Tag Archives: RPGs

A RPG Stack Exchange?

Posted on August 10, 2010 | 5 comments

There’s a proposal up to start a RPG site using Stack Exchange.  Stack Exchange powers the excellent technical advice sites Stack Overflow and Server Fault.

I think this will be a great format.  Frankly I’m sick of all the forums – rpg.net, enworld – with their ubiquitous moderators with an axe to grind and demented clique politics, and full of nimrods making self-congratulatory off topic posts.  With Stack Exchange, everyone gets to vote on questions and answers so the good discussions and ideas float to the top.  And it’s focused on the question/answer format, which is very useful for, you know, questions and answers – in forums those often get mixed in with other stuff.

So go vote for it!

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Ten Interesting Facts About The Reavers

Posted on August 10, 2010 | 3 comments

Our year-long Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate, has seen some extremely good and entertaining character development on the part of the PCs.  Here’s ten facts you may not have gleaned about our “heroes” from the session summaries!  (Check the Characters page for pics, character sheets, and background writeups on the Reavers if you need a refresher).

1.  Sindawe is continually referred to as “Sindawe Woman-killer” by the rest of the group because of his penchant for viciously taking out female opponents.

2.  Everyone’s a little uncomfortable around Tommy since he enthusiastically tortured Jesswin the assassin in “Holiday In The Sun.”  “Watch your nipples, boys!” they say when they see him coming.

3.  Saul Vancaskerkin always slaps Sindawe on the cheek in a “Goodfellas”-esque gesture of fondness.  He hates that.

4.  Serpent has a crazy awesome animal companion, Saluthra the Large constrictor.  But he’s been a good sport about me balancing it by requiring him to take the time to command it – it doesn’t just leap into combat and kill opponents like it’s a mini-PC.  Plus, it has such a low INT, sometimes when it gets something tasty in its coils it just can’t resist eating it rather than participating further in the fight.

5.  They really hate the Splithog Pauper more than anyone (even the villains) and really love Thalios Dondrel more than anyone (even their girlfriends).

6.  Wogan has no skill in Knowledge: Religion, but since he’s the cleric they are continuously looking to him to explain the religious significance of random stuff they come across, with hilarious results.

7.  Pretty much every time they talk to Samaritha now, they just ask her “So when are you going to betray us?  Just get it over with!”  Her semi-boyfriend, Serpent, doesn’t even stick up for her.  It’s sad really.

8.  The rest of the party often does “Wogan impressions” that involve stamping around, kicking up their heels, and firing guns into the air like Yosemite Sam.

9.  Ever since Sindawe slept with cadaverous Amalinda Staufen in “Mansion of Shadows,” whenever they come across skeletons or whatnot Serpent asks him if he’s “feeling horny.”

10.  For some reason, one of the items the PCs always want to loot is inn signs.  They’re heavy and not worth anything, but they just WANT THEM for some undefined reason.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Session Summary 22 Posted

Posted on August 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Twenty-second Session (11 page pdf) – “A Dreadful Dawn” – After a daring and violent escape from Magnimar and the Hellknights, the party goes to find the cursed son of a dead pirate to get the secret to entering the smuggler’s caves under the Riddleport Light.  When they find him running an inn near Korvosa, however, they have to contend with a squad of cultists conducting a nighttime slaughter off the staff and patrons!  If only they weren’t all so drunk…

The first part of the session was inspired by Chris (Sindawe) telling me how much he enjoyed the pirate movie “Nate and Hayes” and described a running land/sea fight with the heroes running around under bombardment.  So I set out to reproduce that feel with the send-off the Wandering Dagger got in Magnimar from the Hellknights!

I was half afraid that the PCs would go after the Paralictor himself, but they correctly divined that a Hellknight in bizarre armor with an enchanted adamantine halberd is probably more than, say, twice their level.  Plus, that pier was being bombarded with cannon fire, which helped them make their minds up.  They avoided that and headed down the next pier to try to catch up with the Dagger – at first, they planned to commandeer a fishing boat but after a bit they saw there was no way they’d get it out into open water in time so they fought their way onto a parked Magnimarian Navy ship that was firing on the Dagger and then boarded the Dagger from there.  Very awesome!

The funniest part was when Tommy first leapt into the fishing boat and asked me, “Is there anyone in it?”  As a DM, that is a cue to toss a random encounter into the mix, and I rolled a fierce guard dog.  This took Tommy aback, but Serpent jumped aboard and murdered the dog with a single shot.  After that, the cries of “And they EVEN killed the DOG!!!” were incessant.  Everyone got a gold coin (which I use to represent Infamy Points) for that one.

So then they wanted to go back to the Riddleport Light to stop the evil deeds happening there, which I’m mixing together from Madness in Freeport, the third installment in Green Ronin’s Freeport trilogy, and Shadow In The Sky, the first chapter in Paizo’s Second Darkness Adventure Path.  But I wanted them to have to work for it (and I needed more time to work up the grand finale) so Captain Clap sent them on the track of the man who could get them into the smuggler’s caves under the Light – Jaren the Jinx.

There’s all kinds of weird synergies in RPG products that make them entertaining to remix.  In Freeport, the sea caves are Black Dog’s Caves, named after a dead pirate.  In the Pathfinder NPC Guide, there’s a cursed pirate named Jaren the Jinx whose father is a dead pirate named Black Dog.  Cha-ching!  I decided he was trying to retire from pirating and was running an inn.  I wanted to walk a narrow line with him – a bit of a sad sack that does have bad luck and some bad judgment (hence Thalios Dondrel’s explanation of “Because he’s a dumb asshole, that’s why!” to all queries about Jaren) but is also a, say, sixth level pirate who’s the son of a really famous pirate.  I think it came off OK.  Also, I made it where Jaren was missing his arm, not only because it adds to the pathetic aspect but also because I’m using him as a hook to run the Wicked Fantasy Factory adventure “Throwdown with the Arm-Ripper” next time!

