The yearly RPG awards are coming around again. Check out the list of nominees. If a good product you know isn’t in there, send this link to the publisher and get them to submit themselves – there’s only a bit to go, May 8 is the deadline. Last year Paizo humiliated all the competition but this year all they have submitted is paizo.com and the Ultimate Combat playtest for some reason so it’s an open field!
Eighth Session (8 page pdf) – “The Devil’s Elbow” – The PCs make some unlikely allies as they brave a remote island seemingly inhabited by beings from beyond time and space. All this and more, in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate.
The PCs shack up with Clegg Zincher in an unlikely alliance. Tommy really, really wants to kill Zincher, to the point where his player’s emailing me lengthy assassination plots to ask what I think about them. But apparently he and his men are the only other people on this Godforsaken island.I had fun with the players’ interaction with him. He doesn’t hate them like they hate him, he’s on top and they work for some guy he has had to put in his place a couple times. Just business from his point of view. And whenever the players got too sassy I had him just let out a big wiseguy “Ayyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
Plus, Tommy was suffering from void death from the bite of the tentacle-dogs. He was remarkably submissive about being strapped to a cot in the infirmary tent with two other infected as a precautionary measure. Sindawe kindly decided to go in there and sit up with him.
My chase rules come in handy in all kinds of circumstances – the PCs got attacked by tentacle dogs in the woods and hightailed it to the beach. They did well and got to the sand just as the dogs attacked. I then made Arbitrary Surf Checks – the waves came in and out, moving the water line up and back 1d6 squares each round. That made it lively.
The rest was just island exploration. Slow paced, but I like mixing up big action pieces with lulls that build tension. Next time, a big finish!
Forty-second Session – Tendril falls to the Externals. We send the Red Queen to Mantebron to figure out what the Externals want with the Glassmaker artifacts there – apparently they’ve extracted an alien superweapon. We risk our lives to go down to the ruins ourselves, and find out nothing that wasn’t already obvious. Then we weigh the odds – two alien fortress ships against one party of PCs. The B Team decides “We can take ’em!” All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!
I missed the first part of the session, resulting in the rest of the party getting chewed up by alien dogs. When a glass spider asks which one of them it should implant with horrid alien devices, Peppin and Taveer both fall all over themselves volunteering. On the basis that Peppin “sounds like you already have at least two people in there already,” Taveer is chosen and as usual plays it up to the hilt. Finally I arrive and the grenades start flying, and we finish out crawling the Glassmaker ruin, for all the good it did us. We got a lengthy description of how unstoppable the obviously unstoppable weapon the Externals got is, which we knew already, and that they are gathering Ancient artifacts for some fell purpose, which we knew already, and that they want to make the Deepfallen on Bluefall disintegrate everyone on the planet, which we knew already.
Finally we head out, and Markus talked everyone else into taking a run at the fortress ship. If it gets out of here with that weapon then there’s no way we can ever take it in a space combat. The ship is still partially splayed open to install it so I figure if we can get on there and sabotage it, fire it off before it’s well seated and have it rip the ship apart, or set off a nuke by it, or shoot it into the other fortress ship, or something, then we can remove the threat. And the B Team is the group of people to do it!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
Speaking of Necromancer Games, they had put out three volumes of good monsters in the 3.5e days called Tome of Horrors I-III. Well, now all three are being published in one super huge volume by Frog God Games, The Tome of Horrors Complete, in either Pathfinder or Swords & Wizardry formats!
The thing is huge, and is now preordering for $90. It’ll be over 1000 pages and have 750 or so monsters in it. And you get a PDF version along with of course. Get this, and never want more monsters again! At least in August, when it comes out.
There’s a good post by Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games on ENWorld where he explains how he got converted from the “biggest non-WotC cheerleader of 4e” to saying “bah” and now planning to support Pathfinder.
