Onwards and upwards...

Since my last post I've done a few things.

Running & Playing

Ran session two of Midnight Sub Rosa for Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu.

As someone who likes a visual reference both as a GM and a player I decided to make a "map" of sorts for one of the scenes not depicted in the adventure.  Whilst I could narrate the scene (and I did) I find it helps to have something visual to help guide that narration.

In session one there were no dice rolls, safe to say that there were dice rolls aplenty during this session. Fortunately the investigators recovered the occult text and returned it to Miskatonic University; and now must come to terms with all that they've seen.

I also ran The Expanse RPG using the Salvage Op PDF adventure.

This was the first time I'd used the AGE system that Green Ronin have published. As I understand it the version for The Expanse RPG is subtly different from how it's implemented in ModernAGE etc.  I enjoyed the game and the system and can see me returning to it in the future.

So far that's two new games I've run and I've got more games planned.

Alongside those my two D&D campaigns continue to move along nicely, plus I got to play in a game of the new Judge Dredd RPG run by Ross and playtested a new Eberron Adventurers League scenario with Rich, Shane, Ian, Iain and Pete.  All good stuff.

Writing

I've been struggling a bit with this, probably due to too many other things occupying my brain (see above) and missed my planned DMsGuild release in February. It's fine though because...

Out of the blue, thanks to a random reference by Kevin Y and John D to a certain film about immortals with swords I wrote this.

"Less Than Two" A One Page RPG about immortals who wield swords.

I woke up on Sunday morning with the game largely formed in my head. About 6 hours of effort later it was written, had artwork and I'd made it look all fancy thanks to Affinity Publisher. 

So I decided to publish it!  It's "Pay What You Want" with a suggested donation of $2.

It's available on itch.io here and on DriveThruRPG here.

I've also come up with an idea for a series of horror / mystery adventures. Will likely use Gumshoe given my familiarity with it. It's a question of whether that's a hack using the SRD or whether it's using Fear Itself and/or Esoterrorists to take advantage of the DriveThru Community Content licence.

Either way I've given myself 6 months to at least publish the first part...

First though is finish at least one of the DMsGuild products I've got loosely drafted.  Starting with one about a broken time-control clock.

Mapping

I've decided to pick up an Inkarnate license ($25 for a year).

Main reason I chose Inkarnate over other platforms is that the price includes Commercial Use and with that comes a LOT of assets.  If Dungeondraft had a larger Commercial Use asset list included by default then I may have opted for that instead.

Think I'm getting comfortable with it as an app but notice there's a real lack of tutorial videos out there for it...  So if anyone knows of any please get in touch!

Events

Ok so the main bit of news is that we've cancelled 2021's Tabletop Scotland event.  Full details are on the website here.

In short, our venue is currently a vaccination hub for Perth and there is no end date for that.  As a result the venue management team contacted all event organisers to let them know that they were cancelling all 2021 bookings.  We'll confirm 2022 dates when we can.

In the meantime, I co-organised a D&D Game Day over on the Dungeons & Dragons Scotland Discord Server on Saturday 13th March 2021 (today as I write this). Good variety of games offered up and whilst I didn't play in any of them I'm keen to see what the feedback is like on the event. Maybe we'll do another one?

At the very least I hope it enables the D&D Scotland community to embrace more conventions in general.  Not least of which is AlbaCon in October.  Proper planning for that will start soon.

DMing Lost Mine of Phandelver

So I've finally got round to running a game of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.  Specifically I've started running Lost Mine of Phandelver.

This is the scenario that comes with the Starter Set and I've chosen it for a number of reasons.

• None of the players have played it.
• It's an introductory scenario and 4 of the players either hadn't played D&D ever or for a very long time.
• One player is currently playing in the Hoard Of The Dragon Queen season of Encounters so had to be something very different from that.

So what did we have?  Well I used the pregens from the Starter Set and I also managed to find some D&D Adventurers League compatible 1st level pregens online.

