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Savaged!

By | | Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, What's he playing?
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**Spoiler Alert**

I’m going to be talking about the Breakout mini-event in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying rulebook. I’m going to be giving away more about things than in the previous act so, if you’re planning on playing the adventure, I’d say skip the Actual Play section.

You Have Been Warned!

A few weeks back, I got together with my gaming group to finish off our run through the Breakout mini-event in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying core book. Our first session had gone pretty well, and I was interested to see how the second act played out.

There were a number of very specific things I wanted to learn from running this second act:

  • The first act is primarily one big action scene. I wanted to run the second act to see how the game handled stuff that wasn’t just face-punching ((This is a bit of an unfair characterization of the combat in MHR, which tends to be very flavourful. But you take my point.)).
  • I wanted to see how the experience point system worked in play, and to do that, I really needed to run the second act.
  • I wanted to gauge the learning curve. Everyone was pretty much up to speed at the end of the previous session, but the gap between sessions was pretty long, and I wanted to see how much of that mastery they had lost in the downtime.
  • I wanted to see if I could speed up the action scenes so that players didn’t have to wait as long between their turns.

So, I brushed up on the act, gathered my MHR gaming kit, assembled my players, and away we went.

Actual Play

Our roster of New Avengers ((Heavy on the X-folks, but what can you do? X-men make fun characters to play.)) was:

  • Black Widow
  • Colossus
  • Daredevil
  • Shadowcat ((And Lockheed the dragon, of course.))
  • Storm

At the end of the previous session, Black Widow had determined that the breakout at the Raft was intended to free Karl Lykos ((AKA Sauron. No, not that Sauron. This Sauron.)), and that he had probably fled to the Savage Land. Further research at the start of this session turned up some mysterious blanks in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files on the Savage Land, specifically on one of their outposts there.

The team spent some time gearing up – that is, using the transition scene to create some Assets and Resources for themselves to use in the adventure. They came up with a couple of fairly standard things, like med kits, but also a device that could detect Karl Lykos’s unique mutant energy signature. The X-folks signed out a blackbird, and they flew off to Antarctica.

Shadowcat was piloting, and ran into the magnetic and meteorological anomalies that prevail in the Savage Land, and pretty much on cue, someone brought up the fact that no one ever lands in the Savage Land. They always crash ((This is almost verbatim what Spidey says in the actual book.)). Kitty looked at me, and asked if she could roll to land the plane safely.

Now, in the adventure, the default action is that the plane lands safely, but then gets stomped by a T-Rex. I had intended to let that happen, but when a player asks to roll on something, that’s usually a signal that that moment matters to them, and as GM, you should do your best to make it a memorable moment ((This is a good rule to keep in mind, alongside Vincent Baker’s “Say yes or roll the dice.” Combining the two ideas does a lot to illuminate when you should and should not ask for dice rolls.)). Given that reasoning, I let her roll against the Doom Pool, which was still at 2d6, to land safely.

Well, her roll boosted the Doom Pool by a couple of dice thanks to the opportunities she rolled, and the Doom Pool roll beat her. I spent one of the new dice in the pool to counterattack, inflicting a d6 of emotional stress on her, as she wrestled the blackbird in for a landing, describing it as a barely controlled crash that left the plane largely intact, but cut a huge swath through the jungle. Everyone got out to survey the damage and decide what to do next.

And that’s when the T-Rex came and smushed the plane.

The T-Rex fight was interesting primarily because it showed off the sophistication with the rules that the group had developed after only a single session. The players worked the Plot Point economy efficiently, taking their Distinctions at d4 to gain points, spending points in clever and useful ways, and even using their power limits and spending experience points to get more Plot Points when they needed them. I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by skillfully everyone worked the system.

