Category: RPG

Gencon 2015 summation

Well it was busy and fairly drunk with a lot of Lamentations of the Flame Princess played.  I’m tired as shit this evening on account of steve’s snoring Sunday morning. My god it was like a constant fart noise for 2 hours from his fucking MOUTH.  We should bring a portable CPAP machine to stick on people that fucking snore during gencon– there is SO LITTLE TIME TO SLEEP in the first place.  Since it was all burgers and sugar and beer and lack of sleep I’m going to need that XXXXXXL they are always sold out of.

I liked this year’s con.  I had all the homies there, though so many that I didn’t get to game with all of them unfortunately, but it was great to see Dan at the Cool Mini or Not line 10 minutes into the con.  Overall, it was very crowded, and for sure I want to hit Gameholecon and some of the other mid-west ones as a contrast this year.  I’ve always had a lot of fun at Plattecon and that’s TINY.  The overcrowding filled my fucking 3DS with PALICOS, which can only help the Monster Hunting right?

Lots of ‘news’ this year of you give a flying fuck about this sort of stuff.

First, the Zak S win of ennies for best writing, art, and another one for Red and Pleasant Land. D&D5 won about everything else, because D&D5 is very well designed and the books have top drawer production values.  Apparently, in absentia, the Red and Pleasant Land guy was heckled by people when the win was announced and apparently it was one of the writers on the Marvel Heroic RP game(!?).   Also, read this.   People in gaming, no doubt about it, have the tendency to have a lot of social problems.  GENCON with it’s sights and smells is case in point. When I can watch two fat dudes with pants 10″ too tight with their bone-white bellies hanging OUT below their tshirts by 2-3 inches and not bat and eye (and not have them constantly pointed at and laughed at by others, which would sadly or rightly would be the norm) or have someone who stinks like a cesspool walking around and not be phased (nor have other people make fun of that person openly by throwing soap at them, as would sadly be the norm), gamers are both an accepting and really, really socially struggling group of people.  I won’t say our group isn’t terrible (which you will see from the coming pictures) and since the late 80’s we’ve built up a set of pictures that would send Richard Simmons into a fit.  There was a day where we were playing Legends of the Five Rings or something CCG in about 1995/6 and there was a man that was as wide as three people with dirty sweat pants leaning over a massive FORTRESS EUROPA table.  He farted there with his belly pressed over the table for hours until we couldn’t smell his ass-breath anymore.  We took grainy pictures on a small camera and from that day on, a hobby was born.

Second, Games Workshop was actually at the con this year, and this is the first time I remember them being there for maybe a decade? What I saw on shelves were MASS amounts of boxes of Age of Sigmar all over the con both at the GW booth and retailers.  The amounts of these boxes did not change and I never saw anyone with a box.  I did see people buying shitloads of 40K stuff as normal.  The diorama with minatures was nice looking, but I just can’t get past the shitty rules to even consider it.  AoS might not tank, but certainly it’s core demographic was not at Gencon this year.

Third, Runequest was rolled back into Chaosium announced at the Con, pretty near when we were playing our game with Lawrence Whitaker of Design Mechanism.  I noticed all the RQ guys I saw wearing Chaosium tshirts and was like: huh? However, based on the press release I think this is a good thing for the game, though if you have the big ass beautiful RQ6 book, HANG ON TO IT.  We may not see it’s like again.

Fourth, where was WOTC? There was no TSResque castle that I saw, no D&D booth in the main hall, no MTG lines all over the place.  D&D 5E has taken the reigns and just needs to ride.

Last, was the Ken Whitman drama over the Knights of the Dinner Table live action stuff.  I saw what I think was one of the actors standing around outside a booth wearing a strange red wig for awhile.  I think a core issue there is that, despite the costume, he looked like 15% of the crowd.  Basically this guy was supposed to make some live action Knights of the Dinner table shorts, got kickstarter money and was supposed to have a filming of the shows at Gencon.  Seems normal, but apparently people doubted the films would be done at all, and everything was sketchy as hell.  I’m not seeing any info on what happened, but something to keep tabs on likely here.

While I just went there to game– there was too much internet kerfuffle to not pay just a small bit of attention to this crazy ass stuff.

Here is my fucking loot picture.

