In case you’re one of the few who missed it, Wizards of the Coast has finally joined the Information Age and decided to make all old D&D editions available for sale electronically at D&D Classics. (It’s a white label DriveThruRPG/RPGNow site.) B1: In Search Of The Unknown is free for their launch week!
They have loads of the classic modules up already and they say they plan to get everything up there eventually. Good on them!
Bethany Razor Works It
Razor Coast, the mega-adventure by Paizo fan favorite author Nick Logue, has had a long and checkered past. But Frog God Games has it now and is running a Kickstarter to get it out the door finally! It’s in Pathfinder, but they also have Frank Mentzer (Red Box, fools!) himself working on delivering it for Swords & Wizardry too at the same time.
Razor Coast is set on an untamed coastline, with home base being a colonial power’s city and it surrounding plantations. Just on the land you have slavery, hostile natives, crocodile men, volcanoes, and monster-infested jungle to contend with. But Razor Coast, like Skull & Shackles, has a strong nautical component too. Ply the waves and fight pirates, or be a pirate and fight the navy – plus weresharks and sahuagin and other demented denizens of the deep! (You can get a sneak preview of the maps for RC on Sean MacDonald’s site!) It wouldn’t be Nick Logue if it didn’t reveal the worst side of human nature and end up in various shrieking bloodbaths.
Pele, Goddess of Fire and Wrack
The good news is that the content is pretty much all done. I was a volunteer editor originally and still am; this adventure (and all the related Indulgences and extras and whatnot) are in the can and just being fine-tuned. I just finished another round of editing the various Indulgences to make them even better. So there’s not much standing between this and release, unlike other Kickstarters that are being done completely from scratch.
Yes, it’s pricey. The hardback level is $110, but you are getting a huge tome and a lot of extras for that. Lou Agresta explains the value and all what you get on the Paizo boards if you’re interested. FGG uses a very high quality textbook printer, made in the USA, so you are paying more but get a book that won’t fall apart and whose binding isn’t mixed with the tears of child laborers. Check out the higher Kickstarter levels too, they have sweet ship models and other cool swag. They’re 2/3 of their way to goal with 19 days left, now’s the time to get in on it! If you preordered back in the day from Sinister, they’ll honor that preorder, so no worries there. You can pledge some to get other bennies though.
Dajobas, Devourer of Worlds
I’m going to be running Razor Coast as part of my Pathfinder pirate campaign (“Reavers on the Seas of Fate“) soon! Actually, I already ran one of the Indulgences that were available back originally to kick off the campaign, and you can read the extended session summary here to get a feel for the kind of adventure we’re looking at! (Well… I did zazz it up a bit myself.) I’ll be setting it south of the Shackles with Port Shaw as a Sargavan expansion port.
Do note that you don’t have to be a pirate for Razor Coast, unlike with Skull & Shackles – it works for good parties as well. In fact, it starts at level 5 (and goes up through 12+), you could capture and impress your PCs with the first chapter of Skull & Shackles and if they end up being goody-goody and don’t want to go pirate, they could flee to Port Shaw and slot right into Razor Coast! I actually used the first two chapters of Second Darkness to start my Reavers campaign and went pirate from there, out to Azlant and now to the Razor!
Maybe my PCs will see you there… Kickstart now to become on of their many victims!
Posted in talk
Tagged D&D, dungeons dragons, frog god, kickstarter, logue, OSR, Pathfinder, pirates, razor coast, RPG, RPGs, sinister, swords & wizardry
Merry Christmas! I was kicking around and found this post on the paizo.com forums with links to all the existing Pathfinder class guides out there and I thought I’d share! Here’s the link to the excellent post curated by harmor. It’s also mirrored at the d20 Min-Max wiki.
In fact, it links a mostly the same but a little more complete list, The Comprehensive Pathfinder Guides Guide from Zenith Games – check it out! Adding this puppy to my blogroll. Every class, most prestige classes, and other guides that might come in handy when coming up with Pathfinder builds.
On the RPG Stack Exchange lately, there have been a couple questions about conflict in gaming groups. Stylistic conflict, player conflict, etc. “What do I do about it?”