Better than that, though, was the way everyone got into narrating the action based on what dice were in their pool. The T-Rex had two dice knocked off its Solo pool in the first round thanks to clever things like Storm lowering its core temperature and Daredevil and Black Widow co-operating to use their swinglines to trip the dinosaur ((Actually, that last thing didn’t work out so well, thanks to some poor rolling, but Daredevil took the opportunity to lose his billy club and get a Plot Point for invoking his Gear limit.)).

After walking through the jungle for a while, homing in on Lykos with their detection device, I dropped the mutates on them. My goal with this fight was to boost the Doom Pool up to 2d12 so as to end the scene with the heroes captured. This proved to be an interesting exercise in resource management, as I need to spend enough from the Doom Pool to keep the bad guys up and fighting, but save enough that I could reach that magical 2d12 level. This wound up generating a fair number of Plot Points for the good guys, which made the whole thing a pretty epic battle.

But I got to that 2d12 I wanted, and had Brainchild lead the group into an area that he had mined with disruptor bombs ((Yeah, I made that up spur of the moment when I wanted to take them out. It fits comic logic, and no one batted an eye.)), and knocked everyone out.

They recovered as captives of the mutates and Karl Lykos, who spent a little time monologuing ((I had to build up the Doom Pool again, of course.)). But you know who you shouldn’t ignore, even when she’s stripped and manacled to a high-tech restraint table? Black Widow, that’s who. She’s got the skills to get out without tripping the power dampening thingies. And she did. First thing she did was free the others, and Storm and Shadowcat double-teamed Lykos, taking him out in one turn ((Shoulda kept some more dice in the Doom Pool. He needed them. The heroes all had at least three Plot Points each, and that’s a pretty big edge.)).

They mopped up the rest of the mutates, in the room, and I told them that they heard more coming from elsewhere in the complex. So, Black Widow said, “Hey! I’m gonna cash in these 10 xp to unlock the S.H.I.E.L.D. Champion Clearance thing and get the helicarrier to show up and take us away!” Which she did, so that was the end of that. We did a little bit of wrap-up stuff, but that was pretty much it for the night.

Thoughts

So, here’s what I found out about the things I wanted to see in this session, as enumerated above.

  • MHR handles non-action scenes just fine. In fact, the light framework they use for the adventures and the fact you can use the Doom Pool to represent the environment makes it very easy to improvise when the characters take unexpected actions. The transition scenes help recovery, but more to the point, they give a lot more options for roleplaying and interacting with the world. The start and end of such things are pretty loosely defined, and I think that’s a big advantage.
  • The experience system works fine, as far as we saw. The main use of xp in this short adventure was gaining more Plot Points in tight situations ((Plus, of course, the helicarrier rescue.)). I think that actually spending the xp to buy up character abilities is going to see limited use if using Marvel characters and events – it’s more likely to see use in longer campaigns and using home-made characters. That said, it does everything it needs to, and the unlockables are a very neat mechanic.
  • The mastery of the system that the players had gained in the first session came back very quickly, and grew in play. The learning curve is not nearly as steep as I had originally feared ((Though I still forgot an important rule during play and didn’t remember it until after the game. Which rule? Oh, nothing important, he said sarcastically. Just that you can add an opponent’s stress die to your die pool for free. Yeah, ’cause that’s not a big deal.)). So, yeah, the game is pretty easy to master once you get the core concepts down. One important aspect of this mastery that was pointed out is the design of the datafiles. They make it remarkably easy to just go down the list and build your dice pool. Some real thought went into the sheet’s usability, and the folks at MWP deserve kudos for that kind of attention to detail.
  • Action scenes are still not fast. I thought they were getting faster, but it was pointed out to me that, as Watcher, I’m involved in everyone’s action, so I’m always busy interacting with the players, and that skews my perception of how long a player is sitting waiting to do something ((Smaller groups will mitigate this to some degree, and larger groups will exacerbate it.)). The fact that combat is symmetrical, with players getting to make reaction rolls and possibly counter-attack when attacked, lessens the sitting around aspect. But the fact that the Watcher has to build a dice pool the same way as a player, but for several different characters, slows down that part of the game. This is far from a game-breaker, but it is something the Watcher needs to be mindful of – make sure that the focus is always firmly on the heroes, and try to keep the spotlight moving briskly and fairly among the heroes to minimize boredom.