The players opted for -

• Dwarf Cleric - Played by Richard
• Halfling Rogue - Played by Steven
• Human Fighter - Played by Alan
• Human Paladin - Played by Theresa
• Tiefling Warlock - Played by Oliver

They managed to rescue Sildar and take down Klarg the bugbear, the wolves and a number of the goblins.  Ok so they had lady luck to thank for some of that after some tributes were made to Tyche in Phandalin as at times the dice were being particularly cruel!

Overall it was a really good session and felt good to be running D&D again, especially for a group of people that I've never roleplayed with before as most of them I've met through East Neuk Tabletop.

Hoping to get at least 2 or 3 more sessions in before Christmas but need to think carefully about the scheduling of that and of course a location to hold it. For this 1st session we used my wife's wool shop on a weeknight, with weeknights largely being problematic for me I think it might need to move to a Sunday post-ENT slot (whether that's coinciding with ENT or not). Something to ponder and chat with them about before organising the next slot.

Sentinels Of The Multiverse: Campaign Game

Another one of those games that I've blogged about on here on a few occasions is Sentinels.  Seeing that someone was running a 3-part scenario driven game of this at Gen Con I knew that I had to play in it.

The linkage between the scenarios was light so that it didn't get 2 prescriptive based on results.  Each scenario had 2 objectives - a primary and a secondary.  It was the successful completion of these objectives that determined specific things for the following scenario.

The villains we played against were -

The Ennead : I've never played against these guys before and DAMN! are they a tough nut to crack.  Unless you're able to nullify their stacking abilities or deal out some serious damage then you're not going to get very far against them.  Which is about as far as we got...  It wasn't a loss but it wasn't much of a victory either!

Then it was Ambuscade : Far simpler to combat than The Ennead (as there's just the one of him!) but he's really tough. Success awaited us in this game though and we managed to take him down although he did take out 2 of us in the process - including Chrono Ranger who I'd been playing.

And finally it was Gloom Weaver.  In this game I'd changed character to Fanatic and boy was she uber effective against him. We didn't defeat him in the time allocated but we did complete the secondary objective.

All in all it was a fun way to play the game and having the clock ticking really added to the play style of the group. After all none of us knew each other before we started to play.

Might look to do something similar for future times we play Sentinels!

Atomic Robo RPG At Gen Con!

So as you may have gathered from previous posts I'm a bit of an Atomic Robo fanboy.

Perhaps you can imagine my fanboyness reaching exponential levels when +Liz Mackie and I played in a game of Atomic Robo run by +Mike Olson who only went and wrote the game!

Ok so I think I actually played it kinda cool and didn't have any fanboy moments but I'll let others judge me on that!

So the game - "Bring Me The Head Of Doctor Dinosaur" had the description of "Twelve years ago, a lunatic calling himself Dr. Dinosaur murdered everyone you know. And to make matters worse, he's your brother. Majestic 12 wants to study him. Tesladyne wants to bring him to justice. But you? You just want revenge."

I played Fang - An almost human with lizard abilities and the character sheet is below.

Our mission was simple enough and that was to find and kill Doctor Dinosaur.
This obviously wasn't that easy to achieve but along the way we encountered Robo, Jenkins, Majestic 12 and many other characters from the comic books which really helped to bring it to life. My companions in the game were
Ghost - A Lemur "ninja" with a thing for knives. Played by +Liz Mackie
Tank - A bipedal Triceratops who hit REALLY HARD.
Professor - An octopus who was supremely intelligent especially in relation to Chaos Theory.

Needless to say we managed to catch the crazy one and managed to put him in an early grave.

Afterwards Mike signed both Liz and I's copies of the game and we had a good chat about stuff.  Liz and Mike are looking to synchronise schedules to try and get something recorded for +NearlyEnoughDice too which would be awesome.

Funniest out of game moment was when Mike realised who we were - "Hey, wait you're David Wright!" and the girl next to me (name forgotten apologies but you were playing The Professor) turned and asked if I was famous.  I politely said No and explained how I'd got in touch with Mike prior to the convention.

Lots of fun had and now I need to start thinking about running it...

