So many games, so little time

I need to get back into the habit (or maybe actually start the habit) of posting regularly to my blog here.  I have a ton of games and even since the last time I posted on here a ton of games have come to my attention and/or into my possession.  Looking at 2013-2014 so far, I'd say my game focus has drifted regularly but there have been a handful of games of interest that I'll talk about for the moment.  In no particular order...

Dragon Age - I finally got a chance to play this game at Jimbocon 4 (my 2013 annual game weekend get together with my brother and friends at my place).  I've been buying the Green Ronin RPG boxes since they came out and I really like this game.  It played pretty quick at the table despite it being everyone's first time with the AGE system.  I'm looking forward to picking up set 3 which is finally being released as I write this.  The good thing is this will basically complete the system and I'll have a fun RPG with a strong theme/setting that I can use without trying to continually buy more products for it.

Pathfinder - Paizo continues to put out a lot of great material for their flagship RPG and the last few years have been no exception.  I’m a huge fan of monster books so the addition of Bestiary 4 was a big win as was Mythic Adventures.  Equally useful to the GM was the NPC Codex.  I’ve picked up a number of Golarion campaign books like The Inner Sea World Guide, Inner Sea Gods and the Rise of the Runelords, Carrion Crown and Reign of Winter adventure paths along with several other supplements, most recently the Emerald Spire super dungeon.  Speaking of RoW, my one friend is running this for our virtual weekly game and I’ve been playing a witch character from the Advanced Player’s Guide which has been a ton of fun.  I’m looking forward to the Monster Codex and Advanced Class Guide for the big products for 2014, and I’ll be picking up the Mummy’s Mask AP as well.

Star Wars – the new RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games, Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion, have made their way into my collection along with the GM kits and beginner sets for both games.  I’ve been a huge fan of Star Wars since the 70s and have many of the books for the older D6 and D20/Saga versions.  At our game weekend last year my friend ran the EotE beginner scenario and I definitely enjoyed the special dice and the way it played at the table.  The only negative I have to say about this system is that because of the way the books are put out, the core books contain a lot of redundant material from one to the next, for examples the basics of the dice, some species like humans and so on.  I hope to play this game regularly at some point.

D&D 5^th Edition (aka Next) – Our group participated in the playtest for a good while and overall we really liked the system and now having the Basic PDF in hand I’m liking what they did with the new version of the King of RPGs.  I find it much simpler and easier to get started than we saw with 3E/4E but streamlined.  The addition of the background system is a big plus in my book and really adds that roleplay element to the character that has been in the past glossed over in lieu of combat statistics.  I’ll definitely be picking up the core books and DM screen at a minimum.

Basic Fantasy RPG – I came across this OSR game within the last year and I downloaded a lot of the great free content.  This is basically B/X or BECMI D&D with ascending armor class and separate class and race.  I love that the core rules and four adventures are available print on demand via Amazon Prime for only a couple of bucks.  I can see using this to run older adventures, or stealing things from Next or other games and otherwise using these simple rules as the engine.

Adventures in the East Mark – I funded this Kickstarter for the English translation of a Spanish game that is fundamentally BECMI D&D.  It has combo race and class with a few more classes and uses the metric system.  I recently got my red box making it the first of my physical Kickstarter projects to arrive.

World of Calidar – the Mystara setting and the work Bruce Heard did with it, in particular the Gazetteer line and Voyage of the Princess Ark stories, are some of my all time favorites so I definitely wanted this as a potential setting for future games.  Looking forward to the final product arriving.

DC Adventures RPG – the Green Ronin supers game, based on Mutants & Masterminds 3^rd Edition has a nice simple four book set and the system looks to be everything I want in a supers game with stats for all of my favorite DC heroes and villains.  I recently was able to get all of the books in PDF for $5 each as well so aside from maybe some M&M 3E support books, this should be the last material I ever need in this genre.  I hope to try this game out shortly too.

More to come in a future post…

Campaign Classics - Fort Sentinal - part 2

2/16/2004
The party interrogates Pugsy and gets some information about the bandits.  The PCs decide to setup camp in the woods.  They surround the cart with caltrops to secure the perimeter of the camp and put the bard Ono on the first watch.

During the night an attack by undead occurs.  Singin swings onto the cart to fight from there.  A wolf skeleton attacks and bull rushes him off of the cart.  The cleric Mel turns the wolf skeletons and one other skeleton paralyzing them.  The bard disarms one of the skeletons.  Two more of the skeletons manage to walk on the caltrops.  The PCs are victorious.  After the fight, the cleric thinks that there must be some cult of Nerull at work.

