Author: littlemute

Free RPG day 2016 and sharting for the win

Free RPG day was good this year.  Perfect weather and two places in town that were hosting it.  There was TOO much good stuff to choose from so tough choices had to be made.  We ended up getting SLUGS! of course, which is a ridiculous Lamentations of the Flame Princess spoof (yes, it has some good monsters in it, but the intro– teeing off on all non DIY publishers in a Donald Trump style diatribe must be read to be believed), The Derelict, a Cthulhu adventure, the Nights Black Agents/13th Age combo (the 13th Age adventure looks pretty good too) and the obligatory Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure.  All of it kick ass stuff that will get some use (except the Nights Black Agents– we don’t play that) even if we just read it.

Why attack the Xmas slug? Why???
Why attack the Xmas slug? Why???

Talisman

After the whirlwind of game and comic shops in the morning, Keneda (in town for the weekend), Sensless, Okyo and I got together and play Talisman with the Cataclysm expansion– with the new board only and not any other big boards. This meant no dungeon, no city, no Highlands and no Woodlands.

We did include the REAPER expansion cards (not the reaper himself) as I feel this expansion at least is absolutely essential.  There were a few Frostmarch and Sacred Pool cards included cause we were sort of drunken by the time we started sorting to no ill effect.

Cataclysm, being a new main board an all, has some surprises.  Gone are the standard places visited for healing, FATE and buying stuff. Instead there are areas where you draw new cards called “denizens” who represent effects from the old board, but randomized around.  If the denizen originally belonged in the space you drew her, she will stay, otherwise they are one-shot cards.  For example if you draw the BARMAID in the graveyard, she won’t stay but she’ll stay if she’s in the Tavern or Village.  Cool stuff.

We also played with the new crown of command as the goal rather than the random center cards, which is more deadly for everybody as the person on the crown can be killed using it as well.

We played at first with only Cataclysm characters (draw one rather than the usual three and choose), then when one would die, replacements were randomized from the whole deck of characters as normal (draw 2 and choose, die again, draw only one, die again and you’re out!)

 

Pyssed up again.
Pyssed up again, post pestilence, pre shart.

Here were the first set of characters:

Sensless: MUTANT

Me: Black Knight

Okyo: Arcane Scion

Keneda: Scavenger

This was a LONG game, about 1.5 hours per player.  Why?  We got drunk and were at least slightly drunk the whole time– with the game initiated via a shot of Jeppsom’s Malort for all and then beers.  There was a lot of side saddle talk and wandering outside.  Luckily no pinners or it would have ended prematurely with unconsciousness.

Despite the drunkeness and length, there was some excitement at the table.  I’ve ripped on 4th edition despite it being my preferred edition of Talisman on account of it’s lack of deadliness,  mostly due to FATE points saving the day all the fucking time, but we had more characters driven into the mud this game than any recent games I can remember.   Cataclysm has some nastiness and by the third turn or so, an event came along and ripped all the fate from all players,  so things were very risky risky.

After fate was gone, there was TOADAGE.  The mutant met the wizard denizen and was promptly toaded. He lived long enough to land on his ‘stuff’ space and encounter the wizard again– and get TOADED again.  There was another wizard that finally put the hapless toad-mutant to rest–and was replaced by the Barbarian!

More Toadage ensued as my black knight was toaded by the same Wizard denizen as the Mutant and didn’t survive; becoming toad-meat for a giant spider.  A lucky draw got me the ELEMENTALIST.

Without FATE, we were all running weak and lifeless with no easy access to the chapel or city and naughty instead of nice denizens about.  Pestilence came at just the right time and took out the Barbarian and Scavenger for their trouble. Keneda was on her last character–the Assassin.

The mid-game was long– maybe 3 hours long and the arcane scion was slowly building up, but refused to go to the middle.  I got pumped quick with the Elementalist (not hard to do) and made a run for the middle, got lucky making it up but suffered badly at the Lich (replaced death on the STRENGTH side of the center region) and had only a single health going into the crown of command.

The command spell destroyed the Assassin and another character I can’t remember that replaced the Scavenger, but it wasn’t enough for my Elementalist, especially after the sharting.  Right before the final turn to get to the middle, Okyo gambled and lost and had to run to the bathroom.  He came back and despite the Elementalist at the crown of command, despite the humidity and Malort and Schlitz and underwear in the outdoors trash can, the Arcane Scion made it to the crown of command with a single life left as well and won the combat handily vs the Elementalist for the final win.