The whole serial killer thing in the inn is from the Atlas Games module A Dreadful Dawn (on sale for $2 on paizo.com!).  They were basically there at the behest of a minion of the Shark God – something I’m using to bridge Jaren’s backstory (a pirate called the Shark Lord was Black Dog’s nemesis) and the upcoming Sinister Games release Razor Coast (if it ever actually releases).    It wasn’t intended to be too difficult, which is good because the PCs decided to drink themselves into abject stupors beforehand.

That whole thing was really entertaining.  It wasn’t a surprise – the bartender said “sip it!” and they quickly realized that drinking Grandma’s Secret Recipe required continually escalating Fort saves with decent INT damage and being sickened for each one you miss – but they didn’t care.  Sindawe and Thalios quit and staggered away, INT-drained and vomiting, but Serpent and Wogan were determined to get to the bottom of the jar of moonshine or die trying, and they both drank themselves to 0 INT and fell into comas.  This caused quite a stir at the bar, since basically four guys walked up to the bar, grabbed big jars of turpentine, and just slammed them and were vomiting and/or unconscious in less than a minute.  And then, rather than be concerned about the pretty good likelihood that they’d die of alcohol poisoning, Thalios and Sindawe haul the two upstairs, strip them, put them in bed together, and scrawl things like “I Like Cock” on their faces.  Pirates really are the medieval equivalent of frat boys.  Luckily that was early afternoon, so by 2 AM when the killing started they were up to 2 INT and could stagger around and try to fight people.

In the end, Jaren’s girlfriend, staff, and some of his patrons were killed.  Ah well, all’s well that ends well!  Next time, and old school dungeon crawl extraordinaire!

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Gen Con Memories

Posted on August 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

I gamed some as a kid, but never got to the level where I went to Gen Con.  I broached the subject with my dad once when I was in high school, IIRC, and he was not at all about that, so pretty much it faded from mind, along with all gaming, in college.

But later on, when I had picked up gaming again, I decided to go.  I went to four in Milwaukee (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001), and then once for just a couple days to one in Indy  in 2003.  Since then none; being a single dad has crimped my “wander off for a week” opportunities.  I tried to get some guys here interested in 2008 for the D&D 4e launch; in retrospect I guess it’s good it didn’t happen as I would have been really pissed at paying about $1k to travel to a location to have WotC take a dump on my head.

Let’s see, checking my infinite email archives, here’s all my old Gen Con trip reports, if you care!  They’re in reverse chronological order.

Gen Con 2003 – First Time In Indy

This is the last year I went to Gen Con; it wasn’t as fun as the previous  years and I wasn’t there with any close buddies, which contributed.  And I had quit Living Greyhawk in disgust at how badly the RPGA runs things, so didn’t have duties to perform there.  But it was still decent.  Surprisingly, even with it being the most recent, I don’t remember a lot of it.

Had a lot of fun at the con.  Was only there for two days, so I didn’t get everything in I wanted to…

Game Highlights

  • Novus Ordo Saeclorum Cthulhu tournament, well staged and run, equivalent to the Cthulhu Masters tourneys I’ve played in the past.  The PCs were college kids on a “summer at sea” on a sailing vessel; we got shipwrecked on a tropical island, but it went from Castaway to Robinson Crusoe fast when the cannibals came – and got worse, Cthulhu style…
  • I played both Spycraft and d20 Modern…  I have both games, but actually getting to play them gives me a better ideas of their relative merits and flaws for a modern action game.  And taught me that if you play d20 Modern and don’t take the Improved Damage Threshold feat you’re an idiot.  (In d20 Modern, if you take damage equal or greater to your CON, you have to save or go to -1 hp immediately).  The Spycraft game flowed better and was more flavorful.  d20 Modern was OK but seemed to promote min-maxed specialization in a character rather than promoting a broader, more diverse character than Spycraft did.
  • Buffy!  I was in a very enjoyable Buffy game with a good GM and really good role-players.  The guy playing Xander had it down pat and the GM had written a perfectly Buffy-esque adventure.  This game is one of the few that truly generates a game session that emulates its source material well.
  • RPGA game mustering was even worse and more confusing that usual.  But that’s what I’ve come to expect from the RPGA.

Dealer Room Highlights

There wasn’t any single thing that was just huge this year.  Places with buzz were:
  • The Valar booth – makers of the “Book of Erotic Fantasy”, a sex supplement for D&D (coming in October). They had chainmail-clad babes out pulling in the masses…  They got a lot of press including spots on local TV out of the gig.  They had a 10-page preview of what will be a 192-page hardback.  The art was bondagey and naked, but other than that the contents weren’t as titillating as one might suspect – the sex part was prestige-class heavy (how many classes that use sex to power their abilities do you really need?) and segued quickly into childbirth issues and stuff like that.
  • Guardians of Order was selling their “dX” rulebook for $1 (normally $10); it describes their generic “dX system” based on Big Eyes, Small Mount and Silver Age Sentinels, and their licensing agreement (it’s not OGL…)  I got it and read it over, it’s fairly solid with only a couple questionable design decisions.
  • Mongoose Games had their new Babylon 5 RPG out, and had a large booth showing off their Judge Dredd, Slaine, and generic D&D lines…  They have gotten the Conan license and are coming out with that soon.  I bought and read their Slaine RPG (Celtic, based on a comic) and I was very impressed by its quality – most of their D&D stuff is shovelware.
Other than that, there weren’t many big releases.  Companies that were notable for having large Gen Con presences and big releases in previous years (PEG, Holistic) had calm booths with not much new.  No big release from White Wolf, either.  Wizards had D&D 3.5 but weren’t pushing it; it looked like they were getting ready to push D&D Miniatures but weren’t quite ready with them yet.  So they just pushed their standard assortment of card games.  Steve Jackson and Atlas had a combo booth, larger than usual, and though there wasn’t much fanfare they had a lot of small new products I hadn’t heard about, including a lot of new “Coriolis” entries (adventures dual-statted for d20 and Atlas games like Ars Magica, Unknown Armies, Rune, and Feng Shui).

