Category: What I’m Playing

Games I Have Played So Far this Year, Part 1

Lists part 2.1

Also not a top ten, not by any means, but I do think this one is useful for me, especially. Even this time last year I could not has envisioned a seven month period where I got to experience so many different games with so many different people. Looking back on it, I don’t think there has ever been a period in my life where I have been involved in so many RPGs.

This got me thinking so I went to dig up some of my old prep books from the 90s (a few notebooks, filled largely with encounter stats.) In these ancient tomes I found prep notes and full scenarios that I wrote for no fewer than three AD&D campaigns (Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Planescape,) a Gamma World campaign, a Beyond the Supernatural campaign, a Robotech campaign, and a home-brewed Aliens game that I think I based largely on the Palladium ruleset. I know I ran a couple of other things too but not much more. I have run more different games in the last 7 months than I did throughout my teenage years! It is a golden age for me and I am loving it!

Anyway, on to the list. In this post I am only doing the games I have GMed/run/refereed. I will do the ones I played in in the next post:

Games I have run this year so far

  • Spire – Kings of Silver – Concluded Campaign. Far more epic in scope than it ever had any right to be. This was largely due to my choice at the start to make use of an optional rule that made the PCs much less likely to accrue fallout. At the time I did not realise exactly how crucial fallout is to pushing he campaign forward. I wouldn’t do that again. This campaign really got me into the products of Rowan Rook and Decard. You will find another couple of games on this list that they made too, in fact. It was a great experience and I know I’ll be going back to Spire sometime soon. I am also definitely going to do a more in-depth look at this one in a post all its own sometime soon.

  • Eat the Reich – short campaign. We started playing this shortly after I received my physical copy from the Kickstarter campaign, just because our regular game night fell through. And what a happy accident! If you too hate nazis and love making up inventive and ultra-violent ways to kill them with vampires, this is the game for you. Also, it is Ennie nominated right now, go vote for it! It is one of the most eye-catching RPG books I own, which is saying quite a lot. It is worth picking it up for that alone.

  • Never Tell Me The Odds – Rebel Scum – one-shot. I planned this one for Star Wars Day this year and really enjoyed it. We actually watched Star Wars: A New Hope before we played it too. This really helped because the premise of the whole one-shot was that the PCs were a rival band of rebels who were actually sent to the Death Star to rescue Leia at the same time as Luke and his pals were blundering about, getting captured and accidentally doing good. Great fun, would recommend this game for one-shots too. It’s all about the stakes and how you play them.

  • Troika! – The Blancmange and Thistle – one-shot. Possibly the most fun I have had in a one-shot all year. Everyone rolled on the random table in this OSR game and played what they got, a Rhino-Man, a Questing Knight and a Befouler of Ponds. Then we played the starter adventure from the Troika! Numinous Edition core book, where they went to their room in a hotel and attended a party. Fucking hilarious at almost every turn. 10/10 would play again, and I definitely will.

Check back for part 2 where I get into the ones I’ve been a player in so far this year.

Black Sword in the Dark at a Wedding

Player Freedom

I have never been the forever GM. Back in the olden days, me and my mates would spend entire Saturdays and Sundays just passing that GM baton. I’d run some Dark Sun for an hour or two, then my friend would try and blow us up in Rifts for a while and later, yet another pal would run us through some MERP. I don’t know if that was unusual in those days as I had no frame of reference. We kept our weird little hobby to ourselves for fear of bullying and humiliation from our peers. But that’s besides the point.

I have always enjoyed RPGs from both sides of the screen. In fact, in some games, I feel almost freer when I have the reins for just a single character instead of being burdened by a whole world. It depends on the game, for certain, but I love the process of establishing, advancing and developing a character over the course of weeks and months and years of play. In many ways, that’s my motivation when GMing too, it’s just more vicarious in that instance.

Anyway, here’s a little bit about each of the games I am playing in right now. Each of them is incredibly different to the others but I get something special and unique from every one.

Black Sword Hack

This is what I would call a home game. It’s just four of us, friends who make up the core of a role playing crew. We have been playing together for the last 5 years or so and it’s the exact same people who make up our Heart game.

