Check out this very lengthy Salon article, How “Dungeons & Dragons” Changed My Life. Apparently it’s hipstery for us old dudes to be playing D&D again. Woot! Keep doing something long enough and it’ll be cool again. Imagine my relief.
Geek Speak
Tag Archives: RPGs
Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Seventh Session
Seventh Session (14 page pdf) – “Children of the Void” – Rescued from an island in the Varisian Gulf by a friendly ship, the PCs make it to the Devil’s Elbow and find the place under siege. They try to rescue the Cyphermage contingent on the island and end up needing rescuing themselves. All this and more, in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate.
This session was fun; it started with all the PCs clinging to rocks to avoid the embrace of a heaving sea, and it ends with the PCs clinging to a different set of rocks to avoid the embrace of a heaving sea.
The first part of the session was slow but fun. The Reavers were marooned on an island after their swan boat got ripped apart by angry orca. Sindawe “made it up” to Mama Watanna, but that didn’t get them any closer to shore. They made the most of their time being stranded, however – lots of inter-character role-playing. Tommy’s player Kevin was gone this session (with some complicated excuse involving the former guitar player for Dokken) and I subbed in for him, mainly in the vein of making off-color suggestions whenever the topic of Serpent’s mother came up. Serpent (Paul) was trying to send animal messengers to people he thought might help them, but Sindawe (Chris) hijacked some of them to send anonymous threatening letters to Bojask at the Gold Goblin, which set the tone for subsequent hilarity.
There was also more serious scenes, the most serious of which was Sindawe talking with Hatshepsut. It turns out she had full memory of what happened beneath the waves, when Mama Watanna possessed her body (“rode her,” in voodoo terms) and made love to Sindawe. I had a hard time with some of this – I had meant to ask a woman beforehand (one who would humor such a demented question) as to what a coherent reaction might be in this situation – this guy I just made love to for the first time apparently had some previous thing with a goddess who then possessed me and had sex with him with my body but as her… It’s more complicated than that even but this is a blog post. Anyway, Sindawe RPed it well and did awesome on a couple Sense Motive and Diplomacy checks, so things didn’t go real bad (with Hatshepsut, getting on her bad side often results in a trip to the ER). Talk about complexity. I had to resort to more explanation out of character than I like, but I had trouble forming that all in character. In the end, Hatshepsut was a little impressed by Sindawe’s courage (or foolhardiness) in defying a goddess to be with her. Though she’s not 100% sold on it.
Beforehand, I had put together a solid timeline of what all was transpiring back in Riddleport and on Devil’s Elbow, so given their timeline of sending calls for help it took five days to get rescue (even though they were only a half day from Riddleport). In this case, it was Captain Creesy, whose crew was in ill humor after having a fire set aboardship by saboteurs in port.
I use some random weather tables for the sea voyages, and my rolls indicated first a windstorm, which required all the PCs to really exert their sea legs (and Wogan to use a wind fan) and then the next roll upped the level to hurricane strength! Apparently the first winter storm from the northeast was a bitch and a half. Luckily they all have very high Profession: Sailor skills and came through without significant damage (and even stayed on course).
Then it was time for the island itself, with weird zombies that have a big ass tongue-tentacle. The PCs were very lucky in that Sindawe critted with his very first shot and realized that they had to attack the tongues – you could attack the zombie all you wanted and it would keep coming. So they got through that easy enough and went to help the Cyphermages in the Witchlight.
Then Serpent got an unfortunate surprise. Fenella Bromathan, who he’s been suspecting is his mother or sister or something, had been wounded by the monsters on the island and was on her way to turning into a zombie herself. This led to a great session of roleplaying. She is all educated and Cyphermagey, but now with death looming she fell back on the ways of her people, the Ulfen.
“I need your help. I know none of the mages will have the courage to do what needs to be done. They are too civilized; they won’t be able to accept our ways. I am a wizard, but first, I am Ulfen.”
Serpent nods. “I can arrange for a pyre, I think.”
She says, “It will be good to die under the open sky.”
Over the strenuous objections of the remaining Cyphermages, they took Fenella up to the roof, built a pyre, and saw her off Ulfen style. Beforehand, she passed on a locket to Serpent that might have a clue to his origins!