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Heroes of Normandie, Monster Island, Junta, 2 boxes of EMPIRE OF EVIL, Strangling sea, a custom DM screen and a bunch of EPIC40K Orks!

And… other pictures.

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find the gunt.

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Runequest Vikings!

Ah…. the camping trip RPG sessions.  Trapped people in the tent in the rain at whoever agrees to GM’s mercy forced to try yet another new RPG system… and usually it works out despite the drunkenness and chaos and insects and general darkness despite everyone having a headlamp.

After playing in Steve’s Lamentations game last year, where my thief nearly died from one of his own traps, I was on deck run something while in the wilderness.  I thought long and hard about sticking with Lamentations again this year, since it is easy to grasp and easy to roll up characters when they die.   In addition there’s just a shit ton of adventures from DCC to any of the TSR stuff to the LotFP originals available to run, you can just pull one off the shelf and  go go go. However, since we only had three players this year, I took a chance and busted out Runequest 6.  While I am a stalwart fan of the system, it’s been mostly via reading as I’ve only run it about 3 times, and only once with a big group of players.  It worked really well so far, but I am still very inexperienced with it, despite a couple years of Call of Cthulhu under my belt as a youth.  I was a bit nervous doing this on the camping trip. Was it too involved with all the skills? Will it be OK without player-mastery of the combat special effects?  Animism?  uhhhh…

I meant to run the start of the new Mythic Britain campaign, but the initial part of that campaign is very…political.  Not exactly what you want to lay down as an intro to the system on a camping trip mostly sober.  That left either Early Modern (1600’s) or VIKINGS.   Vikings are easy right?  I started prepping a couple months ago armed with both Mythic Britain (which takes place during the Saxon invasion but has a ton of info on England and it’s petty kingdoms) and Runequest 2’s Viking sourcebook, which is excellent.  What adventures to run?  Things get pretty violent and I didn’t want to run any big raids (yet) or mass battles (yet) for the weekend, so worked up a mash up of a few ideas I had and a part of a module.  Frankly, I didn’t know if it would work and procrastinated a bit on getting the playing started and was sad that I did as it turned out I had to help make two characters. That took a really really long time in comparison to a lot of RPG’s, so if you are going to play RQ, it goes without saying either have pregens or have characters all made first.

Since characters have to go through three steps of adding points to skills (Culture, Career, Bonus) they may mull it over too much, or not enough and then they want to change it around later.   And it’s 300-350 points to skills…  As an alternative, I was thinking instead of choosing Culture, then assigning skills then picking a Career, etc.,  a player would simply choose a class (like Ranger, Fighter, Magic User, Rogue) and then roll on a table associated with that class for your ‘career’ to get 200 points of skills auto added (like rat catcher), then you just worry about your 100-150 bonus points, which at 15 points max per skill should not take to long or break anything in the game.  Look familiar? Yeah that’s the way WFRP 1 and 2 handled it.  Then you can jump in quick without all the mulling over 300+ points to assign.  While Runequest is a very deep game with a lot of potential customization, I would rather hit fast with a quick start.

So what happened?   The characters got invited to hunt an elk by their Jarl with a gold armband around it’s horn.  In a shocking stroke of luck, they actually found it before the other teams of hunters and after expending all of their ranged weapon ammo (axes and spears) they were able to take it down.    While lucky, they were able to get close to the thing because it was moving away from another hunter towards them, so that helped.  The first hit with a throwing axe would have toppled it, but it hit it’s horns and didn’t strike home.   Dragging the elk through the snow, they got ambushed on the way back by some of Matt’s character’s enemies, but talked their way out of it.  Back at the meadhall they had a big feast and their pseudo-Skald critically succeeded a storytelling/oration roll to describe the hunt and so that will have some repercussions throughout the land as it will be on the lips of the nearby viking villages for some time.   Trouble was brewing with Matt’s character’s enemies, so his mother suggested strongly a vacation.  The characters then headed out to the western shore of Britain to assist with a trade caravan going inland from the coast (a real rarity for vikings who do their business on the shore only, so strange).  Turns out Matt’s character’s mother sent them on this errand to unwittingly send a message to his father who was off fighting in Northumbria somewhere.  Whether the characters are there to protect the caravan or the caravan to protect them to get across the island, who can tell?