It was a good, albeit slow game.  Cutting out all the expansions was a really good idea for this one, as there was a ton of new stuff in Cataclysm. I think I’d like to play it a few more times with just that set, the base adventure deck plus

Since in Cataclysm, no one knows where to go to get stuff until the denizens come out, it’s tough to get healed, get fate and buy weapons/armor.  This is quite a shift from the old board where you know just where to go to get refilled.

a winner is you.
a winner is you.

Tobal 2 and Virtua Fighter 5

We played a surprising amount of both VF5 and Tobal 2.  I just couldn’t get the hang of Tobal again, even with Ill Goga and Gren and failed miserably.  My timing was WAY off.  Matt, however, was all over it with Epon whopping ass.

Despite my love for Tobal, VF is the better game, with a shocking amount of incredibly nuanced characters and simply the best fight engine there is.  It still looks GORGEOUS and caused a lot of yelling (same with Tobal) when the physics or throwing engines showed something spectacular (guaranteed throws and some of the reversals in VF are amazing to watch).  Fighters are a million times more fun when you are all sitting around playing, on a console or arcade machine.  This is why EVO and all those cons have such a strong following.  Playing online is OK, but face to face with the crying out and yelling is where it’s at.

epon-scene

I’d like to imagine this day was like a typical Saturday in 1996-2000 or so, before everything changed.  Those four years were (sad as it seems now) formative madness to the extreme.

Mountainous

I was off to the West for a long training and there’s been no time to really post so this is going to be a splatter of crap on the side of the bowl.

Steve and I went to the new Games Workshop (now WARHAMMER) store in Boulder to get some paints and saw a bunch of AOS crap but amidst it was the new Heroquest style Silver Tower game.  Miniatures looked great, the card board pieces that came with it are up their with Rackham’s Hybrid and Nemesis (read: good) and while not as cool looking as those, it looks to be a more playable game.  Though everything fantasy related from GW these days is really, really, really:

he-man

While out west, I didn’t get inside any headshops or smoke them tweeds as the saying goes. The thought was there, but it didn’t really count for much in the end.  I saw a place called “Starbuds” and thought that was clever and likely going to be sued soon!  I did walk through MANY clouds of THC both indoors and outdoors.  For a little while at least, I could pretend we were (collectively, instead of just Western CO) living in the better times imagined during the mid/late 90’s rather than a billionaire dominated, post citizen united, Swift boat veteran style country.

Blood Bowl is coming out.  There are pictures of people playtesting and some of the miniatures.  This is the first thing I’ve been really pumped about from GW that wasn’t a video game since Warhammer 8th Edition.  While AOS is garbage compared to the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle game and Warhammer proper, with the announcement of a new Epic, Blood Bowl and Necromunda, things may turn around for my interest in their stuff at least.

Blood-Bowl-Human

The BB miniatures look… awful chunky.  I’m not sure I dig the look of the orks, but the humans, especially the human catchers, look great.  The dwarves I’ve seen are very very blocky, and not the drunk, bearded short-fatties we’re used to. It’s not the olde worlde style, since they blew it up and all that.  I’m VERY glad the humans aren’t Sigmarines.  That helps a lot.

For weeks now, Warhammer Total War has been out and it’s gotten good reviews. …and I am going to wait to buy it, not because it isn’t great (it’s been the fastest selling TW game to date) or buggy (reports are that it’s a cleanish release by CA, which is a ..second?), but because I want to get a new video card first and play DOOM, then dish out the cash for Warhammer TW. Plans, plans– all go to ruins when I just start up Torchlight 2 again, or Fallout 4, or Darkest Dungeon.

I started playing LISA before I went off to training.  Wow.  Some broken people are responsible for that shit.  While I haven’t gotten anywhere, I want you to share my pain.  Highly recommended.  Buy it.

lisa

Other stuff along the RPG front:

There are two new releases from Lamentations of  the Flame Princess. One is by the guy who did Dwimmmmmermmmmmount and the other is by some English bloke set during the English Civil war.  Remember that shit?  I got them in the mail and plowed through Cursed Chateau, which reminds me a bit of Castle Amber (a good thing) and started on England Upturn’d. With World of the Lost, Towers Two and these new ones, I’m going to need to run some LotFP again soon.

