Tag Archives: RPGs

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.

3 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , , ,

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…”

2 Comments

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , ,

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.

1 Comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

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 #2, 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 #2 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 #2 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 #2.  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!

17 Comments

Posted in talk

Tagged , , ,

Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 24 Posted

Posted on July 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Twenty-fourth Session – Hammer’s Star is eradicated by a massive alien attack!  The Lighthouse heads into action, and jumps to go assist refugees headed to Argos.  We need help ourselves as a klick task force appears, but we wipe them out and then board them to get their monkey!  All this and more in this fortnight’s installment of The Lighthouse.

Please beware the spoilers for the External War – that is, those few of you that still play Alternity out there, and for some reason haven’t read all the material 20 times by now.

Well, this time the crap hit the fan.  A massive klick/etc. fleet came and totally trashed Hammer’s Star and with it most of the Concord fleet in the Verge.  Some civilians got away but that’s about it.  We went to help them get to Argos and had quite a fight of it with a pretty small klick detachment, all things considered.

Administrator Wakefield has started getting lippy with me and taking charge.  But now that it’s wartime Captain Takashi isn’t going to put up with a whole lot of that.

We did a lot of whiteboarding this session of the plots and alien races involved.  We keep doing it, but it doesn’t really lead to any new insights.  “An arbitrarily large number of big and more-advanced-than-us alien races are here to kick our ass in a variety of ways,” basically.

After the space combat, the “B team” on Peppin’s spy ship decided to board the klick ship and look for humans to free (found some!) and intel and prisoners (found some!).  We captured a big ape.  We all shot frantically at him till we realized we had misheard, and the GM had said he was a GRAPE ape. As it was, he tried to grape us in the mouth, but Markus can beat down the biggest and grapiest of foes.

Next time we’re going to try to get the refugees to Argos, though the enemy have better/faster jump capability than us so there’s every reason to believe that place is gonna get wiped off the map in a couple days too.  Wish us luck!

P.S.  Many of our character sheets are posted – feel free and use these ruffians as NPCs in your own games!

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , , ,

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Session Summary 20 Posted

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

Twentieth Session (10 page pdf) – “The Lower Temple” – As the party continues to wind deeper into the ancient serpentfolk temple beneath Viperwall, there’s investigation, puzzles, and loads of undead threat.  Then the group faces the avatar of the semi-dead god Ydersius.  Death looms near for our favorite Ulfen snake lover…  All in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

Beware, there are plenty of spoilers for Green Ronin’s Madness in Freeport adventure, from which the serpent temple was taken.  And you may want to brush up on the previous couple summaries; there’s a lot in here that ties in with previous events but it’s not expanded on in the summary all the time.

After many levels of the “Upper Temple,” what was the human area of Viperwall, the Reavers have made it down into the “Lower Temple,” of ancient serpentfolk provenance.  And it’s big.  Last time they hit four of its levels, and each one gets larger as they descend. This time, it’s levels five and six.

I think it was a bit unexpected to the PCs that the shadows (which usually attack them) of the serpent men (which usually attack them) were only sometimes hostile; mostly they were caught in their own mildly crazed, shade-trapped existence and the group talked with some of them, ignored some of them, and fought some of them. It was a lot more interesting than a “kill a billion shadows” dungeon crawl.

Here’s one weakness I have though – I’m terrible at riddles.  I knew the riddle in the scenario sucked, but I couldn’t think a better one up (and had been off the plane from California for only like 8 hours when I had to run the session and hadn’t had prep time to search something out).  And it was made worse by Wogan legitimately guessing “egg!” even before Sseth spouted his riddle (fricking Gollum…).  Ah well, an easy win for Wogan.

The group finally released the high priestess trapped in the mirror.  She’s from thousands of years ago.  In traditional adventurer style they went through fits of just wanting to kill her and take her stuff despite her not being overly hostile (she wasn’t overly friendly either – last time she knew she was high priestess of a huge civilization, and now suddenly she’s among a bunch of scruffy nerf herders in skull makeup looting the place).  They settled for beating her down and taking her stuff.  Things were going OK with only threats of violence until Serpent rolled a 1 on his Diplomacy roll trying to convince her of the situation; that made her decide they were just tomb robbers.  Her high level spells are gone since her god is mostly-dead (they nearly crapped themselves when they realized she tried to cast dictum on them) but her low-level ones and her serpent style kung fu made a decent showing of it.

