Category: RPG

Garycon action!

We made it around 10 and it was already hopping at the Grand Geneva.   Great con to wander around in, but like all small cons, if you don’t have a game going on, there’s not a ton to do (except eat and drink!).  It was far from the mass insanity of Gencon.  We pretty much played Numenera all day as the Into the Odd game I wanted to get into is going on NOW rather than when I though it was.

Stuff that was good:

Location – The Grand Geneva is just that, it’s a grand hotel on massive acreage.  in summer you wouldn’t have caught me dead inside any buildings there.

Focused convention— Gary Con is an old school D&D convention with all that that means and all that that excludes.  There were no LARPers, very little cosplay, few board games– people were there to game as well and not jag around.

General friendliness- it’s Wisconsin after all.  WI people are a grim folk generally, but they are nice.  The staff at the grand Geneva were very friendly and accommodating.

Lots of indy stuff.  There were games played that have never and will never see wide publication or even publication outside of someone’s typed up notebook.

Food – was good

Beer – was cheap and good

Gaming – a bit more chaotic to try to get into games, and yet the con is so small you could just walk around and find the people that you want to play with.  Next year I will probably run something (Lamentations most likely).

Large Beards.  Some of the biggest I’ve seen.

So yes, for sure next year.

garycon

Gary Con tomorrow!

We didn’t sign up for jack shit, but we’re going. Last time I was in Lake Geneva for a convention it was probably 2007 or so for Gaming Hoopla. It was held in a small community center (with big fireplaces) and was a great time. It was also within walking distance of Tom Wham’s house, so he was there as well.

This is a big OSR con, so it should be quite a lot of fun. I’m going to try to get in on some Dungeon Crawl Classics and pick up a physical copy of INTO THE ODD. Probably will spend too much money on old modules and shit as well.

I’ll try to post from my phone with pictures of bearded Wisconsin types sitting around circular tables with paper on them!

DAT1

13th Age and the Halfling takes a savage beating again

halfling

The group is still in the mine/ dungeon crawl for the last session and upon awakening an earth elemental, the halfling was smashed into a wall instantly, only saved by the Paladin’s guard skills on a hit that would have taken him out. I noticed reading the session summaries that nearly every battle the Halfling took the brunt of nearly all the damage, and is the only character that consistently goes down during fights, even with a near-guaranteed dodge skill for those nasty blows.  Now, the group has some squishy characters, three in fact, but the other two (Elf Ranger and High Elf sorceress) don’t seem to take nearly as much of a beating as the Halfling does.  Why is this?  It’s not like it’s a gnome that I would go out of my way to kill off out of general principles, it’s a Halfling and a bard no less.

They also seriously discussed cramming him down a lavoratory hole to see if it ‘led to the 2nd level.’

Later in the session, during the post fight decompression, the paladin mentioned off hand: “I still hope to lower him into a toilet.”

13th Age session, Interview with Raggi, other stuff

It’s been 10 months and we finally got back on Roll 20 for some 13th Age.  Unfortunately, the group was right in the middle of a dungeon, so the break between sessions sucked for everyone.   I blame this on 1) Summer 2014, 2) Runequest 6 which most of the same group played in person after summer 3) people not showing up on Thursdays on Roll20 (myself included!).  4) Me taking it too seriously and building a huge campaign area and series of prepared adventures (whether original or pulled from wherever) instead of going the lazy route, which 13th Age allows. 5) Moving.

I think it was a good getting back into the game session, but I still have problems spending player’s Icon rolls in these short 2 hour sessions, especially when they  roll well and I’ve got a bunch of 5’s there.  5’s are the hardest.

More RPG stuff to read.