City Highlights

Indianapolis was definitely an upgrade from Milwaukee for the con.  Huge convention center, with plenty of room.  The RPGA table area was never anywhere near full.  5 large hotels connected by skywalk to the convention center and a nearby mall.  Lots of nearby dining.  Hotels and parking weren’t all full up like they were in Milwaukee – and since it’s 15 minutes from the airport to the convention you could easily stay in the $40/night Motel 6 and commute rather than pay con hotel prices.
Overall, it was a fun Gen Con.  I have been to 3-4 before in Milwaukee, and usually get to stay all 4 days.  This was a quick stay, but it was definitely worth it.
Ah, my last Gen Con.  Hopefully not my last ever, but you never know.

Gen Con 2001 – Last Gasp In Milwaukee

This year, I was still working on Living Greyhawk so did a lot of RPGA/D&D 3e stuff; besides that, random games!  One of the best things about Gen Con, IMO, is the opportunity to play a bunch of games that you might not get to otherwise – even ones you have, but that you just can never get a group together, especially without you GMing.

I just got back from the con.  The things I saw and bought were:
  • Weird War II: Blood on the Rhine.  From Pinnacle of Deadlands fame, this d20 game is like Deadlands but WWII – were-Nazis, etc.  d20 writeups for a bunch of WWII equipment etc.  Very nice.  New classes etc.  As a Deadlands fan and Nazi smasher I like it.
  • Little Fears by Key 20 Publishing.  A horror game where you play little children, who are beset by horrific happenings and indifferent adults.  I love RP challenges and trying to really play a small child as a character is a cool thing.
  • Rune hardback by Atlas Games.  Designed by Robin Laws of Feng Shui fame, this game is all about being a screaming Viking warrior hacking at things and dying as bloodily as you lived.  I also got the first adventure, “Crouching Wizard, Smashing Hammer.”  The system was a little more complicated than I’d anticipated but it’s fun and tongue-in-cheek look at Viking life is worthwhile.
  • In Your Face Again,  an adventure collection for Feng Shui also by Atlas Games.  10 scenarios – haven’t read them yet but FS adventures are always the greatest.
  • Maiden Voyage, an Atlas d20 adventure for characters L1-3.  Ship-based!  We’re running a piratical D&D game at home so I couldn’t resist.  The interior is very pretty, largely by addition of another color (blue) to many of the illustrations.  And I’ve liked all the Atlas d20 scenarios so far.
  • Hell in Freeport, a d20 adventure by Green Ronin Publishing – the Freeport series is one of the best d20 adventure series to date, and the fourth in the series is a big 88-pager for characters L10-12!  And it is HARD core.  Terrify your players with this series.
  • Denizens of Vecheron, by Mayfair Games – this addition to the old Demons series of products has too many demon princes and not enough creatures, as the rest do, but I love the Demons series and am completing it out.  Your PCs have never been properly faced by the demonic legions unless you use these supplements.
That’s it.  Usually I get more.  I looked at a number of things I decided not to pick up.  There were some interesting d20 supplements, like the AEG “Evil” book, but they failed the content-to-price ratio.  As did the Vorox supplement for Fading Suns – I love the Vorox, but a quick flip through the book pretty much gave me all I’ll get out of the supplement, so why blow another $20?
Exalted is a big new launch by White Wolf; it’s about the time of the Nephilim (see Genesis) pretty much and seems very different from their WoD games and interesting and anime-inspired – but I looked through it and saw another turgidly huge WW world in there, and decided to pass.
The Living Greyhawk – Yeomanry meeting at Gen Con was well received, with about 30 attendees from our and other interested regions.  We fielded questions and did a “state of the Union” Yeomanry address summing up what we’ve done and where we’re going in the next year.

Gen Con 2000 – Living Greyhawk All The Way

This was my biggest Gen Con.  As a Regional Triad for the Yeomanry region of Living Greyhawk, I had a galley of 3e and was prepared to run new Greyhawk adventures with its launch at the con.  And our Memphis gaming group, the FORGE, turned out in force and we joined the actual D&D tournament and came in third!

My FORGE Trip Report

Gen Con was a lot of fun.  I ran 4 slots worth of the new 3rd Edition D&D, and one of Feng Shui (a Hong Kong action game).  I am happy to announce that the FORGE won 3rd place in the RPGA D&D Team event!  Myself, Mike Seagrave, Collin Davenport, Alan Black, Angie Overstreet, and Mike O’Keefe entered and kicked ass…  We advanced to the finals and beat out a lot of other teams.
The 3e and Living Greyhawk launch went great.  I hope all of you have your D&D 3e Player’s Handbook already (it’s in stores).  We’ll be running LG events at FORGE functions.
A more detailed report will be given at the FORGE meeting – but the con was good, and we saw a lot of people from Memphis there.  Tip & Debbie Vaught, who some of you may remember from the FORGE’s early days, were there.

My Living Greyhawk Trip Report

The con went great.  I had the honor of meeting both August and Denis face to face, as well as a bunch of other Southern Realms people.I ran a bunch of slots of the Living Greyhawk Special “The Reckoning.”  It’s good, consider running it in your areas.

All the players I had were jazzed about 3e and Living Greyhawk.  I only had one table that didn’t have a good time, and that was because they just *so* did not click as players…  But the e-famous Stephane Tanguay was there, so all wasn’t lost…

I also ran a fun game of Feng Shui, and my team got 3rd place in the D&D Team event – beaten out by Clan Yeoman, from up in Kentucky!  Congrats to those folks.  It doesn’t make me feel too bad to be beaten by fellow Yeomen!  I did get first in a Living Verge event though.  So my first all-RPGA con went well.