SLUGS is coming on Free RPG day.  Look at that purdy cover.  It even has the GENCON booth for this year.

SlugsPromo

And this is from an interview here:

“The inspiration for LotFP is the basic belief that the life of an adventurer is a hellish thing that nobody sane would want – full of danger and violence with no real home, no real family, no certainty, ever. Think of the classic RPG adventure form: You’re going into some dark hole with a sinister history, fully expecting to encounter death traps and supernatural monsters and all sorts of things that want nothing more to kill you and probably eat you, and you’re doing it for some money. …
That’s LotFP.”

GRENKUTS

This weekend is TALISMAN Weekend with Keneda.  We will drink, play Tobal 2 and play a massive couple of games of Talisman with (nearly) all the expansions.  This will include the new board, which is quite a work of art and a full on deconstructionist version of the original 4E and 2E’s boards.

tm16_board

While the 4e board is good, it really needed the FF artistic touch, so here it is!

 

 

Discussion of various mosh pits

this is a PAINTING.
this is a PAINTING.

Had lunch with a friend who had experienced various mosh pits and we discussed them: the changes over the decades, and which mosh pits were better, which were worse and which were absolutely terrible.  It’s been a long time, probably eight years or so since I’ve been in one, so I can’t say from recent experience but…

When I was a wee lad and a skate rat, mosh pits were primarily the domain of the punks, which would be post-punk really since it was the early to mid 80’s. Skinheads, punks, and other various fuckers would be in a mosh pit, so, as skate rats, who these guys would likely love to smash all over the place, we had to watch out. Also, since we were all about 125 pounds that didn’t help either. What helped though was being dodgy, which we were. From my little experience, I remember the 80’s mosh pits sucking real bad and not being fun at all because people were trying to really hurt the other people with elbows and knees and teeth. Luckily there wasn’t any other types of objects involved as there were later.  Unicorn, Shank Hall, these types of places became places I loved to completely avoid to ask to go to a concert.  Despite my taste in music at the time (punk and metal), I would have rather gone to a Boston concert than Die Kruetzen.

When I was in college, it was the grunge and goth mosh pits that I got in. By far the best was at the Nine Inch Nails concert at the UF ballroom in 1991. This was a very fun and silly pit to be in. Before the concert I thought– oh a mosh at a NiN concert? No fucking way, but it was big and people were generally friendly about it, it being Florida and all and not some industrial midwestern wasteland where everyone is pissed off all the time. NiN is fairly goth (see below), but whatever was going on that day at UF, it wasn’t a typical gothpit.

Grunge was a mixed bag. Certainly the mosh pits happened, and I was in quite a few at the Surf Club house at school which had a wrought-iron staircase in the room with the band in it and people would try to ram you up against that if they could. Altogether though, grunge mosh was a bit middling as the whole movement sort of couldn’t be bothered with it much or they just suddenly remembered OH WE SHOULD MOSH and it was sort of stoned and lethargic at best.

During and after college I was in a few, maybe two, goth/neo industrial type mosh pits and they were very stupid. First of all, some of guys in there would wear spikes and stuff and like the punks of old, would be trying to hurt you with them by raking it up your back or arms. I did not take kindly to this and would try to trip those guys onto the ground whenever I could. In once instance one of my larger friends (we were no longer 125 pounds at this time) simply pushed one guys onto the ground over and over until he left the area.

My friend who I had lunch with mentioned the goth mosh pits in an unfavorable way as well, saying that people would put razor blades a little bit sticking out of their boots to cut people up.  This is likely the GG Allen stuff I really didn’t experience, thankfully because it was terrible.