Our GM for Black Sword Hack was very excited to run this when he got his copy of the book (I think he backed the Kickstarter for it but I might be wrong.) We played a memorable one-shot set in the village of Rust where we had to deal with some fucking wizard (those guys are the worst.) We all agreed that we liked it from that experience so he agreed to go ahead with a longer game.

But he took his time putting together something special before diving into the campaign. He made a stunningly beautiful map of the region we would be exploring, a loose history that included neighbouring cultures and ancient empires and some fantastical locales for adventuring in. So when we started off, we felt like we were in a living world, populated by recognisable people with a variety of extremely well acted voices and accents (our GM is a fully paid up member of the funny voice club.)

Until the Queen of the Dead turned up to kill all these people and transform them into the living dead. We escaped in a flying ship and have been more-or-less on the run from her ever since, attempting to curry favour with the bigwigs in the surviving lands so we can add their strength to ours in the fight against the zombie hordes.

Black Sword Hack is an OSR game (At some point, I’m definitely coming back to this term for what will probably be a long post. OSR stands for Old School Revival or Old School Renaissance, which confusingly, seem to mean two different things, or just many different things to different people) that’s very much based on the works of authors like Robert E Howard, Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock. It’s dark and slightly weird with the potential to become something grand and fantastical. But your characters are really just little guys. You do not play super powerful mages or unbeatable warriors, you start off with a bunch of probably not very impressive ability scores, a background and a culture and, when you gain a level, you don’t often get a bunch of new powers or anything. That’s fine. There are ways to improve your character through play, rather than through advancement and you are usually encouraged to seek those out. It’s fun!

My character is a former assassin of the Iron Horde. He has one friend who is a blue-arsed Pictish berserker and another who is a charismatic sword guy from the Northern Raiders, a mum he cares dearly for, an international drug dealing business and a dog variously named Dev Patel, Devandra Bernhardt and Devourer. He is known as Poppy. He has respect for life in general but not for most lives in particular. He talks with a slight rasp that hurts after a while. I love playing him.

Blades in the Dark

I’d imagine Blades in the Dark needs no introduction for most modern RPG players. It’s a phenomenon that has launched a thousand games with variations in its ruleset, know as “Forged in the Dark.” I had been curious about playing it for so long so I purchased the book and read it cover to cover. Became even more curious to play it. But my home group was busy with other games (see the other paragraphs in this post and the other posts in this series.) But, it just so happens that I have another option when it comes to play groups. The Open Hearth is an online gaming community. It is a welcoming and friendly place where you can find people to play almost any RPG you care to think of and many you have never heard of. Probably not D&D though. A fellow member in a similar timezone also wanted to get a Blades game going so he put it together!

Now this has been a refreshing experience from the get-go, largely because of our GM’s inventiveness and insistence on doing things differently. Before we ever started playing Blades we got together to design and populate the particular pocket of the city of Doskvol that our game would centre around. We did this using a couple of other games called, I’m Sorry, Did You Say Street Magic? and Clean Spirits and, let me tell you, reader, that worked like a charm. I immediately had a very clear picture in my head of not just the major locations and NPCs but also our crew’s HQ and our various relationships to one another.

Soon, we were interacting with the mechanics of the Blades in the Dark system itself; planning scores, having flashbacks, doing downtime actions, dealing with stress and heat and entanglements. We got involved with a bunch of other factions, mostly in the wrong ways but sometimes to our benefit.

And we certainly built a team, with what has become something of a revolving cast of characters and players from all over the world. Another benefit of the Open Hearth is that, if you know someone is going to miss a session or two in advance, you can usually get a replacement at short notice. This is obviously aided by the fact that we are playing online using Discord and Roll20.

I’ll be honest, it took me a while to get into the swing of the system but as time has gone on, I have not just gotten used to it but actually embraced its flexibility and its focus on the narrative. Everyone at the table really gets a chance to tell their part of what feels like a shared story every session and our GM has been incredible at drawing that out of us.