And that’s the end of our MHR playtest. Everyone had a good time with it and I think I may look at setting up a longer game in the fall, when my gaming schedule opens up a bit.

As an interesting aside, a number of the players in this group stated a preference for playing canon Marvel characters in these games, rather than creating their own, original characters. I knew intellectually that this was a common preference – otherwise, there would be more emphasis on building your own character in the main rulebook – but I was surprised to hear it in my group. See, for me, it might be fun to play Spider-Man or Doctor Strange in a one-shot, but for a real campaign, I want my own character to play. So, it’s an interesting eye-opener to hear others voice a different preference, and discuss the reasons with them. Enlightening.

Anyway. ‘Nuff said.

 

13th Age Playtest – Character Creation

By | | What's he playing?
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Over the past few weeks, my friend Michael has been running us through the first-round playtest for 13th Age, a new fantasy game from Pelgrane Press. Now that the playtest is over and we’ve submitted our feedback, the NDA allows me to talk ((Well, write in this case.)) about the experience. And you know me; I hate to have an unexpressed thought or opinion.

The game is billed as:

13th Age is a love letter to D&D: a rules-light, story-oriented RPG that honors old school values while advancing the OGL art. Players create unique heroes using flexible interpretations of familiar D20 character classes. New indie-style rules connect each character’s story to the Gamemaster’s customized version of the campaign setting.

I think it meets those goals admirably, and has some very nice little bits incorporated into the rules and the character creation that just shine. I’m really looking forward to the final version of the game.

This post is just going to be about the character creation portion. In a few days ((Hopefully. I’ve been pretty lax with my posts here, and am playing catch-up.)), I’ll have another post about the rest of the rules, and the actual play experience.

Character creation looks pretty standard on the face of it, a sort-of mash-up of various versions of D&D to get your stats and pick your class and race. Once you get through picking the normal components of your character, however, you run into a couple of very indie-inspired elements that turn your numbers into something special: Backgrounds, Relationships, and One Unique Feature.

Backgrounds substitute for skills in this system, and are broad categories of experience that show where your character came from and what he or she can do. There isn’t a list of backgrounds to choose from – you are encouraged to create your own. This not only fleshes out your character history and abilities, it also fills in detail about the world. For example, in our little playtest group, our character backgrounds wound up adding the following elements to the setting:

  • A service of Imperial Couriers that rode gryphons to deliver high-priority goods and messages.
  • A rich noble who employed rangers to assist with the maintenance and record keeping in her menagerie.
  • A network of ex-slave gladiators spread throughout the Imperial military.
  • A loose association of arcane scholars called the Fellowship of the Lost Book, dedicated to ferreting out forgotten magical lore.

All these things gave the GM good, solid hooks to draw us into adventures, and provide information. It made the world feel more complete, and it made our characters feel more a part of it. It gave them a place in the grand scheme of things.

This is enhanced by the Relationships. The world of 13th Age has some very powerful – mythically powerful – beings in it called Icons. These Icons are sort of archetypes that different people may fill from time to time ((Well, some of them. Some, such as the Three, the Lich King, and the Great Gold Wyrm are more permanent.)) and represent the powers of the world. These are things like the Archmage, the Elf Queen, the Dwarf King, the Dragon Emperor, the High Druid, and so forth. Each character gets some points to define a few Relationships with these Icons – not necessarily with the Icon itself, but with the Icon’s organization. For example, having a weak, positive relationship with the Elf Queen doesn’t mean she knows you by sight, but means that you’re in good standing with the Court of Stars in general, and can hope to be well-received there should you need a favour. Again, this does a lot to tie you into the world, and give your character a sense of history and place.