The next day with Puggy’s reluctant help the PCs locate the bandit’s fort in the woods.  The enemy can be seen to have 2 barbarian mercenaries by the gate, two goblins in the front tower and one goblin in the rear tower.  They setup an ambush to deal with the guards.  Using the Dancing Lights and Ghost Sound spells, they lore two human barbarians and a goblin out of the fort.  After the fight out of sight of the fort, the party uses the Disguise Self spell to play the role of a wounded barbarian and calls for help.  This brings a hobgoblin out of the fort to investigate who is also killed.  As the enemy camp starts to figure out what’s going on and regroup, the party falls back to plan their next move.

Experience:
2 Skeletal Wolves * 300xp = 600xp
4 Skeletons * 100xp = 400xp
2 Barbarians * 300xp = 600xp
1 Hobgoblin * 150xp = 150xp
1 Goblin * 100xp = 100xp
5 Roleplaying bonuses * 500xp = 2500xp
Total XP = 1850xp monsters + 2500xp RP
Each PC Receives = 370xp + 500xp = 870xp

Campaign Classics - Fort Sentinal - part 1

I came across my notes folder from a campaign I ran for my brother and a friend back in 2004.  It was one of our D&D 3.5 games.  From what I can tell it started in the middle of the action.

Adventuring Party
McTavish                                       Human, Male     Warmain (Arcana Unearthed class) 
Melianthe                                      Human, Female  Cleric of Pelor
Pomerol Petan                              Gnome, Male    Wizard
Sinjin Grinigog                               Half-Elf, Male     Rogue
Onufrio (Ono) the Fascinating    Human, Male     Bard/Sorceror

Background
(Still looking for my detailed notes file for this, so rather than typing it, the gist is that the party is hired to locate and stop a bunch of bandits who have been waylaying caravans on the road through the Sovereign Woods that connects their home base of Fort Sentinal with the city of Abergrundel to the south.)

Play Notes
1/02/2004

There was a minotaur attack!  Gnome changed to look like Dargar (DM note - a dead goblin bandit with a scar over his left eye) .  He was almost run down by a deer.  Sinjin shot from under the cart.  The cleric detected evil.  The minotaur (?) almost killed the warrior, Lactose.  The minotaur sneaks in and charges the gnome.  The gnome tries two Rays of Enfeeblement and the second one hit.  While this was going on Ono was playing his Song of Courage.  Sinjin critically hits the minotaur with his rapier and Ono disarms its great axe with his whip!  After the fight, they heal up Lactose.  The party leaves a note in the minotaur.  (DM note – classy).

The party continues on down the road acting like they aren’t even aware.  Pomerol goes and talks to a bunny.  The party then sets up an ambush along the roadside.  Lactose hid in the cart.  Ono disguised himself as an old woman talking to Melianthe.  Others hid nearby in the bushes.
Then there was the ambush at the cart.  The rogue performed a sneak attack.  Ghost sound was used to scare the hobgoblins.  Ono hid under the cart.  When the hobgoblin jumped off the cart, he was whipped, tripped and then spiked.  The rogue went invisible to find them.  He critically hid behind a log.  The bard disguised himself as Dargar to confuse the enemy.  One of the bandits in the road runs but is chased down by the Warmain on his horse and lanced.
After the fight, the party manacles the surviving goblin Puggy to question him.  They find out that the bandit gang is being led by the “Dark Lady”.  The gnome puts a squirrel on the trail for the price of some “good eats”.

Experience:
3 goblins * 300xp = 900xp
1 minotaur * 1350xp = 1350xp
2 hobgoblins * 150xp = 300xp
4 Roleplaying bonuses * 50xp = 200xp (lance charge, trip w/ whip, Dargar impersonation, minotaur disarm)
Total XP = 2550xp monsters + 200xp RP.
Each PC receives = 510xp + 40xp = 550xp
Lactose receives = 255xp

5th Edition

At some point I'll have a long posting going into what I think of the recent announcement by Wizards of the Coast of a new edition of D&D.  As for now, my first impression from all of the various articles I've read and WotC previews is a positive one.  I think they're going to be putting together a strong product and I look forward to having a chance to see the beta materials.