On the drive home to Memphis, our gaming group argued out a number of 3e house rules (yes, already)…

So the launch went great, all the LG events were super-overstuffed, and now there’s a herd of 2nd level Greyhawkers out there…  So be careful!

Gen Con 1999 – Alternity

I was a big Alternity fan back then, so I played a lot of that.  And other stuff, but that’s all I had notes on.  If my memory serves, I did some Living City (RPGA 2e D&D) and then as much “other” – Fading Suns, Call of Cthulhu Master’s Tournament, etc. – as I could.

Well, I just got back from Gen Con where I played in three of the four Alternity Living Verge events (missed the last one, darn it).  Some random observations:
  • The first adventure, Whirlwind Tour, was average.  Some crashing in a ship, some combat, some problem-solving – OK, not inspiring.  The second, You Can Pick Your Friends, sucked soooo hard.  The party is accosted by killer robots that look like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.  It was really violent and deadly and was silly and pointless.  The third, whose name I forget (Busy Night?), was a very engaging murder mystery where the party had to solve a businessman’s demise – there was a very complex web of activities surrounding it.  It was cool and very realistic, the plot didn’t come by with laser pistols to urge you towards the pre-set resolution…
  • There were not enough Combat Specs.  I was one of two in most parties, and except for that third adventure they felt obligated to put in lots of shooting.  (Way too much in the Pac-Man adventure).
  • The people playing Werens were always real quiet for some reason.  And nonviolent.  Strange. There were lots of Mechalus.
  • It was pretty disorganized for a Living campaign – no certing or anything, and lots of people didn’t have characters ready.  I don’t mind that per se, but I worry that when they decide it’s needed those of us with experienced characters will get screwed (sorry, no documentation on those advancement points, you lose ’em).
  • It was fun though!  My Thuldan Warlion got to pound down a weren in a single combat round, one of his goals… ;-)
  • Fighting robots sucks.  We were attacked by these (ridiculous) combat robots that weren’t stunnable.  Lots of people choose stutter weapons etc. and basically we all nearly died.  Need to find a good anti-robot weapon.
  • The one time I was really worried was in the Busy Night when two of the characters were “Boss H’ass” and “Bar Bar Jinks”, both T’sa… Fortunately they were good roleplayers and tempered their antics very well.
I was in the Cthulhu Masters Tournament a couple years, so I’m not sure if it was this year – but I think it was, that there was an awesome postapocalyptic scenario.  CMT always got a room of its own and used props and semi-LARP techniques.  New York was half under water, and we went through its ruins into a computer room and used a decryption disk taken from a cultist who was telling us the stars were coming right… When the projected computer screen went from random encrypted Matrix-style gibberish to the bold, blinking words “UPLOAD SACRIFICE” I about shit myself.  The CMT always delivered, boy.

Gen Con 1998 – HK Action and Horror and Religion

My first Gen Con!  And I really enjoyed it.  Mainly I wanted to play Call of Cthulhu/Deadlands and Feng Shui/Hong Kong Action Theater types of games.  Also, I was publications director for the Christian Gamer’s Guild, so the trip report I found in my email focused on religious elements in gaming.  Avert your eyes if you’re one of those tarot-licking types that finds that scary or offensive.

Well, I just got back from Gen Con, and thought I’d give a report. The con was very enjoyable, and I was scheduled for an aggressive set of events.  I noticed that religious characters are becoming a standard set of people to include in any tournament scenario, which gives Christians a chance to show people a more realistic depiction of faith.  For example, here’s a list of some of the games I was in and religious characters included:
  1. Call of Cthulhu “Travelers in the Hebrides” – had one Dominican Inquisitor and one nun, was set in late 1500s.  I played a Dutch boat pilot who had been converted from Protestantism by threat of torture by the Spaniards.
  2. Feng Shui “The New Twilight Sanction” – was a kinda Ghostbusters-meets-HK action event.  It had a Catholic street preacher who works in the projects, played by yours truly.  He busted demons, preached Scripture, and teased the Indian character (“Did one of your six-armed gods tell you that?”).
  3. Deadlands “Everyone Loves Zombies” – had a pair of crazy nuns.  Nuns are great characters in Deadlands!  One was a lush though.
  4. Call of Cthulhu “Sandstorm at Rail’s End” – had a Baptist preacher, played a little tongue-in-cheek (“Sorry lord, I didn’t know she was a Presbyterian!”).
  5. Fading Suns “Demo” – had an Urth Orthodox (futuristic universalist Catholicism) priest.  And lots of Avestite (Inquisitor) NPCs.
  6. And of course all AD&D scenarios have a cleric in them.
Except for the Marvel Super Heroes game and the Hong Kong Action Theater games, everything I played in had some kind of religious figure, usually real-world Christianity-based.  That is an excellent opportunity for Christians playing in these games to demonstrate something besides being a “holy ass-kicker” (though that’s good too, don’t get me wrong).  Many people always play these characters as hypocritical or just silly, and it can be nice to show an alternative to that.
I got a couple religiously-oriented RPG supplements I hope to review for the e-zine: Fire & Brimstone for Deadlands, and Priests of the Celestial Sun for Fading Suns.  I won a supplement for “Providence” for my RPing in the Feng Shui game, not sure yet exactly what that game’s deal is.
The con was great, for those who are going next year I definitely recommend preregistering to the hilt to ensure everything goes according to plan.
Some other notes in retrospect-  the HKAT! “Burning City” game was just awesome.  We were all OCTB agents trying to stop Cthulhu cultists, and there was a great scene where we were taking Zodiac boats out to an island and everyone had geared up, and we went around to have everyone describe themselves.  They were all set up to be badass to the hilt – there was the guy in full riot gear with huge heavy weapons, the guy in the thousand dollar suit and sunglasses with all the automatics, the chick in a catsuit with two MP5s and throwing knives, etc; all totally uber.  My turn was last.  I was the lieutenant, so my description was, “He’s wearing tan Chinos and an OCTB windbreaker, and waves his snubnosed .38 with a pensive but determined look on his face.”  I got high fives.

