Tag: dd

Games I Wanted to Play this Year

Review

So, how have I done with that list from earlier in the year? At the time I wrote that, on the 28th July, I thought, Time-shmime! Who needs it?! Not me, that’s who. I’ll breeze through this entire list of ten frikkin’ games. But, of course, that was assuming a lot.

Assumptions

The first assumption that was happily crushed was that we had a smaller number of GMs willing to run sessions in our little community, Tables and Tales. Up until then, only three of us had run anything so I assumed that would continue. When a fourth and even fifth GM raised their hands to take the helm, I was delighted. That’s what I had always wanted in our space. From what I can see, if GMs were water, most RPG communities would be dying of thirst. Even in the much larger Open Hearth community, you tend to see the same dozen or so members announcing new games all the time, despite there being a membership in the hundreds. Given the size of Tables and Tales, five active GMs represents a pretty large percentage of our total player-base. On top of that we have had a couple of board game nights too. The long awaited and pretty fun Darkest Dungeon board game is, honestly, very close to the video game (actually, I’m told by friend of the blog, Media Goblin it’s closer to Darkest Dungeon 2 in rules) but also pretty close to an RPG so we gave it a go.

Assumption number 2: I have a pretty stable schedule, which meant that I could run games almost every night of the week if I had the wherewithal. And there were weeks there when I was playing, either as GM or player, in four or five sessions. Turns out that was not sustainable. For one thing, obviously, I started writing this blog, dear reader. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing this and it’s not like it takes that long, but if I want to blog, I need to do it in the evening (even though I am typing this on the train to work right now because its a busy week for me and my evenings are taken up with pre-Christmas socialising.) Between that and various other work and family commitments that came up, it was simply impossible to maintain that sort of schedule.

Reality

Even taking these points into account, I managed to play a lot of games in the last few months, just mostly not the ones I expected to. So, let’s have another look at that list:

GM

  • Tales from the Loop – Mascots and Murder – Short Campaign – Nope, didn’t happen. This one is still simmering away on that back-burner, ready for promotion to the front of the stove-top any time now. It had to be shelved to make way for other games and other GMs. Like I said earlier, I was perfectly happy to do it.
  • Dungeon Crawl Classics – individual modules – Haven’t managed to get any of these to the table yet, I’m afraid. But, I have a plan for this one. I have had to re-arrange my schedule a bit to allow it. Our local game shop, Replay, has been undergoing a big refurbishment in the last few months. Once it’s done, they will expand their number of gaming tables a lot and I am hoping to get in there on a Wednesday night to run some DCC Level 0 funnels. My preference would be to get some newbies to sign up for these sessions and hopefully gain some new members for Tables and Tales in the process. The new year will be the perfect time for this, I think.
  • More Troika! – one-shots – Achievement unlocked! Although, technically, it was more like two sessions of the same game, rather than multiple one-shots. I did a blogpost on it! We went to Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, one of the Location based adventures made for Troika. So far it has been very fun. It’s a dungeon crawl, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a warehouse. And the rooms and creatures and general vibe are beautifully weird in the way only Troika can do it. So far, the PCs, a Monkey Monger, a Wizard Hunter and a Gremlin Catcher (there was also a Landsknecht who has since moved to Spain) have murdered the Cacogen they were sent there to murder, made friends with a thin mutant, captured entire detachments of microscopic soldiers in gremlin catching jars, discovered a desert other-world on top of the warehouse and, um, set fire to a load of old rope. Brilliant craic altogether.
  • Death Match Island – one-shot – You know what, I just completed a rewatch (maybe not “rewatch” since I never watched the entire thing in the first place) of Lost, the whole thing. All six seasons. All 5000 episodes. I think I was in mourning for the lost Death Match Island one-shot that should have been. This one was a scheduling issue. Those of you out there who play RPGs (and if you don’t and you’re here, welcome! You must be confused…) will be aware of the difficulties one often encounters in getting four or five adults together in the same room at the same time. Honestly, I am surprised this problem doesn’t come up more often in Tables and Tales. Anyway, having just finished that Lost marathon, I am 1000% ready to play this game. It’s not quite the same and it would definitely not run for 678 sessions like Lost would if it were an RPG but it has the same heart and the same mystery box feel to it. And I want that. That’s what I want.
  • The Wildsea – campaign – Just go read my blogpost on My First Dungeon’s campaign of the Wildsea. I desperately want to play this game. Honestly, whether I got to be a player or a Firefly, I would be excited. But, really? I’m not sure when I was going to fit this one in this year. Another campaign? Dunno what I was thinking.
  • DIE RPG – one-shot – I finished listening to the My First Dungeon Wildsea campaign and just started listening to the DIE one. They have a great episode that is mainly Kieron Gillon being effusive for an hour about his, admittedly very cool, game and I enjoyed it. But then I got into the Session Zero episode and I immediately wanted to play it. I want to run this for my friends and have them play real-world people with real-world problems working it all out it in a fucked-up fantasy world of their own creation as characters of their own creation. I really want it. Maybe next year.

