The gaming group is starting on Rise of the Runelords today. Finally, yay! We've been trying to play this for about a year or two. Two many chaotic life events got in the way. I'm playing a paladin.
Can't remember anyone ever playing a paladin in a game I ran. People just don't really like playing a guy who can't torture or maim for information. I think it will be an interesting experience. Force me to role play. At least enough to convince the rest of the party to hold back on the usual dungeoneering atrocities.
I think my initiative is low enough that when fights go down, it won't be me who throws the first blow. Think this will help with some moral dilemmas. Also, the ability to detect evil will help me wade through ethical conundrums.
Can't wait to shove my Great sword down a goblins throat. That is totally acceptable good guy behavior.
Jum and I drove out to Champaign to play in Labyrinth Lord at the Armored Gopher. Been wanting to do that for a while, the two and a half hour drive was a bit of a deterrent. We both played in J. Rients Big Stupid Dungeon Party at Winter War in 08, and had been itching to do some more of his brand of dungeon crawling. We both made up characters before hand, but ditched them to see what we could roll up on the fly.
Jum rolled up a fighter, with a scottish name. Seamus I think? I made a dwarf with 6 strength, Fonkin Wurp. With a six strength, I figured my role would be to shoot a crossbow and set off traps. We each got a random bit of useful gear. I got leather armor +1, Jum got a net. The net never got used, surprisingly. My fifty feet of rope got used tons though. Another party member swung me by it as a weapon, and a pair of kobolds we captured ended up being tied to each end.
I think four other players showed up besides me and Jum, to make a beefy six man party. Spent the night attacking shit, making jokes, and getting loot. That is gaming right there. I've decided I really couldn't give a hoot about "Roleplaying" unless it's funny. Crunchy tactical combat systems are a bore as well. If I wanted to play hero clicks while occasionally using funny voices, that's what I would do.
Might take Thursday off next time to make it out there, hopefully hit second level before we get a TPK. Which I am looking forward to. Lets you know the stakes are high when everyone dies!
I've found a new reason to love Halloween time. Cheap spooky instrumental soundtracks. I think most DM's have bought CDs for the express purpose of using them as background music. The earliest ones I remember trying to hunt down were the Conan and Excalibur soundtracks. Around Halloween, every supermarket, costume shop and drug store has a small stack of creepy party music. Usually for dirt cheap. The ones I have found the most use for is the Midnight Syndicate ones. I looked at their site, they even specifically made a CD of D&D soundtrack music. Can't wait to try out the one I just snagged for 2$. Vampyre, Symphonies from the Crypt. Makes me want to run Ravenloft or something like that.
I'm playing a wizard in ol' Jum-Jums game. What I have learned so far, is wizards shoot from the hip with the wands. Like pointy hatted gunslingers, they make with the wand action. Zero level spells are for usage against NPCs that annoy you. Those area affect damage spells that annoy other classes will destroy a mage. Having a limited spell book is more appealing to me than having to sift through the entire spell list every time I pick spells. Ignore your familiar, and hopefully the DM will too. You can never have too many scrolls.
This supplement came out when AD&D was seriously winding down. White Wolf was kicking their ass without a doubt. It introduced the spirit world, and three classes that gained their power from it. Saying three new classes was a little misleading, it was more like one new class, three kits.
The new classes were a little like priests, but when they chose spells for their spell slots, it was permanent. If they wanted to switch out a spell it would offend their patron spirit. Most of the spells dealt exclusively with spirits. One gave the shaman the ability to bind spirits into fetishes.
Pretty pointless supplement. In the DM only section, it is revealed that the spirit world doesn't exist. It's all in the heads of the shaman. Stupid. Integrating this into a running campaign would assuredly end it. Starting a new campaign based on this would turn into one guy is the hero, everyone else follows him around as he reads omens and barters with ancestors.
So, before, there was the post about what our gaming influences are. Made me think of the other route, what gaming has done to my influences. Or, what I discovered through being a gamer.
1. THE Authors. Lovecraft, Leiber, Moorcock. All of which I discovered through a lucky find at a salvation army. The Deities and Demigods that contained all of these. I ended up selling it at the first gen con I went to, meh.
2. Cyberpunk. I might have discovered it later on, when love of film would have shown to me that Blade Runner kicks all kindsa ass. For me though, it was Shadowrun. Orcs with guns and cybernetics happened to be the gateway drug for me.
3. Music. Joy Division, Sisters of Mercy, X, Robert Johnson. For as reviled as White Wolf is, at least it had awesome suggested listening lists.
4. John Woo. The Hong Kong stuff at least. Hong Kong Action Theater had a super awesome suggested viewing list, which I only scraped the surface of. The Gun Fu stuff really sated me I think. So fricken awesome.
5. Samurai. I really only watched Kurosawa and read Book of the Five Rings so I could run a kick ass game of Legend of the Five Rings. Never did, though.
6. Anime. I'm sure I would have eventually seen Akira, MD geist, Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D. Heavy Gear just gave me the kick in the ass to get around to it. Starting with Patlabor.