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Pathfinder Sweeps the ENnies!

Posted on August 6, 2010 | 2 comments

Well, it’s gratifying to see most of you voted like you were told.    Paizo is liveblogging the awards and they are winning and winning and winning.

  • d20pfsrd – silver for Best Website.
  • Kobold Quarterly – gold for Best Blog.  (They’re half Pathfinder!)
  • Pathfinder Bestiary – gold for Best Cover Art.
  • Pathfinder Core Rulebook – gold for Best Interior Art.
  • Pathfinder Chronicles City Map Folio – gold for Best Cartography.
  • Pathfinder Core Rulebook – gold for Best Production Values.
  • Pathfinder APG Playtest – gold for Best Free Product.
  • Great City Players Guide – gold for Best Electronic Book, it’s for Pathfinder by 0one Games.
  • PFS #29, The Devil We Know – silver for Best Electronic Book.
  • Pathfinder GM Screen – gold for Best Aid or Accessory.
  • Pathfinder 31 – gold for Best Adventure.
  • Pathfinder Bestiary – gold for Best Monster/Adversary.
  • Classic Monsters Revisited – silver for Best Monster/Adversary!
  • Pathfinder RPG – gold for Best Game!
  • Pathfinder RPG – gold for Product of the Year!
  • Paizo – gold for Best Publisher!

For those keeping track, they won gold or silver (or both) every category they were nominated in.

And it’s well deserved.  I do kinda hate to see anyone win it all, but if there’s a single game company that deserves it, both in a cosmic sense and because of the unflagging high quality and volume of product, and customer support – it’s Paizo and Pathfinder.  It really is great, among the very top handful of RPGs ever.  D&D 3.0 itself was the only previous game that hit my gaming groups with anything near this amount of excitement.  It’s a game meant to be played, supported by the best adventures since 1e AD&D.

And it’s great that other companies publishing for Pathfinder won too; yay third party ecosystem!

If you haven’t tried Pathfinder yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.  It really is great.

Here’s the full list of winners, now that it’s available!  Congrats to all of them.

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Google Wave Dead

Posted on August 5, 2010 | 6 comments

Worth of mention here since I know a lot of RPG folks use it – but Google Wave has been end-of-lifed.  Read about it here.  Sorry guys.  You have through the end of the year.

That’s pretty hardcore – Google lets a lot of marginal junk twiddle around out there, they seldom actually kill something off, but there you go.  They talk about the decision on the official Google blog.

How many of you were using Wave?  What made it better than a Google group, blog, or something like Obsidian Portal?  Will you miss it?

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Adventure Time!

Posted on August 5, 2010 | 1 comment

For those of you with kids or who are young at heart…  There’s a new cartoon on Cartoon Network called “Adventure Time” that is a kinda young, demented version of D&D.

It stars a kid named Finn who is a self-described “adventurer” always on a quest, and his intelligent transforming animal companion Jake, a dog who can grow big and stretch, who often serves as a mount.  Finn calls himself a “paladin” in one episode, and when asked to kill a “Neutral ant” without provocation, responds “No way man, that’s against my alignment.” They are fighting a Wall of Flesh in a dark, evil forest even as I write.  If you want to get your kid interested in D&D, there are worse places to start!

Forget misguided attempts to get kids into gaming with dumbed-down-but-still-complex-D&D-variants – this is custom made.  An “Adventure Time Adventure Game” with simple rules would be a huge win for kiddos RP’ing.

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Destroy All Monsters

Posted on August 1, 2010 | 3 comments

Some of you may already have read it, but I came across a pretty interesting magazine article on D&D called Destroy All Monsters by Paul La Farge from the September 2006 Believer magazine.  It’s a pretty good “real journalist” look at D&D from someone who had played it as a kid.  As part of the article, they travel to Lake Geneva and play D&D with Gary Gygax!

Especially interesting is their look into Gygax – if you remove the blind hero worship that most D&D-types apply to him, you get a pretty interesting and complex character.  He delves into the sordid history of the rise and fall of TSR as part of the article, and gets quotes from the Blumes and Lorraine Williams too, and he’s pretty good about pointing out things he thinks are more self-serving than true coming from all involved.  You don’ t usually get things on D&D from an informed but professional point of view, so I found the article a really good read.

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Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 25 Posted

Posted on July 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Twenty-fifth Session – The klick keep on coming with bigger and bigger ships; also kroath in the refugee ships board and smack around power armored marines pretty easily.  The session summary is short because blow by blow descriptions of combat aren’t all that entertaining, and because I wasn’t there to spice up the conversation.

Whew!  Our Lighthouse campaign is up to 25 sessions.  And these are long sessions; 6 hours on average.  On the main campaign page I have all the back session summaries if you’re not caught up; also up to date character sheets from whichever players bother to send them to me.

We’ve gotten the hang of space battles.  So has Paul our GM; he wrote a program to do it all to avoid the “roll 100 times” syndrome of Alternity “Warships” style ship combat.  Anyway, here’s the secret.  Fire all your missiles immediately.  All of them, as many as you can get into the air.  That’s it.  Beam weapons and other stuff are for feebs (well, ours are, the enemies’ are all more powerful).  More wimpier missiles are better than fewer bigger missiles – we had this big deal with getting “zero point” hellacious missiles but they’re worthless, you just wing as many little plasma missiles as you can and get lucky with crits and take out systems.  It’s effective, if not really very entertaining.  I don’t like the Warships rules; we basically end up never using any of our ship skills!  “Oh, you can only use Space Tactics to roll initiative.”  “Can I use Defenses or Sensors to do something useful?”  “Not really.”  I want to like space combat, but Alternity makes it hard to.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Session Summary 21 Posted

Posted on July 26, 2010 | 2 comments

Twenty-first Session (9 page pdf) – “Voodoo Man” – As the party departs the ruins of Viperwall, the voodoo bokor Glapion catches up with them.  He summons forces from the spirit world to destroy them; in an epic battle they defeat him by main force and a little voodoo of their own.  Then it’s back to Magnimar where they meet up with some old friends!

