Tag Archives: RPG

Paizo APG Playtest Continues

Posted on December 14, 2009 | 1 comment

In true open gaming form, Paizo has put out all six new classes that are going into their Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player’s Guide for comment.  You can download them for free:

In my opinion, Paizo has knocked another one out of the park.  I was prepared to be underwhelmed – most new non-core classes in D&D 3.5e were clearly just there to be weird collections of rules and not represent meaningful iconic archetypes.  “Ooo ooo, I’ve always wanted to be a Hulking Hurler!”  “And I always wanted to be a Master of the Unseen Hand!  Or maybe a Spellwarp Sniper!”  It feels like you may as well just say “DURRRR” out loud after announcing your chosen class.

The Cavalier is the prototypical knight.  He belongs to a specific knightly order, takes oaths, challenges enemies, and has a mighty mount.  Trap avoided: making the class *too* dependent on mounted combat. Remaining weak point: the oaths are kinda lame in implementation and the knightly orders fall into that weird “made kinda generic but still hard to fit into your campaign world” area.

The Oracle is filled with divine force, but less from a specific deity and more of a powerful archetype.  Besides clerical spells, the oracle gets powers appropriate to their divine focus, and suffer from a curse like being haunted, blind, or lame – but the curse turns into powers of its own with level!  Trap avoided: when I read the class name I thought, “Ah, a lame diviner class suitable for NPCs.”  Remaining weak point: the curses are the main thing that seems different about the Oracle and her foci from a normal cleric and her domains; a focus feels just kinda like a “double strength domain.”

The Summoner is what we call a “pet class.”  He has a persistent customizable critter called an eidolon; plus he can summon monsters pretty well and toss other conjurations and enchantments off a custom spell list.  It’s the first time D&D has really been able to do the “Pokemon Master” or “WoW Warlock” thing effectively.  Trap avoided: this class already got nerfed from the playtest doc where he could cast a large number of 1 minute/level Summon Monster SLAs and could easily boost his eidolon’s AC to the 50s without breaking a sweat.  Remaining weak point: The eidolon rules are complicated and probably open to a lot of exploits.  And why the hell does he have d8 HD and decent BAB?

The Witch is the most witchy witch class in the history of D&D witch classes.  It’s brilliant.  It can cast hexes, have a cauldron, join a coven, cackle, lay the evil eye on you…  And she learns spells (off a custom spell list that has enchants, conjures, and even heals)  from her familiar.   Trap avoided: being lame.  Remaining weak point: the covens are weak and should be more interesting, but that’s a minor nit in an otherwise very nicely designed class.

The Alchemist makes potion-like extracts made from formulae, bombs, and self-transforming mutagens.  Very flavorful – taking some of the alchemist schtick (like the bomb throwing) from WoW and other computer games.  They had to cop out a little to explain the limited number of uses in a day – the concoctions are powered by the alchemist’s “magical aura,” so if you’re looking for the scientific angle here you’re out of luck.  Trap avoided: being godawful complicated like the Artificer from Eberron.  Remaining weak point: They don’t get many bombs per day and their extracts and mutagens are pretty weak otherwise – I think they’ll have trouble being useful over the adventuring day.  The mutagens do physical boosts, but it’s not going to sufficiently make up for the BAB/HD discrepancy and turn them into a useful fighter even for the limited duration.

The Inquisitor brings to mind Warhammer 40k, but upon reading it…  This class is an odd mishmash.  It has a cleric’s HD and BAB and invokes judgements upon the naughty; it has a little ranger to it in the “vampire hunter” kind of vein.  But then it gets tactical/teamwork feats.  I’m not really sure what it is trying to be – a paladin of any alignment?  A Buffy?  A marshal?  Mostly a Buffy I think.  Trap avoided:  none.  Remaining weak point: falling too close to what other classes are or can do.  I’d think you could build something like this as a cleric/ranger or pally/ranger.

Anyway, I think they’ve done a great job of taking truly iconic mythical archetypes and making them solid playable classes.  Check them out yourself!

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Life In The Big City – Gather Information

Posted on December 14, 2009 | 5 comments

Once you start running an urban campaign, you start seeing the gaps in the existing rules on a lot of points.  In our case, we had a good number of times where PCs needed to go out into the city and hunt down some piece of information or person.  When we started working through it, I realized there were a lot of gaps that needed filling to make a satisfying play experience.

The rules components you have to work with from the Pathfinder core book and the APs are:

1.  A random encounter table for a given city (with no instruction as to when to roll a random encounter). Maybe I’ve missed it in poring over the Pathfinder RPG and Bestiary, but despite there being random encounter tables, I can find no place where they assign a chance of a random encounter happening.

2.  The Diplomacy skill has replaced Gather Information from 3.5e.  Information on using the skill in this way is light, just saying it’s a variable DC to find out something about a “topic or individual.”  As is traditional, there’s an unclear overlap between this skill and Knowledge: Local when it comes to the practical work of finding a nearby fence for your stolen goods.  Furthermore, there’s no accounting for a check being opposed by someone trying to hide or conceal information.

3.  The “Urban Adventures” part of Chapter 13: Environment in the Pathfinder RPG (p.433) has some other details that may be helpful – kinda.  But not really in this case.

4.  Rumors.  Every AP has a load and every DM loves having a bunch of rumors to pass out, but their incorporation is always an adventure-specific hack.