Interview with Raggi and the guy that finished the new TOWERS TWO adventure after the GWAR guy died:

– Provocation is the entire purpose of fiction

Raggi always has a lot of really interesting stuff to say and ways to say it.

also an erection

As the Runequest name goes back to Chaosium and Gloratha for good, we have Design Mechanism’s new name for their BRP D100 game following the RQ6 ruleset: MYTHRAS.  While I won’t need to buy this since I have RQ6 already, I likely will.  Best thing is that any supplements based on Mythras will be RQ6 compatible, and that’s fucking awesome for you and for me.

Mythras
Mythras

What’s more, DM is coming out with Classic Fantasy, a hack of RQ for dungeon crawling old school style. Here is a preview of it.

For those playing/GMing 5e, below is an article detailing that you can stack your D20’s (like 3D20 and take the worst one or vice versa) and it works. Say someone is wounded, turning to stone, being eaten alive, etc.  you can double down on the disadvantage roll and the math doesn’t turn to shit. Overall Advantage/Disadvantage is a great mechanic that has definitely trickled into my games.

Stacked disadvantage in 5E with maths.

Lastly, the Shinobigami translation will be ready for playtesting in about a month.  This is a ‘get together for about 5 hours’ type of game like Carolina Death Crawl, so look for that on your calendars in May.

Edge of Empire – first play

I got to play Star Wars: Edge of Empire Saturday with Matt and run by Dan at this benefit thing.   We could pay $$ for rerolls or the game’s version of bennies so it was good.

Thoughts:

I have a fucking sore spot for Fantasy Flights ‘special dice and cards’ style of RPG/board game after they fucked up Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition with one of the most complicated RPG’s that it could have only come out in 2009.  I wanted to like it, bought a bunch of stuff in the fire sale but it was VERY difficult to learn, VERY difficult to play/GM and covered the table in crap.  The core dice mechanic wasn’t terrible though, it was everything else surrounding that which had the suck.

Secondly, while I like the new film a lot, I’m not a big star wars GAME fan. Yes Xwing vs Tie fighter was awesome but I pretty much stick to the movies and that’s it. There’s just not much there that’s gameable to me.  Two factions, one is on the run, the other one is cool for the movies, but otherwise boring.

Naturally when Edge of Empire came out I scoffed at it since it was a version of WFRP3.  However, having played, it’s not that bad.  Gone are all the stupid cards for attacks, and though the character sheet is about 4 pages of crap long, it played fast.

What’s more, while it uses some elements of those lame-ass story games like FATE and Dungeon World, it can be played entirely ignoring that type of stuff on the dice, and use those sides for entirely mechanical effect.  It has some blammo sides to the dice (triumphs) but their effect is completely dictated by the GM, it’s basically a reason for GM fiat to hurt or help the players.  This is without any mechanics if you want, unlike FATE which piles every fucking thing about everything in the game world into ‘aspects’ that are really just wholly mechanical +2’s.  So if your group has realized that the FATE-style games are a total waste of time like ours has, you can roll and not care about that stuff.

We played with minis, but it was very abstract, like Numenera, 13th Age, etc.  That is very good.  No nurpling around with goddamn squares and five foot steps and all that 3.5 bullshit.

So, I have a plan, that may or may not happen. I want to run a 1 v 1 JEDI fight using Edge of Empire, the Star Wars West End D6 game from the 90’s and … Design Mechanism’s free Mod for Runequest 6 and see which is the most fun.  I know where my hypothesis would tell me, but let’s see what happens. Volunteers?

Star Wars

World of Darkness post

A VERY frank discussion about Paradox’s plans for the World of Darkness.

This is the quote I liked most, but read the whole thing, there are others:

In the last few years, focused and easy-to-use products like Mutant: Year Zero and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are selling unexpectedly well. Their brevity and low threshold makes them perfect for introducing new players to the hobby, while the monumental classic-WW-style books generally sell poorly and are more read than played. If future editions of WoD are actively used rather than collected we have done our job.

Que a discussion of the pile of Exalted books in my house and how much we actually played it compared to…well nearly everything.  And fuck, I tried, I really tried.