I am up for suggestions here actually – so far she’s still with them, and I’d like to depict well someone who is from a wildly different, ancient culture.  She only speaks Aklo of course, so communication is only via Samaritha (and Serpent, in this chapter) – I’m trying to come up with less verbal stuff for her to do – I don’t know, weird habits, eating rituals, smacking people for weird stuff – to help depict that she’s very different.

The snake fight is short in the summary but the thing did horrific amounts of damage to people – bite, grab, and constrict and away go the hit points.  Serpent had to spend an Infamy Point to not die (he wanted to get a lot more out of it, but he waited until he had taken enough damage to go past -10, so an emergency save is all it got him). I think Sindawe might have spent one too.  Well, that’s what they’re for.

In the end, they broke the curse, freed the shades of the serpent priests, collapsed the temple, and got the idol!  Wictory!  So now with idol and priestess in tow, and a delay poison wand to get them safely past the poison gas the ruin weeps outside, they’re heading out to return to Riddleport and prevent the arcane nastiness!  But it’s not going to be that simple…

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , ,

I’m Back!

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

OK, convention and vacation are over, and I have four more session summaries in the can waiting for me to edit and post them.  When time gets short, the blogging goes but the gaming stays!  I’m relaxed after a week of downtime, so even though it’s crunch time now at work I’m ready to get caught up on gaming stuff – this blog, and doing some editing work for Sinister and writing for Louis Porter.

I could bring up all the goonery I’ve seen in forums and blogs the early part of this week – an unnamed ex-TSR guy ragging on an unnamed Scandinavian, more legalistic game rules frenzy from the Paizo boards – but eh; I’m in a good mood.  On to the content!

Leave a comment

Posted in talk

Tagged ,

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Session Summary 19 Posted

Posted on June 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

Nineteenth Session (10 page pdf) – “Viperwall” – The ancient human ruins of Viperwall give way to even more ancient serpentfolk ruins beneath.  And a shadow-cursed high priest of that race asks Serpent for help!   Traps, shadows, demons, and ancient artifacts abound, but there is nothing more dangerous than another PC.  Check out the hot PvP action in this installment.

This episode is a good example of how to successfully weave together published scenarios into a campaign.  I combined two adventures as part of the dungeon – Beyond the Towers, a Green Ronin adventure, which served as the layout for the swamp and the human temple of Viperwall, and Madness in Freeport, which gave us the subterranean serpent temple.

Where they have elements that support your themes – like the shadows in the serpent temple – you keep it.  Where they have elements that don’t – like the lizardy guys BtT placed in the swamp – you change it (to boggards, the classic Varisian swamp threat, in my case).  The players were surprised to find out that the upper/human temple and the lower/serpent temple were taken from completely different adventures, and that’s the way you want it.

The PCs faced some decent fights this session, but the biggest one was when Wogan got dominated by a statue magic trap thingy and unloaded on the party.  He wasn’t going to kill anyone, but they had to be careful with hurting their priest, and he was blowing valuable spells and channels on them.

Next time, the dungeon crawl reaches its conclusion!  I am not really a huge dungeon fan, truth be told, but they’re good as one element in a complete mix.

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , ,

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Double Session Summary (17 and 18) Posted

Posted on June 27, 2010 | 2 comments

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Sessions (14 page pdf) – “Fleeing Riddleport” and “Beyond the Towers” – In this special double summary, the PCs flee Riddleport with shadows, gendarmes, and half-orc enforcers on their heels.  Samaritha suddenly comes out with a whole bunch of information about how they need to go to an ancient ruin deep inland in Varisia called Viperwall.  They are suspicious, but go anyway.  The trip is pleasant, and an old voodoo mambo living in the swamp gives them some aid.  Then, it’s into the ancient trap-infested ruins of a lost culture!