As I was older, I got to experience Metal mosh pits, which really wasn’t a think in the hair band days of the 80’s. The difference, and this is critical, between Goth, Punk and Metal mosh pits is that at a metal concert pretty much everyone is VERY HAPPY TO BE THERE. You go to Slayer or Hatebreed, Gojira or Clutch, the fans are really happy to be there and they are happy to see the other happy metal fans that are there. So, naturally, the mosh pits are big, fun pushing affairs where people pick you up off the ground if you fall down and don’t try to stomp or kick you or knock your teeth out. I don’t know the year, but the biggest mosh pit I’ve ever been in was at Hatebreed in Milwaukee. I don’t know even where the concert was held or remember how I ended up going, but it was sn incredibly huge pit, never ever stopped and tons of fun.  While mosh pits are not exactly METAL-NATIVE, we both agreed, they are the best by far. You will still get a bit hurt as it’s  a mosh pit after all, but really the people are there to get fucking loaded, mosh and listen to metal and they are not, in general, broken, degenerate people who focus on being raging pissed off at everything (punks) or very sad and wicked as a natural state (goths) with violence on their mind above all.

Dan Witz
Dan Witz (PAINTING)

Gladiators Runequest 6 style!

To show off the combat system for those who had not experienced it yet (and Matt, who has), I decided to put together a little player vs player gladiatorial combat action using Runequest 6 based on this article.   I rolled about 15 Gladiators for RQ, priced them based on their stats (mostly looking at AP, Combat Style, Damage mod, Evade and Endurance) and had the players buy them with 1000 sectartiis.  Most gladiators were about 300s, but a few hardcore guys were more.  The only requirement was that they had at least 3 fighters for 3 rounds of that day’s games.  The winner of each round would receive $$ and if any gladiators were killed, the owner of the killer would have to pay up, just like in real life.

If they had $$ left over after buying fighters, they could buy luck points for 50s.  These could be used at any time for any gladiator to force a reroll on another player, or reroll the dice themselves.  Once used for the day, they were gone.

I did use miniatures for this fight to keep things clear.  Everyone was close together and there were no ranged weapons, so it made it easy.  We had three players for these events, again with 3 gladiators each and a few luck points between them.

When Animals Attack

The first round was a fight with a bear, naturally (I recommend all new players and GM’s start with an animal combat of some kind, like a hunt or bear attack).  The players threw in one gladiator each and they went to town.  The combatants were:

Beaire the Nasty, a Thracian (note, these guys have big shields, but only a hooked DAGGER)

Nesset the Ugly, a Provocator (huge shield, shortsword)

Tecocia the Reaver, a Retiarius (the net and trident dudes)

There was some early confusion as to what the bear would do with the net being thrown onto him, but I made the call since he didn’t know what it was, he wouldn’t parry.  Needless to say, the bear didn’t spend a lot of time parrying, and mostly spent his time attacking.

Nesset was able to impale with his short sword, but it did not hinder the bear’s skills at all (based on a size chart of weapon to creature/person size).  As a group, they were able to fend off the bear for a bit, long enough for Tecocia to net it so it had difficulty attacking and then impale it with the trident (which did quite a bit of damage).  Unfortunately, the poor Retiarius decided not to parry a blow from the bear and had his leg torn off for his trouble.  The remaining two gladiators were able to hack the bear down with the trident still sticking out of him, and survive unscathed to the cheering of the crowd.  While it seems forgone conclusion, things could have gone terribly, terribly wrong for the gladiators.  Without the retiarius, I think they would have been bloodied meat in the sand mostly because the Thracian and Provocator use their weapon special effects to good use vs humans, but not so much vs the brawn monster that is a bear.

provacatour2

Individual Fights

The second event was the individual fights between gladiators.  The players put forth their champions and lots were drawn to determine the fighters.  I stepped in because we had only three players in order to give a fight to the odd man.

The combatants in the first fight were

Coprica – Murmillo (Large shield, short sword, Heavy head armor)

Pepominili – Hoplomachus (Short spear, tiny shield and a dagger)

This went back and forth and really caused us to look in the rulebook a lot for being prone, tripping, different weapon lengths and a few other rules since the spear and the short sword were two weapon lengths apart.   While I love the RQ6 book, not everything you need for a rule is in the same place, so there’s hunting and pecking.  Also in this fight we ran into some trouble with players taking a long time to pick special effects–  the android app would have helped here, but no one had an android, so we had to use sheets of paper and my homemade GM screen.

This was a reach fight.  The Hoplomachus was able to keep the Murmillo at bay for most of the fight, despite his small shield he was able to defend mostly by backing away.  There was a big difference in combat style % here, with the Hoplomachus at 82%!