While these two elements do a lot to tie your character into the world, One Unique Feature is there to make sure your character stands out. This is something that lets you create something, well, unique for your character. Examples included in the playtest document run the gamut from weird little abilities (a half-orc with a supernaturally compelling voice) to odd bits of character history (a monk who started life as a bear before being transformed into a human) and everything in between. There are no mechanics attached to what you come up with here, so giving your character the Unique Feature of being able to kill with a touch is pretty much off the table, but being able to use your Unique Feature for bonuses or to be able to attempt things that other people wouldn’t seems firmly within scope. But the real advantage of the Unique Feature is that it turns your character from The Wizard ((Or even worse, The Other Wizard.)) into the wizard who wields the sword Bitter Understanding.

Together, these three elements really bring the character to life, and make it so that, when you start play at 1st level, your character feels like a hero.

I glossed over race and class, above, to get to the bits of character creation I think are neatest, but you get a standard mix of races  – human, dwarf, half-orc, halfling, three flavours of elf, half-elf, and gnome, plus their version of dragonborn, tieflings, aasimar, and warforged – and classes – barbarian, bard, cleric, druid ((The druid is listed in the playtest doc, but the actual class was not ready to be distributed for playtest this round.)), fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, and wizard, along with a system for multiclassing. Each race gets a neat little mechanical benefit, and each class gets an array of features and abilities to choose from.

One nice touch with the classes is that the playtest document has a short section that rates each class according to how difficult/complex it is to play, with barbarian at the low end of complexity and wizard at the high end. There is a note that multiclass characters are going to be more complex than any single class character, and that seemed borne out in our test.

Overall, I think the character creation section of 13th Age is wonderful. There are a few little quirks of math that made me raise my eyebrows, but finding those things is what a playtest is about, and I’ve passed my concerns on to the folks who can do something about it. The only other complaint I had was with the organization of the document, which made it necessary to do a lot of paging back and forth to create a character. This is, again, a product of the fact that this is a playtest – I know the final version of the game is going to be cleaned up and reorganized once it’s complete.

In short, in 13th Age, you wind up with a character that has depth, history, competence, and feels like a hero right out of the gate. That’s a big win for any fantasy game like this. We also managed to create four characters in under two hours, so that’s pretty good considering we’re all just learning the game.

In a few days, I’ll post about the actual play. Watch for it.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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*** Potential Spoilers ***

The adventure described below is loosely based on the great sword-and-sorcery novel Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed. I think what happens in the game is probably different enough from what happens in the novel that nothing’s gonna get ruined, but things change in play, and I might end up using some plot point from the book that reveals a little too much. I’ll try not to let that happen, but you have been warned.

Oh, and you should also go read Throne of the Crescent Moon, because it’s a fantastic book.

There’s some stuff going on in real life that’s been making it hard to get quorum to play the Storm Point game, so for the next little while, we’re relaxing the quorum rules a bit to make sure the game doesn’t die from lack of momentum. Normally, we play as long as four out of five players can make it, and have one of the players double-up on running a character. But doubling up on a character is a pain, and we’re more likely to get three than four players these days, so I dropped the quorum requirement to three, said no one needs to double up, and decided to keep the entire adventure within the city of Belys to allow a little bit of verisimilitude for changing party composition based on player attendance ((That is, only the characters of the players who attend get to go on the adventure, so no one has to play two characters.)).

This sort of ties in with some other meta-changes to our regular game. One of the reasons we had players doubling up on characters was to keep the experience point and treasure distribution even, and so limit the amount of fiddly bookkeeping I was having to do as GM. I’ve decided to move a couple of steps farther in the direction of eliminating fiddly bookkeeping, in the interests of making the game do what the group wants it to do. A few sessions back, we had a discussion about the direction of the game, wherein we decided that we would use campaign downtime to be able to advance the characters without it taking another six years to get to 3oth level ((Check out the link for more details about the discussion and the decision.)). I’ve decided to do away with handing out experience points ((I’m still using experience points to build encounters, because it’s a pretty handy way of balancing things.)) – instead, I’m just going to tell the characters when they advance in level, and use downtime for bigger level jumps.