These are the ingredients, but a recipe is lacking, especially once you hit the intrigue-laden bits of any city campaign.  I wanted to bring all these things – gathering information, random encounters, rumors – into one easy to use system.  Here’s how I put them together.

Goals

When the PCs hit the streets, they may have a variety of different goals in mind.  Sometimes they are looking for a specific fact or person.  Sometimes they just want the “word on the street” about what’s going on.  In certain cases they want something else specific to happen – to spread the word about a particular rumor themselves, maybe to provoke or mislead someone.

As a result, someone seeking a specific goal will use a different skill check depending on what they’re trying to find.  Diplomacy/Gather Information is the clear choice for traditional finding stuff out, for example, but you could use Bluff instead to spread a false rumor.  Or Perform to get the peasants all singing a catchy yet treasonous little ditty.  There’s a lot of possibilities here.  Consider rewarding relevant Craft and Profession skills by letting them be used instead when relevant; if you’re looking for someone you hear is a blacksmith, then a relevant Craft or Profession check would be a great way of tracking them down by talking to other smiths, checking at places smiths would tend to buy supplies, etc.  If you are trying to find out when the Midnight Mermaid is setting sail, Profession: Sailor would be appropriate.

In many cases you’ll want to call for a complex skill check for tasks taking more than a cursory amount of time.  Each attempt would usually reflect a half day of asking around, staking out places, fending off streetwalkers and beggars, etc.  You can reflect each success with some kind of in-game description of how they’re getting closer.  “You find someone who says they’ve seen two guys with mustaches like that hanging out around the Wharf District – you can focus your search there.”  If there’s an extenuating factor like “find them before they leave town” or “figure out the cult’s leader before they sacrifice that victim” then the check should be of the “X successes before Y failures” model.

If the goal being sought is simple – a fact or public personality – then the DM simply sets the DC, with perhaps more knowledge available at higher DCs.

“I’m looking for a high quality weaponsmith!”

  • Natural 1 – “Your mother’s a weaponsmith!  She can bang on my sword anytime!”
  • DC 5 – A random blacksmith’s name, probably makes simple weapons only.
  • DC 10 -A decent weaponsmith’s name who has a selection of martial weapons.
  • DC 15 – Otto the retired adventurer reliably makes masterwork blades.
  • DC 20 – Otto hates elves, don’t take your buddy with you if you’re going there, he’ll refuse to help you.
  • Natural 20 – “Oh, I know Otto, tell him Grey sent you and he’ll cut you a deal.”

Sometimes, however, the PCs are trying to track someone down who’s actively trying to conceal themselves.  Or, they need to lay low and thwart other people’s attempts to track them down using these rules!

If someone is just trying passively to stay hidden or hide an item, place, or bit of information, they make a check using a plausible skill to set the seekers’ DC.  If you’re hiding out, you can try Stealth or even Disguise.  If you are in a friendly ethnic enclave, you can try Diplomacy to convince people not to help snoopers.  If you’re going by a fake name, use Bluff.  The DM should see fit to add on bonuses or penalties based on the circumstances.

Keep in mind the quarry may not know specifically that anyone’s looking for them.  Many criminals or other underground figures will routinely be trying to stay somewhat off the public’s radar as part of their daily routine.

Stay flexible and use common sense.  If the PCs are trying to place a false rumor to flush someone out of hiding, their seeker checks might be opposed by the target’s Sense Motive, for example.

Random Encounters

Let’s get an important distinction out of the way first.  There are several different kinds of random encounter charts, derived from different unspoken philosophies of what an encounter should consist of.

The first, which I’ll call the “normal” encounter table, includes a bunch of stuff a PC might come across in a locale, whether it’s a “hostile monster” or not.  These kinds of charts contain everything from peasants to hookers to “Event: someone empties their chamberpot out of a second floor window as you walk by” to real threats.  The first edition AD&D DMG was a great example of this theory of random encounter design, what with the random harlot table.

The second, the “hostile” encounter table, limits itself only to likely combat situations.  A city encounter chart with only “Muggers, press gangs, stirges, and vampires” is a hostile encounter chart.  This kind of chart has become more popular over time as D&D groups who “just want to kill something” don’t want to bother with chatting up some “rich panderer”.

It should be obvious why you need to understand what kind of chart you have in hand – if it’s the former, the chance of encounter should be higher, but if it’s the latter, it should be much lower.

Traditionally in D&D, there’s a flat random chance of having a random encounter.  But there’s a reason native New Yorkers run afoul of trouble less than visiting tourists; an innate knowledge for an area leads to instinctively safer behavior.  You avoid “that street,” know to ignore certain voices calling “Hey Mister!”, et cetera.  Therefore it would seem to me that Knowledge: Local is perhaps a relevant factor. It feels about right to say the chance of encounter in a normal city is when you roll a DC 5 or less for a “hostile” table and DC 10 or less for a “normal” table.  You’d manipulate these chances for special places or times – if the city is wracked by revolution or martial law reigns, crank the DCs up.  (Consider using Survival in the same way in the wilderness.)

Pro tip – consider customizing your encounter table over time.  Have 91-100 be “someone who the party knows” and keep a list of likely people.  PCs love running across people they know, it adds to their sense of belonging in the game world.

Rumors

Rumors.  The lifeblood of any campaign.  You can always rely on the PCs to spend a bunch of time interacting with your lovingly crafted setting and NPCs if you feed them random information that they think might be amusing to follow up on.  It turns setting information from something you inflict on them using boxed text to something more akin to “treasure I found!” which is innately more motivating.