Eventually due to sheer luck, Coprica kept getting hit in his unarmoured arm (among MANY armored places) and passed out from the shock and blood loss for a win for Papamillia the Hoplomachus.

The second fight was the fastest RQ6 fight I’ve ever experienced.  The combatants were:

Nesset the Ugly (the Provocator from the first animal fight)

Necnipro the Doomed (a Dimachaerus, which has only leg armor and two short swords !???)

I figured this would be a chance to see how the FLURRY special effect worked since that’s what the Dimachaerus’s come with, but, Nesset engaged and attacked… and fumbled his attack roll! Necnipro succeeded with her parry giving two special effects (and access to the attacker fumble special effects) which were Compel Surrender and Force Failure.  This means the combatant would normally get a willpower roll to resist the compel surrender, but the second effect, only usable when someone fumbles, forced the failure.  Nesset, while unhurt, was booed by the crowed and probably died of shame in his heart moments later.

The Melee

The final battle was a free for all melee with four fighters and would be a long slough to the end.

The combatants (in order of strike rank):

Misuae (I just kept calling him Mouse) – another Retiarius again with a net and trident

Necnipro the Doomed (Dimachaerus fresh of her 2 second win over Nesset the ugly!) – two short swords

Ecaubus the Monstrous (a huge Gual/Sartar with a broadsword and big shield, but no other armor).

Posttastis the Blood Drinker (Provocator, again, big shield, shortsword and armor)

Misuae charged Postastis (here on out, called mouse and potatoes) and while the Retiarius got in some shots without parries from the Provocator, his armor saved him multiple times (warding location with that fuckn big shield helped too).  Mouse was just unable to close the distance for long versus that trident and even hit himself in the leg with his shield at one point.  Eventually though, the Provocator was able to strike the spear arm of the Retiarius and forced him to drop his trident.  Mouse carried on with only his net until…

Necnipro and Ecaubus had the exact same strike rank in this fight, and this was odd since if one declared and attack, the other parried and… could attack again?  We didn’t have time to look into the rules much for this but a few times both gladiators simply attacked without parrying at the same time.  In one exchange, Necnipro got a bleeder on Ecaubus and nearly severed one of her arms.  She stayed in the fight and impaled Necnipro with her broadsword.  Necnipro in a display of bravery, pulled the broadsword out of her abdomen, made her endurance roll and fought on, twice forcing Ecaubus to check willpower or surrender (who made very good dice rolls to stay in the fight).  Nearly bled out, Ecaubus had the last laugh and took Necnipro (remember, armourless except her legs) out of action.

The Gaul (Ecaubus) then ran and attacked the Retiarius who had regained his trident from the bloody sand and was warding off Mouse again.  We were not sure whether or not the longer weapon (trident) could hold off the broad sword and deemed not because one was L and one was M.  Ecaubus got a special effect and compelled Mouse to surrender.  Even while bleeding out (she was at formidable skill difficulty at this point) Ecaubus the Monstrous was able to hit the Provocator and that was the end of it– until the owner of the Provocator remembered a luck point and using this, was able to keep the fight going and force surrender on Ecaubus the Monstrous who would have probably collapsed moments later from bleeding…

hoplomachus
that’s a 25mm equivalent of a penis. It’s like the evil plot from Black Dynamite happened to this guy!

So that was that.  There was a lot of discussion about the nature of opposed rolls, which means that if both parties succeed, whoever gets highest without going over their skill wins the contest (an ideal roll would be 95% [corrected from 98%, which is an auto failure] if you had 100% skill).  This is one of the subtle yet awesome things about RQ6 to keep the game moving and not have ‘nothing happen.’  Granted attacks/parries are not opposed rolls, so there can be times when, if both opponents have the same weapon size, that they bounce off each other in the attack-parry sequence. However, shortly something will happen when a failure, critical or fumble comes along.