The sunday D&D game I'm playing in just descended into a gore fest. Now if boobies are inappropriate in gaming, gore is totally kosher. How can you have a game that 75% of the time involves people chopping away at each other with swords and not have a little viscerata? The grinding and chopping was all happening to townsfolk, so it was especially brutal. Gore is blunted in gaming, and wisely so, because if your axe can lop off slabs of ogre flesh, it stands to reason that his cleaver will do the same to you. No player wants to get maimed in every fight.
Gurps goblins used nasty injuries, but in that game, your characters are virtually unkillable. The injuries would just make your phobic sickly alchoholic goblin more miserable. Seems with healing spells, chopping the hell out of players would be ok. The cure light would just stick that flapping chunk of flesh back on you.
I'm playing in a new game on sunday nights, good times. Still trying to get a handle on the personality of my Mwambi (African) tribesman magic user, Witch Man. Just talking in third person all the time doesn't seem like a deep enough characterization, but meh, I'll get the hang of it eventually.
During the scenario, it became obvious to me that in fantasy towns and fairs there is an abundance of sex workers. Brothels, dancing girls, street walkers, saucy barmaids, willing succubus's, all kinds of naughty girls. In addition to this, I just saw the south park episode Major Boobage. Ahh, one of the hidden ingredients to perfect fantasy. Puerile adolescent nudity and violence. Korgoth of Barbaria, Heavy Metal, Frazetta, Nekkid titty demons in the monster manual, all these reflect this naughty piece of the fantasy puzzle.
Try running naughty things in your game though. It's pervy as hell. For the most part, players are going to be guys. As much as they like boobies and sex scenes, they don't really want their buddies to think them up for them and then tell them about it around a table. I guess it is sexist as well, to plaster manuals and scenarios in boobirific art. Still, I'm thinking the best fantasy has awesome boobage and mysterious super science.
1. Piers Anthony As much as I wanted to read real fantasy fiction as a lad, the local library left much to be desired. Of your fantasy mainstays, seems like they never had more than one or two of any given series, and never the first episode. Except for the Xanth books. Think this is where I decided a little bit of silly anachronism is ok in fantasy.
2. Elfquest When Marvel comics reprinted this under the epic imprint, in color no less, I was lucky enough to stumble onto the first issue. I was just strolling through the local drug store, when BAM! I espied a first issue of a new series. I spouted "Wow! This looks just like dungeons and dragons!" From there on I was hooked. Took periodic three mile walks to the local comic store to try and snag the current issue. If I missed an issue, hunted for it in the back issue bins of whatever comic store we might visit on family vacations. I'm still missing one issue, which I have sort of avoided finding. I like having that quest unfinished.
3. Krull My brother had the board game, which came with little resin figures of The Prince, and The Beast. They found their way into the first couple of sessions I ran, along with whatever half painted mini's of my bro's I could scrounge up.
4. Zork Not the computer game, we were too poor for that. Nope, the What-do-I-do-now books. Good stuff, picked them up at school book fairs, when I could beg the change for them. Still have a copy of #4 Conquest at Quendor. Bivotaur and Juranda have to face down a riddle talking cat head on the end of a tentacle. The demon Jeearr!
5. Dr. Frankenstein's Haunted Castle Awesome attraction at Indiana beach. Just really think a good dungeon should kinda be like a haunted house ride. Like the intro to the DnD cartoon. Rat tails tickling at your feet, drop away balconies, false doors, all kindsa tricksy fun.
I've been far too lazy to post, this is a pretty common occurrence so it really shouldn't raise any eyebrows. Anyway, as far as gaming goes, I've got mixed feelings on how soon Shackled City is going to be over. On the one hand, I'm a little dissapointed I couldn't meet my personal goal of finishing it by summer, setting back further the much anticipated (at least by me!) start of Rise of the Runelords. On the other side, kinda glad it's dragging out, because I've really enjoy trying to kill Krunk, Midori, and Silverswift.
Things I am diddling with:
A Subsector of Traveller. Something I started in september, and have slowly been adding to over the past nine months. Tedious, mind numbing at times, but also super fascinating. Trying to make each world stand out, when there are dozens in a system, pretty damn hard. Eventually it will be to the point where I can drop players in on a planet and have the fun explode out from behind the screen by the gallon!
Omega World. From the polyhedron article that I borrowed, and will give back, because I just downloaded the pdf. Making a ruin crawl and such, drawing up maps, slapping together monsters and npc's. Planning on adapting Legions of Gold to it next, for a micro campaign (four to eight sessions tops).
4.0 Random Dungeon. Love randomizing dungeons, and this one set of tables really breathes life into my random dungeonizing. Pretty much the only table I use on a regular basis is the Gygax ones from the DMG, so using these makes me happier. No 45 degree angle tunnels, curved tunnels, tunnels that smack into each other, x intersections, all that poop. Made up 3 levels of my 4.0 MEGADUNGEON! so far, it has way too many goblins in it for my tastes, gonna have to go back in there and change them into robot dogs or something.