As with random encounters, there are a couple schools of thought on rumor creation, largely depending on how much work the DM wants to put into it.  Some create a small number of mostly valid and/or important rumors, or even customize them to individual PCs.  Some create a vast host of rumors of varying importance and accuracy.  In this case you want to divvy them up by DC (crappy false rumors=DC 5, etc.).

As the PCs roll their seeker checks, you can give them rumors according to your chosen DCs.  I usually do the “small number of good rumors” approach and give one out on a DC 15, plus an additional rumor for every 5 points of success.  You’d select DC 10 or DC 5 if you had a lot more rumors of varying provenance.

Make sure and hand out rumors you really want them to have first and then hand out the random stuff.

Keeping It Quiet

In some cases, the PCs want to track someone or something down without other people getting wind of it.

If you’re actively seeking but want to keep it quiet, you need choose a skill designed for misdirection to use as you ferret out information.  This could be Bluff (I tell people I’m a merchant from some other city who owes the guy money) to Stealth (I try to overhear conversations more than actually precipitate them) to whatever’s plausible given the circumstance.  Seeking “quietly” doubles the time required to make each seeker check.  The DC for the quarry to detect the seekers’ activity is set at 10+the selected skill bonus.  The seekers can deliberately take a penalty on their seeker checks and add that as a bonus to their keeping quiet check.

The quarry (or other interested third parties) can make seeker checks of their own to determine if someone’s looking for something or someone.

For example, the PCs are looking for a jumpy guy who owes them money.  They decide to take it easy and send a seeker group that has a good Bluff skill of +10 out to find him.  The seeker group searches at the rate of one check per day, and the jumpy guy asks around every other day to see if anyone’s after him – a DC 20 on his Diplomacy check would indicate yes, there’s some guys asking around after him.

Hitting the Streets

All of this boils down to a reasonably simple system for urban information warfare.  The various participants break up into teams as they desire.

1.  Setup

The DM sets the random encounter DC and chooses a random encounter chart, and decides the success DC, how many successes are required, and what those successes mean.

2.  Hide

If there’s an active opposition, the “hiders” roll their check first to set the DC for the “seekers” (if the hider’s an NPC it’s easiest to just take 10 on this check).  If there isn’t, the DM sets the DC based on the availability of the knowledge or whatever is being sought.

3. Seek

Each seeker team makes a DC 10 Knowledge: Local check, the team member with the best score leading and any others assisting.  Rolling below the random encounter DC  indicates a random encounter.  Success indicates that the seeker team has used their knowledge of the city to find a good audience or locale for whatever it is they’re trying to do.  Success gives a +2 bonus to subsequent checks, with an additional +2 for each 5 points by which the team beats the DC.  Each seeker team decides whether they are keeping the search quiet or not, and makes a relevant skill check to seek out their goal.  Time spent and successes are noted and rumors are handed out.

4.  Cover Up

The hider can take time to do their own seeker check against the DC of the seekers’ chosen mode of sneakiness if they want to know if anyone’s looking for them.

Repeat steps 3-4 as necessary.

Playtest: Guerilla Marketing

In this case, the PCs were looking to go out on the mean streets to promote an upcoming animal fight they were arranging; they weren’t specifically looking for information in the traditional sense.  No problem, these rules handle that.  They divided up into solo teams of one to cover the most ground and were not trying to be subtle in any way, confident that the crooked town guard would not care one bit about all this.  I gave them their choice of social skill to use – Diplomacy (“Come see the awesome matchup!”),  Bluff (“You’ll win big if you bet on the bear!”), or Intimidate (“You punks can’t handle carnage like you’re gonna see at this fight!”).  They disperse throughout the city and promote their fight.

Since this was a fairly diffuse goal, it doesn’t have a clear success or failure criteria.  The locals are, in general, all about a semi-legal animal fight.  Therefore I set the base DC at 10, with each increment of 5 above that indicating that more people would hear about the match and come. Each attempt would reflect a half day of work.  They could do as many checks as they wanted to spend the time on until fight night.

The encounter table I was using has both “normal” encounters and “hostile” encounters so I set the encounter DC level to 10.  If any PC rolled below the base DC of 10 while conducting their marketing, it would generate an encounter.

I had prepared a small number (7) of fairly juicy rumors, so set a base DC of 15 to get a rumor, with an extra for every 5 points above.

All the DCs were set, so each PC made their skill check.  1-9 indicated an encounter, 10-14 indicated limited success, 15-19 indicated moderate success and a rumor, 20-24 was good success and two rumors, and so on.

Because most of this group lacks meaningful social skills, they started provoking random encounters, and since they were alone, those encounters didn’t go well.  One PC, trying to drum up business outside the competition’s gambling halls, got beaten insensible by some goons and had his cash stolen.    One got bitten by a monstrous centipede as he sat down to rest outside an alley.  One had a nice chat with a friendly lady who owns a fruit stand (later destroyed by the PCs in the commission of a chase, that’ll show her).  After a day of that they decided to leave off; they got an OK crowd in at the fight night.

Playtest: Manhunt

In this scenario, the PCs had killed off a criminal gang but the leader, the Splithog Pauper, got away.  They decided to hunt him down (and by decided, I mean another crime lord made them an offer they couldn’t refuse and told them to).