The fight with Glapion took about three hours.  He kept summoning shadows and shadow creatures, and the players fought and fought.  It was an excellent endurance fight.  I did some voodoo research to prepare for the big event; he invoked various Petro loas during the battle (like Kalfou, Samedi, and various Simbi loa) to trigger appropriate powers.

Here’s Glapion’s character sheet.  I wanted him to be able to summon shadow spirits, as that’s one of the themes of the campaign, so I made him an Oracle of Bones (from the Paizo Advanced Player’s Guide preview)  with levels in the 3.5e prestige class “Master of Shrouds.”

I think he came off very well.  Even though the spark of inspiration, I will admit, was from seeing Disney’s “Princess and the Frog” with my daughter, this is how he appeared (the art is from a comic called Doctor Voodoo).  Reskinning foes is so easy, you can find the core of an idea and then hang whatever visuals you want on it.  I made him very exotic, from his hunga munga to his gunpowder-infused bottle of rum.

Once he reached the end of his powers and the shadow demon came into play, things got hairy.  It magic jarred Tommy and started to telekinetically toss around other PCs. That was entertaining.

Then the rest of the session was travel and roleplay.  They went back to the interracial-friendly town of Nybor and interacted with their semi-insane gnomish swamp guide, then went back to Magnimar where they met their good old buddy, Thalios Dondrel, son of Mordekai!

There was also an important development with Sindawe.  He had an Angel Heart-esque sexual encounter (walls bleeding, snakes writhing, etc.) with a kava store clerk who turned out to be Mama Watanna, the “old voodoo mambo” from the ship in the tree at the beginning of their foray into Viperwall.  This is also courtesy of my research; Mama Watanna is effectively a Golarion-ized aspect of Mami Wata, well-known African water deity.  Mami Wata is known to take lovers, and give them good luck in exchange for their fidelity; that’s basically what happened to Sindawe.

Sindawe is Mwangi (Golarion’s Africa) and venerates Shimye-Magalla, a janiform deity that is also partially goddess of the water, but he hasn’t put 2 and 2 together on that yet.

You know, there’s a lot of people out there apparently, grown adults, that don’t do any kind of adult themes or “icky sex” in their games.  And that’s their huge loss.  The vast majority of real world myth, fiction, etc. strongly incorporates sex/love/romance, human frailties, the horrors that men do, etc. – that’s what gives them their impact.  I mean, if you just want to “play casual” and kick down doors and kill orcs, fine, but I got over that after my first ten years of playing RPGs…

Anyway, the session went really well – hardcore combat, hardcore roleplay.  Can you believe it’s 21 sessions?  We’re nearly at a year.  As I keep telling them, “you’ll be done with the first chapter of Second Darkness any session now…”

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And Don’t Forget The Indie RPG Awards

Posted on July 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Sure, the ENnies are all well and good, but what if you’re not stuck in the D&D Ghetto and want to take a walk on the wild side?  Well, there’s a thousand games out there and many of them are small, daring enterprises known as “indie” RPGs.

The Indie RPG Awards are taking a look at the best games of 2009.  Some of them you saw in the ENnies list, like diaspora, Escape from Tentacle City, Atomic Highway, and Lady Blackbird. Others you may not have heard of.  Many of them are interesting departures from the traditional RPG format, and some sport features like no GM, no prep, collaborative storytelling, weird resolution mechanics…  Settings from the prosaic to the esoteric.  here’s some little sniblets to tempt your interest.

“Montsegur 1244 – A story game about burning for your belief.”

“In Ribbon Drive, we collectively create a story about a road trip.”

“Misery Bubblegum… helps you tell the stories of strong, sympathetic young teens dealing with the incredible difficulties of relationships and identity.

“DAWG is the role-playing game that lets you unleash the full canine experience. Here you can learn what it truly is to be the pinnacle of evolution that is dog.”

Yes, everything from zombie survival horror in Shotgun Diaries to the refugee experience in Last Train Out Of Warsaw to being a bad, bad schoolgirl in Hellcats and Hockeysticks.  Some of them are even free, like Ocean, 44, and Lady Blackbird, so check them out.

Playing some very different games, even if you return in the end to good old D&D, really helps your game.  You get to see all the different ways you can do things, and realize that some things you always thought “must be” that way aren’t.

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The Correct Choices for ENnies 2010 Voting

Posted on July 18, 2010 | 17 comments

Like my fellow bloggers, I encourage everyone to vote for the 2010 ENnie awards!  Mad Brew and others only told you how they voted, but I will go one step further and tell you how to vote!  You are all commanded to adhere to this right thinking agenda without deviation.

I’ll start by just noting that I’ve disqualified Catalyst and Shadowrun this year due to their adoption of “criminal conspiracy” as their new business plan.  Once the men responsible are rotting in unmarked graves, Shadowrun can win an award again.  Till then, I’m not going to bother even mentioning them below.

P.S. The nominees page has links to more info on all the products, I’m not gonna bother to link the products here.

1.  Best Cover Art

Ah, an interesting field.  I am not in love with any of them even though they’re all technically decent – Pathfinder art is usually excellent but I don’t think the Bestiary cover is the best example of it, going over the line into a bit cartoony/goofy.  Rogue Trader’s is a decent example of that style but strikes me as a bit too “staged.”  I really don’t like the style they use on Gathering Storm; I’ve seen that style (or even the artist, who knows) on novels and some other game products and it seems too busy for me.  “I got a deal on wisps!”