They interacted with the surviving Cyphermages. I got their names and descriptions from daemonslye’s SD Pathfinder Beta conversion PDFs – Fustinius the Balding, Eli the 12-year-old prodigy, Jean-Jacques, and Georges St. Maarten. They explained that the monsters were resistant to magic and killed half their number before they locked themselves in the Witchlight.
Then the monsters attacked. They look a lot like Sammael from the Hellboy movie. I have changed them a lot from their Second Darkness writeup to fit my campaign arc; their high DR was part of that and made them a mighty tough fight. In the midst of it, the tower the PCs are in topples and rolls down a cliff! In the Children of the Void adventure there’s a great mini-game where the PCs are in the tumbling tower, monsters are still attacking, and it gets really crazy. Everyone but two of the Cyphermages survived, though – Georges was killed by Saluthra when he panicked and tried to unbar the door, and Jean-Jacques died in the tower tumble. In the end, they were all clutching the rocky beach at the base of the cliff; luckily salt water affects the monsters like acid and they are momentarily safe from attack.
I really enjoyed this session, it ranged from hardcore roleplay to fun roleplay to action setpiece. Woot!
Reaver Character Updates
Our merry band of miscreants in my Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign have all leveled, as well as accumulated various distinguishing scars and marks. Check them out!
All these characters now bear a strange glyph on their bodies, like a tattoo, which appeared when a glyph-covered plaque the evil serpent man was using to open the Cyphergate exploded, embedding fragments in all those present. They are not sure of the significance of this, though the glyphs burn painfully at certain times.
PCs
Sindawe is a Bonuwat Mwangi skilled in unarmed combat. He became the party leader early on and earned the epithet “Woman-killer” for his complete lack of hesitation when it comes to taking down female enemies. He got a new snake tattoo when he became the lover of voodoo loa Mama Watanna, and a set of orca bite scars when he cheated on her with Hatshepsut, an Osirian monk/priestess of Ydersius they pulled out of suspended animation in Viperwall. He’s also a very skilled cartographer and has been learning the ancient tongue Aklo. His favorite weapon is a pair of cold iron brass knuckles he bought second hand with the letters “ELFPU” and “NCHER” engraved on the knuckles. A life goal is to find enough treasure to go back to the Mwangi Expanse, wipe out the clan that killed his family, and restore his own clan. Sindawe Narr, Monk 5
Tommy Blacktoes was just a halfling rogue from Cheliax with a penchant for nipple torture. But since coming to Riddleport, he’s become smitten with the tiefling whore Lavender Lil, taken on the geas of the ghost of Black Dog the pirate, and accepted the profane gift of a succubus agent of Nocticula. Finally he became an assassin and popped his cherry on a crazy derro who was in the middle of an autopsy. His Disable Device, Escape Artist, and Stealth skills are at a legendary level. A life goal is to murder Clegg Zincher, free Lavender Lil, and become a feared pirate. Tommy Blacktoes, Rogue 4/Assassin 1
Serpent, real name Ref Jorenson, is an oddly colored Ulfen man of uncertain parentage from the Land of the Linnorm Kings. He has a gigantic pet python named Saluthra. Serpent became romantically involved with Samaritha Beldusk, a half-elf aspiring Cyphermage. When it turned out she was really a serpent person in disguise, he decided “Eh… Snakes are my thing anyway.” He recently discovered that he may be related to Cyphermage Fenella Bromathan, right before he burned her alive on a pyre in accordance with Ulfen tradition. He is extremely nimble and can’t settle on a single character class, though by all accounts he’s good in the wilderness. His prized possession is a single Boot of Striding and Springing liberated from the chieftain of the goblin “Junk-Kicker” tribe. A life goal is to find out who his mother was. Serpent Jorenson, Druid 2/Ranger 2/Barbarian 1
Wogan is a portly, bearded cleric of Gozreh from Cheliax. He is most notable for his love of guns, a newfangled kind of invention that makes the others nervous. His religious vow of chastity has kept him out of a lot of the trouble that dogs the other Reavers – so why do they look on him with pity whenever it’s mentioned? Between his thundering trident, his firearms, and call lightning, this is a guy you hear coming a long ways off. He’s also a very skilled fisherman. A life goal is to drink more than anyone else in any place at any time. Wogan, Cleric 5