The goal was pretty concrete – find him!   He was very much trying not to be found.  His main skill is Disguise at +11, which would normally mean a pretty hardcore DC of 21 for the seekers.  However, when they raided his gang’s headquarters the PCs got an encoded list of various IOUs to various petty criminals and business associates.  Since the Pauper was staying in town and trying to rebuild, this was an extremely relevant leverage point and I gave them a huge +5 bonus for having it in hand.  Also, they got a description of two thugs that may or may not have been affiliated with the Pauper (turns out they were).

The PCs learned their lesson about running around the streets solo.  They split into two teams, one of which was following up on the list of associates and the other of which was talking to various prostitutes and homeless people they associated with to track down the thugs.

They were rolling well, and since each team had several assists they stayed well out of random encounter DC territory, sad to say.  It took them a day and a half to get the five successes I figured were needed to track him down.  They had not been subtle in their inquiries, however, and he knew someone was looking for him, so when they went to the inn he was laying low in, he was disguised and had a bunch of thugs nearby ready to ambush intruders.

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Life In The Big City – Chase Rules

Posted on December 13, 2009 | 33 comments

My Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign is well underway and the PCs are all over the mean streets of Riddleport.  There’s some common scenarios that come up in urban adventures that I wanted to streamline; here’s my current efforts for your edification and comment!  They’re Pathfinder based but very easily adapted to anything d20-ish.  First, we have chase rules!

Chase Rules

Exciting chase scenes, the staple of action movies everywhere, are very hard by default in D&D because though every other part of the rules has variance built in – from stats to skills to damage – movement has always been completely static.  “30 feet a round whether you need it or not!”

I got Adamant Entertainment’s Tome of Secrets for Pathfinder when it came out, and it has chase rules, but those rules are like a lot of chase rules I’ve seen in RPGs over time – way too complicated.  They’re 40 damn pages of specific maneuvers and all.  The entire Combat chapter in the Pathfinder RPG is only 25 pages.  I wanted something that could be run without everyone having to do homework; in my opinion if a new bolt-on special case ruleset is more than about 2 pages then “you’re doing it wrong.”

So here’s what I came up with.  It was hard to balance it out but after a couple playtest chases in the real campaign I think they are pretty light and easy to use, fair, and keep the PCs engaged.

The Movement Check

A character’s Move check is +2 per 5′ of base speed.  For an unencumbered human that moves 30′, that’s +12.  In a self-powered race like a footrace, you can add your STR bonus to this in a given round but then have to make a DC 15 Fort save to not become fatigued from the exertion.   Use this same formula for other movement types (riding, swimming) because it takes differing speeds into account well.  (as a bonus, this means you can have a chase where various participants are using different modes of movement).

The Chase Track

Rather than keeping up with specific distances, a chase has distance represented by an arbitrary condition track.  It’s defined relative to whoever’s in the lead, and has six levels –

  1. Close Contact – within melee range of leader.  Subject to all obstacles the leader has to deal with.
  2. Point Blank – close range (all those “within 30 feet” powers proc here).  Take leader’s obstacles or take an alternate path at DC 20.
  3. Short – Take leader’s obstacles or an alternate path at DC 15.  -2 on ranged attacks.
  4. Medium – From this far back, it’s usually easy to avoid obstacles.  -4 on ranged attacks.
  5. Long – -6 on ranged attacks.
  6. Lost – you done lost ’em.   If you have allies still in the chase and you can still run (not fatigued or just giving up) you can run after them sufficiently to at least arrive on the scene once it’s all over, but you can’t get back into the actual chase.

For each 5 points by which you beat the leader’s movement check,  you close by one category on the track; similarly you slip back by one for each 5 points by which you miss their check.

Chase participants start at a chase level that makes sense – if they are right there with the leader and take off after them when they take off, they can start at point blank.  If they’re a round of movement away, or pause to shoot or take another action before they get going, start them at medium range.

Obstacles

In a chase, there’s a bunch of different kinds of obstacles and complications that can come up.  Here’s a sample but not comprehensive list.  In general the checks to pass these obstacles are DC 15.  If you fail the check, you drop back one level on the chase track; if you miss by 5 you take 1d6 nonlethal damage from a collision or similar mishap.  This is an urban specific list.  In a crowded urban environment, each round has a 1 in 3 chance of bringing a mandatory obstacle, or the leader can deliberately head towards obstacles as desired.  Roll 1d8 for what type, or choose one:

  1. Simple (Acrobatics, attack an object) – barrels, gate, street vendor’s blanket, etc.
  2. Barrier (Acrobatics) – fruit cart, unexpected turn
  3. Wall (Climb) – traditional “end of alley” wall, fence
  4. Gap (Acrobatics/Jump) – ditch, open manhole, pit
  5. Traffic (Acrobatics/Overrun) – pedestrians, mule team, orc pirates
  6. Squeeze (Escape Artist) – crawlspace, hole in wall
  7. Water (Swim) – river, wharf, pool, fountain
  8. Terrain (Acrobatics) – gravel, mud bank, slick cobblestones

Chase participants farther back on the chase track can choose whether or not to hit the same obstacle.  Chasers in close contact have to negotiate the same obstacles as the leader.  Chasers in point blank can take the obstacle or make an alternate check at DC 20 to avoid it – for example, “I can’t swim, I’m going to run around the reflecting pool instead.”  Chasers at short range can take the obstacle or an alternate check at DC 15.  Chasers farther back can generally avoid routine obstacles, but the DM can require them if it’s logically necessary (the leader swam across the river, for example).