Frankenstein's Bodies - A Demo At Conpulsion

The gaming highlight of Conpulsion for me was taking part in the "Kickstarter Launch" demo of Frankenstein's Bodies.  Ok so it was also the only game I actually played but it was still the gaming highlight!  After all if I hadn't enjoyed it then it wouldn't have been a highlight, would it!  Anyway...

What is it?

It's a competitive card game for 2-6 players where each player is a junior surgeon working for Frankenstein.  So basically you get to create bodies from various parts and try to animate them.

You have a lab which will look something like this -

That lab is used to complete 2 bodies with as many parts of the same gender and ideally parts that share the same re-animation serum (denoted by colour).

Gameplay itself is "Draw 2, Play (up to) 2" with a 5 card hand limit.  Cards have various effects from the default of being a body part for you to place on the table to carbolic spray to remove infection.  Other cards such as additional Surgeons enable you to avoid infection and stop other players from stealing your body parts.
Oh yes, that happens a lot.  Body parts were flying around the table so much that I'm surprised there was no blood spatter.

Ah but Dave, is it any good?  Would you play it again?

Yes.
It's very good.  Andrew and Jenny have produced a complete game that has been refined and playtested over a number of years.  It works, it is fun and has potential for future development / expansions.  It's theme may be a bit dark and potentially limiting with respect to audience but the game play is simple and effective with fluid rules.

I only refer to the theme as I'm not a horror guy and I suspect that this will primarily appeal to consumers who like horror themed games.  That initial spark of interest from the gamer will largely come from the theme and rightly so as it's a good iconic horror based theme.  The challenge for the game might be in getting those aren't into horror (like me) to pick it up off the shelf without really knowing much else about the game.

So you'd buy it then?
This is part of my quandary.  I don't "do" Kickstarter with 1 exception and that was entirely down to "this must happen" reasons.
The game is also £35 which does have that "cause for pause" value proposition associated with it.  The key benefit that this game brings over other £35 games is that it supports 6 players.
So will I buy it?  Not sure... I'm tracking the Kickstarter so we'll see if I "back" it.  I want to see the game make it into production but at the same time I want to see the game make it into shops as I prefer that to buying online.

Anything else?
One element of the game that held no resonance to me is it's origin but thought it worth sharing.
The game is set in the same "universe" as the RPG 'Dark Harvest: The Legacy of Frankenstein' by Iain Lowson set in a world where Frankenstein had got it right.
I have no knowledge of this RPG (other than knowing it exists) and I just want to stress that you don't need any knowledge of the RPG to play the card game.

Alpha Strike After Thoughts

So on Friday 10th January I played Alpha Strike for the first time.  Tonight I expect to play it for the second time.

What worked?

I bought it on the premise of it being a simplified and distilled rule set that enabled me to play Battletech on a Friday night.  It lived up to that premise and then some.
4 players working in teams of 2.
100 points a side which worked out as 10 mechs on one side and 9 mechs on another.
Total play time was around 1 hour and 40 minutes.
It felt like Battletech.  This is of particular importance.  Ok so it's a different game, a simpler game but it's still Battletech.
Let me put it another way.
We were able to play a game that using even the Introductory Box Set rules would have taken probably 6-8 hours to play through and that's optimistic.  The result and "style" of play was largely the same though.

What didn't work?

Well that's harder to quantify given it's been a LONG TIME since I played Battletech properly.
In and of itself there were only a few things that I wasn't sure about.
We were only using the most basic of rules so it wasn't a true test of the game system. There were a few things that just didn't feel right though.
Charge rules - not clearly defined in the book as far as I could tell.  Need to re-read to see if we were mis-interpreting it as the way we were playing a Charge essentially became a free hit (with risk associated).
Heat rules - Again didn't feel clearly defined so it almost became irrelevant.  Again needs a re-read.

So what's next?

A few more games with the basic rules, adding in complexity over time.  Also likely to try more varied points values.

Overall though?  It's Battletech Lite but Battletech nonetheless and that's good enough for me.