The group got into one big fight with some rather crappy thugs and there was some splitting of heads with a Dane Axe and we had our first full decapitation (11 points of damage to an unarmored head will do it). Matt (the noble) had himself disarmed by one of the shitbirds, so that will be one to grow on.  This part of the session illustrated what happens when a person with no action points or taken unaware gets hit by a dane axe.   I urged the guys that every fight can be terribly dangerous, and I think that some of the normal murderhoboish tendencies were abated, certainly a lot more than your standard 3.5 or Pathfinder player who wades right into any fight knowing that the adventure path they are in wouldn’t dare have a TPK.

It was a fine set of sessions for me for practice, and I am fond of the RQ 6 system for this type of game.  The Viking era seemed a bit limiting at first, but then you realize that’s where all this D&D stuff came from in the first place and matched with some of the Lovecraftian weird and some of the historical maelstrom, it’s cooking with gas!

Vacation 2015

I’m going to post a bunch of silly shit this week, since I have about 30 draft articles over the years that I’ve never posted (some for good reason).  I want to try to cap next week off by posting in REAL TIME our camping Runequest 6 sessions.  While last year was a high watermark for fun with Lamentations, and really it’s the game of choice for me in that type of situation (chaos, booze, insects, low light) for easy of play and clarity of rules, I was thinking about running D&D 5th edition on the camping trip.  However, because we get horribly drunk and 5th is so similar to some of the OSR games (this is a GOOD thing), I don’t really think there’s be enough difference except instead of handing over one of the LotFP book marks to explain something, I would be handing around my D&D 5 players handbook all over…

So, since I have this… forced…audience during the camping trip and RQ 6 has been calling out to me to run again I’m going with that.

So yeah, summer vacation begins.

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Tomorrow is Free RPG Day

Stores have stuff–free.  No LotFP adventure this year, but DCC and 13th Age for sure.  I think one of the key questions that people need to start asking is not how D&D and rpg playing started but how has it survived for 40 years and why is it so awesome.

For me personally:
1) Captures my imagination and focuses it while making up and running adventures. I’m not exactly the scatterbrained type, but I have a lot going on and I really like it when I can focus on JUST THIS ONE FUCKING THING because if I don’t it will suck for everyone. The pressure of being a referee gives imagination a purpose and goal.

2) Stress relief. I have mountains of potential stress, stress you can’t understand until you’ve had unprotected sex a few times and when before you had no cause to worry, now you have ALL cause to worry about everything.  The RPG action is a huge stress reliever to me, even though prep and the actual act of running a game can be stressful in of itself. Once I get past the first 5 minutes, It’s all go go go and the stress of the actual world dissipates entire.

3) True social interaction. The one thing the smell nerds at the game store playing Pathfinder know is that they are actually interacting with other human beings in a meaningful way. Some of them will never have girlfriends or touch an actual human female bodies’ nether region, but they will have actually socially interacted with other people during their mountain dew time on earth.  This is not social media pseudo-interaction either, despite it being about fantasy lands with robots and vampire dragons, it’s more real than that.

4) Exposure to art.  While the actual physical modules are works of art themselves (some are shit and some are profound with lots in between), the process of play, which is the actual game, is also a collaborative work of art.

Enough sappiness and navel gazing– time to tear some players to shreds or send them to CARCOSA.

A very short academic paper on Murderhoboing.

 

The second Nicole Gingerbottom

This week I had the pleasure of running Lamentations of the Flame Princess again with a group of five wary but enthusiastic players. I ran, for the second time, the small adventure ‘A Stranger Storm” which was a layover part of a larger adventure that will remain unnamed at this time.  Spoilers abound.

The first time I ran ASS (see that?) I had only two players, so they were very wary of fighting, especially since they were outnumbered by EVERYTHING, the Morris Dancers, the Merchants, the horses, and even the Inn staff if you count Nicole and both Innkeepers. They were extremely cautious and did not have a magic user or cleric with them to try to snuff out the changelings magically.

The second group from this week had 5 players: two fighters, a specialist, a pretty badass elf and an ancient cleric with terrible stats (a ‘zero’ as my players have started referring to characters that have no net stat bonuses).  They were on the way to an abbey to ask the Abbess about some sort of magical box for their master when bad weather hit and a broken wheel brought them to the Incontinent Vicar where ruination ensued.

In both play-throughs, I think the moment the players realized that the insanity with the changelings was not going to let up but would continue unabated was when the second Nicole Gingerbottom arrived at the inn to make breakfast. This is when both groups of players started saying “we’re fucked,” which, when confronted with a LotFP “player-fucker” is the correct assumption.

The second group had shown the first Nicole the dead body of Doodles (the inn keeper) and Patrick Roktar in the common room, so she was near catatonic when the second arrived…. and then they showed the second one the bodies as well. As the merchants were trying to leave, I had one of the Nicoles change into the Elf and they fought and one of them (turned out to be the Changeling) went down in a single hit.

Eventually they made their way to the nearby village and met the local Priest (Father Naylor) who let in on the secret of the jewel in the changeling’s hearts. That’s that’s when the frustration and ‘we’re fucked’ became ‘we can make a lot of XP off this!’ and instead of wanting to get away from the changelings, they wanted to go straight at them!  Matt had the quote of the night to Father Naylor with “You’re low fantasy, I’m HIGH fantasy.”  He was playing the elf.

Given the knowledge about the jewels, when confronted with the duplicated knight on the road they just sat back and watched and then cleaned up the survivor.  Afterwards slicing up all the bodies (horses and men) to get at the jewels.  I wondered how long it would take someone to cut out a horse’s heart in the pouring rain.

So the bad part of ASS is coming next and we’ll see if the players can navigate the narrows of morality ahead.  And what happened to the Morris Dancers?

Chaos Warbands! First play since 1993!

Last Saturday, Mouth was in town and we dragged Dan and Amie into a 4-square of the old-school Chaos Warbands using 8th Edition rules and a mish mash of stuff from the two wonderful and awesome Realm of Chaos books.

For those that don’t know about these, they are absolutely essential to any gaming library, whether you play Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer 40K or none of them.   You simply must own them both even if you have to pirate the PDF’s.  Inside each are rules for the four major demons of the Warhammer world, plus rules to make your own, plus a kitchen sink of rules for all three of the systems listed above.   These are both a MEGA supplement, one that these days would have had content split across 16-20 separate books.

What’s more, there’s a fucking GAME in these books that’s separate from all three games they supplement where you roll up a character and his warband and fight it out to get favor from the dark gods. I played this in college a bunch, probably 50 or so battles with multiple warbands and only one guy “won” the game with his champion becoming a minor daemon.  The rest of us either got turned into spawn, or died in pools of blood and urea. And that was fun as shit.

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My champion was one MAGROK ROCKSLIDE a chaos dwarf with FITS and a flail.  Pretty weak to start except he was accompanied by a Dragon Ogre!  After four battles, I ended up with a chaos weapon, four chaos spawn who gave people the evil eye, and eight beastmen.  My spawn had 6 chaos attributes a piece and here is where the old Chaos warbands rules start to fray a bit.  You can end up generating demon weapons, attributes, spawn inside other spawn that transform into other types of spawn longer than you end up playing out the fights!  Now a bit of this is a ton of fun, and the randomness is one of the fantastic elements, but based on the recent play, there would need to be a cap on the amount of chaos attributes at least.

In addition to the chaos attributes, all entities in your warbands that get wounds have them applied individually.  What this means is when you have a unit of beastmen or humans, you need to know which one has -1 toughness and which has a busted leg.  This gets tedious as hell.   More modern designs like Mordheim (which had it’s own terrible problems*) and Legends of the Old West, solve this issue by differentiating between Champions and minions. Minions are treated as a group and have less complex rolls associated with them.

Overall, it was a fun day of gaming.  I only got four games in, and probably could have had a bunch more if I had just an hour or so more.  I worked on an updated set for Mordheim ages ago (here is the PDF) and I think based on rumors of 9th Edition WFB being skirmish based, it may be a good time to rewrite them for 9th Edition in the coming year.  Note, statements in the PDF are contradicted below.  We learn stuff over the span of time…

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Dragon Ogre vs Minotaur!

 

*Mordheim is a fantasy game with swords and stuff should have a focus on close combat, naturally , and yet, it’s sci fi brother with lasguns and bolters and stuff, Necromunda, has much, much better close combat rules.  I wouldn’t say Mordheim’s close combat rules are bad, I’d say they are terrible.