That brings it down to Rough Magicks and Eclipse Phase.  I really like them both, especially the audacity of the Rough Magicks cover.  In the end it seems a little too Photoshopped to me though, so I give lead honors to Eclipse Phase – even though their cover art doesn’t cover all that much of their cover, which seems like a bit of a waste.  Anyway, Magicks is at , then the rest.

2.  Best Interior Art

Here, it’s no shame to anyone else, but the Pathfinder Core Rulebook internal art is just super.  Copious and excellent.  Why, I can tell that Seoni the sorceress wants me just by her depiction in the book.  They clearly get my #1.  (And yours!  No exceptions!)

Rogue Trader and Warhammer have good if varying internal art – Rogue Trader goes from really good to “blobule-derived” in places.

And a surprise nominee from “so indie I haven’t heard of it” land, Escape from Tentacle City, with a striking stylized black and white approach.  I give it for not making me say “meh!”

3.  Best Cartography

The Paizo maps are all awesome.  In fact, I figured this was a total sweep until I saw the Maps of Mastery – those are shockingly bad ass.    Apparently that guy used to do the good maps in Dungeon and now has his own thing.  I will allow you to choose freely between the two for top honors, as I am magnanimous.  I chose the Paizo Pathfinder City Map Folio maps though as that extra “it’s directly relevant and useful to me” factor overcame the sheer technical niceness (though see the Minis category below).

4.  Best Writing

I really like the Eclipse Phase writing.  Top billing.  I haven’t read Kerberos or Victoriana, but “oh another pulp or steampunk game” doesn’t thrill me at this point – about a hundred of them have come out over the last couple years.  I’ve leafed through FantasyCraft and its writing isn’t what comes to mind, seems like a strange nomination, would be better in Best Rules.  And I’ve leafed through the Native American game too and it’s pretty good but not as good as Eclipse Phase.

5.  Best Production Values

This one’s hard.  This year saw a lot of great produced games, and they’re all on here.  Give it to Warhammer because of all the gewgaws they shipped with the game?  Hmm.  In the end I interpret “best” not as “most expensive” but “makes the game reading/using experience really nice” so I’ll have to go with Pathfinder, but that may be my “prefer less board game in my RPG” aesthetic talking.  If you vote for Warhammer I won’t excommunicate you (but don’t think I’m getting soft).

6.  Best Rules

Hmm, another hard one.  Many of these rulesets aren’t new per se but are variants on previous ones.  Hero – I had a brief fling with it but it’s just too much rules for me.  BASH is very nice, but sometimes I think maybe that’s too little rules for me.  Voting for Diaspora is really a vote for FATE and a vote for Wild Talents is really a vote for ORE, both of which are fine systems.  The v6 engine of Atomic Highway didn’t seem that notable to me when I read it; I mean, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t have selected it for a rules nomination over the 100 other games around.  On the balance, I guess BASH#1 and ORE but I feel conflicted about that.  And do I really like BASH more than FATE, or is that “FATE burnout” talking?

7.  Best Adventure

You can’t beat the Pathfinder APs in the adventure category.  Just can’t be done.  However, The Grinding Gear has made the old college try at it, coming in with .  And a really honorable mention for the Armitage Files, that’s great too.  Ah, I love that adventures are back to their rightful place of primacy in RPG products, having emerged from the decade-plus of “mouth breathers what love their rules supplements” ghetto.  Keep up the good work, all of you.

8.  Best Monster or Adversary

A lot of good stuff here.  I really like the Aces & Eights offering, and it’s extremely helpful for a more “subtle” game (not monsters, just all Wild West people, so it can get stale without great NPC ideas) and the Pathfinder and Hellfrost books are good too.  I’ll have to give a tough #1 to the Classic Horrors Revisited though – it’s more than just “here’s a bunch of monsters,” it takes its time on how to use each of them.

9.  Best Setting

Although Ken Hite has been known to turn me off (I find Suppressed Transmission’s “schiophrenic consipracy theorist gobbledygook” approach grating rather than charming), The Day After Ragnarok is the best setting this year.  Audacious and entertaining.  Kerberos Club suffers from being pulp game #20 over the last 2 years; Judge Dredd is entertaining but I’ve read it before; I don’t believe in awards for a second edition.  The Rome setting looks really interesting; I haven’t read it though, same with Goblin Markets.

10.  Best Supplement

Lucha Libre Hero is great stuff.  Usually Hero is way too rules heavy for me, but I have played it on occasion, and this supplement excited me the first time I heard about it.  I’ve got a soft spot for psychotronic stuff.  I also like Hollow Earth Expedition – though pulp in general has gotten overexposed, something with a specific focus like this still gets me.  I’m not sure why the Rebellion Era product is a “supplement” and not a “setting”…  I don’t know much about the rest of the field here.

11.  Best Aid or Accessory

This is another category where “they’re all good.”  My top billing has to go to Hero Labs though – I did a roundup of char creation software earlier this year and it was way better than its competition (PCGen, RPGXplorer) and was so good I bought it, and it’s come in very useful.  Second is the Pathfinder screen – it’s the highest quality screen ever!  Textbook-cover thick.  I like the idea of the Gaming Paper, and it’s cheap – the problem is, no one here has it, and buying it from the Paizo store doubles its price once shipping & handling is added on.  The Battlegraph dry erase “puzzle pieces” are nice and avoid the “have to erase that because we’re moving off the table” problem.  And I like the idea of the Campaign Coins, I really wanted coins to use in my campaign for Infamy Points and ended up having to go with plastic party favors, but I wish that in execution they had gone more “historical” than “looks like what a WoW gold piece would resemble.”

12.  Best Miniatures Product

I don’t have the patience for elaborate metal mini construction and painting any more, so I’m not interested in the Alkemy, and the D&D minis used to be better but look like a first grade art project nowadays.  I’ll give this one to Maps of Mystery to compensate for their whisker-thin second in Cartography.

