Games I Got to Play This Year Part 1

A game at the table is worth two on the shelf

So, in the last post we discovered that I had played only three of the ten games I had wanted to in the last five months of the year. But, as everyone knows, it’s not about the number of games you play, it’s about the quality of them and the fun you have while playing (even if the fun is terror or sorrow.)

In this post, I’m going to get into the games I actually took part in in the last few months instead (apart from those I wrote about in the last post.) There were actually quite a few, mainly one-shots and mainly GMed by Isaac of Lost Path Publishing. By the by, Isaac is blogging again on his own site, linked above. Go and read the words he writes.

Ongoing Campaigns

1. D&D 5E – Spelljammer. I’ve written quite a bit about this campaign. I like to mess around with the rules and try new things to keep it fresh. Here’s a post about hexcrawling the Rock of Bral. Here’s one about using an engagement roll type mechanic to improve the dungeon experience. We have recently finished a major campaign arc and it looks like the crew is about ready to take off into Wildspace again. They’ve had an extended shore leave on the Rock. After a short hiatus through the holiday season, the next session we play will be number 30 and they have been on the Rock since session number 11…that was over a year ago in real time. One of my players recently dropped the timely hint that they did not want to end up stuck on the Rock of Bral for the rest of the campaign and that prompted me to get them spelljamming again. Listen to your players, GMs!
2. D&D 5E – An Unexpected Wedding Invitation – Finished. My first foray into D&D as a player in many years was a murder mystery set at a wedding populated with beautiful and complicated NPCs. We had some issues with the use of 5E as a system for this one but we had a ball role-playing our characters. The link above will take you to my post-mortem of the game.
3. Heart: The City Beneath – Home game, GM. Finished. Man, I miss this game already. The PCs all activated their Zenith Abilities in the last session and it was a thing of beauty. After 12 sessions of delving, the android they were searching for turned up in Terminus, and they discovered that he was a sort of proxy for the Heart. He was trying to make their Heart’s desire come true. But he was bound to do the same for another denizen of the City Beneath, The Drowned Queen, whom our heroes had trapped in the Grey in session 8. The Android freed her and released her into Terminus, which she quickly began to drown in salt water. The PCs realised she could drown, not only this one Landmark but both the City Beneath and the City Above as well, linked as it was to every line in the Vermissian network. And so the delvers combined their newly acquired Zenith abilities to defeat her, imprison her and ensure themselves a place in heaven afterwards. So satisfying.
4. Black Sword Hack – Three of Blades. This is one of Isaac’s games. It is another long running campaign. I went into some detail about it in the post I linked above. Recently, it has been hard to find time to get together for more sessions of this. Can’t wait to get back into it. In the last few months, our group has discovered that if we recover three legendary weapons from the most unlikely of places (one of them is on the friggin’ moon, but that’s OK, because we nicked a spaceship/big sphere off a bunch of cultists a while ago) we can use them to defeat the Queen of the Dead. As players, however, we have realised that, if we want to advance, we have to complete more “stories,” or adventures, so pursuing these weapons has taken a back seat recently. Instead we had a moral crisis about killing a big ol’ wyvern, we dithered over how to rescue a town of people from the mercenaries we were, ostensibly, working for and we argued over how to deal with a native woman who was summoning harpies to murder the invaders who had killed her lover (apologies to Isaac if I am misremebering that one.) Isaac says we’re the ones inventing the ethical conundrums when all he does is lay out the situations, but I’m pretty sure he plans them that way.
5. Blade Runner – Electric Dreams – Finished. The link will take you to the first post I wrote about this short campaign. I was enjoying it immensely at that time. Once we got to the end, I feel like it really shone, though. That last session had a proper climax. Both of the players found the ending satisfying and sort of unexpected and I found it fascinating to see how they dealt with everything the case file threw at them. It’s hard to go into specifics without spoilers here, so I won’t. Suffice it to say, the investigation took some twists in the best way. I wrote a bit more in this post, where I compared the experience of playing this game with the Unexpected Wedding Invitation. TLDR, I think Free League have done a great job creating an investigative game that is a lot more that just a cop simulator and that works significantly better than the 5E system for this sort of thing.

New Campaigns

1. The One Ring – The Star of the Mist. I wrote briefly about this one in the post I linked above. It’s a shame that we have not played much more of it since that first session. Basically, unless it is not entirely clear from the long list of games in this post, we have been busy in Tables and Tales! Sometimes it is hard to schedule sessions around all the other sessions. Anyway, session 2 brought us very, very close to a TPK. We learned a few things about this game. Thing the first: it’s not like D&D 5E, your characters are tough, but they are not super heroes. Thing the second: some times you should run away when you keep getting knocked prone and you can’t seem to hit anything and you are surrounded by marsh zombies. Thing the third: use your head. We beat the zombies with brains instead of axes in the end, partly because Isaac, who also runs this game, was very generous to us. I think the next session, we’ll be a lot more circumspect about approaching encounters and I can’t wait to see how we get on.
2. Mörk Borg – The Great Borgin’ Campaign. Isaac sure is running a lot of campaigns, isn’t he? The ones I have listed on this page aren’t even all of them, just the ones I’m in. This has been great fun. We have a regular every-second Wednesday game of Mörk Borg going now. It is a sort of a drop-in, drop-out game but the playership has actually remained fairly consistent. My character is a Sacrilegious Songbird, a class from the Heretic sourcebook. Coincidentally, that’s also where our first adventure was from. Merkari the Magnificent and his weird companions managed to survive Graven-Tosk, the sprawling graveyard setting of “Graves Left Wanting.” I loved this module. It was dark and filthy and involved some brilliantly shitty situations. I mean, we started the game by waking up in a charnel pit. Anyway, once we got out of there, we moved on and played through “Death Ziggurat.” This was a (mostly) hex-crawl that I found equal parts foul and hilarious. This was partly due to Isaac’s amazing character work and partly due to the non-stop comedy from the other players at the table who included friend of the blog and local Media Goblin, Tom, in one of their most brilliant roles yet. The wildly unhinged scatological, pyromaniac shit from Shannen and Jude has been an absolute delight too.

And I haven’t even gotten to the many one-shots I was part of in the last five months. If you have been hanging around the dice pool for a while, you have probably read about some of them, at least. But they deserve a proper review in this series as we approach the end of the year so tune in to the next post, dear reader.