Twenty-eighth Session (10 page pdf) – “The Battle of Nightfall Station” – It’s death or glory as the Ekujae elves assault the station in force. Can the PCs stem the tide of these “savages?” Or will they fall to overwhelming numbers? Find out as we conclude River Into Darkness!
Well, it turns out one of the Hated British was actually a necromancer, making fast zombies out of elves and dead colonials alike. The Ekujae have very severe taboos around their dead so that explains their “wipe out whitey” program. There’s no opportunity to negotiate a peace, however, as wave after wave of elves throw themselves at Nightfall Station.
But finally they are rescued by a real high level party – the Hands of Slaughter from the Rival Guide, a real bad set of dudes (like, a gorilla antipaladin named “Eater of Elves” bad) that are the Aspis Consortium’s local enforcers. The party gets paid, levels up (they’ll level up again in… seven years I guess, spoiler alert), and heads off to Nantambu, putting the impending genocide out of their minds. “We’re pirates, man, this isn’t our problem.”
It’s always tricky emulating a problematic type of story, but I think everyone came away with the clear message “these were the bad guys and we were helping them.”
Twenty-seventh Session (9 page pdf) – “The Siege of Nightfall Station” – The PCs guard the station as the native elves harass them – but is treachery from within the bigger threat?
Nightfall Station is an interesting mix – it’s the beleaguered Europeans being attacked by violent natives, but it’s pretty obvious these Europeans aren’t the good guys (the heads on pikes and torture is a hint) – but are they ever? The elves start to hit the station and the PCs charge out to kill every time it happens. Luckily the elves like traps and ambushes.
Serpent leads the way in the dark right into a punji stick pit that swallows up him and Wogan. Sindawe narrowly avoids falling in as well, then relights his ioun stones. Wogan and Serpent extricate themselves, then Wogan heals them. Serpent says, “I think there’s poop on these spikes.” Wogan replies, “I hope it’s elf poop. That stuff has healing properties.”
Twenty-sixth Session (6 page pdf) – “Nightfall Station” – Mansquitos and sleeping sickness and elf ambushes dog the pirates until they finally reach their destination, Nightfall Station. It’s a shithole.
A fight with a giant mosquito (which they name a “mansquito” since it is the size of a man) gets more complicated when they douse their captured shambling mound with water causing it to revive. And then they get ambushed by elves.
The Ekujae (jungle) elves have some cool tricks, like:
Thistle Arrows These arrows are a specialty of the Ekujae shamans, who craft the arrowheads out of the thistles of a toxic plant that most creatures find highly caustic. They deal normal damage but have a 25% chance of becoming embedded in the wound and causing an additional 1 point of damage each round from their irritating sap. Creatures immune to critical hits or sneak attacks are immune to this extra damage. A creature can remove an embedded thistle arrow as a move action without provoking attacks of opportunity, but doing so deals an additional 1d3 points of damage as the thorny barbs are pulled free. A DC 12 Heal check (made as a standard action) can pull free a thistle arrow’s head without dealing any additional damage.
Twenty-fifth Session (12 page pdf) – “Brimstone Falls” – After leaving the somewhat-relieved Whitebridge Station and its casual racism, the PCs search for fuel for the River Queen, leading them into both toil and trouble in the depths of the jungle.
Anyway, the party has to go get some tumors off a shambling mound to power their magical riverboat. And in a cool twist, the adventure has some lizardfolk “come to pay homage to the loa spirits” that have statues along the path and they are “none too please to find strangers (especially “softskins”) at this sacred place, and don’t hesitate to attack.”
But the party, having a wendo goddess sponsor themselves, left an offering at each loa statue on the way up, and when they also parley with Serpent’s “serpent shaman” parseltongue trick, that’s enough to chill them out. I really, really like rewarding interacting with the fictional world and not just moving from “combat” to “combat”, that is so lame.
And (almost) just like that, they have a captive shambling mound!
Twenty-fourth Session (7 page pdf) – “River Into Darkness” – the PCs steam up the Vanji River on a magic-powered keelboat and deal with the snake-and-disease-intensive bowels of the jungles of the Mwangi Expanse. And the station house they come to seems strangely depopulated…
A lively kech attack from the trees overhead keeps the mood sinister – and finally, they reach Whitebridge Station which has fallen to some catastrophe – and finally, contact with the elves! Turns out they don’t have tails after all, that was just a racist rumor.