NPCs
Samaritha Beldusk appears to be a chirpy half-elven woman who aspires to become a Cyphermage. Really, though, she is a serpentfolk wizard. Perhaps even more surprisingly, she appears to not be the evil world-dominating type, and is in love with Serpent. She is a transmuter, but is quite fond of her wand of magic missiles, which can solve many a problem given enough time. She knows many things, which is a nice counterpoint to the PCs, who never met a Knowledge skill they liked. Samaritha, Wizard 4
Hatshepsut is of Osirian descent and was the priestess of Ydersius in a large temple that is now the ruins of Viperwall. She was trapped in a magical mirror when her temple fell and kept in suspended animation for many centuries until the PCs let her out. They then tried to kill her, and then took her prisoner, but eventually they became fond of her vicious “serpent strike” punches that cause continual bleeding. She is very taciturn, and mostly only speaks Aklo, though has been working on learning Common. She is very standoffish and is known to unload on someone for violating whatever archaic system of etiquette she subscribes to. Sindawe befriended her and they fought side by side for a long time. Recently, after a violent bout of sparring, she and Sindawe had a violent bout of lovemaking. This annoyed his goddess lover and the fallout is still in progress. Hatshepsut, Monk 4/Cleric 4
Both Samaritha and Hatshepsut worship Ydersius, who they claim was a lawful deity before the Azlanti cut his head off. No one is sure of the truth behind this claim.
P.S. The great pics of the PCs are by Paul (Serpent), we use them on paper standups for the characters too.
Posted in talk
Tagged D&D, freeport, Paizo, Pathfinder, pirates, reavers, riddleport, RPG, RPGs, second darkness
Gamer TV 2
Well, I decided since a year has passed, it’s time for a refresh posting of Gamer TV, a poll I did for my gaming group as to what TV shows they’re watching.
In my last Gamer TV poll, there was a lot of unity around a number of shows. However, now, not as much. A lot of good shows many of us watch are on hiatus (or cancelled, who can ever tell) – Walking Dead, V, Stargate: Universe, Psych, Warehouse 13, Sons of Anarchy, Burn Notice, Metalocalypse… And what’s left isn’t that compelling, especially in the SF/fantasy/horror/geekitude arena. Here’s the poll results, sorted by number of votes and rough level of enthusiasm (some respondents provided categories of enjoyment).
Gamer Approved TV
- 30 Rock x3
- Supernatural x3
- Tosh.0 x3
- Being Human (US) x3
- Being Human (British) x2
- Castle x2
- Daily Show x2
- Chuck x2
- Sons of Guns x2
- How I Met Your Mother x2
- S#*t My Dad Says x2
- Doctor Who x2
- Archer x2
- Big Bang Theory x2
- Fringe x2
- House x2
Random Might-Be-Interesting TV
- Southland
- Gold Rush Alaska
- Lights Out
- Modern Family
- Traffic Light
- Community
- Perfect Couples
- Modern Family
- Covert Affairs
- White Collar
- Glee
- Kitchen Nightmares
- No Ordinary Family
- Simpsons
- Mythbusters
- Eagleheart
- Justified
- The Middle
- Raising Hope
- Better with You
- Fringe
- Avengers
- Young Justice
- Family Guy
- Rules of Engagement
- Shameless (British)
- Detroit 187
- Mr Sunshine
- Outsourced
- Onion
- Primeval
- Bob’s Burgers
- Robot Chicken
- The Cape
- Kitchen Impossible
- Renovation Realities
- Kill It Cook It Eat It
- House
- Bizarre Foods
- Bitchin Kitchen
- The Colony
- Top Chef Allstars
- Chopped Allstars
- Kathy Griffin Life on the D List
The thing that struck me about this was the wide variety. Some of the picks (like the cooking shows) are from our groupies, not the gamers per se. Yes, it’s odd, our gaming group has groupies. But there’s a lot of diversity even taking those out of the lineup. Six respondents, only 3 votes for any single show. Last time, nearly everyone watched Dollhouse, for instance.
Volume varied a lot, too. One guy only watches three shows. One submitted thirty-three! (I only watch seven, not counting all the ones on hiatus.)
The biggest change is that Big Bang Theory used to be quite popular but has dropped way down the list. I know I used to watch it and don’t any more, it got boring.