There were a lot of new rules I had not had to deal with in the Vikinthulhu campaign yet, so we had to look up a lot. Things in the heat of the moment could not always be made clear.  Issues we had specifically were around:

  • Arise (special effect) and getting up from prone, and what the effects of being prone are.
  • Charging – it costs an AP to charge…but you don’t get to attack as I understand it with that AP? strange!
  • Flurry (special effect) seems pointless? I don’t get this special effect. (only unarmed and two weapon guys can have it, so no big deal).
  • The use of NETS and tripping and immobilizing

Overall a good time and great practice for me as a GM.  The special effect selection slowed everything down more than I would have liked, but this could be helped with a better organized cheat sheet that shows normal special effects, critical ones and ones only on fumbles.  A sheet specific to each player with just the special effects they can use based on their weapon-set would be cool to make. OR if that special effect app was either web-based or on IOS would help

13th Age characters are tough as hell!

We’ve been playing 13th Age for over a year now and I’ve been following the balanced encounter advice in the main book (with an excel sheet some dude made to back it up).   Most of the time they’ve been fighting humans, which are easy to make on the fly, but a few times I generated a monster with Raggi’s RANDOM ESOTERIC CREATURE GENERATOR FOR CLASSIC FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING GAMES AND THEIR MODERN SIMULACRA and slapped the 13th Age stats on them (and triggered powers, gotta love those).  The system makes it fairly easy to create battles that won’t totally fuck the characters, but I’m finding now that maybe as published the advice leans a wee bit on the easy side and by wee bit, I mean a lot. Most of the stuff I’ve thrown at them is pretty much in line with what the characters, now at level 2, supposedly can take on, but last night I threw the kitchen sink at them, and no characters dropped!  The battle was tense, and the characters got messed up, but I went for the (planned) dues ex machina without them really needing it.

1463335205130

Basic math suggestion is that with 4 characters at level 1, you should have 4 (normal sized) monsters of level 1 for an even fight (or equivalent).  This changes with tiers to be finally about 2-1 at Epic tier, but if I was to give advice to start the calculation, I would say # of creatures at the party’s level +1.  So five first level characters vs 6 first level orcs should be a balanced encounter.

I had a prepped battle ready for about 6 months to pull out when needed (wasn’t sure where it would take place, but I knew what was coming) and I tweaked it from time to time to make sure it wasn’t too hard, yet it was supposed to be a hard fight, the capstone of part of the campaign if you will.  It ended up being a 2-session battle and even without the Barbarian in the first session, they mopped the floor with the bad guys including a nasty Hungry Star.

How did they do it?

  • Paladin (with the apt nickname “the dauntless”) has a ridiculous AC as the escalation die goes up due to a magic shield.  By round 4, she was nearly unhittable by the mooks, and one of the bigbads couldn’t manage to hit her.
  • Bard had a power to give 2 free recoveries out during the fight.  This saved a couple character’s asses and is very powerful.  The bard’s song also helped quite a bit.
  • Doling out huge damage from the ranger, including special effects.  The ranger class can stunt to get bonuses/effects and there was incredible rolling. He rolled at least two 30’s during the combat– enough to hit anything that exists!
  • And, as always, the Barbarian in session 2 of the fight, even without being able to Rage this battle, was destroying everything nearby with nearly comically high dice rolling.
  • The sorceress can and will be a mega-damage dealer as long as she doesn’t get attacked by enemies too often and dropped.

Now they get their first long rest (unless they do something… stupid) after about 6 sessions and the recovery gas tanks will be filled to the brim.

Gencon events, what a chore!

Why do I still go to Gencon?  I’m thinking the smaller cons (especially around here) are going to fit the bill better than the 60K attendance monstrosity.  Having everyone ready for 11 AM today was a bitch, people got together as if it was some sort of business meeting.  Fucksake, this is what you have to go through to get events? Madness.   Despite the craziness, the online system is pretty amazing.  While confusing at times, it parses a shocking amount of information in a fairly short amount of time.   Coordination is the fucking thing.  If we weren’t trying to get into games together, it would be a lot easier, but half the fun is playing with part strangers, part amigos.

I got all my Runequest requests, but nothing else.  I ain’t complaining.  The only game I really wanted other than that was Feng Shui 2 and, though there were no games, Shinobigami Modern Ninja Battle Game.

And I’m running a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game.  First event I’ve ever run there after all these decades of going.   I was thinking either that, Into the Odd or Feng Shui 2 and LotFP won out.  I’m going to run an entrant (randomly from a set of 10 good ones) from the one page dungeon contest.