In the beginning

There have been a lot of different beginners products out there for RPGs over the years.  From the classic 1983 Red Box Basic D&D set to the Pathfinder Beginner Box and many more.  Last night glancing through my collection I spotted the old Star Wars Introductory Adventure Game from West End Games from 1997.  I used to play a bunch of Star Wars D6 back in the day and this game is essentially the same rules as the full game minus some extras and more complex rules.  It includes maps, dice, cardboard cutouts and some starter adventures.  One nice thing for the new GM is the fact that the box has a number of cards for different characters, vehicles, beasts and Force powers to make it easy to reference.  I can easily see where this would be a good set to get someone who's a Star Wars fan into roleplaying.  How it plays in practice though is hard to say.  I plan to give it a full read to see if it would be easy to run.  If I did run it, I'm sure I'd probably use the SW miniatures that WotC produced in the last decade instead of the cutouts.  What makes an ideal beginner box for you?

Freeport Campaign - Death in Freeport summary

The module Death in Freeport was one of the first d20 modules released by Green Ronin for D&D 3^rd Edition at Gen Con in 2000 which is where I got my copy.  It was later released again as part of the Freeport Trilogy 5^th Anniversary compilation for the 3.5 rules.  I ran the adventure using the Pathfinder rules.  The characters were created using PF but for most of the NPCs I did little to convert them fully to PF.  Where a PF version of a monster or basic NPC existed in the Bestiary or Gamemastery Guide I used that over the original stat block.  General warning – there are a lot of spoilers for this module below.

Session notes – Friday 8/19/2011-Saturday 8/20/2011

Party:

Alaina, Human Rogue (Keith)

Betadrome, Human Evoker, “The Wizard” (Keith)

Krodin, Human Corsair (Derrick)

Malevir, Half-Elf Sorcerer (Tom)

Rollo, Gnome Fighter (Tom)

Thorgrim, Dwarf Cleric of the God of Valor (Derrick)

Welcome to Freeport

The party arrives on the docks in Freeport and quickly becomes the target of an attempt to press gang them.  The scurvy dogs who try end up finding themselves outmatched and those not knocked down run for the hills.

After the incident, they are greeted by a priest named Egil who has a job proposal for them and offers to buy them drinks at the tavern known as the Bilge Rat if they’ll hear him out.  He’s a brother at the Temple of the God of Knowledge (known as Seltrok) and is seeking a missing friend of his named Lucius, a librarian at the temple.  The party stuck in Freeport without employment agrees to the offer.

Investigation Begins

Egil informs them of a quiet inn called the Scholar’s Quill where they can stay.  The Innkeeper Desy runs a pretty tight ship and for a gold piece per day the party is given rooms and meals.

A search of Egil’s friend Lucius’s house turns up a few things.  A to-do list Lucius wrote provided some insight into his activities.  The party also turned up a diary in the false bottom of the drawer in the desk.  They find a hatch in the back of the house that leads down to the basement.  This revealed little except for some new shelving that was empty (something missing?).

A Pirate’s Life

The party discovers that the Captain Scarbelly mentioned on the list is an orc pirate and his ship the Bloody Vengeance is currently in port.  Scarbelly is rumored to have killed 29 men in hand-to-hand combat so he doesn’t sound like one to take lightly.  He and his crew have mostly stayed on board the vessel.  There are 10 orcs along with the captain and his brutal first mate named Aggro.  The party decides to setup a diversion of a fire on the docks at night and while that was happening, the rogue Alaina, swims out stealthily, climbs on board and sneaks into the forecastle cabin where she finds some coins and a magical staff of defense whose specific powers couldn’t be identified by the party casters.  (DM note:  The staff apparently was created by at least an 11^th level caster.)

Later, the party confronts two thugs who were spying on the Scholar’s Quill.  After this, the party decides to keep their old rooms but get another spot across the way to watch who’s looking for them.

Temple of Knowledge

The party went to the temple to report to Egil.  The head priest of the temple, Thuron, seems suspicious to the party (“a dirty bird”) from what they hear as is his right hand man, Milos (probably a “Nazi”, nicknamed Mogwae by the party).  They party is denied access to meet with Thuron who is apparently busy working on the upcoming dedication of the Lighthouse of Drac.  Milton Drac, the Sea Lord and top dog in Freeport, has been constructing the immense lighthouse overlooking the harbor for ten years in honor of his ancestors who founded the city.  The lighthouse is due to be completed shortly and opened to much fanfare.