Seventeen

Sadly, Session Seventeen’s original writeup was lost in an untoward laptop OS reinstall incident.  We put it back together as best as we could, but of course it is a bit more brief.  The PCs fled Riddleport after discovering all the crime lords voted to have them whacked.  The group disagreed as to how guilty Saul was in all this.  Some felt that he had betrayed them and should die; others felt that he was stuck in a situation where he had no choice and did the best he could.

The trip, though reasonably uneventful, was fun.  There are two things that PCs can’t get enough of – shopping and goblins.  I had the new Adventurer’s Armory book and threw in some random weird stuff for them to find – naturally, they bought about everything.  I think their favorite was Sindawe’s purchase of a set of cold iron brass knuckles crudely engraved with “Elf Puncher” – ELFPU on one hand and NCHER on the other.

I don’t let PCs buy just anything they want; common equipment is readily available but if you’re looking for people to have unusual stuff (especially magic) “on hand” then there’s a lot of random chance involved.  You can commission things, if you plan to be around and not be dead or in jail in a week or so, which is a sadly uncommon state for player characters.

They then had a pretty calm trip upriver. So calm that they were getting a little stir crazy, when a batch of goblins appeared.  They were all stuffed into a washtub they were using as a boat to tow a bloated cow corpse somewhere.  There was a fire going in the tub for unspecified reasons.  This captured the PCs’ imagination like no one’s business, and they ended up betting on who could shoot the most goblins.  There was zero danger in this encounter; goblins are incompetent in general and they only had a couple bows between the lot of them.  Good old redneck style fun.

Everyone really enjoyed the session.  I find that to often be the case – shopping and travel and the other “mundane” parts of life bring out the role-playing and world immersion in folks, and they really get into it.  It never fails to surprise me, but in previous campaigns as well I’ve had PCs have a great time going through bazaars and shops finding random stuff to buy.  It’s a popular recreation in real life too, I reckon.

Eighteen

I had a little fun with this one.  After the previous session, I remembered the other thing besides shopping and goblin abuse that groups always love – and that’s hating gnomes.  Nilbog the trapper is the typical crazy gnome, and I borrowed liberally from various movies to spice it up.

Nilbog’s Trapper Song was taken from the awesome Cannibal: The Musical (Trey Parker’s first feature length film).  Watch it to get the full experience!  (I replaced “Eskimo” with “Wendigo” to make it more Golarion friendly but otherwise it was usable as written!)

And his crazed raccoon and trunk full of rabbits in his boat was taken from another great movie, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges).  Start watching about 4 minutes in:

And to be honest some of this adventure was inspired by the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog.”  The voodoo mambo who was living in the boat in the tree was inspired by Mama Odie,

and Glapion is inspired by Doctor Faciler (at least in part).

As you can see, the cinematic inspirations you use can be pretty far flung…

More next time!

2 Comments

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , ,

Free RPG Day Swag

Posted on June 24, 2010 | 1 comment

Thanks to my FLGS, Rogue’s Gallery, for participating in Free RPG Day!  I got two items – it was one per person, but my daughter was with me, so we were two!  (And it worked out well for them, because she successfully wheedled me into getting a cute plush Cthulhu doll for her.  This led to a later argument about whether Cthulhu pees and poos or not – she insists yes, but I think no.)

Anyway, the first thing I got was the thing I was specifically wanting, the Pathfinder module Master of the Fallen Fortress.  They’ll be putting up the PDF for free later so don’t weep too bad if you didn’t get one of these.

It’s a super short level 1 dungeon crawl (arguably 10 pages of adventure in the 16 page piece), glossy full color with Paizo’s standard high production values.  The more notable part of it was the full page writeups of the new iconics representing classes from the upcoming Advanced Player’s Guide – Damiel the elven alchemist, Alain the cavalier, Imrijka the half-orc inquisitor, Alhazra the blind oracle, Balazar the gnomish summoner, and Feiya the witch (who is smoking hot by the way).  These give good insight into the new classes – although I was a little disappointed that they didn’t have any personality or background writeup at all.  They all seem very interesting and a little additional personality would make them valuable NPCs/better convention or fast-play PCs.  So in the end, it’s near and VERY pretty, but I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of it – even as an “here let me introduce you to Pathfinder” adventure, it would last about an hour.  But – it’s free!