I’m playing a Skovlan Spider, a master of manipulation and centre of a web of contacts, informants and assets. He has been changed by his experiences of late; he was once called Red, but now he just goes by Finn. We are nearing the end of a twelve session run so, if he survives this one last score, he might just retire into the mundane life of a tavern keep, but probably not.

An Unexpected Wedding Invitation

I do not remember the last time I got to play D&D as a player. Honestly, it’s years ago for sure. So, when another member of our little gaming community, Tables and Tales, suggested a 5E adventure that she would DM, I jumped at the chance. I had a githzerai Oath of Redemption Paladin created the next night. Honestly, I probably could have come up with something a little less weird than a hippy knight alien from Limbo for the purposes of this adventure, but our DM is endlessly patient (as my Paladin would appreciate) and she has rolled with it beautifully.

I don’t think I need to go into any detail on the ruleset of D&D 5E but I will say that this adventure uses it in a unique and fascinating way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that we haven’t killed any monsters, or rescued any unfortunate travelers from the road, it’s just that that is very much not the point here. An Unexpected Wedding Invitation is going for Regency, it’s going for romance, it’s going for Austen. You’re trying to impress some wedding guests with your charm, or your hunting skills or your graciousness. The key, we are beginning to find out at this stage of the game, is to get to know the extensive cast of well-to-do NPCs and romance them or befriend them, all during the course of an elvish wedding.
This may be the whole and only point to this adventure, and I think, if that’s what you did as a party, you would come out feeling good about it. However, there is a sort of overarching mystery, the details of which, I will not go into here. So, even if you are not interested in romance, you won’t be left out.

This crew of Tables and Tales players is, far and away, the most impressive bunch of voice artistes I have ever played with. Our DM is another member of the funny voice club and can pull off almost any accent flawlessly, but everyone around the table is camping it the fuck up. It is hilarious every single session. So much fun to play this sort of game in person with a very full table (there are 6 of us altogether.) And this is the third game we have played as group together. I feel like we are all just pushing ourselves further with each game.

My little guy this time, as I said, is a githzerai Oath of Redemption Paladin of Zerthimon. He swears by patience and peace except that one time when he killed that goblin by accident and he has a bunch of madcap friends including a satyr party-cleric on the run from her mistress, a dour tiefling warlock who’s patron is the cleric’s mistress and was sent to bring her in, an orc rogue who is mates with the bride to be and a half-elf fighter who presents very much like a character from Blackadder Goes Fourth. I’m off to play another session of this tonight. Maybe Paxil Tramadol will make a new friend!

So, in hindsight, that probably could have been three different posts…

Blade Runner

IP

These days I don’t play a lot of games based on an IP. At least not ones as big as Blade Runner. That wasn’t always the case, of course. When I was kid I played Palladium’s TMNT and Robotech quite a bit. To be fair, I don’t think Robotech really counts as a “big IP.” I also played a bit of Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP).

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, maybe the only major IP based game I played in the last few years was the One Ring from Free League. Now, as a player who had been liberally punished by the unforgiving and gruesome crit tables in MERP, I had my reservations going into another Middle Earth game, but I shouldn’t have worried. We played the introductory One Ring adventure as a bunch of Hobbits wandering around the Shire getting into relatively innocent shenanigans. It wasn’t brutal and it wasn’t unforgiving, it was fun!

This wasn’t the first Free League game I had played. I had also run a few sessions of Tales from the Loop, which is a game based on the art books of Simon Stålenhag, where you play kids solving mysteries in the sci-fi 80s that never was. It was almost universally loved by my players and was fun and engaging for all of us.
So, when I saw that Free League were Kickstarting a Blade Runner RPG I smashed that “Back this Project” button. Unsurprisingly, it ended up 16,153% funded…

You know what? They put that money to good use. The core book looks gorgeous with the sort of noirish artwork that draws you into the future megalopolis of LA, its rainy streets, its crumbling facades, its neon drenched midnights. It lays out a version of Free League’s by now familiar Year Zero Engine rules that is specific to this iconic setting. The focus is very much on the dramatic juxtaposition of human and replicant, the mega-corps and the working stiffs, the thriving off-world colonies and the decaying Earth, the LAPD and everyone else. The focus is on those things and the investigation.