The party was granted an audience with Milos where they asked him about the staff (claims he doesn’t know about it) and name dropped Lucius.  Milos claims that Lucius is an excellent librarian that made some poor choices.  He was gone from the temple for four years but returned last year.  Milos indicates as they talk that Lucius has appeared worn down lately and asked a lot of strange questions.  According to Milos, Lucius had violated the inner sanctum and was expelled before his travels but was let back in upon his return because he supplied the temple with an interesting collection of books he acquired during his worldly travels.  He hasn’t been to the temple in a few days.  Milos seems to think that Lucius is ok and just sleeping off a hangover somewhere.

Norton, Milos’ assistant shows the party where Lucius had been curating in the geography section.

Boat Ride

After leaving the temple, the party hires a small boat manned by a fisherman and his son to take them out to the lighthouse to investigate.  The party seems to have been followed part way but didn’t see who it was.  The party notes something odd about the construction.  On the return to town, the party’s little boat is overtaken by Scarbelly and the Bloody Vengeance.  The orc captain seems to believe that the party stole some things of his but via some negotiations and discussions the party agrees to search for a staff for Scarbelly (the one the party in fact stole) and in return he’ll provide some information he has regarding Lucius.  Scarbelly decides to hold the fisherman, his son and their boat as collateral.

The Yellow Shield Gang

Upon returning to shore, the party is heading back towards their lodging when they get jumped in the street.  Crossbow bolts fly and a group of warriors carrying yellow shields come from the alleys to attack them.  Krodin whacks a horse on the rump to see if it will run down some of the gang with a cart it is attached to but the enemy dodges the runaway beast.  The party ends up winning the fight in the end and takes the gang’s gear.  Among the items taken were an ivory hilted dagger with an L in the hilt, a silver ring and a crumpled piece of parchment with an address on it located down by the docks.  They interrogate the leader, a man named Rittoro who along with his sorcerer Belko were hired by someone named Enzo to take out the party.  The gang was supposed to meet Enzo on the docks at the Black Gull Tavern at 7pm to get paid.

The Cowardly Cultist

Sending the gang on their way, the party heads down to make the rendezvous with Enzo.  He’s a coward as it turns out and some mild interrogation pretty quickly gets him to spill the beans.  He was hired by “The Master”, the leader of a cult called the Brotherhood to have the party killed in order to prove his worth.  It’s clear that Enzo is just being used as a pawn, lackey and errand boy to do dirty work for the cult.  Enzo reveals that he is supposed to go to a small house in Scurvytown to confirm that the job to eliminate the party is done.  Enzo has been periodically taking food to this house and the party ponders if this is to feed Lucius.

Dark Temple

When the party arrives they find the structure empty.  A trap door in the floor is discovered that leads down to a wine cellar.  The room has nine barrels, some full, some empty.  The third barrel on the left turns out to be hollow and lead to a tunnel behind it.  At this point the party sends Enzo packing after they leave a note behind telling that the job is complete.

The party proceeds to head down the tunnel which goes down a flight of stairs until reaching a small T shaped room with two doors ahead and to the right.  Despite his stone cunning, Thorgrim fails to notice a covered pit and falls into it.  The party extracts him.  They listen at the two doors and find that the one on the right opens to an octagonal room that is some kind of vile chapel or ritual chamber of sorts.  The party turns and goes through the other door which leads to a hallway with doors to the left and right before it bends out of sight.  Upon opening the left door, they discover a small rectangular room with garish purple curtains.  But the décor isn’t the worst part.  Skeletal figures spring to life and attack the party.  Meanwhile from behind, lizard or serpent creatures of some kind with poisonous bites step out from a secret door in the T shaped room.  The battle is tough but all of the party survives.  The skeleton room contained four chests, two with magical auras.  In addition to some mundane treasures, the party finds a bottle, a heavy shield and a magic spear.

The party then explores across the hall and finds a small octagonal room filled with books and scrolls of “dark blasphemous crap”.  Among these is the Book of the Unspeakable One.  There are also a couple of letters discussing progress on the lighthouse.  The party theorizes that it’s to be some “Soul Sucking Ziggurat”.  They find a letter from someone named Natal indicating that “The Brotherhood is counting on you”.

The party goes back to the T room and enters the secret tunnels.  They find a second secret door that would have opened into the skeleton room and then further down a large cavern with a side tunnel to yet another secret door.  This third door opens into what appears to be the main temple.  The Temple of the Unspeakable One is a large chamber with six pillars and a black basalt altar.  Three hooded figures are in the room and one is revealed to be none other than Milos.  A tense battle ensued with Milos casting spells that held the gnome and caused other damage.  In the end the party killed the assistants and backed him up behind the altar and finished him off.  As he died he underwent a horrible transformation and turned into an ophidian serpent man similar to those that attacked the party before.