There were a lot of choices for item #2.  I considered the Goodman Games Cthulhu adventure, but finally went with the Deathwatch: Final Sanction, and intro to Space Marine roleplaying in the Warhammer 40k universe.  It’s fat – 36 real pages – and full color.  You get 4 pregen Space Marines, one from each major chapter (Dark Angels, Blood Angels, Space Wolves, and Ultramarines).  Because their stats aren’t all that complicated, they actually have a brief history and demeanour section in addition to the numbers in their one-page writeups.  Then there’s six pages of quickstart rules that don’t differ in any immediately obvious way from the other WH40k RPGs.  Next is two pages of “Horde” rules, which adds a bit of the “3:16 – Carnage Among The Stars” aspect to this – a horde is a mass of attackers you get to mow down en masse.  They also talk about the Demeanours, which aren’t just role-playing – you can leverage them by triggering them via roleplaying, but they then give you the effects of a Fate Point.  Nice!

Next is weapons and gear, and then a 17 page adventure, complete with location writeups and NPCs.  It’s quite a value for $0 – hell, people try to sell something of this size nowadays for $10 or more!

I never played any Warhammer 40k.  I got their first RPG, Dark Heresy, about Inquisitors, it was vaguely amusing but not moving.  I didn’t get Rogue Trader because it seems lame to me.  But even being a WH40k noob I know about space marines and orks.  There’s a lack of good space marine games.  Bughunters was good and is REALLY old, Aliens was not, Starship Troopers was OK, and 3:16 is good but all indie and super rules light and all.  If you want to shoot the shit out of hordes of aliens, this seems like a good bet!

1 Comment

Posted in talk

Tagged , , , , , ,

Alternity “The Lighthouse” Session Summary 23 Posted

Posted on June 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

Twenty-third Session – The Symposium on the State of the Verge concludes!  Captain Takashi makes a stirring speech about the External threat that is trilevised across the Verge.  Peppin astral-travels and talks to a Deepfallen and asks them to please not disintegrate everyone on the planet.  And we finally go look up Angela Quinn!

I made it to this session, and thus got the thrill of sitting through many stellar nations’ conference presentations.  Peppin is trying to get someone from every single weirdo alien race we come across to take up residence on the Lighthouse.  I had a good moment as Captain Takashi – I planned out a presentation to make on the External threat, and I rolled a natural 1 (critical success) in addition to my Celebrity perk taking the net result down to sub-zero.  I informed all present about the exact nature and depth of the External threat, and the tri-d crew broadcast it unedited to every corner of the Verge.  Woot!

Then we had some recreation shooting fish from a yacht.  Captain Casoval and I (as Markus) had an innunedo-laced bet going – I lost, but still won, if you get my drift.  Lambert Fulson, entertainingly, was trying to participate but pretty much just fired at random over the rail.

Finally, we looked up Angela Quinn.  She’s a recurring NPC – she was memorable in our very first session of this campaign and has been back since.  Ten-Zel Kim was kinda sweet on her.  I was somewhat enraged to find out that despite being on her planet, no one had looked her up yet.  I hinted a couple times, then had to just flat out say “Are you going to tell me you’re not going to look up Angela while we’re here on Bluefall?”  We were almost discouraged from it – Kim kept calling her up and getting “I’m busy, blow” messages back.  Clearly she was undercover doing something.  Finally we decided “Screw it.  We’re PCs, and poor impulse control is part of the package.”  We went and interrupted her undercover operation and sped it up to the “kill the principal” finale.  I mean, really we should have left her to it, but the GM wasn’t really giving us much to work with – she wasn’t totally convincing in her “leave me alone” so that we’d think “the GM *doesn’t* want us to do this now,” but there was no compelling reason to go in either.  But it was the end of a long session of mostly PowerPoint presentations, so we decided murder was called for.

Leave a comment

Posted in session summaries

Tagged , , , , , ,