You’d choose different obstacles and skills for other kinds of chase – a horseback chase would use Ride instead of Acrobatics, and a chase in the country would have trees and hedges instead of crates and alleys.

Actions

Anyone in close contact with the leader can conduct melee attacks on them.  Whoever wins initiative gets to determine if attacks or Movement checks happen first.

A character can take a missile attack but automatically drops back one level on the chase track when they do.

If the chase goes a number of rounds equal to anyone’s CON score they have to make DC 20 Fort saves each round or become fatigued, and effectively drop out.

Chase Playtest

Our PCs ranged from halflings and humans in encumbering armor (Move +8) to barbarians and monks (Move +16).

In their first chase, they went after the Splithog Pauper, a skilled rogue.  He had a normal Move (+12) but high Acrobatics, Climb, and Escape Artist checks.

The chase was pretty long.  Everyone managed to stay in the chase; as the slower guys dropped back they benefitted from not having to negotiate as many obstacles.  The Pauper wasn’t rolling well on his movement checks and deliberately hit a lot of obstacles to try to shake the faster guys – the barbarian stayed with him, but he managed to push the rest of them back with this tactic. The cleric was the only one with a ranged attack; he shot an icicle at him a couple times but to limited effect.

There was a cool obstacle moment that everyone thought was very “parkour,” where the Pauper ran and dash vaulted through a fruit stand; one PC followed through the gap with his own leap but the next didn’t quite make it and busted, spraying fruit everywhere.  The barbarian caught up with him legitimately and was stabbing him with his boarding pike (after a pretty bad string of misses he finally was connecting); the cleric used an Infamy Point to find a shortcut to head him off and gave him a good clotheslining; at that point we dropped out of chase mode and the two PCs cut him down before he could maneuver away from them.

The next chase was interestingly different.  This was the party trying to follow a guy through the tenements, but he spotted them and ran.  He was just a level 1 expert, nothing special, but he rolled really well and lost most of the party except for the tracker (the rest of the party was staying an increment behind the tracker to avoid detection).  But the fleeing guy totally sucked at obstacles, and after a couple slowed him, the tracker got into close contact and dragged him to the ground for a good cuffing and stuffing.

In the end these rules rewarded faster Speeds and higher relevant skills without being overwhelming – in an earlier draft I was using the Acrobatics skill as the Movement check but it made that skill too much of a “whoever has it wins and whoever doesn’t loses” power.   The quarries had a good chance to get away in both situations but after a good hard run they got them.  The chases were long enough they were interesting but went quickly enough and were dynamic enough that they held interest.

These rules work well for a “one on many” chase; it’s not clear how they’d work for a complex many-on-many chase (e.g. horde of zombies vs. party of PCs).

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Outlaw Press, aka Jim Shipman, Is A Big Crook

Posted on December 11, 2009 | 26 comments

Outlaw Press is a small press outfit that publishes for Tunnels & Trolls, run by one Jim Shipman.  Late last month, a South American guy noticed that a cover for one of their products was miscredited and posted on RPG.net about it.  Innocent mistake?  Overreaction?  Well, as time wore on, actual RPG artists took note and started noticing work of theirs appearing as covers on Outlaw Press products. A huge list of artists.

In the last month, a staggering 70+ works of art have been identified as having been stolen by Outlaw Press and used in their publications, as well as a large laundry list of other kinds of IP theft.  There’s a convenient PDF someone put together showing the various copyrighted works and the products ripping them off. Much of the art isn’t even just copyrighted by a random artist, but was work for hire and actually owned by Games Workshop, Dreamworks, and Blizzard.  All their products have been yanked from RPGNow for these shenanigans, and is getting yanked from Amazon and other locations as the wronged parties hunt down everywhere these tainted products are being sold.  Apparently and incredibly, Shipman has responded to all this with vague evasions and defiant “I do what I want” declarations, continuing to sell these products despite being notified of the art theft.  In fact, Ken St. Andre and Flying Buffalo pulled his Tunnels & Trolls license over it, but that’s not stopping Jim!  “I have warehoused products to sell!” he declares.

He is still selling his wares clandestinely on eBay and other places under shifting seller names, including jimship1, Hobbit_King@yahoo.com, and actionseller99.

Do not buy anything from Jim Shipman or Outlaw Press, now or in the future!  And feel free and take whatever kind of righteous retribution you see fit upon him, his products, his Web site, and his business.  He’s flaunting the law and ripping off legitimate artists and creators trying to make their way generating content for their favorite games.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Sixth Session Summary

Posted on December 6, 2009 | 1 comment

The characters become more proactive in their criminal enterprises in the sixth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, “Three Days to Kill.”  It’s based on a 3e Atlas Games adventure also called “Three Days to Kill.”

Sixth Session (14 page pdf) – One of the crime lord Clegg Zincher’s capps, Braddikar Faje, is headed out of town on the road to Roderic’s Cove to conduct some kind of sale at a villa in the hills.  Jacking up Zincher’s day is more than enough motivation for Saul to send his favorite scum off to break up the deal.

But first, Tommy heads to the local whorehouse/temple of Calistria to see his favorite gal, Lavender Lil.  He finds her hiding behind a tapestry; Captain Scarbelly and his orc pirate crew are visiting, and, as she says, “I like it a little rough, but not orc rough.” So Tommy tells her he and his comrades are headed out into the woods to try to find the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy they hear tell of, as a cover story for their real job.