Tied up below the altar was a man who turned out to be the missing Lucius.  He tells that he was sent to the small brick house where he was overpowered and tied up.  The party arrived just in time for surely he’d have become a sacrifice to the dark god of this temple.

Epilogue and Experience

After safely returning Lucius to town and reuniting him with his friend Egil, the party ties up some loose ends.  They take the staff back to Scarbelly to exchange for the information about Lucius’ time with the orcs.  It turns out the information he yields is nothing really new at this point.  Lucius had come by the orc to find out about his time on the Bloody Vengeance of which he didn’t remember.  The captain indicates that the librarian and ridden with them and mostly stayed out of the way.  Surprisingly, Scarbelly honors his deal and returns the fishing boat and his two hostages.

Given the infrequent running of the Freeport adventures, I’m going to use the fast Pathfinder experience track (1300 XP for 2^nd level).

Combat Experience (per PC):

Press Gang (8) – 280 XP

Thugs (2) – 130 XP

Yellow Shields (4) – 100 XP

Belko – 35 XP

Rittoro – 65 XP

Serpent Men (5) – 125 XP

Skeletons (8) – 200 XP

Milos – 135 XP

Assistants (2) – 50 XP

TOTAL = 1120 XP

Roleplaying Experience (per PC):

Stealing staff from Scarbelly and dealing with him without a fight – 500 XP

Setting up second lodging to spy on first – 50 XP

Checking out lighthouse – 25 XP

Recovering Lucius – 100 XP

TOTAL = 675 XP

GRAND TOTAL XP/PC = 1795 XP

Ninjas Pirates Dinosaurs

Today's review is a short one but it touches on something a lot of D&D gamers would probably agree on.  The paper Dragon and Dungeon magazines were excellent and shouldn't have been dropped.  The other day I grabbed Dragon #318 from April 2004 off the shelf and it's as good as it gets.  As the title of the blog entry suggests, this is an issue with articles on all three of these mostly disconnected items but the articles inside this issue were great.  It had 3.5 updates to Oriental Adventures.  It had stats for several new dinosaurs.  It had the first intro article on the warforged prior to the Eberron release.  It had an article on using historical Port Royal as a pirate base in a game.  One winning article after another.  I'm not saying that WotC couldn't offer the release of the magazines as a PDF each month, but a paper version of the issues would still be a great idea.  And if the quality was as good as the Paizo years of the magazine were, I'm certain that it would stand out as a great way to promote the game on store shelves.  Until then I'll pick up the odd old issue now and again and enjoy a glimse into one of the finer parts of gaming's past.

Long time away

It's been a long time since I posted here.  Going to start putting more up again soon.  I've been on an ebay binge since the summer and have a lot of classic items I picked up that I hope to start to review.  I also want to start posting summaries of the Ravenloft email campaign I'm running.  Stay tuned!

What will be the next big thing?

Roleplaying games are one of those hobbies that seems to be at a loss for the next big thing.  I'd say the last big thing was Open Game License in 2000.  Since that time there have been a lot of different games that have come out and products for existing games but nothing about them has really been revolutionary.  So if I had to guess as to what the next big change will be, I'm going to guess it will have to do with the virtual tabletops.  If WotC gets their act together and has their VTT hit main stream for 4E (and possibly older E) gaming in a way that takes advantage of all of the various modern devices and connection approaches I think it could really get the games going again and we'll see a wealth of new products hit the streets that really finally start to give that at the table experience in a virtual environment.

Planning for an adventure

Been a while since I posted.  One thing I find is that preparing for running an adventure is something that gets easier when you do it all the time.  I'm finding I'm really a bit out of practice as I prepare to run the first adventure of the Freeport trilogy at an upcoming August weekend.  Here it is June and I'm really enthusiastic about this but it feels like it's a slow process.  Of course, some of that is probably the character creation process which a) normally wouldn't be the case if the players were making their own characters but this is essentially a one shot so I'm doing pre-gens and b) involves the Pathfinder system which is close to 3.5 but different enough that it's a learning curve.  But while I've read the module a number of times I still have a lot to do converting/learning the encounters and planning the visual presentation of the encounters with maps/tiles and minis.  I'm still confidant I can do it by August since it's not even July yet but I'm trying to recall if it's felt like this before.  What steps do you go through when you normally prep to run an adventure from a published product?