WotC has perfected the art of screwing things up with this edition. Hopefully all of Mearls’ Legends & Lore columns asking people about how they really like to play (hint: not the 4e way, is the general tenor of the responses) will culminate in a better D&D 5e sooner rather than later. And perhaps whoever is in WotC legal (and marketing, and product planning) will get tied to some railroad tracks.
[Edit: Never mind, this was an especially douchebaggy April Fool’s joke by Louis Porter. But he’s apologized for the lapse in judgement, so water under the bridge.]
If you haven’t been keeping up, Nick Logue’s Sinister Adventures was working up a mega pirate adventure called Razor Coast that had great potential. Preorders were taken. Nick kept dropping the ball, and Lou Agresta picked it up and whipped the manuscript into shape. I was one of the two volunteer proofers on the project, and I really believe in the product.
But then Lou (and we!) delivered the product back to Nick, and it continued to languish, and finally the Sinister Web site went down for the last time. All seemed lost.
But in Louis Porter Jr’s latest blog post, he hints with his trademark subtlety (which is to say, not at all subtly) that he’s involved in it somehow and will be bringing it to market! That would be amazing. I’m glad it worked out, he did kinda bust Logue’s balls a couple times about the whole fiasco, I’m glad Nick saw that it was justified instead of backing away.
Razor Coast should be amazing – and I’ve read it! I hope it got a little cleaning up since the last version I saw, but it’ll definitely be many, many sessions of gaming goodness for those who partake, if it is finally going to see the light of day.
Forty-first Session – The Lighthouse is going to Cambria to meet the Medurr, but is knocked out of drivespace early and has to head off an alien setup. Then we throw our Picts into battle against the kroath! Under 50% losses is a victory in our book. The Medurr sign on to the Verge Alliance, and we plot strategy. All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!
Bruce (Taveer, Lambert Fulson) has taken to attending the game via Skype, because he’s too much of a wuss to drive from Dallas to Austin every weekend. Since we upgraded to a HD camera it works pretty well, and when he starts gibbering we can mute him, which makes the game go smoother than previously even.
We discover the Medurr have a drivespace denial weapon, which we thought was impossible, in addition to the riftships we had thought were impossible. The N’sss conduct a transparent “We’re attacking the Medurr and we must be treacherous humans” ploy, which we foil by blowing up one of their ghost ships. Then they dump a bunch of kroath on the Medurr, and the big tough Klingon centaurs start whining like bitches. So we finally pop the tab on all those insane Pict warriors we brought on board in Lucullus and start the kill.
We finished that up pretty quickly, and then burned two hours debating where to send our various battle groups to in order to defend the Verge from the “alien fleets so massive you can’t beat a single one of them,” to hear the GM tell it. Sigh.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
Between going to SXSW and my college roommate coming into town, I haven’t had much blogging time, as I always prioritize real gaming over talking about it! Luckily for you things are calming down, so there is a rash of session summaries coming this week. Once I’m through the backlog, I’ll try to do something else interesting.
In other gaming related news, I’ve been reading a lot of good stuff with gaming take-aways. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, is brilliant, and is basically Unknown Armies, the novel! The ancient gods are real, and there are “instances’ of them in America, but as they’re not worshipped any more they largely live among us and work in Quickie Marts. It’s must read material if you’re running any modern occult game.
I’ve also been reading both C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels as well as their sci-fi stepchild, David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels. You know, sometimes you think “What, novels from the 1930s? Must be lame!” but these rock. Weber’s novels are interesting too – they manage to make SF space combat interesting in a tactical sense, which is a refreshing change, even if his interpersonal writing is a little too “Heinleiny,” as I think of it.
These are giving me loads of inspiration for my Admiral Ken Takashi character in the Lighthouse campaign! I’m becoming more of a Navy prig with each novel. Inspired by these books, I sent an unprovoked email to our GM the other day, reading:
Request to Convene Officer Selection Board
From: Admiral Ken Takashi, Commanding Officer, Verge Alliance Starship Lighthouse
To: Verge Alliance Lords of the Admiralty
Subject: Request to Convene Officer Selection Board
1. I would like to respectfully request that an Officer Selection Board be convened with the purpose of evaluation of Commander Martin St. John’s fitness for promotion to the rank of Captain.
2. I would like to further submit the following information for consideration in addition to the Commander’s record on file.
a. Commander St. John has served under me with distinction aboard the Lighthouse for many years and enjoys my personal confidence and recommendation.
b. His record for command and bravery as well as discretion is without question, and includes the recent rescue of Admiral Rastaad from the occupied Hammer’s Star system.
c. He has led ships during a number of spaceborne engagements with hostile forces including the pacification of pirates in the Corrivale system and destruction of numerous klick vessels in the Hammer’s Star system.
3. The exact date of the Lighthouse’s return to Bluefall is unclear due to the exigencies of the current conflict, but I respectfully request that such a Board be scheduled for the earliest possible opportunity.
4. I sincerely believe that Commander St. John’s record indicates the highest standards of excellence of command and request that the board deliberate these when deciding upon the Commander’s selection for promotion to Captain.
Signed,
Adm. Ken Takashi
I’m sure he thinks I’ve flipped my lid. But I can’t wait to tell one of the other bridge officers to “Please convey my compliments to Commander St. John on that last missile barrage.”
Fortieth Session -The B Team takes the Red Queen to Ptolemy and has to whip the crazy cyber-lovin’ women manning her into shape. Once we get there, the pirates are shacked up with the aliens, so we set an inescapable trap for them. And we buy Taveer a lap dance. All this and more in this fortnight’s session of our Alternity Star*Drive campaign, The Lighthouse!
The Red Queen is as crazy as ever – the ship from the Last Warhulk, but run by a crazy “Alice” AI who thinks everything is in fantasyland. Her new “handmaidens” are a bunch of Nariac cultists with so much cyber that they go nuts from cykosis at the drop of a hat. They are pacifists, but conveniently have all sorts of hideous weapons implanted for when they go bugfuck crazy. Which they do.
Then we infiltrate the pirate flagship. My favorite part was when we burst onto the bridge, where the pirate captain and his External handlers were chilling.
Markus shouts out, “Alien collaborator says what?” and flings a pulse grenade into the midst of them.
Exciting!
We laid a good trap for the pirates. We figured that if we just jumped a battle group in, the pirates would jump right out. But then their stardrives need to recharge. So we figured out their rally point, staged a diversionary attack so they’d flee, and had our battle group waiting for them at their rally point. Whap!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged alternity, lighthouse, RPG, RPGs, scifi, SF, stardrive
It’s been a while since my last installment in my RPGs as Sports series, but while I was at SXSW Interactive last week a little cutie I met on a shuttle bus introduced me to a cool tool that got me thinking.
Gaming group management is a pain, and the few tools that exist to help with it suck. I’ve used Yahoo groups and other such things and that’s pretty much state of the art. But you know who has the exact same problems we do? Sports teams, especially rec teams. You need to keep up with a team roster, get info out to people (players and parents and whatnot) on games, share files, see who’s bringing snacks, even possibly collect dues. (I have a friend who manages a rec soccer team and getting the money out of the damn deadbeats for the ref fees is never ending.) Enter TeamSnap. It’s designed for people putting together sports teams, but has pages on using it for clubs and other stuff.
I used to run the FORGE, the local gaming club in Memphis, and boy I wish this had been around then. It does rosters, game scheduling, tracking player availability (scheduling games around our schedules is hard nowadays isn’t it old gaffers?), forums and messaging, player stats (think XP), photo and file sharing, payment collection, refreshment scheduling, shit it even has an iPhone app. Every bit of it is useful for a gaming group or organized play club. And it’s way slicker than anything aimed at the RPG sector specifically.