It’s probably about this time I should share the rumors the PCs got from hitting the streets of Riddleport.  It may explain otherwise bizarre behavior on the part of the guys.  (The weird terminology is mostly Riddleport slang…  As you can tell they are meant to be exactly as a random Riddleporter would relate them.)

Bonfires are sometimes seen in the mountains to the northeast.  I hear a bunch of priestesses of Calistria gather there every new moon for secret all-lesbo orgiastic rituals, and they murder any man who glimpses them.  It still sounds pretty tempting to try.  Woooo!  Man, I wonder if that Pamodae sideshow goes there… Mmmmm…..

When the missionary who founded St. Casperian’s Mission died, he left behind a treasure cache of the money he defrauded from credulous citizens.  Although the building is dilapidated and overrun with grog-blossoms, there is a secret room beneath the ground where the priest hid his ill-gotten gains.  They say it’s guarded by a magical protector that has disappeared everyone that’s tried to claim it.

There are orcs wandering the streets of Riddleport!  Captain Scarbelly’s pirate ship, the Bloody Vengeance, is in town and the whole crew is orc.  People say he’s killed twenty-nine men in hand to hand combat.  He’s probably hooked up with Boss Croat, that snout-lover.  I could totally take an orc.  It’s about speed, not strength!

Gebediah Crix, keeper of the Riddleport Light, got killed by one of those devils he summons.  His parts were strewn all over the lighthouse.  The gendarmes have posted guards outside the place.  I wonder if the devil’s still around?  Hey, I recently came across some Vudran charms, guaranteed to keep evil spirits away.  Wanna buy one?

There’s some kind of gang of whiskers that operates in the Rotgut District.  I have a cousin who got robbed by a bunch of rats in an alley that suddenly turned into people.  And the gendarmes don’t do jack crap about it, say they’re low on funding.  The rats must be connected and that’s why they’re getting a pass.

Some guy, an out of town wizard, wanted to become a fancyboy, but when they wouldn’t let him in, he insulted Elias Tammerhawk, the Speaker of the Order of Cyphers.  They had a duel in Zincher’s arena.   Tammerhawk totally wasted that guy’s dumb ass in short order and magiced up a swarm of rats to eat the body.  He said that was what he got for running his rathole.  Haw haw haw!

There’s been some turf changes on the streets lately.  I hear Avery Slyeg is totally Croamarcky’s bitch now and they’re consolidating and looking to squeeze competitors out of the gambling biz.

The completely false St. Casperian rumor is what caused them to go all SWAT team on the mission last session.  Although their minds are going overtime, and they mentioned that “planting a rumor like that would be a good way to get someone to go in and kill off a rival gang…”

Anyway, they head out to the Trail’s End villa and get a lot more than they bargained for – besides Faje and his men, there’s Asmodean cultists, Marcello Marcellano (the Chelish son of Ox’s former owner from “Water Stop”), and a bunch of raiding Shoanti braves.  They actually carve through the guards OK, but when the Asmodeans start summoning freaky demons from the mirror Faje is selling them, they decide to bail (over Serpent’s objections, who really really wants to kill Faje and everyone else, despite Saul instructing them not to kill him.)

The PCs for some reason thought they had done poorly, I guess because of the default D&D expectation that the only success is found in killing everything in sight and looting it.  But Saul praised them – they killed everyone but Faje and one of his goons, who had to ride into town two to one horse.  The Asmodeans got the mirror without paying for it.  So Clegg is out like 8 guys, a bunch of horses, and the mirror with nothing to show for it, and Faje did NOT get killed and bring the wrath of Zincher and potentially other crime lords down on the Gold Goblin.  The PCs kinda wanted to murder the Asmodeans, Marcellano, and the Shoanti (which Saul couldn’t care less about) and Faje (which would have pissed him off mightily).

But before they got back…  They happened upon the secret Calistrian lesbian orgy ritual.  Or, at least, Tommy snuck up onto something that might have been it and promptly got chased off by a manticore!

I was prepared to run an actual chase scene here, with the mounted PCs fleeing from the manticore, using chase rules from Adamant Entertainment’s Tome of Secrets for Pathfinder.  It was not to be, however, as the usual D&D group problem emerged of one guy refusing to run and that making the rest of the party stand with him.  We then had a weird start-and-stop chase as Sindawe stopped to fight.  But when the manticore dropped his horse in one shot, he thought better of that and hid in the underbrush.  But of course Wogan and Serpent had stopped to help him…  They got away by popping obscuring mist and letting the manticore eat all their horses.  Ah well, all’s well that ends well.

Once they got back, they went with the guy that they let live from the Splithog Pauper’s gang, Madrat, to hit one of Avery Slyeg’s couriers.  Of course, Madrat was a mole working for Slyeg.  So we left off with the PCs facing down a dozen crossbowmen and a crime lord in a warehouse.  Will they sleep with the fishes?  Find out next time, in Reavers on the Seas of Fate: Death in Freeport Riddleport!

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Tenth Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary Posted

Posted on December 6, 2009 | 2 comments

Tenth Session (10 page pdf) – In the latest installment of The Lighthouse, we participate in a beta test of a new missile system and generally sneak around the Thuldan scientific research space station and cause problems.  A new character, Professor Pepin of the Borealins, is inflicted upon us.  He has an outrageous French accent.  And we find pod people who look like Warhammer 40k escapees!