Electric Dreams

And that’s where Case File 001: Electric Dreams comes in. This is the scenario you get in the Blade Runner Starter Set and it’s fair to say that this box is all about the investigation. Oh, and you can see all those sweet, sweet Kickstarter krona in it too. It is full to the brim with beautifully rendered handouts, mugshot cards, initiative and chase manoeuvre cards, detailed and evocative character sheets for the pre-generated characters and maps maps maps. chef’s kiss

This case file is meant as a starter scenario, easing players and Game Runner into the style of play in Blade Runner as well as the rules and unique aspects of the game. I really think it does a great job of that. Everything is laid out efficiently and yet beautifully, with the same type of high quality artwork from the core book throughout. It introduces the ideas of Shifts, 6 to 10 hour periods of time that your days are split into, and Downtime, which you generally have to take after 3 Shifts on the job. It does an excellent job of guiding you through the LAPD, the hierarchy, the resources and the characters there and the ways the Blade Runners can use their abilities and skills to investigate their case. It takes you to a nice selection of areas in the city, too, without overwhelming.

And it does all this while hitting some major touchstones from both Blade Runner movies. My players and I were all delighted by the cameos and the familiar locations, the flying cars and the replicant cats. But none of it feels forced or wedged into the scenario. It feels natural and serves to bring a familiar world even further to life.

Mechanically, it uses the Year Zero system, where you build a dice pool and count up the number of successes. Unlike in Tales from the Loop where the system relied entirely on d6s, and only 6s counted as successes, Blade Runner uses every dice from d6 to d12. 6 or above is still a success but if you roll 10 or over, it counts double. The introduction of the different types of dice in this is quite satisfying and makes for more interesting mathematical permutations when players are trying to figure out who should do what actions, we have found.

Working the case

This game was always going to be a bit different. For one thing, it’s only me as the Game Runner and two friends as the players. For another, they decided to use two of the pre-generated characters, which is unusual in my experience but got us playing as soon as we could. We are spread pretty far and wide around the country so we are using Zoom and Roll20 to play it. It’s not ideal because it means I get to use my beautiful boxed set props only sparingly. However, I have to say, having purcased the Roll20 version of the module, it works really well. I would recommend it. The character sheets are top notch and all the hand outs are there at the tip of my fingers. An added bonus is that I recently figured out how to use the juke box feature so it’s nice to have the Blade Runner soundtrack in the background too.

Our player characters are:
– Willem Novak, a human Inspector. He is an old timer whose back-story says he doesn’t trust replicants, though that is not currently the way the player has decided to go with him, which I love.
– FN9-2.39 “Fenna,” a replicant Doxie (I am really not sure about this particular archetype name, to be honest. I think it might be a case of sticking a little too closely to the source material.) Fenna is a Nexus 9 Blade Runner who has only been alive for about a year. It’s a weird situation and the player is making the most of that.

We are only two sessions in and most of the first session was an intro to the game, the system and the characters. I would expect anywhere from two to four more sessions, depending on how quickly they figure things out.
It’s going well, so far they have been to the morgue, the Esper wall, the LAPD mainframe, Wallace Corp HQ and the crime scene. There have been precisely zero fights and no action scenes of any kind but I feel like the investigation and the NPCs involved in it have a hold of the players already. They are making connections and coming up with theories and it is all very cool.

As for me, I am loving going ham as the Deputy Chief with the synthetic lungs, the traumatised replicant dancer and the inconvenienced club owner and I genuinely can’t wait for session number 3 next week.