I feel like racism is an important theme in a story like this. Paizo has gone way the other way, trying to make everything sparklingly sensitive, which is great if all stories you want to tell are G-rated, but in my opinion if you are doing a story where, basically, fantasy Europeans are on the loose, it’s a cop-out to NOT have to deal with their racist depredations. Of course in this story, the PCs have been hired by the racist depredators, so we’ll see how it turns out…
Twenty-third Session(12 page pdf) – “Bloodcove” – After some hijinks in the city of Bloodcove, the PCs take a job going upriver into the darkest Mwangi to protect the East Indian Trading Company – I mean Aspis Consortium – against cannibal natives – I mean cannibal elf natives. They even have tails, we hear.
As usual I like saving myself the heavy lifting by using some of the thousands of dollars of gaming gear I’ve bought, so I sourced Bloodcove from both Heart of the Jungle and River of Darkness, the latter of which is their next adventure! After screwing around (literally and figuratively) in town, they head upriver on a riverboat for a Heart of Darkness type encounter with the Ekujae elves, since they may as well make some money while their ship is in drydock, and they want to go find a friend of Mitabu’s who knows about some ancient flying city that sounds lucrative.
This is their first true venturing into the African-type jungle of the Mwangi Expanse, so I did a bunch of both factual research and movie-type-inspiration research to try to make it super different and memorable. Sleeping sickness, here they come!
Twenty-second Session (9 page pdf) – “Crossing the Line” – The ship is threatened, first by mutated wyverns, and then by the equator!!! And then by squibs! Will the horror never cease?!?
After finishing a whole major plot arc, it was time for a fun session. They sailed south from the Shackles and across the equator. Crossing the equator, to sailors, is an occassion for all kinds of weird fun and games known as a line-crossing ceremony. Of course my players didn’t know that, nor did most of the players, so I got to surprise them…
Wogan notices that the crew is acting strangely. He asks Dum Dum about it. Dum Dum replies, “Nothing.” But when Wogan presses him further, he says “OK. I’ll show you. It’s in this sack.” The curious Wogan peers into the sack. The sack goes over Wogan’s head and he is beaten unconscious.
That evening Sindawe and Serpent are in the stateroom when there is a knock on the door. Upon opening, they are loudly informed by a Little Lord Fontleroy-clad Thalios Dondriel that “All officers and men of your ship are hereby advised that His Oceanic Majesty King Gozreh and his royal retinue will board your ship on the morning watch at eight bells for the purpose of cleansing your ship of all pollywogs as may be present. Be ye in all respects prepared to receive them with full oceanic honours.” He turns on his heel and stalks off.
Most of the session is then engaged in weird shenanigans and they finally arrive at Rickety’s Squibs where they intend to get the Teeth of Araska renamed to Chainbreaker, upgraded, and her lines changed to no longer be recognizable as her previous self.
It’s been a long time but we’re still playing this campaign! I’ve been posting sessions on the session summary page but have fallen behind blogging them, I’ll try to get caught up.
Twenty-first Session (12 page pdf) – “Devil’s Arches, Part V” – The PCs finally reach the Terraken (or “Terrorkin,” as they call it). But- betrayal! They make a daring escape, but then a recurring enemy gives them what for.
They find the undead dragon turtle weapon the Terraken but Sindawe decides it’s going to be too much trouble in the long term and just murders Mase Venjum instead and they bury the ancient weapon. They escape the collapsing island complex and sail out to the Teeth of Araska, where they again run across their pirate foes on the Omen from season 5 session 17. They try to ambush them with a night boarding but it goes poorly; Mitabu manages to break their keel to prevent pursuit and our crew slips away in the night.
One of the key rules we use in the Reavers on the Seas of Fate campaign is Infamy Points, colloquially called “gold coins” because I hand out actual replica pirate coins to represent them.
I asked for feedback on hero point mechanics prior to the campaign starting, and then I had posted them quietly on one of the Reavers pages but never really talked about them. Recently, Paizo has started to unveil their “new take” on Mythic rules in Pathfinder 2e and it seems like a step in the right direction, but still a little fiddlier than it should be.
Infamy Points (2 page pdf) in my piracy-oriented Pathfinder game are gained rarely, by performing significant acts of derring-do that get the populace’s attention. They don’t have to be “evil”, but do have to be “dangerous and badass” (a paladin who killed an apartment building full of criminals is as scary as someone who just mass murdered; no one wants to hang out with Judge Dredd). You get one a level, and one each time you do something super notorious – not every game session, not tied to “completing an adventure”, you have to do something really badass. Maybe that’s once every 4 sessions, maybe less if you don’t have a local populace to impress.