Player

  • Old School Essentials – campaign I think – So this one has not happened yet. I think it is, at least partly, due to the fact that Isaac, of Lost Path Publishing has been running other shit like crazy in the last few months instead. I hope it wasn’t my OSE character creation post that put him off running the game (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’d really be flattering myself to imagine I had that much influence on anyone.)
  • Heart: The City Beneath – Open Hearth campaign – Our GM, Mike, brought a whole bunch of us together (There were six PCs at the start) to hopefully save the landmark known as Nowhere from being consumed by the Heart. This was a real learning experience for me as it was only my second time as a player in the Resistance System (see the section on Magus, Pike and Drum below for my first experience.) I discovered that, if left to our own devices, players (for “players” read “Ronan” but not just “Ronan”) are apt to take the hand when there is no form of initiative to govern the order or frequency of actions in combat. It was a lesson learned early in the campaign due to one player’s proper and timely use of Stars and Wishes after the very first session. Saying that, I had a brilliant time playing my Incarnadine, Priest of the God of Debt, alongside a Heretic, a Cleaver, a Deep Apiarist, a Vermissian Knight and a Deadwalker. We often had opposing desires and drives, which made the role-play fun, and the GM came up with lots of weird and interesting situations, NPCs, enemies and locations for us. Forgotten-Frost-Remembered, my Aelfir Incarnadine, got to reach Tier 4 of the Heart and retire(!) at least in his head.
  • Call of Cthulhu – Masks of Nyarlathotep – campaign – Not really sure if this was anything other than wishful thinking when I wrote this, to be honest. This post explains that it was always going to be a long shot to get this campaign started again. But someday, I would love to get Grant Mitchell back on the trail of the mystery in this thoroughly classic campaign.
  • Magus, Pike and Drum – Playtest – This is Isaac again. He has a great basis for a Resistance System game set in the English Civil War that never was, and this is it. There were four of us gathered around the table for this playtest at the end of the summer. I genuinely had so much fun with it. Gráinne was my character. She was an Irish noble and she had some very fun abilities (some of them were a bit too fun with a few too restrictions, it was decided, as a result of this playtest.) What was important in the game is that we solved the mystery in very short order, after scaring the shit out of the mayor and not blowing up the town. But what’s really important is that we provided Isaac a lot of valuable feedback to feed back into his new game. Can’t wait to play this one again, hopefully in the near future. I hope to write a lot more about this game as it develops.

Conclusions

So there you go. Three out of ten. Not great. But! I experienced so many other games instead of the ones I didn’t get to in that post! And I got something out of all of them. I’ll tell you about them in the next post (or the one after if I don’t have time to write the rest of the week and just post some more old fiction on Sunday instead.)

Hex-jammer

Messin’ with 5E

I’m sure those of you who have been around for a while are aware of how much I enjoy mucking around with my D&D campaign. It is a Spelljammer campaign of the 5E variety and it has been running for quite some time. About 25 sessions, I think. That makes it one of the longest running campaigns I have ever had. That’s probably what makes me want to keep messing with it. A while ago, I introduced the very FitD idea of Engagement rolls before big jobs/dungeons and that has worked pretty well. I also brought in the adversity token, which have come in handy for our heroes in a few clutch moments, let me tell you!

1E Throwback

This post is not so much introducing yet another rules hack or even anything home-brew. It’s more about utilising a style of play that went out of fashion in D&D a long time ago. Hexcrawling! A couple of the oldest D&D publications I own are from AD&D 1st Edition. One of those is UK5 Eye of the Serpent, written by Graeme Morris and released in 1984. This was designed for one DM and one PC! Specifically, it was made to be the first adventure for a druid, ranger or monk character. This is besides the point. I just thought it was unusual. Also, it reminds me of a Troika! adventure I just read, The Hand of God, mainly because it starts much the same way, with the characters being abducted by a powerful winged creature and dumped in their nest at the top of something very, very high up.

Anyway, the point is the hex map of the outdoor region, Hardway Mountain (the name of which, I think we can all agree, is a little on the nose.) Now, the use of this map was incredibly restricted in the text. If your PC was playing a druid, not only did they have to have a prescribed set of three NPCs with them, they should also be forced to take a particular selection of the marked “routings.” These would be distinct from the routings a ranger or monk character would be forced down. You can see this laid out in the unfeasibly complicated two-page spread below.