Seems like that in real life, people have trouble with handling these conflicts – usually, they let them fester and refuse to confront them because geeks tend to be passive-aggressive (see Five Geek Social Fallacies for more). But then on RPG.SE, we tend to get more immediate recourse to Internet tough guy syndrome where the answer is always “leave the group/kick them out! How dare they disrupt your fun, even though we have no doubt been fed an incomplete and biased view of events!” Perhaps “nothing” and “nuclear option” are not the only conflict resolution choices open to us.
You know “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten?” Well, it’s true and applicable to this situation as well. It’s been amazing how much seeing a young child go through this stage of character development has helped me as a manager at work and a GM at home. Most conflict ends up being addressable by the basic stuff you were supposed to learn in kindergarten, but apparently didn’t.
Conflict resolution. Someone’s doing something that bothers you. What do you do? Well, at my daughter’s kindergarten, they used a frog mascot named Kelso who had a number of Kelso’s Choices you should select from to handle conflict without escalating it. “Try two of these before calling an adult.”
Next time you have a problem in your gaming group – try two of these options before escalating, please. No, seriously, these really are the civilized answers to virtually every problem you’re going to have with another player or GM or play group. If you can’t exercise kindergarten level conflict management, then probably seeking others’ help won’t really get you very far – reteaching people the basics of human interaction is pretty out of scope for most of daily life.
I might venture that there’s one choice that can be viable in the scope of RPGs that isn’t just plain ol’ kindergarten behaving, which lies in the distinction between in-game and out of game. Sometimes in-game conflict bleeds into out of game conflict or vice versa. So you might also consider more strongly firewalling in game behavior, or even crafting it to sublimate the out of game behavior. In the same way that nothing relieves some intra-group tension like some Quake deathmatching where you get to shoot at each other, a clever GM/players can set up in-game situations to generate desired outcomes.
In my long term AD&D 2e “Night Below” campaign, we had a problem player. He would flip out about in-game things and then get really agitated in real life. I remember once a tribe of hobgoblins captured the party and made them go in and fight a cave full of orcs. They killed the orcs and bundled up the treasure, but left their couple thousand copper pieces hoping that might placate their former captors as they snuck out a side tunnel. This player, I think it is fair to say, “freaked the hell out.” He went mental. He was yelling. “IF WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE THE COPPER WE SHOULD LEAVE ALL THE REST HERE TOO!” All the rest of the players were very uncomfortable. Shortly after, they went into a forest and in a fit of demented pique he ran up and hugged a wraith till it energy drained him to death. Then he went home.
I figured that flameout was the last I’d hear from him, but he called me up mid-week and said “I have a great idea for a new character!”
I said, “Uh, well, we’ll have to talk about that…”
“I know what my last character’s problem was!”
“Really?” Maybe he’s learned, I told myself.
“Yeah, he was way too much of a team player! My next character is an assassin!”
“Jesus Christ,” I thought to myself while facepalming. But then inspiration struck.
“OK, great. You’re an assassin of the Scarlet Brotherhood. You’ve been sent to spy on the PCs and find out what they’re discovering about the Underdark. You have to totally get into their confidence and convince them you’re their good cleric friend. Send Scarlet Brotherhood HQ letters about what they’re up to every week. Never break your cover!”
This worked better than it had any right to. The player then “pretended” to be a helpful good cleric 100% of the time. Then he’d snicker at night as he wrote his poison pen letters back to HQ. The rest of the players though I must have subjected him to some North Korean style torture or something for him to shape up so fast.
Other games, too, are more explicitly PvP or shared-story – Amber Diceless Roleplay and Fiasco come to mind – where as long as people get together well enough that they don’t just attack each other when they enter the same room, you can perhaps avoid the need for a pure buddy-collaboration feeling on the parts of players not fit for it.
This is a bit of an advanced topic and requires subtlety and brinkmanship, however, so you’re usually good sticking to Kelso’s Choices.