I have a list of things they can be used for but over time it’s basically boiled down to “anything.” Spend a coin, tell me what you want to happen. This is a big level up from the usual “Inspiration” type mechanics you see in D&D and D&D clones. “Oh you can add a couple points to your roll!” “Oh, you can reroll it, but before you know the result!” A bunch of fiddly crap if you ask me – kinda OK if you get a fistful per game session but if you only get it once in a while (like 5e inspiration) – why are you so afraid of making it powerful?
Get out of death? Sure. (Proactively you get off scot free, if you do it reactively after you already took the death blow I give some kind of drawback – like Sindawe lost an eye after being critted through the head with a rapier). Save someone else from death? Sure. (It’s a pirate campaign so this is a great source of people needing peglegs, hooks, and eyepatches.) Just take out some goon? Sure. I don’t let them take out a major villain with it but “they cackle and run off” or something is fine. Change the narrative somehow? Super! Oh the guy that runs this bar is your old buddy? Why not.
This is a place where I feel like D&D/Pathfinder has been too conservative – there are plenty of games out there that let you use actual narrative control but here everyone argues about “oh but if you can decide to roll inspiration afterwards it’s so powerful“…
Because, you see, here’s the secret. It’s not a tool for the players, it’s a tool for the GM. Whoops, you unleashed something too hard on the PCs and their ship is about to get eaten by a shoggoth? Well, they spend an infamy point and look there’s another nearby ship they can speed by and have the shoggoth eat them instead. The PCs are finding a plot thread boring? They short-circuit it. In Reavers, Sindawe had set up in his background a whole thing about his family so later I have his long-lost brother show up to fight him in a shark cult temple – “I kill him. Here’s an Infamy Point.” Uh, OK – I was surprised, I thought that was something he wanted, but this gave him a way to say “nope” that has his character come out well in the fiction, so fine!
Also, getting them is based on interacting with society ™, and it’s always good to promote that. Heck, my PCs use these rare and valuable things on saving their favorite NPCs fairly commonly!
So don’t be afraid of letting your PCs thwart death and accomplish things. A limited powerful narrative currency is IMO much better than fiddly ass shit like action points (add a 1d6 to a roll if you declare it before you roll! You get 1d8 of them a level! Please.)
I have two editions of Behind Enemy Lines, a WWII RPG. You know, for how much RPGs are about blowing things up, there’s a startling lack of actual military RPGs. Like, what from this decade except the Warhammer 40K games? I mean, a lot of games let a player choose “a Soldier” as their class but aren’t military in any real sense. This irritated me so much I went on a military RPG buying spree. Sadly the older version is incomplete, the newer one is 1982 newer and it’s table-riffic, kinda like Squad Leader with RPG elements.
Next is Palladium’s Beyond the Supernatural. Hobbled by the mad science experiment that is the Palladium gaming system, it is otherwise a fun psychics vs monsters romp. And I like the random scenario generation tables. Oh no, it’s a… Tibetan supernatural threat… in a Prosperous Urban Condominium and Shopping Area… Precipitated by a PC suddenly remembering an obscure event from their childhood… And in the equipment list you can choose a black and white, green, or amber monitor for your top of the line IBM computer! Probably best used nowadays for a retro Stranger Things type game, and maybe with another game system.
I have two editions (1e/2e) and several splatbooks of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, the Guardians of Order anime RPG. A 4e got kickstarted some years ago it looks like. I liked this game and the Tri-Stat system was pretty nice – just Body, Mind, and Soul stats and rolling 2d6 versus them. Then you had attributes and skills giving bonuses for specific things. Simple but elegant, good for emulating the array of 1990s anime.
Next is a little indie RPG called Blowback that is basically “Burn Notice” (the TV show) the RPG. Written by Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, this is a spy game with several unique mechanics for the genre – analysis, operations – and the big innovation, the “push pyramid,” that details the escalation path as you start to mess with a conspiracy or whatnot, how much they come back at you based on how deep you’re getting into them. This mechanic was taken and incorporated into Night’s Black Agents (with credit given) by Kenneth Hite. A very light game but one meant more for the long haul so the consequences can operate. Still available for pay-what-you-want on her site.
Then we have a challenge for my alphabetization skills – is it The World of Bloodshadows? Is it Masterbook because that’s the generic rules book that powers it? Screw it, it’s in the B’s and it’s Bloodshadows. Masterbook was a generic system by West End Games, because their beloved d6 system was too simple I guess, and in the ’90’s we were all “Crunch: Ride or Die!”. I have no reason to want to learn Masterbook but the Bloodshadows line is basically “Cast a Deadly Spell” the RPG – modern fantasy noir. Be a hard boiled detective in a magical setting, but before the Dresden Files came around. And it has several adventures and sourcebooks, which makes it actually runnable (the bane of my existence is “here’s my cool new trad game, no adventures of course.” If I want to make up my own setting and adventures why would I use your shitty system? I’ll buy any trad game that has a setting book and 2 adventure books, that’s my minimum viable.)
Blue Planet is pretty high concept. It’s an environmentalist science fiction RPG, set on an ocean planet named Poseidon with humans along with uplifted dolphins and orcas fleeing an eco-burned Earth and wanting the sweet resources of this place. A very cool setting, and a basic tension very much like the movie Avatar. There’s “first gen” colonist natives and alien aborigines and newer megacorp arrivals… But it’s a little unclear exactly what to do with it story and adventure-wise.
And now… One from the vaults… Boot Hill. I think it’s the oldest Wild West roleplaying game, it’s part of the initial wad of stuff TSR put out with D&D back in the day, like Gangbusters and Gamma World. I have the 1979 printing, the first was in 1975!!! Only 34 pages long and 6 of them are a “Fastest Guns That Ever Lived” chart with stats for everyone from Sam Bass (a local favorite) to the James brothers to the Earps.
Bubblegum Crisis is a cyberpunk anime from the 1990s in which power suited young ladies fight replicant type bad guys made by an evil megacorp; this R. Talsorian game was the first to use their fairly long lived Fuzion system they used for many anime games.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a licensed-property Eden Studios game using Unisystem released back when the Buffy series was still red hot! Unfortunately for something with so much presence at the time it hasn’t had much staying power so not sure anyone will ever want to play this.
And finally, one of the granddaddies – Call of Cthulhu. The classic Lovecraftian RPG, I have several versions of the corebook (5th edition still the best) and a lot, lot, lot of the adventures and splatbooks – I love the 1920s setting best but I’ve got a pretty good swath of the OG content. I paid a pretty penny for that Spawn of Azathoth boxed set on eBay, I’ll tell you! I’ve played lots of Cthulhu, including the Cthulhu Master’s Tournament at Gen Con. It’s a great system that someone can pick up in 30 seconds – here’s a pregen, oh look a crap ton of skills you roll percentile against, ok let’s go. (I also have the d20 version, which is best left forgotten). Not indie hippie dippy but still one of the best most playable games around. Narrative control? YOU GET EATEN, how’s that for your narrative control?
OK, that’s shelf 2 of 22 (not counting 3 shelves of Dungeon and Dragon and other magazines). Chime in below, have you played any of these? What should be stolen from them to use in gaming nowadays?
Welcome to the sixth and final collection of us playing the Sentinel Comics RPG with our Aussie family of Kaiju hunters. This collection revolves around finally finding our wayward relative The Umbral and stopping his villainy one way or the other – and The Yowie’s love life!
Thirty-first Session – “Dark Side of the Moon” Kaiju Defenders International (KDI) is doing well. Our sidekick team the Bondi Beach Brawlers are doing well, El Genio has an evil infiltrator girlfriend, and Golden Key, Overwatch, and Dynamo Joe have upgraded themselves. The Yowie is torn by his love for both social media maven Dr. Broussard and the giant queen of the Endlings, Jansa Vi Dero. However it is marred by our missing family member Haskell Marston, aka The Abyssal, aka The Umbral who has turned to evil and is lurking in some dimension or another. Sure enough, The Harpy shows up to tell us he’s abducted the Argent Adept. We have to go to the Moon to save him and then back to the Harpy’s manor to try to save a MacGuffin, but the Umbral is ahead of us at every turn.
Thirty-second Session – “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” We save the Sydney Harbor Bridge from “The Kookaburra” but then all our love lives go nuclear. The Yowie’s love triangle with Dr. Broussard and Jansa Vi Dero… El Genio’s torrid affair with an evil infiltrator… Golden Key’s dalliance with a chick who likes to cosplay as his ex-wife.. Dynamo Joe and the secretary based on “Roz” from Monsters Inc… Overwatch and Feral Juggernaut from the Brawlers… But evil does not rest and we have to to back to Argentina and deal with Guarani demigods to fend off Ivana Romanat, aka Baroness Blade, and her goon squad.
Thirty-third Session – “Around The World In About Eight Hours” We are drawn too far into the land of the telenovela and go back to our home in Australia to decompress. Except for The Yowie, whose layover in El Salvador is interrupted by a summons from Jansa Vi Dero for a DTR talk. Meanwhile Sulimar the Magnificent is abducted from his magic shop leading the KDI crew to Hesse, Germany to fight some Aryan villains. “But no one who speaks German could be evil,” we lament!
Thirty-fourth Session – “They Snowblinded Me With Science” After more love triangle drama we are off to Longyearbyen, Svalbard (home of the Global Seed Vault!) in Norway, which is having dinosaur attack problems. No one bothers to mention that cats are banned there, which is good because we’d probably leave them to their Eurotrash fate if we heard. We fend off the dinos and go to the EISCAT scatter radar station (it’s not Ikeas up there, they got lots of science). The Umbral is behind it but his plot is foiled by Yan-Gannoth the Nadir King and we have to pound on him and some rando villains. Then at the end a troll(?) appears from somewhere(?) to be seduced by El Genio(?). Your guess is as good as mine.
Thirty-fifth Session – “Neighbors” Our grand opening of the Singapore branch of KDI is full of conflict – everyone’s women (including both Dr. Broussard and Jansa Vi Dero, which is a problem) but then also the Bondi Beach Brawlers don’t want to just be sidekicks any more. We set up a giant fight in the simulator with Yowie as a kaiju that needs subduing against the Brawlers and the other Marsden clan as sub-villans. We pound the Brawlers but they learn a valuable lesson. Then we go to the Dreamtime and fight the most dangerous enemy – Australian wildlife!
Thirty-sixth Session – “Wake in Fright” The grand finale of our Sentinels campaign! We go to our final showdown with wayward family member The Umbral. Some are willing to kill him to end the threat! To others, blood is thicker than water! Atlantis! Cthulhu! Time travel! Dimensional travel! And most importantly, which woman (and personal fate) will The Yowie choose? Read on, true believers!!!
Welcome to the fifth collection of us playing the Sentinel Comics RPG with our Aussie family of Kaiju hunters. This collection revolves around Golden Key, his roguish ex-wife Ermine, their baby Rain, and alien weirdos wanting to get the “Heart of Acceleration” from him (well, probably from his limp body).
Twenty-fifth Session – “My China Girl” We did so well in Shanghai at the end of last issue that we have a secondary HQ there now. Our second string team, the Bondi Beach Brawlers, is getting pretty butch and star in their own cartoon show. And Golden Key’s villainous ex-wife (aren’t they all) and baby get kidnapped again! Talk about fridging! They want the Heart of Acceleration, which I guess is like the Speed Force from the Flash. We save her but I (The Yowie) get my ass well and truly kicked in the process. After recovering with lots of hot-pot, we decide rather than let the space baddies come after us again, we’re going to proactively hunt them down – IN SPACE!!!
Twenty-sixth Session – “Snarfhockers” Super space battle! We use our new attack ship the McTits to attack General Stryken’s Domination. Pretty much one big fight scene, from ship combat to boarding to hand to hand on the enemy ship. Remember, even though “In space, no one can hear you scream,” your copilot will still turn around and tell your bitch ass to shut up. (Yes, this is a Star Thugs reference. RIP Mark Argyle.)
Twenty-seventh Session – “Battle of the Bands” Splitting time between stalking Golden Key’s ex-wife and looting the Domination of alien tech somehow ends up with us forming a rock band to take on an evil rock band, Helfyre. Our band ends up consisting of Ermine on vocals, 4 entirely different genres of drums, and El Genio stripped to the waist and playing the saxophone like the guy in The Lost Boys. Then, a big ass battle. It has something to do with the Heart of Acceleration somehow since we need a theme.
Twenty-eighth Session – “Bung on a Blue” A very short session, mostly spent on forcing the Bondi Beach Bruisers to fight Fright Train by themselves. But hey get the home field advantage since we do it at Bondi Beach! It was on for the young and the old, a real barney. There is a perhaps unsurprisingly large number of Australian slang terms for a brawl.
Twenty-ninth Session – “Stowaway” We take the Domination to planet Vollax and infiltrate Kronus Station in orbit around it with El Genio posing as the captured General Stryken. We disguise and sneak and sabotage and then break out into a good old fashioned melee. We capture Scientist Karna and plan on how to take the fight to the Unspeakable Wave! (To be honest, we’re not really sure what the Unspeakable Wave is – sounds like it might be weirder than some alien in Spandex but I guess we’ll find out.)
Thirtieth Session – “You Can’t Make An Omelet…” If you haven’t noticed yet, Sentinels is organized into six “issues” of a “collection”, comic style, so this was inevitably a climax. We discover a giant Cosmic Egg and a priest-attended, Unspeakable Wave-infused – kaiju! Our specialty. We take it down, the Wave comes out, the scientist zaps it – all to plan, but then the Cosmic Egg starts hatching, which will apparently be a Neverending Story level negative event. The Yowie considers sacrificing himself somehow (getting in the egg?) but luckily enough violence solves all problems. And he gets to see the giant Jansa Vi Dero again and lay some mack down on her.
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