If you are having trouble scheduling games with your group, give it a try (most of the features are free) and see if it helps! I may try to talk my group into it…
Greetings, faithful readers! It’s been quiet around here because for the last week I’ve been at SXSW Interactive, the most bad ass tech conference in the world, in the most bad ass city in the world, Austin, TX.
Most of my time was spent in Important Technology Pursuits Well Lubricated With Free Alcohol, but the geek in me came out as I wandered by a booth in the Screenburn Arcade featuring a new Traveller-based MMO for the iPhone, Traveller AR. (AR stands for Augmented Reality.) It’s got an old school hex map and both trading and combat, and is being done by a bunch of folks with fondness for the tabletop RPG. In fact, who did I get to meet in their booth? None other than Loren Wiseman! (Middle rear in the pic below.)
Traveller!
There are few people with more Traveller chops than him (really only one, Marc Miller himself). You can go sign up for the beta, but hurry, it begins in April.
Also, for some weird reason, Mayfair Games had a booth showing off Settlers of Catan and their new America version. Good to see the old school games representing in the new world!
Aren’t third party D&D publishers doing fine? No, we mean third party publishers for 4e. So you can see the problem.
Chris Dias wrote this Open Letter to WotC: Save 3rd Party Dungeons and Dragons Publishers, asking WotC to do something, anything, to help out their third party business partners, please.
Of course, this reasonable request brought out the psychos of the Unpaid WotC Defense Brigade, who rebut Dias by telling him that he and his whole grey market sub-industry should consider themselves lucky to be suckling at Wizard’s teats. Bonus, one 3pp’s “lawyer” chimes in to give his opinion on how draconic business practices are the only way to go.
Surprisingly, I’m on WotC’s side on this one. Well, at least kinda. Let me explain.
Q: What do you tell a third party D&D 4e publisher with two black eyes?
A: Nothing, they obviously don’t listen.
Look, man. Wizards has been making it clear for three years now that they would like every other company to die in a fire. They pulled all their licenses from third parties. Then they abandoned the OGL, dragged their feet on putting out any kind of license, and then when they put out the GSL it had a “poison pill” clause saying you couldn’t use the new license if you were doing anything OGL. (They retracted that eventually in the face of a firestorm of criticism.) They don’t let 3pps into the DDI, they don’t promote them at all, they clearly see them as leeches upon their largess that they’re not even clear themselves why they tolerate.
So by continuing to try to publish for them, you’re really just getting into battered spouse syndrome. “Hey maybe if you just beat me a little less I can really please you!” Why are these people still trying to do it? “I know WotC still really loves us, even though they treat us so bad!”
Sorry, baby, they don’t love you. And they’re not gonna stop whupping on you. It’s time to go find yourself a new man/woman. Try Paizo and Pathfinder, they cheerfully promote their third party partners and those guys are creating large amounts of great content and selling it. Open Design, Rite Publishing, LPJ Designs, Adamant Entertainment, and many more. Heck, I have personally bought Pathfinder stuff from those guys plus Green Ronin, Sagawork, and probably some others I’m forgetting. On RPGNow there’s 4x the number of third party products for Pathfinder than for 4e.
Morrus from ENWorld seems to be the only one happy about publishing for 4e, he says “it’s great being a big fish in a small pond.” I would hope you could sell SOME copies when you slather ads for your product over every single ENWorld page all the time. And I’m glad you’re happy with “a big slice of a small pie instead of a small slice of a big pie” – but that’s not really what real companies usually try for, and it certainly doesn’t breed innovation or excellence. Try using software written for a niche industry sometime; you’ll discover where all those Nazi scientists fled to and what they’re doing with their time – Gmail it’s generally not.
You’re left with two choices – embrace the indifference, mediocrity, and occasional ass-beatings, or break up with that abuser and find a new sugar daddy, one that’ll treat you right. Come on, baby. We’ll give you what you need.
Geek Related 