This session was fun even through we didn’t really get much done.  The missile test goes semi-horribly wrong and we do some sleuthing to find out why.  We find clues, although not actually culprits or reasons.  Martin St. John and Taveer have a near death experience piloting a fighter near a space-singularity to try to fix it with SCIENCE!.

My favorite part of the whole thing is the commendations Captain Takashi gave the two afterwards.

The group returns to the Lighthouse, where Captain Takashi awards Martin St. John the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroic actions. Taveer isn’t a member of the Concord Military, so he can’t be awarded a medal, but he isn’t forgotten. Captain Takashi sends a recommendation through channels to the Administrator hierarchy about his valiant acts. They award him with a “STAR Award” and a $50 gift certificate to the restaurant of his choice. He discovers this when a Concord HR administrator shows up at his cube and drops off the certificate and a nice plaque made out to “Thomas”.

That was all my invention.  You can tell I’ve worked for corporations for too long.

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New Paizo Class Playtests Continue

Posted on November 30, 2009 | 7 comments

Today, the playtests for the new Paizo Advanced Player’s Guide classes continue with the Summoner and the Witch.  (Previously, it was the Cavalier and Oracle.)  Go get ’em, it’s a free download from all from the Paizo store.

I was really looking forward to the Summoner, since I put a lot of work into playing a good summoner in 3.5e, the Internet-famous Valgrim the Malconvoker!

Hey, the summoner is really cool.  It’s a CHA-based caster, has a custom spell list derived from both mage conjurations and also druid-type buffs (magic fang, etc.).  However… 11 pages, Jesus Christ!  This is one complicated class.  It gets a pet called an “eidolon,” which finally explains what the hell that weird LucasArts game I had back in the day was about.  Maybe.

You get to totally determine the form of your eidolon, which is neat.  It uses rules completely different from the current animal companion rules, which is a little sad – with the Cavalier and Summoner they have decided “bah” to standardization on existing rules.  But it’s pretty cool, they go up in level and toughness with you; they’re pretty buff – d10 HD and a strange nonstandard but semi-full BAB progression.  And they have an “evolution pool” you can use to mutate them – there’s a long list of 1-4 point evolutions, from claws to SR.

And besides this, and normal spells – the summoner gets Summon Monster (whatever the highest level you can cast) 3+CHA times a day!  OK, I love me a summoner, but DAMN.  Once you put even a little optimization into this, it gets really good.

It’s certainly a very interesting class.  I have to say, in general I don’t like splatbook and splatbook classes.  You either get flavorless junk or bizarre crap.  But these, even the weirder ones like the Oracle and Summoner, have a way high cool factor.

Now let’s look at the witch…  Many people have many different takes on what a “witch” should be.

Surprisingly, they’re an INT-based caster.  That’s nice, it’s good to see the flood of CHA-based casters stemmed, though I would have guessed they’d go with WIS instead for the “witchy wise woman” feel.  The class is full of the good old witch tropes – pact with otherworldly power, hexes, a cauldron, a coven…

In a very cool twist, the witch’s familiar is the one teaching them magic, so they function kinda like their spell book – they can only prepare spells their familiar knows!

The familiar list is 80% the same as the sorc/wizard one, but has weird changes for no real reason I can determine.  No weasel, but you can have a pig.  Whatever.  And the benefits by level are slightly different.  Grrr.  But then the coolness is that different familiars get different spells they can teach.  The toad gets jump, for example.  The witch spell list is a good combination of mostly enchantment, healing, and divinations.

There’s a bunch of cool but weird touches – a witch can be in a coven with hags, and a familiar can learn spells from another witch’s familiar.  The hexes are OK but not all that much to write home about.  In the end, a really good witch class, and a lot more balanced than some of these new ones.

I just wish they went a little more standard on these various critters, it’s going to be a nightmare to DM and to prepare NPCs when one familiar or animal companion is like another but different – adding new powers for a given class is fine, but like the Summoner’s companion has the same HD but different and nonstandard BAB progression than a druid one.

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Mongoose Publishing Doing Grand

Posted on November 30, 2009 | 1 comment

Mongoose Publishing has posted their 2009 “State of the Mongoose Address” and it’s great to see a RPG company doing so well!

In general, they say “you have to work hard but you can still do well in RPGs.”  They’ve grown to 14 full timers and have a huge roster of games going on.

Highlights:

  1. A bunch of new Traveller settings and supplements.  The coolest one is Reavers – Piracy in the Sea of Stars, which in title sounds a lot like my “Reavers on the Seas of Fate” pirate campaign I’m running.  Synchronicity!  And there’s Codename Veil, which sounds a lot like Delta Green.  Plus, a new 2000AD license in the vein of Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog called “ABC Warriors,” where you play warbots!
  2. A new Runequest 2, redesigned and taken back to its roots – but without a SRD.  With a  huge campaign, Glorantha book, and more.  And variant settings, including Deus Vult, where you are a Catholic demon fighter in the 12th century, and the Eternal Champion stuff.  And they’re moving Wraith Recon over to it, they say they have no plans to do any more D&D 4e stuff.
  3. The Conan license is in limbo but they’re dropping prices on the old stuff!
  4. They are trying to expand Paranoia as a line, I get the impression they feel like they’ve tapped out the life of a Troubleshooter and have tried some “out of the mold” splatbooks and are seeing how those go to determine direction.
  5. And more Earthdawn!  And Dragon Warriors!  And Cthonian Stars, a Cthulhu setting for Traveller!  And a bunch more other stuff!