Now, I think this is really interesting in comparison to what you might deem a hexcrawl style game today. I think most OSR games that use a hex map are thinking along the lines of open-world or sandbox play where you go to a certain hex on the map to explore, with the understanding that the whole thing will be open to your PCs. There might be geographical or other obstacles they have to overcome but that’s up to them, they can either try them out or forget about them.

When it comes to encounters, places of interest, etc. a lot of the time these will be generated randomly and the GM is discovering along with the players in many cases. Even if the GM is the one who came up with the encounter table they’re rolling on, they are not to know what the roll will turn up in the moment or what the PCs will do with them! I realise I am probably teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here, but I want to point out that, although the hexcrawl is a pretty old school style, it wasn’t always necessarily as free a style as it is generally taken to be today.

One last thing. That Eye of the Serpent module has some fantastic art by Tim Sell. Just check these out.

Hexing the Rock

The Spelljammer campaign may have gotten a bit bogged down on the Rock of Bral. Why? Is it because it is the only location described at all in the Spelljammer 5E set? Maybe. Is it because all the plot threads of the campaign led there? Partly. Is it because it takes a life age of the earth to get through a round of 5E combat? That’s a distinct possibility. Anyway, the crew have spent a lot of time exploring, murdering, stealing, negotiating, shopping, drinking and dating on the topside of the Rock already. But one of them has had a literal ooze-heart pulling them to the underside since they got there and they finally made it down. Now, to get them there, I invented a little something I like to call the Shaft of Bral. Stop sniggering! It is a shaft of pure void half a mile wide through which you can reach not just the top and under sides of the Rock but everything in between too. So they took a little row-boat called a spell-rudder down to the bottom and now they are crawling through the hexes underneath. I threw a few random encounters at them on the way down as well. I invented a few encounters for the Shaft of Bral and put them in a d6 table. I got the players to roll for those and they had fun getting hit by another spell-rudder in a hit-and-run and avoiding the sickly air of a boat full of corpses on their way down.

So far, using the encounter table in Boo’s Astral Menagerie (the Spelljammer Monster Manual,) I have been unimpressed. The first time I used it they got an encounter with a ship of aggressive Vampirates. Then there was a fight that lasted three full sessions. It wasn’t all bad, it just derailed things in a less than ideal way. So, I thought I would just make my own encounter tables from now on.

Once they were finally on the Underside of the Rock, I had to think about how I was going to handle it. It is a very large area, made up largely of farmland and forest and they were there to find one wee gnome. I could have just given them directions, but I wanted it to feel like they were exploring and finding their own way, so I took the map of the Underside of Bral and popped it into Roll 20. We are playing this game online so this worked out well. Then I set the map layer to have a hex grid, instead of the standard square one. Now, as they travel, each time they pass from one hex to another, we roll for an encounter. Some of these encounters are designed to beneficial, some are quite the opposite and others are what they make of them. They have been using their own skills, abilities and traits to push on towards their goals while getting the impression of uncovering things about this place as they move through it. I’m not sure how the creators of this version of the Rock imagined people using this map. Maybe this is exactly what they thought we would do! But, I doubt it. It doesn’t feel as though any thought went into that, in fact. As it is with so many recent D&D 5E products, you are given the bare minimum and expected to figure the rest out for yourself. Even a little advice to go along with the map would have been useful. I mean, even Eye of the Serpent did that in 1984.

Anyway, the last session we had was one of these hex crawl sessions and I can’t remember a funnier time. Genuinely laughed the whole way through. Now, I am incredibly loathe to take any credit for that. It was entirely the hilarious antics of the fantastic players I am blessed with. A couple of highlights:

  • Our Giff Charisma-Fighter/Paladin climbing a tree to hide from a patrol with his trousers ‘round his ankles because he thought his hairy grey arse-cheeks would help disguise him as a bunch of coconuts (didn’t work, it was an oak tree.)
  • Encountering a bunch of Hadozee who were on the run from the nearby prison but didn’t know how to escape the Underside. The party told them all about the secret hatch in that stump over there which led to the Shaft of Bral. What’s that? Do we have a boat there? Yep! On, ok, bye then! Good luck in the shaft!
  • Herbert Gũsfacher, ornithologist, the latest identity adopted by the party’s resident illusionist, Balthazar.
  • Gary, Son of Gary. Oh, are you based in the Garrison, Mr Gary-son? No, the Citadel, actually.

Anyway, these random encounters did help along the good times and, I hope, gave the players a sense of active exploration. They haven’t found what they were looking for yet (it’s Eccta, the plasmoid Mum) So I can’t go into any detail about what is in store but I will be using a lot more of my own home made hexcrawls and random encounter tables, that’s for sure.