Epic level rules in D&D have always sucked. Usually they’re just bad rules, but also no one ever really gets to those levels – I’ve been playing D&D in various states with various groups since the 1980s and have yet to play any character over level 16. And they don’t end up really simulating much. The superheroes of myth, Perseus et al., they don’t usually show the totally “uber” attributes of a high level character. They’re just special.
Paizo had a massive flash of inspiration around this problem. “Hey, what if there’s levels of mythic type, proto-deity power, but those work at low levels? So you could be Perseus, the fifth level fighter demigod, where a cyclops or whatever is still a real threat, unlike if he were level 25?” And thence came the new Mythic Adventures rules for Pathfinder, available for free download and up for discussion in the playtest forums.
Now of course, it wouldn’t be D&D 3.5e/Pathfinder if they didn’t take a cool idea and mechanize it all to hell – “You need four greater and seven lesser trials to gain the 7th mythic tier, and if you complete one in excess you regain a use of your mythic power” – which can threaten to turn the sweet idea into more number crunching. But I plan on giving it a good solid read and, who knows, maybe even playtest it. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to use, as I prefer lower level play because of the more human, less videogamey feel and the lower complexity. But say “E6+M3″… Now that’s something.
I was initially put off by the path names, thinking “well what about character type X?” But as I looked at it, they are pretty wide ranging. I can see a niche character (alchemist?) having problems but I tried to map my Reavers party to them, and I think Sindawe the monk/pirate captain would be a Champion (he focuses more on ass-kick and less on leading people, so not really a Marshal), Wogan the cleric of Gozreh would be a Hierophant, Tommy the assassin would be a Trickster. Serpent the druid/ranger/barbarian is the hard one, I didn’t think there was a fit, but after reading Guardian more in depth it really fits him. The fluff on that one doesn’t really do it justice. Although with each of them, I could see them making an argument for one of the others depending on how they wanted to spin themselves.
Check ’em out, see how you like ’em!
First Session (11 page pdf) – Finally, civilization! Well, at least the rice paddy and hamlet intensive outskirts of civilization. We roleplay our attempt to recruit allies, but nothing gets you allies like murdering a lot of people. So we do that.
The first part of the session was more treasure distribution, getting faction points from the named NPCs, giving them presents, etc. Many of the Paizo APs have been anemic in the treasure department in the past. Not so this one! Check out the current incarnation of our patented treasure spreadsheet – we have pulled in a lot of loot and stand to see more once we get to a place with walls where we can sell off.
Then we headed like a thousand miles through the Forest of Spirits. Miyaro and the kami kept us largely safe. There was a big storm, though, and I finally got to use my Order of the Dragon samurai power to add a big Survival bonus on inclement weather into the mix. The GM calculated the storm would about wipe out the caravan, but once we pulled out the sashimono of comfort and all our Survival skills, it was only mildly banged up. Once we hit the grasslands I had to take a RP moment to gallop about on my mount Akumu with Miyaro. Poor mount, he gets so little opportunity to be around in this AP.
Then we went and bantered with a ronin who will aid us against the Jade Regent. Yoshihiro rolled pretty hard on him; the adventure seems to want you to suck up to him but I was just like, “So how would you like a chance to regain your honor?”
And then we do what we do best – hit a fortress and kill bandits. Our quick recon set us up great, we d-doored into a storage room next to the main dormitory at night and V’lk murdered most of them including a sub-boss in their sleep. We fought a couple and then another group with their leader Gangasum (which immediately led us to Gangnam Style references) and put him down without much fuss. Yay planning. But then a druid and weretiger bust out! More next time…
Posted in session summaries
Tagged asian, D&D, jade regent, kami, oni, Paizo, Pathfinder, ronin, RPG, RPGs, session summary, story hour
Sixth Session (7 page pdf) – At the heart of the House of the Withered Blossoms, we find the oni Munascuru, and fight her and her children for the kami and for glory!
The first fight took a long time – I arrowed the hell out of the oni and Bjorn dropped her, but the chain devils up near the ceiling were like AC 31 or something once the cover’s figured in, and they have DR. Took Gobo putting an align weapon on my bow to finally dispense with it. Everyone else was occupied trying to kill a mostly dead but regenerating oni the whole time – by the rules it’s remarkably hard to finish them off while you’re still in combat.