Cursed Item Horror Stories

As I've posted previously me and horror don't really work that well together and given that this post is going out on Halloween I felt I should post something with the word Horror in the title.

This post could so easily have been about horror stories of games that have gone horribly wrong and been memorable for all the wrong reasons but I wanted to focus more on player character disasters rather than gaming disasters as it were.

For those old school D&D players amongst you there may be a shiver down your spine when you read this but please hang in there!

Back in D&D and AD&D 1st Edition (the latter especially I feel) cursed magic items were very much a part of the game.  Now these came in a variety of formats and in many respects were just variants (dangerous variants granted) on a normal item which if the PCs weren't careful would backfire on them.

One such cursed item that has stuck in my memory all these years is the Horn Of Collapsing.  A cursed item so vile and malicious that it was deemed too risky to include in the Queen Of Demonweb Pits scenario.  So what makes that item stand out from all the others?

Easy - It resulted in my first ever total party kill (TPK).  Ok so it wasn't really the Horn itself that did that, more the recklessness of the player who thought "Hey there's a bugle, I wonder what will happen if I play a tune on it?" and ultimately resulted in that TPK.

Now I no longer own the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide but through the power of Google I was able to find a version of the rules for this despicable cursed magical item...

The horn appears to be a normal musical instrument, perhaps a bugle or warning horn of some sort. If it is sounded improperly (e.g., without first speaking the proper command word) or 10% of the time in any event, the following will result:

• Out-of-doors: A torrent of fist-sized rocks will strike the individual sounding the horn, 3d6 in number, each causing 1d6 hit points of damage.
• Indoors: The ceiling overhead will collapse when the device is blown. The character suffers 5d12 points of damage.
• Underground: The area immediately above the character sounding the horn will fall upon him. The damage is 5d8 points base, multiplied by one for each 10 feet of height which the material above drops (i.e., twice damage if a 20-foot ceiling, three times damage if a 30-foot ceiling, etc.).

Proper use of a horn of collapsing enables the character to sound it while it is pointed at the roof overhead from 30 to 60 feet beyond the user. The effect is to collapse a section of roof up to 20 feet wide and 20 feet long (10-foot radius from the central aiming point) which inflicts damage as noted above if indoors or underground only.

The horn can be used once per day.

Some versions of this horn have charges. These kinds can be used as often as desired until the charges are used up. They cannot be recharged but also do not require attunement. They will usually have 2d6+2 charges.

I just remember explaining the result and back then I didn't really cater for rewinding the clock or anything like that to give the players a 2nd chance.  The decision had been made to blow the horn and now all that was left was for lots of dice to be rolled.  The character in question was being played by my good friend Craig Milne who was part of my original gaming group back in the day and some 25 years later this episode is STILL cast up even though none of the original group (other than me of course) still play games.

I can't even remember what class Craig's character was playing back then or anything like that.  I simply remember that they were in a cave/underground complex and Craig's character discovered the Horn and decided to blow it.  The resulting dice roll killed the entire party in one foul swoop.  Needless to say that for many future games to come Craig was never again allowed to pick up random objects to see what they would do...

Character Creation: Edge of the Empire

So we recently went through character creation for EotE and I really felt this was one of the easiest and most interactive character creation processes I've ever taken part in.

To set the scene - I've got about 9 people interested in playing and that number might increase so looks like the Active/Passive approach is going to be a must have here.

On the night that we got together for character creation only 5 of the players were able to make it.  Some of the players had fairly strong concepts in mind whereas others were largely winging it.  Lots of good chat followed and the players settled on the following.

Human Explorer (Fringer)
Human Smuggler(Scoundrel)
Human Smuggler (Pilot / Scoundrel)
Rodian Colonist (Politico)
Wookie Tech (Outlaw Tech)

What was most interesting though was how the characters changed as the players went through the process of creation.

One of the mechanics of EotE is called Obligation and this brings a very simple narrative measure of what connection the character has to the fringes of the galaxy.  Within the rulebook the player has the option of rolling d% or choosing an Obligation from the list; or with agreement from the GM they can develop another Obligation entirely.  There are other narrative components to the creation that develop the character's origin, journey to the fringe and their motivation.  All of which help to hone that initial character concept into a more rounded playable character.