Being Human, Doctor Who, Fringe, and Supernatural are the only “genre” shows making the cut for us right now. Note to the networks, we don’t love SF or whatever so much we’ll watch the shit you shovel out. In fact, all the Fringe watchers say that it is on its way down hard and they only watch it out of habit now (Heroes/Lost syndrome).
What about you? Anything we missed, that you think has wide gamer appeal?
Sinister Adventures – Looks Like It’s Finally Dead
Well. Many of us have been waiting, waiting, waiting for Nick Logue’s Sinister Adventures imprint to publish Razor Coast. He took pre-orders and said it was “close” in 2008. It wasn’t. Then he took a new job and effectively disappeared.
But the early stuff on Razor Coast looked AWESOME. Finally Lou Agresta and some volunteers (including yours truly) pitched in to try to the the manuscript completed, proofread, etc. Lou did a great job of taking something half finished and pulling it all together. A complete manuscript got handed over to Nick a couple months ago. You can see a bit of the three years of trauma on this Paizo.com thread. You could see it on Sinister Adventures’ site, but as of now the domain name expired and it’s down. Probably for good.
Which is probably for the best. The forums were overtaken by spammers, which Nick didn’t bother to do anything about (heck, or give the forum mod password to any of the people that would have been happy to do it for him). He dropped in on his own forums once every three to six months to say something chirpy and then disappear again. No answers to most emails. No meaningful updates or responses to customer queries.
Will Razor Coast eventually emerge? No. No, despite it being completed except for layout and printing, Logue has shown that he really doesn’t care enough to do anything to complete the work required to get it out. Even though e.g. Louis Porter has offered to pick it up, even though I’m sure a quick layout job and then PDFing it would at least get it out there.
Nick Logue really dropped the ball in a completely negligent manner on this whole thing. I don’t think anyone has any legitimate expectation that this product will see the light of day. At least I hear he’s still giving refunds to those who can somehow find him to do so.
Nick – there’s no excuse for how you handled this. If you’re not going to do it, send everyone’s money back and close up shop. If you’re going to do it, then how much work does it take to go make a forum post once every two fucking weeks? Britain may be a shithole but they do have the Internet there and you work at a university. I guarantee you can send emails and access the Internet. But people who invested in you apparently weren’t worth 15 minutes of your time every couple weeks – or, indeed, every couple months. With the way you’ve handled this, you’ve effectively been saying “Fuck you” to a bunch of people that liked your work and believed in you, to the point of pre-ordering, a somewhat psychotic thing to do in the incompetence-riddled RPG industry.
Your work for Paizo was great and bought you some apparently ill-deserved credibility, and it’s unfortunate that this reflects back on them as well. Next guy that tries to spin off their own side thing from Paizo, I won’t be able to trust them one single fucking second just because they got stuff out there while working there. You’ve reflected poorly on yourself and degraded confidence in other Paizoites and the industry in general. You’ve reaffirmed that any given RPG company is probably incompetent and you should never give them money in advance, and that the rare exceptions like Open Design are probably just a temporary aberration. You have squandered more good will than most people in the industry ever. Solid work.
XCrawl Is Coming… To Pathfinder
I just ran across this post on the Goodman Games forum – the new version of XCrawl will be powered by Pathfinder!
I ran my first game of XCrawl recently and found it to be a lot of fun. Here’s the play report. It’s like a kinda modern day game where dungeon crawling is the most popular professional (blood)sport.
They considered using 4e, but WotC’s cunning plan to have their license say you can’t use a modern setting with real world place names makes it impossible. As one forum poster said, “Oh well, Happy accident then. suck it WOTC” [sic].
Terror Is Coming… To Pathfinder
Waiting for just that right time to get in on the Paizo Adventure Path subscriptions? Well this might be it. They are about to begin their newest Adventure Path, called Carrion Crown, and it’s going to be a big ol’ Ravenloft-esque Gothic horror fest. Its blurb:
“The Cult of the Whispering Way weaves a wide-ranging conspiracy throughout the horror-tinged lands of Ustalav aimed at freeing the Lich King Tar-Baphon, better known as the Whispering Tyrant, from his eternal prison in the dungeon of Gallowspire. Their debased rites and malicious schemes set werewolf against vampire, ghost against terror from beyond time and space in a thrilling campaign that touches upon themes of classic horror and dark swords and sorcery!”