I bought the fourth issue of Kobold Quarterly last week. Gotta say, I'm really happy with it. Really miss having a gaming mag in print. Just doesn't seem the same, reading printouts on the crapper instead of a periodical.
It really reminds me of White Dwarf, or White Wolf, back before they both became essentially a catalog for their parent company. Interesting how what would have been game specific content is now generic content. Seemed like before, the current edition of D&D was the default, with a little bleed over between editions. Now gamers seem to want to stick with 3.5, play a cloned version of an older edition (osric, labyrinth lord, hack master), or a progressed version of an older edition (castles and crusades).
They all have the same basic framework. Sessions could be damn near identical, only differences between them would be matters of preference in specific rules, mechanics. It's like D&D has gone from chess, to a deck of cards and whatever version of poker you prefer.
Anyway, loved the articles, funnies, and even ads in Kobold. Makes me wanna get a copy of Fight On!
So the Champions of Cauldron defeated a pyroclastic dragon. Not surprising, considering they have also killed a lich, a draco lich, a room full of mustache twirling villians, and eradicated an entire thieves guild. How they bested it was the shocker for me.
Going into this fight, I was pretty sure this bad mamba jamba was gonna kill one if not all of them. They decided to chat with it first, which was a good thing. Slight chance they might be able to achieve their goal by cleverly lying to him. Seemed possible, they did roll enough to change his attitude from hostile to friendly. The lying part though... well he had a sense motive of +31. Not so easy to fool. Especially when you come in telling him you are gonna kill his employers.
The fighting starts, and the party wizard tries yet again to disintegrate. On paper, disintegrate seems like whoop ass in a can. Never seems to work though, after the ranged touch attack roll, overcoming spell resistance and save, the baddies get at least one lucky roll. I roll a two on the save, which is still enough. Now my stomach drops, because I can tell I'm gonna have to kill characters now. Lots of them, unless the Champions get really really lucky. This thing has like 312 hp, and breathes superheated ash for 14d6. Its favorite tactic is to bull rush people into the lava, then grapple to keep them cooking. Painful, very very painful.
They try to banish it. Banish is turning out to be a super useful little spell, considering everything seems to be extra planar at high levels. Knowing that only a botched save on baddies part is gonna save them, I roll it right out in the open. I roll a one. It was kinda weird, it was like everyone was really too shocked to react. Plus it was like the first round of combat. I'm thinking if this had happened a little deeper into the combat, when like two or three cohorts had been toasted, there would have been whooping and cheering like in the commercial. It was more like "huh, wow, umm.. no fricken way... huh" Awesome, utterly awesome. I'm glad after like twenty years, the game can still surprise me.
Also, that's Jami Gertz and Cameron from Ferris Buehler in this commercial rocking it with the polyhedrals. I guess it originally aired only a couple of times, once of which was during Saturday Night Live. That table looks pretty damn uncluttered for a gaming session.
I bought a couple of boxes of Dungeons of Dread, the new DnD mini set. Lucky me! I scored a hook horror, not accurately represented on the left. No, that over there is one of the damn coolest toys ever. Meaning I never owned it, other wise it wouldn't be so cool. This is one I desired greatly, but never acquired.
The hook horror seemed to be one of the most important DnD monsters to me as a kid, for three reasons. It had a toy, a whole bunch of them were featured in the cartoon, and I had the stats in the only monster book I owned, the fiend folio. Having only the fiend folio and the players hand book (both scored in a bargain rack at Kaybee toys) gave me a strange, skewed vision of how to play DnD. I had to cobble together the rules from those two books, maybe one of the books from the basic set, and an adventure written for the expert rules (Quagmire!). Occasionally I would check out the dungeon masters guide from the library, but that tended to muddle and confuse more than help. When I finally started earning enough allowance to start to buy the needed books, seemed like all of the ones I needed were never in stock. Probably because they were out of print. Second edition was soon to be released!
The April fool's page on WOTC? Right up my alley! Autognomes, evil squirrels as players, all kindsaErol Otis art. That's what the site should be all year long. Lurkers above and below 24/7. Grumble grumble, wish those links were real though.
Another critter the Champions fought was a farastu (tarry) demodand. That's the scrawny little critter on the left. Four of 'em exploded outta some zombies. Not much of a challenge, but sure evokes some nasty imagery, very Dead Alive.
Not a big fan of demodand, just kinda feel stuck on, because they needed neutral evil demon/devils. They excrete yuckiness, and in the farastu's case, it is tar. This tar makes weapons stick to them unless a relatively easy save is made, all saves were made so I couldn't use these scummy little boogers to take away some weapons.
In second edition, when they didn't want to call fiendish critters demons and devils, they changed demodand's name to ghereleth's. The decision to try to disguise demons and devils always pissed me off. In a weird way, the belief that D&D was devil worship gave it a little more credibility. Something you might play with metal heads, instead of a hobby exclusively enjoyed by dorks.