The other thing about Obligation is that it matters how heavily obligated the whole party is to those fringe elements.  e.g. The higher the parties obligation the less likely that respectable (if only publicly seen that way) connections might be willing to do business with them.  The counter to that though is that if their obligation isn't that high then certain parts of the underworld might not take them seriously.

What was of particular interest here and something I was keen to do, was how the players started to knit their characters together through shared Obligations and other elements of their backgrounds. Alongside that those players with fairly strong concepts at the start of the process were happy to revisit and adjust them to create those links between the characters to ensure that the party had a strong foundation to work from.

When it comes to creating the other characters those same links will need to be woven into any underlying plot for all the characters that will be taking part in the game.  That's one of the challenges of the Active/Passive approach - involving all the characters in the game.

Seasons is a game of layers.

Not that long ago I picked up a copy of Seasons.

I picked it up on a whim really, I knew of it but only that there had been positive noises on the internet.  Plus the box had the typical Asmodee approach of "lets use lots of colours to dazzle the weak into buying our games", or at least that's my excuse!

So what is Seasons and why did I buy it?

2-4 player dice/card/resource management game, which scales in based on the number of players and can have varying levels of complexity.
Each player is a wizard looking to gather resources to build up their power and ultimately have the most power (represented by crystals and magic items) before 3 years passes.

I bought it because the board looked really really weird.  I also bought it because I knew who I could get to play it with me.

Having now recently played it I have to admit that 30 minutes in my fellow gamers and I were looking at each other scratching our heads and struggling to get to grips with the game.  However as we persevered through the game more and more the rules started to click into place and by the end of the 2nd year of the game we felt confident enough to re-introduce more rules that had confused us earlier.

By the end of the game all 4 of us agreed that the game was awesome.  Seriously, this game has so many layers of complexity and options about what you can do turn to turn it's obviously been written by some crazy mathematical genius type.  Reminder that we were using the most basic of rules when playing.  The layers of the game are further advanced by using a larger card pool to build the year decks.

I look forward to my next game of Seasons.  It really took us by surprised by how good it was; especially after that first 30 minutes of not really getting it.

Lords Of Waterdeep

I picked up Lords Of Waterdeep on a recent visit to my FLGS.

I had planned to buy it when it first came out but it was too early in my journey into the 2nd Chapter so I ruled it out.

When I learned that the expansion Scoundrels of Skullport was coming out I knew that the core game would be re-released to coincide.  When I also heard that Lords was going to be showcased on TableTop I decided to order it before it went out of stock.

So what is Lords Of Waterdeep?  Well it's a number of things to different people.

At it's core it's a board game set in a fantasy realm where players take on the roles of Lords (hence the name) who watch over the city of Waterdeep looking to impose their dominance over all that happens there.

Yeah ok so what does all that mean?  As a Lord you look to recruit adventurers to complete Quests to provide you with "victory points".  These essentially reflect your influence and status in the city.
Along the way you can purchase buildings to enhance the availability of resource (such as adventurers) and you also get involved in the Intrigue of the city.  You see in Dungeons & Dragons terms, the city of Waterdeep is quite famous.  It's one of the key landmarks of the Forgotten Realms setting for D&D.

As I've said previously D&D and me go way back but the published settings have never been that big a deal for me (with a few exceptions).  My connection to Forgotten Realms is more through PC video games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights than it is through the tabletop game but all the same it's a rich fantasy setting worth exploring.

So what about the game itself?  Well I've only played it once but I have to admit I thought it was excellent.  Indeed it's been well praised across the internet as a very well constructed game which I think took a number of gamers by surprise.  Not because Wizards/D&D are synonymous with poor quality products, more because those products are usually more designed to promote D&D itself e.g. Wrath Of Ashardalon

What different about LoW from other D&D setting based games is it's a game first and the setting is overlayed on to it.  Yes there are plenty of references to things in the D&D FR setting but those ADD to the game rather than take away from it.

