hiding out on the Teeth of Araska since she was taken. Not all that stable in the first place, her faith in the goddess of lust and revenge has driven her to fanatic heights of kill craziness. She was hoping that if she could rid the ship of the new interlopers that she could control the old crew. But Seven has been sucking up to them and clearly was their favorite. So in standard crazy-chick logic, he became target #1. Serpent was skulking out there when she broke invisibility to hold person and then coup de grace Seven. Serpent whaled away on her good and made his saves against her blindness, but she managed to murder Seven before being beaten down. I was hoping she could re-cast invisibility and escape to beset them but Serpent just does too much damage. Serpent was happy to leave Slasher Jim alone with her corpse.

Oh, and they devised a pirate Articles of Agreement (I mostly copied it from a historical one) and all signed on! The healed slaves decided they wanted off the island (except for the wererat – they marooned him, but figured that as a rat he’d get along OK) and most were good with piracy as long as it’s against the Chelish.

Tired yet?  Well, the session is still only 2/3 over. So they set out for Sandpoint to resupply and drop off the one family that didn’t want to take up the pirate life. We’ve had a shoggoth, and had Survivor-on-crack intrigue, and now we have – a winter storm!

My random weather had the temperature drop and drop some more, and a gale force wind whip up. The seas heaved as a freezing wind buffeted them.  The last third of the session was them weathering the storm.

Now, often in an RPG that can be boring. But I’ve been reading a lot of Hornblower and wanted to make the actual sailing part exciting; there’s no reason that man vs. nature, one of the fundamental kinds of literary conflict, should suck in D&D.

So here’s what we did. I rolled randomly and saw the storm was going to last nine hours (I didn’t tell them this). They had to make shiphandling checks to not founder or have other problems. The slaves, I rolled to see if any had shipboard experience, and a couple had – the others had to make Fort saves against seasickness; a couple dropped out immediately and some more succumbed to it over the course of the storm. And it was cold.  The Pathfinder cold rules say you have to save every hour, DC 15 + 1 per previous save, or take 1d6 nonlethal and be fatigued from frostbite.

This led to a really interesting battle against the elements. Each hour, I had Sindawe roll Prof: Sailor, aided by Serpent and Wogan. As long as they had 20 crew the ship was fully manned; each 5 fewer people manning the ship yields a -2 to all rolls. Based on how well they did they were fine, or being blown off course, or a worse threat like foundering or whatnot. Then came the cold saves. Wogan used the power of Gozreh in the form of channeled healing to throw off a lot of the frostbite damage, but more sailors succumbed as the storm wore on. And third, accident checks. Basically on a 1 on 1d20 something bad might happen to you – a wave comes to wash you overboard, you slip on the icy deck, someone drops a tool on your head. For each 5 by which the captain borks his roll there’s a penalty and if you’re fatigued there’s a penalty, so sometimes people were looking at a 1-3 to 1-5 chance of something risky happening over the course of that hour. Goat fell to the deck from the rigging and Bel and Pirro nearly got washed overboard; finally a chunk of ice fell from the rigging and KOed Bel. Wogan kept as many folks going as he could but by the time it was over more than half the slaves and a good quarter of the pirates were incapacitated. It was an epic battle, but just of man and ship versus the weather.

Finally they ended up in Sandpoint, dropped off the family, and bought supplies.  They wanted to buy crates of weapons, but a poor Bluff meant that the local sheriff didn’t like the looks of them and told the locals not to sell them any. We’ll see if they impress any townsfolk onto their crew in vengeance next time before they set off to find the wreck of the Sandspider! (They found that treasure map when they were returning from Viperwall aboard the Blackfin back in Return to Madness, Season One, Episode 25.)

Goodness!  I was tuckered out by the end of all this, but was happy with the results.  All the NPCs were fully realized enough that the PCs interacted with them with interest and realism. And there were a lot of call-backs to previous sessions; the players are remembering a lot of that stuff and their history is really helping to drive them. I consider it a success!

Unfortunately it’ll be a little; due to work and vacation trips Reavers is on hiatus for six weeks.  But we’ll be back with some hard hitting pirate action soon!

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What Do RPGs Teach You?

Posted on June 4, 2011 | 7 comments

In my recent article, Your PCs Are Murderous Cretins, I talk about the ethics of violence in RPGs and how most PCs we see are not acting in any way we would consider moral in the real world. I made a side point that ended up generating most of the controversy, which is that how we roleplay can shape our view of the world.  Not so, I am told – it’s completely separate, or cathartic, or whatever.

I find that interesting, especially since when we are talking about positive skills and attitudes, people are happy to explain the benefits that RPGs have provided them. I think many people would say that RPGs have honed their ability to navigate and exploit complex real-world rules, or GMing has made them better at public speaking or management, or they read a lot and learned a lot of history, or whatever.  Many nodded in agreement and not mockery when the X-Files character said “I didn’t spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons without learning anything about courage.”  Many books have been written by people talking about the character attributes that playing sports, or playing some other game like chess, imparted to them.

Of course, as soon as you bring up the possibility of imparting something negative, you get a lot of fear reactions. People don’t understand or want to deny the cognitive training aspect of RPGs.  But role-playing existed long before RPGs, and what it is specifically used for is teaching new skills and behaviors! Both in formal educational and business settings and in psychotherapy settings.

There’s a huge amount of non-gaming-related literature on role-playing and how it educates both didactically (you set out specifically to teach a certain thing) and developmental (more freeform roleplay which teaches by discovery). Here, try out this Google book from the Instructional Design Library series  that explains role-playing as a technique both to teach skills and attitudes.

If you for some reason cling to the unjustified belief that RPGs are different in nature than discovery-oriented roleplay (except in that people who aren’t paying attention don’t have a clearly focused end goal), try out the latest issue of the International Journal of Roleplaying that talk about this, especially “Immersion as a Prerequisite of the Didactical Potential of Role-Playing” and the part on “drift” in “Stereotypes and Individual Differences in Role-playing Games.” There are a lot of good references there which can point you to other sources that discuss this effect.

Anyway, what you have to understand is that the claim that roleplaying does not cognitively train you is plain false, and not supported by any actual research. It does.

But that’s not a bad thing!  Like I said, RPGs can teach plenty of good things, skill and character trait both.  We should just understand that teaching is a two-edged sword, and we might want to keep an eye on mindsets we might not want to be teaching people. The real world has a lot of other things trying to teach people that “groups that disagree with you are evil” and “don’t worry about the moral consequences of your actions” and a near infinite litany of other negative traits – consider whether you’re helping or hindering that process in your game.

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