If you want to discuss it, please let me lend you my Fair Folk 2E book so you can read that first.

annike

Massive armour and weapons visuals

If you are looking for examples of weapons and armor from across the globe in pictures, look no further than this Pinterest user. He has everything well categorized.

https://www.pinterest.com/magnusbarbadus/

This will answers stuff like:

What does a Gambeson look like?

What types of Morions were used in the English Civil War?

What did Landsknechts actually wear?

What’s the difference between a Dane Axe and a Lochaber Axe?

Lamentations Exhibiting at Gencon 2017

Email this morning that is big news for fans of Lamentations of the Flame Princess here in the States– LotFP will be at Gencon 2016.

So the key thing here with a small publisher is to help fund this (James Raggi IV lives in Finland) by buying a bunch of stuff that you need to have.  Buy it for yourself, buy it for people that are for some inexplicable reason do not yet play LotFP.  There’s lots of small stuff, like shirts, and I love the bookmarks during play, so I buy a set with nearly every order, and you should too.

Buy Stuff here (real stuff)

Buy Stuff here (pdfs)

Iconic

 

2015 In review

Ah so long 2015, it was a good year for gaming. Not the best ever, but very good.  This is going to be a long post.  I think this blog is now 5 years old as well, wow.

Board Games and such

The first best is Blood Rage. I can’t get enough of the game and having it only a short time, I’ve already played it 11 times and will pretty much play any time.  While the set up time is a bit long and the boxing back up time is ridiculous, Blood Rage has been worth playing every single time we’ve busted it out.  I sleeved all the cards and now store it in a huge pelican case.   While I won’t knee-jerk everything that CMON comes out with, Blood Rage was a design and artistic triumph of board games.  I wish I had bought it at Gencon AND gotten my kickstarter stuff later because we lost a couple months there waiting for the boats to come in from China. It was a long wait.

I’m tired of worker placement games. I think during a game of Keyflower this year my eyes went blurry and it wasn’t from drink but from the ‘oh shit I’ve played this same thing before with different rules.’  While some of the new stuff looks and plays great, like Caverna, Tiny Epic Galaxies and Euphoria– I’m just real tired of that type of game.  Sure, Caylus is one of my favorites, but I don’t remember when the last time was I brought that out to play.  There’s just too many of these games and people keep buying them.

Dead of Winter was my second favorite game this year.  Excellent psuedo co-op game that plays very smooth and is easy to teach, even to non-hardcore gamers.  While the premise with these zombies has been done to death here in 2016 now, Plaid Hat did a fine job with this one.  Co-op games are usually crap, but because everyone has their own goals to fulfill to win, it doesn’t fall into the pandemic trap where one player ACTUALLY plays the game while everyone else just sits there.

The new Epic Spell Wars was cool, but it hasn’t hit the table much. I got in one game of Moongha Invaders, and it was good, but Blood Rage pretty much hammered everything else to the side.

Arcadia Quest was played quite a bit, and while it’s not my favorite game, it has a certain appeal to it for the DOTA in all of us.  I’m definitely interested in playing more (but not too much).

Talisman is still going strong, but we’re not. I’ve played only twice with the Woodlands and there are more expansions out than number of plays for our group.  While Netherealm was awesome, Deep Realms was too difficult to figure out and I haven’t even purchased the Harbinger expansion yet.   I am happy they are coming out with a new main board expansion though; that may be very cool and I’ve always hated a few bits of art on the 4th Edition main board (which Fantasy Flight did not produce originally).  One of these days we are going to do a series on how to play Talisman, i.e.: which expansions to use and which to leave out.  It’s a great game, but it’s over the top now to play with all expansions (not including dragons) that we keep buying.

Video Games

darkest

My favorite this year went along with my splurge purchase of a 3DS XL.  Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is completely amazing and hellaciously addicting.  It’s a shame it’s only on handhelds.  It has a message in the beginning to take breaks from playing it for a reason.  I’ve played mostly single player, but I have gotten in on some 4 player monster hunting and it’s great fun.