Heart: The City Beneath

Spire

Ok, look, you do not need to have played Spire: The City Must Fall, before delving into Heart: The City Beneath, but it sure doesn’t hurt.
As it happens we finished a year long campaign of Spire earlier this year. We had a great time with it. It was a refreshing change of pace for us. As a group we had played a lot of D&D, a couple of Free League games and a bunch of Call of Cthulhu so this was quite a departure. The ruleset of the Resistance system was something we had to get to grips with throughout the course of that campaign but, once we embraced it, the speed, flexibility and the power of the fallout system, in particular, began to really work for us. Fallout is the consequences you have to endure when things go wrong. Like Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games, it works with a dice pool system, but in this case you roll a number of d10s dependant on your skills and domains in a given situation. The top roll is the only one that matters and it can give you a complete failure, a mixed result (a success with consequences) or a total success. There were a couple of niggling issues that we had with the system, mainly involving how you determined if you took fallout or just stress. These generally revolved around the stress/resistance protection mechanic.

I will not lie to you, dear reader, I was worried going into it. Spire does not encourage the GM to prepare much. I used a published campaign frame, so that helped, but much of the plot is supposed to be generated by the PCs. This was tough for the players too, at least for a while. The campaign frame and I put a stew of NPCs, locations and events in their bowls in the first session, asked them to separate out the individual elements and come up with a recipe for their own, different dish, using the same ingredients. It took a while and a lot of discussion to determine their preferred approach and that changed multiple times. But by the end of the campaign we all felt much more comfortable with this style of play and that stood to us going into Heart, which uses broadly the same system.

Still, I don’t know if we would have decided on a Heart campaign as the very next thing to replace Spire if it had not been for the setting. Rowan, Rook and Decard’s Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor brought to life a beautiful and terrible city-state in Spire. The high-elves, or Aelfir, came to the mile high city of Spire two centuries ago and took it from the dark elves, or Drow. The PCs in Spire are members of the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress, the outlawed para-military wing of an outlawed Drow religion. They fight a losing battle to regain control of the city for the Drow while dealing with cannibal cults, dangerous human retro-technologists, demonologists and, of course, the Aelfir themselves and their loyal Drow.

The setting and the classes of this game are what drew us all back to the same world.

The Heart knows what you want

And Heart, as implied by the title, is in the same world. It is the fucked up and enigmatic city beneath Spire. The Heart itself, (the true Heart, the one at the centre of the City Beneath, the thing that imbues it with bizarre intelligence and a wish to fulfil the desires of those brave mortals who dare to tread it’s veins and arteries) much like Spire, could be whatever you and your table decide it is. Maybe it’s an alien intelligence stranded below Spire, maybe it’s a portal to an other dimensional world, maybe it’s the echo of a technological marvel from the future. In practice, I feel like answering that question is a trap you should avoid, even if it is the goal of the PCs.

The most important thing about the Heart as a setting is that it is, in some way, sentient, aware, alive. As well as that, as alluded to above, it would grant the desires of other sentients. It is clear, though, that the Heart has a different idea about what you want than you do. It will take your desires far too literally or take them too far or misunderstand them to comic/tragic effect. So what the PCs want overall and from session to session is especially important to the game and how it turns out.

Delvers

As for the PCs, unsurprisingly, they play characters with classes that are matched only by the Spire ones for sheer inventiveness and bonkersness. Unlike Spire, they are not rebels, they are not fighting the aelfir for control of the Heart, they are adventurers, or Delvers. They are drawn or forced to explore the Heart for their own reasons.

The Players get to choose a few important elements for their characters before they start, their Ancestry (human, drow, aelfir and gnoll,) their Calling and their Class.

Ancestry and Class are fairly self explanatory but Callings will be unfamiliar to most. A PC’s Calling is their motivation and their route to advancement and eventual death. You might have been Forced to travel the Heart by a master you dare not refuse. Or maybe you are a Penitent who feels the need to make amends by finding those in need in the City Beneath and aiding them. Perhaps you are simply in search of adventure or enlightenment or the echo of the Heartsong itself. Each of these Callings bestows on the PC a core ability but more importantly, it provides a long list of beats. A beat might be something you want your character to achieve or something they need to endure or have inflicted on them. They come in minor, major and zenith flavours. A PC has two active beats at any given time and together, the GM and the player are trying to make at least one of those happen every session. When you hit a beat, you get an ability of the corresponding type, minor, major and zenith. When you hit your zenith beat, you get your final ability, and when you use that ability, it’s curtains for that character.