As for treasure, I’m still working on that, but I’m leaning towards abstracting that more, and letting characters gain and swap magic items in the downtime. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway.

I had just finished reading Throne of the Crescent Moon, so when I was looking for a city-centric adventure idea set in a vaguely Arabic city ((My game city, Belys, is vaguely Arabic. Dhamsawaat, the city in the novel, is much more than vaguely Arabic. This comes from the author having done actual research, and me having based my Arabic city on hazy memories of 1001 Arabian Nights.)) , I had a good model right in front of me. I took the main idea of an evil necromancer summoning ghuls for a nefarious purpose and came up with my own nefarious purpose and version of the necromancer. Then, I started reskinning ghouls to serve as my ghuls.

In the book, there are a number of different types of ghul, and I wanted to reflect that, but Belys is all about the Genasi noble families controlling the elements, so I decided that my flavours of ghul were all going to be elementally linked – earth ghuls, sand ghuls, wind ghuls, fire ghuls, storm ghuls, water ghuls, etc. I started with the earth ghuls, using the horde ghoul stat block, and just describing them and their paralysis attack differently – they looked more like putrescent corpses with burning eyes, long claws, and sharp fangs, and their paralysis felt like the earth trying to draw the victim down into a grave.

I’m not going to talk about the other flavours of ghul I’ve come up with, because the party hasn’t met any of them, yet.

So, armed with the ghul stats and the necromancer stats, we started the game.

The characters had become moderately famous in their quarter of the city after their elimination of Channah and their favour for Bitaryut the Blind, not to mention their popular feasts and their ties to a few merchant concerns. When they heard reports of poor families disappearing from the labyrinthine alleys of their neighbourhood, they decided to take a look.

Investigation found that the missing families had all lived in homes on cul-de-sac alleyways, and each had had a symbol drawn on their doors in blood. These symbols, according to the priest and the swordmage, were sigils of dark magic designed to call the corrupted dead to their location. Our heroes found evidence specifically of ghuls – and the priest was able to fill his comrades in on the difference between ghuls and the more common ghouls. The primary difference was that ghuls were created by necromancy, and didn’t propagate themselves the way ghouls did, which meant that someone was creating and using them.

The gang trooped up to the main temple of the Raven Queen, who handles the official graveyards of the city, and managed to only insult the honour of their priests a moderate amount when they asked if anyone had been robbing the graves under their care. The Raven Queen priests huffily informed them that none of the graves they oversaw had been desecrated, but that some in the city performed private burials for their family members, either for religious or financial reasons, and they couldn’t be expected to watch over them.

Putting things together, the party began to speculate that they might have someone trying to build an army of ghuls in the city, starting with some of the non-consecrated graves, and then using those ghuls to fetch fresh materials from the poor living in the alleys of the city. This was somewhat worrisome to them.

Given that their investigation had revealed that the attacks had all occurred on nights when the moon was either new or hidden by heavy clouds, the group decided to set up a watch to try and stop the next attack and, hopefully, gain some more information about where the mastermind was located. They hired a few mercenaries and paid a number of vendors and other street people to keep an eye on things ((And, of course, they pointed out that, if they had become crime bosses after ousting Channah, they’d already have these operatives on the payroll. I just sighed and rolled my eyes.)) and, when a dark night came, they used the hand of fate ritual to narrow down the probable location of the next attack.

They took to the air on their hippogriffs ((I will never live that down.)) to be able to get to any of the three or four alleyways they thought were the targets. And, sure enough, one was. The ghuls were mainly minions, with one tough ghul seeded in the middle, and they took them out pretty quickly. They also spent a fair bit of time looking around for the necromancer they were sure must be on the scene to control the ghuls, but didn’t find him ((Was he even there? I’m not telling.)). They then followed the ghuls’ back trail down into a sewer and another huge mob of ghuls. Again, they were minions, and the gang managed to wipe them out in short order.