I’m still playing Darkest Dungeon, even though I just haven’t gotten it yet in terms of how to ‘win.’  I’m getting used to losing a lot of guys and on top of that, running away a lot more.  Other than that, I haven’t gotten very far at all sadly, but I keep playing– and playing.  It’s great!

Fallout 4 is more Fallout.  It’s not a ‘holy shit WOW’ type of game like Skyrim, but there’s a lot going on and it’s been pretty compelling so far.  I meant to play it more during holiday, but I didn’t get too much time in.  Being able to make gun modifications is a pretty addicting part of the game, though I’m not totally sold on the Minecraft stuff yet.

endless

Other than Fallout and Darkest Dungeon, I played a shitload of Dungeon of the Endless in 2015, which is amazing and beautiful in all ways.  Rebel Galaxy has gotten some solid play, which is also good Privateer style fun.

My biggest disappointment was probably the much hyped Endless Legend.  Absolutely GORGEOUS art style and aesthetic, even the UI is great, but I hated the gameplay.  I’m just not a CIV-style person.  Others will love this game.

I guess if I was to pick a runner up game of 2015 it would be Far Cry 3.   I know it did not come out last year, but 2015 is when I got around to it.  Great shooter, one of the best I remember and a redemption of the franchise after Far Cry 2.

There are a lot of video games out worth playing.  Far, far, far too many to even scratch the surface to discuss. I would be like talking about TV shows you’ve seen– there’s just that many out.

Miniatures

When AT-43 was tanking and everything was on sale everywhere, I had just had a kid, so there was no way I could take advantage of it.  That said, this year I spent some cash on it and got a large UNA army and filled some gaps in my Red Blok and Therian armies.   I got to play once, but this is one I want to expose people to more since I have all the shit and it really is a great game.

Age of Sigmar was a catastrophe.  It killed my desire to play Warhammer 8th Edition (for now) which is sad since I was closing in on finishing painting my minotaurs as the capstone to my beastmen army.  8th did not get enough play this past year, and that’s got to change.

We did get some Necromunda in recently, but I think 2015 was not the best year for miniature games and especially sad to see the death of what I think is one of the best rulesets for big midieval style battles- 8th edition Warhammer

RPG’s

This was the year of Runequest 6.  Despite some trainwreck sessions I’ve had with the game, I am pretty much convinced that Runequest 6 is the best fantasy RPG for the style of play I want in a serious campaign.  While Lamentations and 13th Age are fantastic and will absolutely get played, Runequest 6 just has so much going for it and so many possibilities in a campaign setting.   If you have the 6th Edition books, hang on to them as it’s going to pull a Marvel Heroic Roleplaying next Spring and will start to get rarer and rarer.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get this together in 2016.

13th Age is my Roll20 game, and we have yet to scratch the surface.  On Roll20 it’s a TON of prep though, so when there are weeks when people can’t get it together (myself included), it’s demoralizing.

Feng Shui 2, though I’ve only run 1 session so far, is excellent. Something to bust out for a couple session runs from time to time.  I’m not happy the architects are out of the setting, but as a GM, that’s easily rectumfied…

And lastly I need to mention another game I really liked running this year: Into the Odd.  Extremely rules light and heavy on the weird.  The character generation alone is inspirational and takes 2 minutes.  I’ve got this shitty print out of the rulebook that’s stapled and is coming apart from abuse so I need to get a real copy someday.  I went so far as to support the author on Patreon so yeah, love it.

I got all the 5E books, liked the DM’s guide but the PBH is just too huge to use as a rules reference.  I have not yet PLAYED 5E which I hope to change in 2016.  It’s not my D20 of choice, but it’s good and with the OGL now out, it will be deluged with content.

 

2015, see you later.