You can go download the free Player’s Guide and see what you’ll be getting into. Subscribe now and they’ll ship you each installment as soon as it drops, you’ll get a 30% discount, and you’ll get the PDFs free.
GUMSHOE Is Coming… To Pathfinder
I came across a very interesting post on the Pelgrane Press site today, where they are soliciting playtesters for “Pathshoe,” a Pathfinder supplement that incorporates the GUMSHOE rules for investigation into the Pathfinder RPG.Apparently I missed this tidbit buried down at the very bottom of the Pelgrane state of the union I reported on just a couple days ago! I need to learn to read better or something.
This is a very interesting concept. If you’re not familiar with GUMSHOE, it’s Robin Laws’ newest game system and was designed to fix the chronic problems with investigative scenarios in RPGs. Most trad game skill systems make it so there’s a lot to go wrong with them – you plant a clue and give some DC skill check to find it. But what if the character with the right skill isn’t around? What if he fails? Well, you have to either say bye bye to your investigation or build layers and layers of clues in so that they end up being pulled back on track. It especially haunts investigation-centric games like Call of Cthulhu (which is why the GUMSHOE-based Trails of Cthulhu is their biggest line). What GUMSHOE does is make it so that the “core clues,” the ones PCs must have to proceed along the plot, are always found, but skill checks indicate how much useful additional info you get from them.
Pathfinder has this problem too, as it focuses on exploration and investigation in equal share with combat in its normal mode of employ. I was contemplating this problem just this week reading the new Paizo adventure Cult of the Ebon Destroyers, where the PCs are tracking down an assassin cult in Jalmeray. The whole first part of the adventure is a careful dance to provide clues but if the clues fail basically have someone run up and blurt out the next step. If only bad guy organizations would stop sending understrength incompetent hit squads with notes in their pockets indicating where they’re from against every PC party in their area of operations, they’d get away with a lot more shenanigans! I’m not knocking Ebon Destroyers, it’s good, but this is a problem that is very tricky to solve in most scenarios.
I’m really interested to see how they plan to add the GUMSHOE concept seamlessly to Pathfinder!
Steve Jackson, Posthuman, Pelgrane, Green Ronin States of the Union
Steve Jackson Games’ annual report says they’re doing well, and it’s all Munchkin all the time. No new RPGs and GURPS gets a small part of the overall update. Ah well, we still have one GURPS diehard in our gaming group that still gets the stuff.
Posthuman Studios’ annual report says they’re doing real well! Releasing Eclipse Phase as a Creative Commons product (free on BitTorrent!) has, as usual, proved the “Piracy Kills!” crowd wrong as their sales are brisk. The only fly in the ointment has been fallout from leaving Catalyst Games, whose embezzlement scandal is well documented (I’ve been ignoring it lately, I assume there’s no big news there). Several people in our group are interested in Eclipse Phase but we have a bit of a “where do we start?” problem.
Pelgrane Press was worried about 2010 and is fretting about print but it seems to have worked out well for them, a lot of GUMSHOE out and more on the way including the slick-looking Ashen Stars. Hint – keep publishing those adventures! Whenever I buy some weird high concept game, the thing I want right after it is adventures – that’s why Hard Helix sold 50% of the Mutant City Blues run. I got it, and I got Little Girl Lost for Esoterrorists. And I see you have adventures coming hard on the heels of Ashen Stars, which is absolutely the right thing to do.
Green Ronin’s Message from the President indicates that they’re doing well, but the subtext is disturbing – they’re not doing much with their own games (True20, Freeport) and are focusing on the licensed properties – DC Adventures, Dragon Age, and Song of Ice and Fire. But they note that those properties are tough because the licenseholders often dick them around (my translation). I’m worried about such a large part of their product strategy being tied up with stuff like that; it seems like it would only take one of those deals going real bad to send them into a death spiral. Hopefully they’re sufficiently spread out. M&M Third Edition hopefully will bloom a lot – right now most of what’s for it is DC but that line seems somewhat unsatisfying in that it’ll be “four books then done…” I liked the original Marvel Super Heroes because of the adventure support…
Posted in talk
Tagged eclipse phase, green ronin, gumshoe, GURPS, industry, mutants and masterminds, pelgrane, RPG, RPGs
Call of Cthulhu News
Seems like the hoary old tome is still squirming – news is that a Call of Cthulhu Seventh Edition is coming out, maybe in time for GenCon! As usual it won’t be that different from previous eds. but may have some innovations.