So, as a purchase it's already achieved it's principle status of being played and I might end up playing it again at my next gaming night. More than that though I can see it being used as an "intro" game as part of my objective to introduce more people to proper board games.

Just need to give it a few more plays before I succumb and buy the expansion!

August's Gaming - A look back.

My gaming time is exclusively Friday nights at the moment.

During August I managed to play the following games over 3 sessions of gaming.

The Resistance twice.
Played it wrong the first time (which seems to be a pattern!) but got it mostly right the second time.
Excellent game and definitely has great roleplaying possibilities as well as acting as a simple bluffing game.

Sentinels Of The Multiverse twice.
First time with all of the expansions and some heroes getting their first outing.  Excellent fun as ever and great to introduce someone else to the game.

D&D Next once plus a character creation session.
I've posted elsewhere on this but I'm starting to look forward to the next playtest packet if only because it will be the last before the final game is released (likely) next year.

Bang! once.
The rules are so badly translated but once you work your way around them and increase your understanding it really is a fun game.  I seem to die most games so need to work on not having that happen!

So that's 3 sessions of gaming with 6 games played + 1 character creation session.  Not bad.

What do I take from that?  Board Games are very very adaptable to multiple plays in 1 night. Obviously that's down to the board game but being able to fill available time by playing a board game is a great thing.

The Resistance and Bang! in particular are really great as pickup games for large groups of players but Sentinels remains at the forefront of the board/card gaming section of this 2nd Chapter.

First Session : D&D Next

So we went through Character Creation, sorted out equipment etc and dove straight into a pre-written scenario that I had where all I had to do was pull some monster stats out of the Bestiary.

We were using the most recent packet for the Beta of D&D Next (2nd August 2013) and the first thing I noticed was that as a DM the rules were very simple.

In this packet they've removed Skills and in the main removed Feats too.  So it's probably fair criticism to say that the mechanical character variation options are somewhat limited.  This didn't seem to bother the players though as they all went down different paths with their characters.

The character choices were -

Forest Gnome Druid
Rock Gnome Barbarian
High Elf Cleric
Halfling Ranger
Dwarf Monk
Human Paladin (unfortunately the player had to cancel at short notice so wasn't able to play).

The players all got into character in the main and brought their character's to life very easily without any problems.

So how did it play?  Well it reminded me a lot of Basic D&D and 1st Edition AD&D in many respects although it is fair to say that my memory of these 2 editions is fading so the connection between the current incarnation of D&D Next and those earliest of editions might be incorrect.

Ultimately though the mechanics, particularly around Advantage/Disadvantage, were simple and didn't get in the way of the play. Characters were able to do everything they could do in 4e and 3.5 albeit the lack of skills put greater emphasis on "general ability" associated with Attributes as opposed to any granular focus.  For those players looking for more detailed rules will likely be confused or even perhaps underwhelmed.  e.g. All agility/physical/alertness style checks fall into Dexterity and Strength checks depending on the situation in which they are called upon.

That's not all bad but what it does mean is that your Attributes have significantly greater sway over the effectiveness of your character than in 4e and 3.5e.  It brings more suspension of disbelief around a character with a high Attribute being good or bad at every applicable focussed use of that Attribute but then again it largely makes sense.

It also seems to speed up play for players new to the game.  No more checking lists of skills to determine which is the most appropriate one to use.  You want to do X, Y or Z?  All you need to determine is which Attribute is the best match and roll.  Use of Advantage/Disadvantage can be used to bring some balance to situations that don't "feel right" based on character backgrounds and in several occasions we had vastly different rolls on the 2 d20s that were rolled demonstrating the impact of those rules.

So, in summary.  So far I like it.  I'm keen to see what they do with the next release especially to see if they re-integrate skills/feats or any other form of granular focus into the rules.  It would make sense to me for the introduction of a "focus" on specific types of Attribute use which would bring bonuses to specific uses.

More as we go.  I can see us playing this semi-regularly so will need to look at what the group wants to do setting wise...