In our game we have three PCs:

  • A human Junk Mage with the Adventure calling – There is an element of junk to the junk mage, they can fix stuff with magic, but there is also an element of the junkie to the Junk Mage, so magic is their fix. Get it? They are on a mission to reach greater and greater heights of magic in the Heart and it draws them into some interesting situations.
  • A human Deadwalker with the Heartsong calling – The Deadwalker has his Death, an aspect of a loved one, (?) which follows him around and, which only he can see. He can fold himself into another dimension called the Grey. This has led to some very entertaining moments and solutions. The Heart knows him and wants something for him. But what?
  • An aelfir Vermissian Knight with the Enlightenment calling – The knight has a suit of armour that he personally constructed out of trains. He is obsessed with resurrecting the long defunct Vermissian subway network to serve The City Above. This is mainly because he is partly responsible for the disaster that rendered it, not only useless, but actively dangerous.

From Haven to Terminus

I started the party off in the City Between, Derelictus, making liberal use of the Heart sourcebook, Burned and Broken, for descriptions and ways to use this, lowest of Spire’s districts as a delve. From there they were sent into the Heart to retrieve a robot duplicate of a guy based in Haven Station. They have to check all the Vermissian stations on the way down to find him. So I called the campaign, “From Haven to Terminus.”
We soon moved into the events of the beginners’ scenario, Drowned, which is featured in the Heart Quickstart. We’ve been delving for six sessions and expect three or four more.

Mechanically, Heart has improved on some of the rules that Spire introduced. The stress/resistance protection mechanic has been simplified and is much easier to understand and apply now. Determining whether or not your character takes fallout is more straight-forward. Healing is a lot easier and more accessible in general and even combat feels like it flows a bit better.

In play it feels like a procedurally generated mega-dungeon with pockets of hardy civilisation, or havens, eking out a living until the pathways and caverns of the Heart warp and change enough to wipe it out again. The PCs go on delves for one reason or another but a common side-effect of delves is that they establish connections between havens, making it much easier for the PCs and others to travel between them in the future. This is a cool way to have them make a significant impact on the world and, dare I say, have them feel some sense of responsibility for it.

My overall impression so far is that I love this game. I love the weirdness of it and the horror of it, I love the dungeon delve theme that does not require a new monster or puzzle in every numbered room, I love how it has made us think on our feet and tell a story that we could not have foreseen at the start of each session. I love the beats that give me and the players something to aim for every time we play and I love the looming rewards/threats that are the zenith beats and abilities. And I do almost no prep at all. I might write a couple of notes of the kinds of things they might encounter on a delve but the rest is improv. The me that was shaking in my boots about running my first Spire session would not recognise the me that is improvising entire dungeons on the fly in Heart.

Dungeons and Dragons 5E, Spelljammer

This campaign is called Scatterjammer. When I started playing RPGs regularly again about eight years ago, I started up a 4th edition D&D game, since it was the most recent edition that I actually owned. When that campaign fizzled out, I switched to 5th edition and have been playing one campaign after another since then. I invented a homebrew world that I called Scatterhome. There are a few things about this place that I really liked and I will probably write a post all about it another time. For now, it’s enough to state that Scatterhome became the home base for the PCs in the Spelljammer campaign I had been planning for quite a long time before the Spelljammer 5E set came out a couple of years ago. That set was missing a lot. A characteristic of a lot of the 5E setting content, I’ve noticed, is that, unless it’s Forgotten Realms, they’re really only meant for a single campaign that probably came with the setting. That is certainly the case with Spelljammer. Boo’s Astral Menagerie is a solid enough Monster Manual supplement but the Astral Adventurer’s guide is too light on detail for my purposes.