Man, hats off to these guys, they are shipping some product.  And for those who remember the “old Mongoose” and the bad editorial, they’ve tried very hard to hire up and improve quality in editorial, and claim that in 2009 “in the past few months, the number of editorial issues in the many, many books we have released can be counted on one hand.”

I’m not sure why they are stepping away from openness with RQ2 though, it seems to have paid off for them enough with Traveller.  One demerit for that.  But otherwise, they are expanding heavily despite the global economy, doing so many things that the “common wisdom” says are bad – licensed games, having a bunch of different game lines…

I have some Mongoose games (Conan, Paranoia, Traveller) but don’t play any faithfully.  The lure of large game lines and rich ecosystems, especially like the Traveller one, may just bring me over however.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Fifth Session Summary

Posted on November 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

The characters decide to take the fight to the mean streets of Riddleport in the fifth installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate, “St. Casperian’s Salvation.”

Fifth Session (11 page pdf) – Michael Vick, eat your heart out.  The PCs start off by arranging one of the Gold Goblin’s underground animal fights.  The NPC ranger, Bojask, got a diseased bear off the back of a ship somewhere, and their boss Saul wanted a championship match with the current champ, Pigsaw the boar.  Here’s the naked bear:

I based this on reality – I read a recent news article about how all the spectacled bears at this German zoo all lost their fur all over except for on their faces.  Zoo staff is baffled.

Anyway, player reaction: OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT THING.  They then spent an inordinate amount of their funds buying some drugs to knock it out so they could paint it green.  It seemed like the thing to do at the time.  They started channeling Don King and dubbed the fight “Pigsaw vs. Bearclaw.”

The PCs wandered through Riddleport separately to go spread the word and got the worst end of the deal.  It’s a rough town, and when Ox went into the gambling district run by the head crimelord and started putting up flyers, three goons quickly showed up, beat his ass senseless, and robbed him.  Others fared slightly better.

I was planning to run the 3e Atlas Games adventure “Three Days to Kill.”  I handed out some rumors, though, gleaned while beating the streets doing fight promotion, and they were fascinated by a (totally false) rumor about a haunted treasure hoard in the cellar of St. Casperian’s Mission, a local derelict flophouse where, it turns out, their old buddy Vincenz is hiding out.  I had planned to run “St. Casperian’s Salvation,” a set piece adventure set there, later, but the PCs were all over that mission like white on rice as soon as they heard a rumor of cash.  Ever prepared, I switched and ran that instead.  Basically there’s a local small street gang using the second floor as a hideout.  This was somewhat of a surprise, and it was a brutal tight quarters battle.  The gang leader, the “Splithog Pauper,” got away with the gang’s loot.

Eventually they had the fight and the bear won.  In attendance was Captain Scarbelly, the orc pirate, a clear warning to those in the know that the Freeport trilogy is almost upon us.

Next time – Three Days to Kill!  I hope.

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Ninth Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary Posted

Posted on November 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

Ninth Session (12 page pdf)  – Intrigue and staff meetings reign in our Alternity-based campaign aboard the Lighthouse space station as all the characters madly follow their own personal paths to power.  Little space monkeys infest the station, the station AI gets a little bent, and sneaky teleporting space Nazis visit the captain.  Some of the characters get ready to mess with some Thuldans, while Ten-Zil Kem pretty much concentrates on the chick from Bluefall.

This campaign was enjoyable, pretty much a freeform roleplaying riff by all the characters – we each played both of our characters this time.  There were some plot hooks – Thuldan arms, space monkeys, the station AI fritzing – but really we just kicked stuff back and forth, introducing new complications as much as we could.  I find this session summary hilarious, it captures the command staff banter, the places Ten-Zil found to bang Angela, the many annoyances our too-proactive station AI inflicts upon us, poor St. Cloud’s assignment as Animal Control Officer…

Personally I was happy; Markus walked away with a briefcase with 100k Concord dollars as commission from the illegal cyber deal, and Captain Takashi got to have his staff meeting.  Everyone gets what they want.

I’m sure next time it’ll be a killfest again but this was a great change of pace.

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Ballad of the Monster Manual

Posted on November 20, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is totally sweet.  Check this Monster Manual music video from Dan Meth on Vimeo.

(via Topless Robot)

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D&D Players: Online Predators or Online Prey?

Posted on November 16, 2009 | 6 comments

The Thurston County Sheriff Department warns in this helpful posting [edit: they seem to have taken it down, but here’s the Google cached version] that those who indulge in “fantasy adventure games such as Dungeons & Dragons” are showing a warning sign of “possible computer crime problems.”  Along with an unusual vocabulary consisting of “computer terms, satanic phrases, sexual references…”  Or you have files ending in “GIF, JPG, BMP…” on your computer.  All this means you are likely to be victimized by online criminals.

What the hell?

Come on guys, the D&D players were the feared ones, the ones who were going to be the demented criminals, back in the ’70s and ’80s.  Who is wussing it up so much that we’re victims now?!?  That’s what we get for letting up on the Satanic killings.

To be fair this seems to be a pretty old posting.  So we still have time to reclaim the 2000’s as the bad guys and not as easy marks for Internet predators.  Roll a d20 and get out there and burn something down!  Quick!

(Courtesy Fark)

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