13.  Best Regalia

I hate this category.  It means “other geek shit they sell as impulse buys in gaming stores, that isn’t really a game or mini.”  Kinda.  Though Grind is just a board game/minis game isn’t it?  If they want a board game category they should sack up and have one.  Similarly, two of these are fiction books – have a fiction category or forget it, how’s someone supposed to rate “random crap” against each other?  It’s ridiculous.  But for lack of anything better to do, vote for Lost Tales of Pine Box, Texas, as I encourage settings based in Texas, greatest nation on the Earth.

14.  Best Electronic Book

The only product I’m familiar with here is The Devil We Know Part 1: Shipyard Rats, an excellent Pathfinder adventure.  The others are probably lovely, though…  There are literally thousands of electronic products so it’s really hard to do them as a popular vote kind of thing – if they were popular they would be in print 😛  By their nature there’s going to be a small minority of gamers that have been exposed to any one of them.

15.  Best Free Product

I have to give it to Wayfinder #1 – call me a Paizo fanboy, but that fact that this is a fan publication is impressive as hell.  It’s fun (Ask a Shoanti is a hoot); my only complaint is it’s a little fiction-heavy for my tastes.  Lady Blackbird is a nice little one-shot game in a box, with great art too, and gets my silver nod.  The Pathfinder APG Playtest – is that really a “free product?”  I guess it was semi polished,and Paizo’s dedication to public betas that are as good as full free product is impressive, but it doesn’t get my vote.  I’m not totally sure what to make of the Warrior Cats game; I appreciate games being aimed at kids but I kinda feel like the practice of just using a normal traditional-but-somewhat-stripped-down RPG for it is lazy and never going to work out well.  And I have to say – I am one of those “4e haters” that doesn’t like it’s “WoWiness,” so  I wasn’t sure what to think of Combat Advantage’s “lets make D&D more video gamey!” approach. Initially I thought it would make me incontinent with rage, but after reading it I kinda like the boldness of them owning it and saying “Well… Let’s pretend we are not trying to be a realistic game at all, and just making an interesting variant.”

16.  Best Website

Interesting.  The two Pathfinder contenders are the d20PFSRD.org and the Pathfinder Wiki.  d20PFSRD has all the rules, but way more than the old d20SRD site – they get everything up there in moments after it’s posted (beta stuff too); they have value added info, “Labs” stuff for house rules, etc.  I use it all the time and it’s awesome.  The Pathfinder Wiki is its counterpart that has all the setting info.  It’s awesome that a company doesn’t mind this – it has more setting info that anything I’ve ever seen online.  I do wish it had a little more comprehensive editing, but it’s good too. I have to give #1 to d20PFSRD.org, though.

Obsidian Portal and Epic Words are different takes on campaign Web sites.  Epic Words is newer and has a slightly better design but it looks like Obsidian Portal still has the functionality edge; I do wonder why they are better than any other blog or Google group or whatever for the purpose, however.  I guess there is the “community” aspect to it, though from going and surfing the sites it seems like if you wanted others to read you’d still have to go post updates in Story Hour forums and whatnot, they don’t really do a great job of surfacing active campaigns to casual readers.  I’ve looked at Obsidian Portal from time to time but always return to just posting my campaign stuff on WordPress.

Pen & Paper Games seems OK, but I’m not sure why it’s not “just another” RPG.net/ENWorld “here’s some forums” RPG site.  I mean, it might be; pretty much one forum site is like another, it’s about getting a critical mass of people there and then not having the moderation be a big self serving cliquey mess of goons, so it wouldn’t be hard to beat out RPG.net or ENWorld if you can just get the critical mass…

17.  Best Podcast

I don’t listen to podcasts, so I have no basis from which to judge.  I’m trying to start, but my limited time (and short commute) means reading is a much more concise way for me to consume content.

18.  Best Blog

They’re all good, but in the end Critical Hits is the one I read the most especially since it joined several big blogs into one.  I like Kobold Quarterly too but it needs some navigation help.  I read the others from time to time too.  Gnome Stew is in my blogroll and I slandered them by saying they had gotten 4e-focused and lost my interest, but upon further review that’s not true. Maybe I was thinking of another one of them.  Anyway, all the RPG bloggers are great, and helping further the community of gamers.

The big thing missing here is any OSR blog.  I’ll be honest, though I don’t play the retro-clones I find a lot of the discussion in the grognard circles to be more interesting and useful than the big mainstream ones, which seem to often have very short articles with about one little takeaway in them – “Did you know you could make your game more interesting by spicing up… <random roll> X in your game?  Well you can!  OK, thanks for reading…”  As an experienced player and GM, I appreciate longer articles with more complexity to them.

19.  Best Game

Pathfinder baby!  It’s brilliant, I love it, my whole extended gaming group loves it.  Best thing to happen to D&D since the launch of 3e and the OGL.  The others are nice, but this one is awesome.

20.  Product of the Year

Hmm, is it Pathfinder again?  There’s some strong stuff here…  Warhammer was a daring but controversial new direction for the franchise.  Dragon Age is a computer game tie-in with a lot of promise.  Eclipse Phase, with the “free but you can buy it if you want” approach, is innovative in business model and the game setting itself.  I have to say, it’s a close run between Eclipse Phase and Pathfinder for me but in the end… Pathfinder is more of a major industry changer (spawning its own third party ecosystem, etc.)

21.  Fan Award for Best Publisher

Paizo‘s the obvious choice for #1, but a lot of these companies are very good – open, innovative, good at communicating with and supporting their customers.  I think Pelgrane Press and their games are underrated.  Posthuman, Green Ronin, Cubicle 7, and many more – all good guys.  There’s a couple high profile dumbasses in the industry – Catalyst, Outlaw, Palladium – but there’s a lot of people out there working hard and advancing the gaming community.

All right, you have your marching orders… Go vote!

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