That’s where we left things. Tomorrow is the next installment, as they see if they can find out where these ghuls are coming from, and what vile plan is behind their creation.

We’ll see how that goes.

Feints & Gambits: Fate

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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The most recent session of Feints & Gambits picked up almost immediately after the previous session. Our heroes had retreated, bloodied ((Mostly metaphorically.)) but unbowed ((Both metaphorically and literally.)), from their… conversation, let’s call it… with Nightingale the Robber and his army of monsters beneath the catacombs of Christchurch Cathedral. They had some ideas about who stole the heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, and an idea about which direction it had been taken.

After some discussion about the relative merits of finding another gate into Hell ((As the underground tunnels of Dublin are known.)) – like, say, the bricked-up entry by the Cook Street Gate – and trying to beat some more information out of the Russian contingent, they decided to just focus on finding the heart. They wanted to start with some divination, but one of the problems with that is the fact that Dublin has the Liffey running right through the heart of it, and that means that they often need to cast the spell twice – once on each side of the river.

But they really just wanted to find where the thieves ((Whom they presumed to be the mummies missing from St. Michan’s Church crypts.)) went when they came out of the underground portion of the Poddle. So, they went to the point where the Poddle enters the Liffey, and Mark whipped up a divination ritual.

Well, I say “whipped up,” but it was a pretty impressive undertaking. In a matter of fifteen minutes or so, he managed to gather enough extra elements for the spell ((Including an elaborate magical circle on the pavement and the hunting instincts of Rogan, the Were-Smilodon.)) to pull off a complexity 15 ritual ((He’d been planning on doing complexity 10, but Nate goaded him on, thanks to the player-on-player compels we’re using.)). He decided to cast it slowly, drawing two shifts of power each turn, which meant he’d have to roll -4 on his dice to lose control any turn.

Now, I didn’t want to make things too easy ((Also, I didn’t want to let casting a big spell right out in public be something that the players could do without consequence; if it was that easy, why weren’t they doing it all the time, after all?)), so once he made it up to 10 shifts of power, I had a couple of cops come along to ask what was going on. Aleister intercepted them and spun some story about street theatre, which let Mark finish his spell and unleash it.

The idea behind the spell was to look back through time to the moment the thieves left the Poddle and entered the Liffey, with Mark knowing that he’d probably lose them once they moved out on to the water. But I figured that, for 15 shifts of power sucked in for character reasons, I should go one better. So, I gave Mark a vision of the little boat coming out into the Liffey, then across the Liffey and downstream to one of the quayside docks, where the passengers disembarked and headed north-east into the city. He also overheard a few snippets – “She can use this” and “Raise the clans” foremost among them.

The gang immediately tried to figure out where their targets were heading, asking me what was in that direction. I blinked at them and said, “Well, the docks, sort of, and besides that, about HALF THE CITY.” The pushed a bit for historically or mythologically significant sites in that direction, and I got a bit short, finally telling them “You’re barking up the wrong tree. You won’t find them just by guessing where they went. You need more information.” ((I was, I admit, a bit flustered and snappish for a couple of reasons. First, I hadn’t decided precisely where they were headed at that point. Second, I couldn’t list a whole bunch of appropriate sites in the area off the top of my head. And third – most tellingly, I think – I was dealing with some significant joint pain. There were a couple of occasions during the session when I was harsher than I should have been because of that last point. I apologized to everyone afterward, but it bears repeating. Sorry, guys.))

So, off they went, looking for more information ((And yes, I understand that their questions that I shut down were an attempt to get more information. I already said I was sorry.)). They didn’t have enough of a symbolic link to either the thieves or the heart to use divination to find them, and Rogan wasn’t able to follow their scent trail. