Fresh on the heels of my son deleting all of his Castle Crasher characters I wanted to post the next BEHEMOTH game– which looks like their version of Disgaea!
Behold! (note if you finished Battle Block Theatre you’ll notice that this takes place directly after the ending… whatever happened to Hattie at the end triggered this…)
Matt and I made the trek to Gamehole Con yesterday in Madison, WI and it was a fine time. Due to no planning on my part, we didn’t get into any scheduled games, like the bolt action tournament or any of the 5E or other OSR RPG games. However, for me this was just a ‘check out’ year to see what it was all about, so walked around and painted stuff and I busted out BLOOD RAGE and got a few games of that in.
It is not a huge con, maybe twice the size of say Plattcon or Hooplacon. Yet it is a huge OSR con–there were tons of Dungeon Crawl Classics, Swords and Wizardry and other OSR stuff going on. If you count 5E as in the OSR style, the entire con was mostly OSR RPG’s. Absolutely there were Pathfinder games there, but they were in the minority.
We spent about 3 hours at the free painting table where I found an old Talisman Rogue and just had to paint the fucker. They had BOTH of the Kevin Dallimore painting books there was well, so I was able to pour over those. Matt got stuck on painting some sort of samurai and though he spent awhile on it, it was still not finished. The lady that runs it had a ton of great tips so highly recommended.
Stuff I saw:
Otherwise it was extremely well run and organized. They really have their shit together and I will be definitely attending again. Likely I will run something next year as well.
The races look good. Voices are cartoonish (not like the old game wasn’t cartoonish though…)
Exalted 3rd edition is out in PDF form to backers and all over the internets for everyone else. It’s being poured over by fans of the game as well as people that were inspired by 2nd editions mess to make other games because the older systems were so fucked up–yet some things were platinum awesome about it. I’ve got a long post coming about the new version, but today I want to blather about the failure of the game to address one of the terrible problems with Stunting in the old edition and it’s not what you think–mote retrieval for stunting– but something fundamentally worse:
If the dice say it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.
Exalted stunting works like this: You say what you are going to try to do and if excites people at the table and titillates the GM, you will get bonus dice or bonus successes on the subsequent roll. In theory, this seems like it will work well: players describe what they hope their character will do and it leads to descriptive flair at the table. However, in actual play it works like this:
Stunting like this seemed cool back when it was done in Feng Shui and copied around to other games. Feng Shui 2 has fixed this problem while still incorporating stunts fully into the combat and chase systems. First, stunts happen AFTER dice are rolled when a big success happens to ask the GM for a special effect– not more damage, not anything completely defined by rules, but something that is decided at the table like punching a guy so hard (the punch HAPPENS because the dice say so first) that his limp body knocks down a row of motorcycles like dominoes and pisses off all the biker onlookers! Second, there is the option to ask for a special effect before dice are rolled, at which time the difficulty of the roll goes up– letting the player know that he is trying something that could more easily fail. This is simple on paper and PLAYABLE. Players aren’t going to get fucking bored off their ass because yet another 30 dice attack failed to even hit the big bad guy since he has seven shadows evasion every round…
Because Exalted is a min/max’ers, system junky style game with very little narrative freedom during fights (stunting always translates into raw mechanics) I guess they had no choice to make stunts like they did, but they were rubbish in play in 2nd Edition and not just because they gave motes back.
I’ve heard this on pandora a bunch but didn’t pay much attention to it, but then realized that THE BEAT IS SICKNESS ITSELF. And yes I’m man enough to like a song called “FALL IN LOVE.” I think.
A few of the core members of Runic went off and made this while we were all still playing Torchlight 2. Bad audio I know, but it gives you the FEEL of the game despite the incoherent babble:
It’s a lot like Privateer and you have to wonder if this small team was able to pull something like this off quickly, what will happen to STAR CITIZEN?
Due to accidentally thinking I was running 13th Age Thursday rather than next week, I tried to haphazardly set up a session on the fly, which didn’t really work since the players had no idea it was happening. Instead of throwing in the towel, I ran another session of Into the Odd, which is pretty much made for this sort of thing.
This session saw our heroic gentlemen, Cisero Collingham and Ancell Warner drunk in a tavern by the docks when they were interuptted by a stout woman named Mable Curmudgeon and strapping thug named Peter Selle (Fart Saddle in French) who required them to accompany them on a voyage to retrieve some of young Severin’s entertainers left in the underground. Unfortunately for Ancell, he was the only one in the tavern at the time, so he was taken aboard a flatboat and headed into the sewers again. The group saved some hungry kids dressed in lobster suits who were lost and starving. Since they were just in the sewere, they brought the kids back to the docks before continuing further. Later they found a woman in a worm mask who begged to be taken aboard, she was an old whore named Gusta Sidebottom who complained about her crotch quite a bit. Heading into a massive grotto, they found a barrel bumping against the boat that contained non other than Cicero Collingham and his mutt who had boasted about their adventure to the underground the day before and were stuffed into the barrel and thrown into the sewer for their eloquence.
What’s more, an old rotting monk was found clinging to the side of the boat and he was brought aboard babbling about the Smogfather and offering stinking ale. No sight of the giant frogs with glowing eyes in the grotto this time…
Knowing that the lost entertainers were in the bubbling cavern, and after the boat survived the drop, the group searched that area and found a body, badly boiled and dead for some time. As they investigated further into the caverns a pack of horrible blood men assaulted them with poisonous millipedes and then charged with cruel axes. Selle was hewn to the ground and Ancell took a horrible wound to the leg and both had to be dragged back to the boat while the punt men fired a cannon into the pack of howling savages. Unable to continue the search, and sure that the remains of the entertainers were in some foul thing’s belly, they retreated back to the surface and found themselves popping out of a manhole cover covered in filth and coagulate gore on a busy market street on a sunny afternoon in July.
Weeks later, the Elder Severin wanted to have a chat with them…
So this was one that I had to absolutely back on account of Studio McVey (miniatures) and Adrian Smith (art). Regardless of the game design or how the fucker played, this was getting my cold, hard cash way up inside it.
Thankfully, after 3 plays, all of which I’ve lost badly, I can say that Blood Rage is a good game, I’m not going to say it’s great until I have near a dozen plays, but it’s good. Certainly it’s on part with Chaos in the Old World, and while that has a solid appeal and hasn’t gotten played enough, the miniatures alone make Blood Rage a clear champion at the moment.
First, the miniatures are shocking to behold and fun to play with. The plastic is tough and a bit bendy (not like say GW’s hard, easily paintable plastics) and I can’t imagine any of them breaking without something crazy happening. It is most excellent to slap down one of the big ass monsters when you play their upgrade (or later, when you fuck people with the Troll or Fire Giant) because the miniatures are so damn meaty. I finally opened all the monsters and with the exception of the wolf man, which is just OK, all of them are really awesome sculpts.
In terms of the clans, I have all but the Rams opened up. I like the Wolves and the Ravens best. Serpents (the female one) are also swell looking. When on the board, it’s all about the silhouettes and that’s where I think the Boars and bears get a bit muddled. Painted though, who knows, they will all look good.
Gameplay. This is the important bit as this could have just ended up as a game that sat on my shelf and looked good instead of something that got busted out frequently (as frequently as a game can with all the competition these days). It’s a very tight game. It feels very short, even though the games are just under 2 hours. You will feel the Agricola pinch as you just can’t get everything done that you wanted to by the end of the game. Battles are fast and decisive (first time you get your huge monster blown off to valhalla the same age you put them on the table is an eye opener and most importantly, can involve everyone in the game. Taking turns is relatively fast, though there is some brain burn that comes in during the 2nd and 3rd ages. In terms of turn-angst potential, I would say the draft part (that happens at the beginning of each age) will take the longest and with five players, it may be a very long drafting stage.
Strategically, I don’t have much to say yet. My first game I just middled around to little effect. The second game I went Loki as in, lose a lot, steal rage, steal honor, get points for your dead stuff and I still lost. The third game I went Frigga/Tyr and just destroyed everyone in nearly all the battles I was in. Yet I still lost! What I think is important is the balance across all things. You need to win battles, you need to complete quests, you need to get your clan stats up to the VP levels (think tech in eclipse) and you need to draft so your opponents can’t bust out with tons of points. Overall it’s a game that begs to be played, a lot.
So the kickstarter came with a ton of stuff. If you are buying this retail let me tell you straight that you won’t need anything except the base game to have tons of fun. All the extra monsters are great, but most games you will only see about 4-7 monsters out of the whole group anyway. The mystics are neat, but not essential. The GODS expansion is one I may be playing without going forward (need to play it more). Basically two of the gods occupy areas on the board and change the way battles are handled. I’ve only had Tyr and Odin on so I can’t comment on it much but it seemed a bit unnecessary. It may grow on me later though. The five player expansion is only good if you consistently have five. For me, based on our gaming group attendance, it was mandatory to have. The sixth clan, the boars, are simply extra, and you cannot play with 6 players with it (balanced at least) however the box comes with some neat minis that replace the counters in the game with the critical one being the token that shows where Ragnarok is going to hit next. This one is probably the least important to get.
All in all, it was one of the best kickstarters I’ve ever backed– I even followed the fucking boats as they made their way through the med into the atlantic and to Georgia…Blood Rage and those kickstarters like it, despite being almost pre orders, just prove that not everything is like Star Citizen or Exalted 3rd edition (ie – FUCKED).