And this is cool coming on the heels of the new The Laundry RPG, which is based on some Charles Stross novels where a British buraeucracy tries to combat Lovecraftian horror and budget cuts. Dark horror/comedy, and BRP-based like CoC is.
What is it about Cthulhu games and shitty Web sites? Cubicle 7’s main site doesn’t even mention The Laundry and Chaosium’s site hasn’t mentioned jack in ages.
I just bought a couple of the new third party licensed Call of Cthulhu modules myself, Murder of Crows and The Doom From Below by Stan! of Super Genius Games – and their Web site actually lists the products, so that’s a leg up right there. And they’re decent – not awe-inspiring, but serviceable Cthulhu adventures, and linked together to boot. I might just have to dust off my old Scooby Doo Cthulhu characters and take these for a drive.
In non-BRP Cthulhu news, Trail of Cthulhu has a dizzying number of supplements published now and there are more on the way. Shadows of Cthulhu (True20) and Realms of Cthulhu (Savage Worlds) don’t seem to be doing much, though they promise some adventures for Realms soon.
The Two Ultimate Pathfinder Links
As a public service, I thought I’d reiterate the two links you need if you are playing Pathfinder (besides paizo.com and this blog of course!). Apparently not everyone knows about them, and one has moved!
The Pathfinder SRD, which has all the OGL rules from Paizo (pretty much all of it) and a variety of third parties. If you need to look up a rule, here you go! It’s always kept super up to date, even new beta playtest stuff shows up here ASAP, as well as sometimes links to useful rulings from the Paizo boards, etc.
The Pathfinder Wiki, which has a primer on the entire setting of Golarion. Beware – it moved without warning and the old site is still up! If you are using a wikia.com address, stop, switch to pathfinderwiki.com. Up until today even I have been misrouting people in my blogroll. I have tried to figure out how to contribute a couple times and have run away, tail between my legs – I couldn’t even figure out how to leave a forum post saying “set up a redirect or something guys” in their system. But it’s a great place to search for that mostly-forgotten reference or link your players to in order to get them briefed on a country or something.
Oh, heck, here’s a third link. No, not the Pathfinder Database, for fan created content, which I wish well and all but there’s just not a lot of quality content there so I don’t use it. But this is my #3 go to for Pathfinder…
Hero Lab, the best character builder tool for Pathfinder, many hands down. I don’t build NPCs above 3rd level without it. I’ve tried PCGen and RPGXplorer but IMO those weren’t any more helpful than doing it myself. Now, it’s for pay, and they’ll charge you for each additional bit of rules they add from the various Paizo stuff, but they’re “official” so they do have it all. I wish all the NPCs from the APs were downloadable from somewhere, that would be a huge time saver. One of our players even uses it at the table to roll and apply conditions to his PC.
E6 – Because The First Six Levels Are The Best Anyway
This is old news, but I just came across a D&D 3e variant called E6 which is really clever, and is inspired by the classic Dragon Mag piece “Gandalf Was Only A Fifth Level Magic-User.” Basically, it recognizes that a lot of the fun in D&D is at low levels and that the larger level spread causes a bunch of problems. It works kinda like levels did back in 1e, where once you reach top level (6 in this case) you stop getting levels per se, but just more feats – so the power range always stays within a manageable band. The mightiest men are indeed total badasses compared to level one guys but can’t kill a whole country with impunity. I might have been tempted to do it up to level 9 or so instead, but it is a variant that I think would create a very interesting game that really executes on some modes of play much better. Frankly I don’t like 3.5e/PF gameplay above level 10 myself. And come to think of it, the sixth level PCs in my Reavers campaign have ACs up to like 24 and can dole out 30+ points of damage a around – is there really a compelling reason to go up further from there?
He explains “why E6” better than I could in the post, you can also download the rules in PDF from the ENWorld thread or the E6 wiki.
Geek Related 