My favorite part of that fight was us trying to cover up for the fact that we have an invisible rogue around.
V’lk casts greater invisibility and runs over to help Bjorn with the archers. Bjorn lands a flurry of blows on an archer, wounding him, and suddenly a bunch more wounds appear, spraying blood, and the archer falls. “Sword of the North Star style!” Bjorn yells and runs after another archer. This one obtains an array of wounds from the invisible V’lk before Bjorn even gets there. “Precognitive Sword Strike!” he yells as he hacks away at him.
As most final boss fights are, the fight with Munascuru was short but brutal. We almost misjudged badly, we buffed up and busted into her lair based on intel from the prisoners – to find out her lair is a whole sub-dungeon, we ran to and fro trying to find her before our 1/round buffs expired!
Once we busted in on her it was a true team effort. I charge her and smite her badly, Jacob flies up and breathes a line of fire on her, Bjorn comes in with a full attack routine, and V’lk stab-murders her invisibly from behind. She got in one shot – a crit with a naginata which probably would have killed me outright. However, one of my newest samurai tricks is to throw off a critical hit using my resolve!
The rest is all wrapup. The spirit possessing V’lk leaves and gives him a free weapon proficiency. He takes wakizashi as it fits his two-weapon fighting style so I gave him my magical one, Whispering Shrike, to commemorate the occasion (he got the kill shot in on Munascuru). Hiro is moving from his “glory for me!” origins into a “all for one, one for all” guy along the lines of what the Order of the Dragon dictates.
Now, it’s on to the penultimate chapter, Tide of Honor, where we recruit help to take back Minkai!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged adventure path, asian, D&D, jade regent, kami, oni, Paizo, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs, session summary, story hour
Fifth Session (9 page pdf) – We do just fine against the real encounters of hobgoblins and oni, but the BS nuisance wandering monstery group of four destrachans nearly TPKs us.
I was grumpy about this session. We had a couple things go wrong that made it not-so-fun for me.
The first was purely interpersonal. People were just super distracted. Bruce was Skyping in but the connection and mike were awful and so he couldn’t hear us, we heard him but also got weird noises and feedback. People were making comical amounts of noise on both ends of the line, too, and just not really bothering to not interrupt the GM or other players, or pay attention in general. There was one time during a combat round that I was trying to announce my damage to the GM and got interrupted before I could get it out 5 times from people on both sides of the call. I really was one more away from just saying “fuck it, I’m leaving.” It’s not really even about the game, if I get interrupted 5 times in any other situation I tend to assume my contribution is clearly not valued.
The second was the setup. I don’t really like three month long dungeon crawls, but Paizo insists on inflicting them on us. This one was nicely tactical so far, and we have gotten our enjoyment out of plying tactics vs our opponents. Well, this time, despite having our rogue scout ahead and being wary, we just got plopped on the battlemat pretty much surrounded by four destrachans. The positioning seemed to be more of a function of “well you can only be 20′ away and still fit on the map tile.” And of course they about killed us. 8d6 sonic at will overlapping all of us, plus in this situation it caused a cave-in. In a cave-in, you can do nothing. Most of us spent the encounter buried in rocks. Boring and deadly, yay. And it’s not clear how that makes sense or how they got here.
These two fed on each other – we only did 3 encounters the whole day because of the disarray, and one of them being a suckburger made the session overall not great.
There were some high points. We found the cute little kami’s bonsai tree. And we found statues we could stone to flesh and talk to; the one we destoned seems to be Harwynian’s soul mate.
We play again tomorrow, I’m sure it was just a one time “bad day” thing and the next one will be fine. Even with a good group and good material, not every session’s a winner! You just have to get back in the saddle.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged adventure path, asian, D&D, jade regent, Paizo, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs, session summary, story hour
My friend Kevin asked me to run a game for his 12-year-old son and his friends this weekend. They’ve been getting vaguely interested in RPGs (I think he gave him both the 4e and Pathfinder Beginner’s Boxes) and wanted a) an experienced DM to run and b) him to have a chance to actually game with his son et al, both for the fun of it and also to show in a non-DM role “how to do stuff.”
I was like, “Twelve year old boys eh? OK, I know what to run,” and pulled out the Paizo Free RPG Day adventure “We Be Goblins,” (I had it in print but it’s also available as a free download from paizo.com) where the PCs are goblins sent to get some fireworks from a boat in the swamp. As many of you know, Pathfinder goblins are insane little melon-headed pyromaniacs that sing violent songs, like pointy things, and are generally demented little balls of energy.
It went great! Of course they were trying to kill each other before they had fully read their characters’ descriptions. As there were 5 players, I cloned Mogmurch the alchemist goblin into two brothers, Mogmurch and Mogmarch, with completely identical stats and backstory (except that their wives’ names are Rempty and Rumpty, also twins).
The dad played Reta the big fightery goblin (of course the one left unpicked due to being female) and the others played the rogue (Chuffy), cleric (Poog), and the two alchemists.
They got totally into it starting with the “Dares” at the opening bonfire, which is like Fear Factor for goblins. First was “Dance with Squealy Nord,” where they have to rodeo-ride a squealing piglet for three rounds. I like it when serendipity arises from dice rolls and snap GM calls – each goblin that tried, the first round the pig ran around and they managed to hold on. Then the second round, it jumped back and forth, and they all made that roll too. On the third round was when they all failed, so the first time I said it had run by a root sticking out of the wall of the mud pit and clotheslined the goblin off. Second goblin, same thing, because “goblins don’t learn.” Third goblin, same thing – it was the big-headed gobliness so I ruled that she tried to duck but there wasn’t enough clearance between the root and pig so off she went too. Finally the last goblin (Mogmurch) made all three rolls and won the rodeo and everyone was really stoked.
Then they tried the “Eat A Bag Of Bull Slugs Real Quick” dare. Three goblins managed to get 1-2 of them down before puking. Finally Chuffy managed to eat all five, but at the cost of failing a save to become sickened for 24 hours, so he fled to an outhouse with projectile diarrhea. They came and pushed his prize (the chief’s magic dogslicer) under the door. The gross factor was also a big yuck-but-hit with the lads. “You hear a sound like ‘ptthpthppttthhhAIEEEEEEEEE’ coming from the outhouse,” I said.
Then it got even more hilarious. They played “Hide Or Get Clubbed,” which is like Hide and Seek but if you get found the goblins that find you give you the Rodney King treatment. Each goblin took a turn hiding and the others looked. The funny thing is that we went around, and they’d fail, fail, fail, but then the sick goblin, Chuffy, would make the roll. Each time I said that he ran out of the outhouse, found them in their log or tree or pile of skulls, whacked them with the club and then ran right back into the outhouse and slammed the door. Finally it was his turn to hide, and he rolled super high on his Stealth and no one came near it. I said that he declared he’d go hide and went into the outhouse. They ran over and opened the door but he wasn’t there! They had the presence of mind to look up to see if he was lurking ninja style, but he wasn’t. They wandered around looking for him in vain till time was declared, at which point Chuffy surfaced from within the latrine. They came and slid the next prize under the outhouse door. A double big hit.
Then came the “Rusty Earbiter”, a tunnel of blades and barbed wire to crawl through. Poog tried it first and kept rolling natural 1’s on his Escape Artist checks (which I ruled to be ear loss, the module was lamer and just gives damage for missed checks) – he lost an ear, got stuck got stuck some more, and lost another ear. They had to drag his unconscious body out of the thing. And then Chuffy came sprinting out of the outhouse. Being smeared with poo gave him a +2 (no really that’s in the module) and he totally went through it immediately and ran back into the outhouse. The third prize (he won 3/4) was pushed under the door.
Now, this was an opportunity for envy and maybe scuffling over one guy winning three of the prizes, but it was done with enough flair that no one was sad.
The next morning they were kicked awake, except for the sickened Chuffy who was still awake and hating it in the outhouse, and sent on their task. As they went through the swamp they all decided they were going to try to collect frogs/bugs/fish so I had then roll Survival – high meant yes, fail meant no, low meant something scary or unfortunate requiring them all to run away. And Poog rolled a natural 1 – not his first, and not his last this session. The boy had the knack for it. Anyway, he was trying to catch frogs and snakes when the giant spider they had heard lived in the swamp, “Lotslegs Eat Goblin Babies Many,” descended upon him. He ran for it and the “Boom Brothers,” the alchemist goblins, bombed it while Reta shot arrows. It closed with them and bit a couple when Poog came around the side and Burning Handsed it bad. It fled into the swamp and they ravaged off in pursuit. When they found its deadfall lair, Reta used a Desnan candle (firework like a Roman Candle) to try to flush it out and natural-20’d it, blowing its head off. They looted all the goblin and human bodies around, and showed great inventiveness in picking body parts from humans and spiders to take along (Poog was constantly trying on new items to use as replacement prosthetic ears).
They got to the shipwreck, wandered towards it, and got attacked by Stomp the horse. Now, they’d done plenty of collateral damage on their own party with the alchemists’ bombs before but it was about to ramp up. Chuffy nearly one-shotted the horse with his magic horsebane dogslicer, and then Mogmarch finished it off with a bomb that also hurt about everything else. Mogmurch his brother had lit a skyrocket with the hopes of killing the horse, and he said “the explosion makes me let go of the rocket headed back towards Mogmarch.” So the skyrocket shot out and exploded, but it has a large radius and so all the goblins were caught in that as well! Both Mogmurch and Mogmarch went down. The party blamed Mogmarch and Poog was going to just heal Mogmurch, but he made a natural 1 on his Perception and accidentally healed the wrong one (they are twins after all!).
This was where it was good the dad was playing. Though they were having fun, they all wanted to “kill Mogmarch” – I think it was 50% his continual damaging of them with the bombs but 50% just boy interpersonal dynamics, he was definitely the low man on the social totem pole in the group. Dad/Reta declared “Anyone kill Mogmarch, Reta kill them!” and that plus residual dad-authority got us back on track. Of course, then Mogmarch was the only one who figured out the next trap was a wasp’s nest and decided to not tell anyone. (He was kinda asking for it).
While the rest of them ran around being stung by wasps, the dad and his son went on deck and fought a pair of dogs – Reta has special anti dog powers and they killed both. Poog came running up at the end, it’s his life goal to kill a dog, but the son landed the last blow right before he got there. “Noooooooo!” he said, but then the huge dog Cuddles attacked. Humorously, the group killed it after a couple rounds of fighting but Poog could just not land a single blow.
Then Vorka the cannibal gobliness and her pet giant toad attacked. She spider climbed to the rigging and started tossing produce flames at them. The kid running Chuffy was using his gear like a pro. From the chief’s robe of useful items he pulled out a ladder and climbed up to her. He rolled a natural 1 on the climb check though so I ruled she just pushed the ladder back and he came smacking back down on the deck. But he leapt up, drank a potion of jump, and leapt up into the rigging to fight her with thechief’s ring of climbing to help ( in the intervening round she tried to summon a swarm, but Mogmurch interrupted it with a bomb).
Down on deck things were going poorly though. Her first produce flame took Mogmarch out. Then the frog took Mogmurch to negative and swallowed him. Then took Reta to negatives and swallowed her. Then swallowed Poog – “There’s always room for goblins!” But Poog was alive – he did a burning hands inside the frog, which hurt it but also caused hitpoint loss and loud objections from the other two dying goblins in there. But the next round he went to 0 hp but managed to cut his way out with that last staggered action. The frog hopped around angrily but couldn’t swallow; three goblins stabilized at negative and one (Mogmarch) was plain dead.
In the rigging it was round after round of Chuffy cutting at the cannibal and her threatening to roast and eat his <face, thighs, buttocks, lips, intestines, nipples>. As a rogue he had a good touch AC, but she was hitting him 1/3 rounds and doing a lot of damage each time. He was hitting her half the time but his damage was 1d4 and she was made of hit points.
Finally he stabbed her and brought her to 0 hp! Everyone cheered! And she used her staggered action to drink a potion of healing. Everyone shrieked! Then they fought another couple rounds. He stabbed her right in the same place and brought her to 0 hp! Everyone cheered again! And she used her staggered action to drink another potion of healing (she had three!). Everyone shrieked again! Then more fighting. Finally he hit her enough to take her to -1. I said, “You stab her in the chest again right in the same place! She pulls out another healing potion to drink it. But then you twist your dogslicer and she sprays blood out of her mouth and falls to the deck below!”
Everyone was psyched. The combat went long enough that the players of the dead/unconscious goblins were wandering around and looking at books and miniatures and not paying a huge amount of attention for a while, but once the “She’s at zero… Now she’s not!” started they came back and were glued to the action.
The frog ran off and Chuffy managed to scrape together enough healing to get the three non-dead goblins mobile. They were all happy Mogmarch was dead, but gave him a good sendoff by strapping his body to a skyrocket and shooting it off. “He died as he lived,” they remarked as he exploded for the last time.
As usual goblin looting is a frenzy of who can make initiative and Perception checks first. In true goblin style every time they were looting it was free for all – even when the chief gave them fireworks it was initiative for each person to grab something they liked. Chuffy found a crystal flask shaped like a heart, which even 12 year olds immediately identified as a love potion. This was awesome because when they went back, the Chief declared that Chuffy, who had clearly been the bravest in the whole thing, was to wed his daughter—the fearsomely corpulent and ferociously lusty Gupy Wartbits. “DRINK THE POTION!” counseled his friends, and he chugged it down. “Sounds great! When’s the wedding?” Poog declared his intent to take Mogmarch’s stuff and wife and burn down his hut, which caused Mogmarch’s player to strangle him around the neck, but that was all quelled by some parental scolding.
It ran about 5 hours, 2 to 7 PM. This would make a great con module and is certainly a good introduction for kids new to the game – they loved it, and only a couple had any experience with the rules.
The only downside there was that 3.5/PF is so frickin complicated, I tried to keep it simple but even in this adventure there’s a lot of touch ACing and poisoning and splash damage and… Ah, for a true Basic D&D again (and no, those 4e/PF box sets don’t count, they are still 100% more complex than Basic). The dad is torn on whether to try to just get old Basic stuff and have them play it, but that’s hard to get much of nowadays.
He talked to me about 5e, his take is a lot like mine in that it seems “OK” but they’re not resisting the urge to overcomplicate the base game and he hasn’t seen anything about the playtest that has that spark that says “Cool I want to play this specifically.” So he’s trying to set his son and his friends up for some good gaming, but is at a crossroads there. They all had a really good time, mostly paid attention the whole way through, and left excited to go to the game store and buy minis, so mission accomplished I reckon!
I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and thought I’d share the good ones. I’ll be honest, I didn’t use to listen to podcasts. I read faster than I listen so considered it simply lazy production. But with my new job I have a commute pushing an hour so it’s a great thing to fill the gap with. (Video podcasts are still out for this reason…)
Dirty secret, I only listen to podcasts I can get on iTunes. Why? I’m a single dad with a challenging job and most of my RPG hobby time I spend doing something actually useful like playing or GMing or writing content. Fiddling around with people’s Web sites and manually downloading crap is right out.
Game publishers – you want to support podcasts. Hearing people talk in depth about products is better than any marketing. I was very cool towards the Pathfinder MMO and I had picked up Night’s Dark Agents (Ken Hite) in the game store and put it down again. But then Chronicles’ GenCon recording about the MMO and RPPR’s discussion of Night’s Dark Agents (I didn’t know it used the Blowback pyramid and had decent combat rules!) sold me on those products.
Without further ado, here’s my favorites.
Chronicles: Pathfinder Podcast – it’s irregular and when they do come out it’s these 3-7 hour long monster episodes (hint: audio editing software allows you to release that as 7 1 hour episodes!) but it’s got great Pathfinder coverage, they go over AP chapters in depth, get the authors on, detail fixing the problems with it, etc. As a Pathfinder GM I get the most direct use out of this podcast.
Role Playing Public Radio – they have both a discussion podcast and an Actual Play podcast. I prefer the discussion – most Actual Plays are very hard to listen to without headphones and using a lot of mental CPU to overcome the audio problems endemic to the format. But the great thing about them is that they do a wide variety of games. CoC, Eclipse Phase, Wild Talents, and more. Loads of shout outs to RPGs and other genre stuff they come across and like. And they come out weekly!
Geek In Review – Geek talk from RPGs to movies to TV to politics. Comes out religiously every week. Very knowledgeable commentators. Has become my first weekly go-to podcast.
Others Worth Mentioning
Podcasts I’ve run across and listened to some of.
So in honor of my newfound love of gaming podcasts, I’ve added a new Podcasts section to my links, check them all out!
Back in 2009, noted Paizo freelance author Nick Logue started Sinister Adventures, a small imprint which announced a great-looking product, the pirate mega-adventure Razor Coast. Sadly, it was colossally mismanaged and closed its doors in 2011 without having delivered.
However, the manuscript showed promise and Lou Agresta did a huge amount of development work (for free I might add) to try to save it at the time. I was one of the volunteer editors and it definitely was shaping up well.
So Nick has come back to the States and is paying some attention again and has said “Sorry I was such a doofus” (I’m paraphrasing), paid off refunds, and Lou got Frog God Games to pick the thing up as a Kickstarter starting on Christmas!
It’s a good play. If I didn’t personally know the state of the manuscript I’d be staying way the hell away from this – “I know I colossally screwed it up once, but let’s try again” is the uninspiring clarion call of various sad sacks of the RPG industry. But it’s reasonably close to completion, and as long as they keep on top of the schedule, this could be sweet. Certainly the Paizo faithful are eager to pour money into anything they do (the hugely successful Paizo MMO Kickstarter where you don’t even get the game for your pledge proves that). So maybe Razor Coast will see the light of day after all.
Just one caution. Kickstarter is in a huge bubble right now. The RPG industry in general is all over patronages and pledges and kickstarters and all. But it just takes a couple where people mess it up and don’t come through to tarnish it for everyone.
I personally am wrestling over pulling out of the Open Designs “Dark Deeds in Freeport” patronage. I love Freeport but the project (started in 2010) has been plagued with designer turnover (“Previous one just disappeared”) and delays; two years in it’s unclear what’s going on. When head Kobold Wolfgang Baur is asked about progress and schedule, the answer is “I don’t know! I’ll refund you if you want.”
Well, I was going to bail, and it’s only the fact that that very day I got the email that the other Open Design patronage project I was in (Journeys to the West) had finished and would ship stopped me, raising their cred just above my waterline. Kickstarters/patronage projects get you seed money but they don’t reduce AT ALL your need to project manage the heck out of a product to get it out.
I hope FGG structures this so they’re not putting Nick on the critical path for anything, and that this one doesn’t become the thing that gives RPG kickstarters a bad name. With how much companies are starting to go all in on that model, if public opinion turned it could really hurt a lot of people in the industry very quickly. It’s a somewhat fragile trust-based mechanism to convince people to pay you up front – something that historically has been an awful bet in the RPG industry – and it’d be easy to convince people that “wait till it shows up in the store to plunk down money” is the more prudent course.
Anyway, let’s see if Razor Coast can finish out super strong! The third party ecosystem for Pathfinder has oddly been shying away from adventures and adventure paths – that’s maybe 20% of their output and they tend to focus on rules splatbooks just like the ones we all didn’t buy back in the 3.5e days – and since you can never have too much adventure, a third party AP that is a credible major success would encourage that!
Posted in talk
Tagged D&D, fgg, frog god, kickstarter, Pathfinder, razor coast, RPG, RPGs, sinister
This video has Mike Rugnetta from PBS’ Idea Channel. He uses Heidegger and Vin Diesel to prove that playing D&D makes you an all around better person. Just in time for Romney to pull all his funding.
Via Topless Robot
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