The premise of Spelljammer is just fun and silly and I have tried to keep the vibe fun and silly too. I have five players and, due to geographical peculiarities, we play online using Zoom and Roll20. We have a session once every two weeks on Wednesday nights and we’ve been going for over a year now. I always enjoy playing this game with the people I play with. My wonderful and dependable wife has been in every D&D game I have run since 2016 so she’s player one, the rest are a mix of newer and older friends. We have such a laugh with this game that we brush off the cons of running online.

But I have to be honest, the D&D system really slows things down. In one instance we spent three entire sessions on a ship to ship battle. Elements of that battle were immense fun and some of the players’ moves will live in infamy but, for a random wildspace encounter… I just think a different system could have handled it in a less time-consuming manner. Now, I am sure that, had I approached it differently, I could have sped it up as well, but only if I didn’t use the rules of D&D. It is actually something I’m considering for the bigger set pieces in the future. Black Sword Hack has an impressive system for dealing with NPCs fighting NPCs, allowing single die rolls to determine the outcome of their battles each round. It has a tendency to be a bit more deadly, perhaps, but it moves things along more swiftly. Even 4th Edition D&D handled this sort of thing better. You could have waves of enemies in a fight. The sheer number of them would scare the living shit out of the PCs but the majority of them would be Minions. They could still do damage but they only had one hit point apiece, so the party could mow them down with spells and the like.

If I want to actually reach the meat of the story we are trying to tell and that my players have told me they want in their stars and wishes, I am going to have to do something to allow large scale battles to resolve themselves much more quickly, that’s for sure. It’s either that or eliminate ship to ship combat entirely, and that seems like a shame in game where adventuring in wildspace is the whole point!

The party consists of

  • A Gnome Battle-smith Artificer who abandoned a promising career in the navy for the faintest chance of adventure! Likes spiders. What happened to her uncle?
  • A Gnome Illusionist Wizard who has a peculiar plethora of puzzling personalities and disguises to choose from. The main spelljammer. What happened to his brother?
  • A Changeling Mastermind Rogue/Bard with a dark past and a mysterious identity (that’s a bit of a theme.) What happened to his dad?
  • A Plasmoid Open Hand Monk following her ooze-heart to who-know’s-where? Has an Auto-gnome sister. What happened to her mum?
  • A Giff Fighter/Oath of Vengeance Paladin who is the sole survivor from his family’s spelljamming vessel. Total Casanova. What happened to his dad?

I’m sure I’ll write a lot more about this campaign in the future. The players have come up with some fascinating and hilarious characters, who all have just enough back-story to allow me to get creative with how I weave it into the events of the game. Some of them are very keen on pursuing their personal story threads while others are more focused on the narrative I put in place at the start. DMing challenges and opportunities abound!

What I’m playing, July 2024

Lists

The internet loves a list. A top ten, preferably. I don’t have a top ten today. Sorry to disappoint you, dear reader.
Instead, here I have gathered an unranked list of the six RPGs I am currently involved in. I’m running half of these and I’m a player in the other half, so it’s organised that way only.

This list does not represent the full catalogue of games I have been involved with so far this year. That will come in a separate post or series of posts in the near future. I guess this might seem like a lot of ongoing games to some. On the other hand, I’m quite sure it doesn’t seem like all that many to others. I usually fit in the odd one-shot into the schedule too, but other than that, this works well for me, especially as they are all fortnightly, pretty much.

I play two of these games in my house with my wife and friends, I play one with some members of our fledgling local RPG community, Tables and Tales. We play that in another friend’s house. Two more are online with friends and the last is played online with members of the international RPG community, The Open Hearth.

There’s no doubt that the ability to play online has opened a world of possibilities that, up until the start of the pandemic, I had not really even considered. It’s not the same as meeting around a table with snacks and drinks and banter. You can’t have cross-talk on Zoom. The chaos that is allowed to reign over the table in home games at times is to be treasured, in my opinion, and you really can’t recreate that on a video call. But when your mate you want to play with lives hundreds of miles away or when the only people you can get to play the little-known, esoteric story game you want to experience are located all across the world it’s definitely a boon.

Anyway, for now, I’m going to write a post on each of the games I’m running since I have more to write about each of those. I’ll do a single post for the games in which I am a player.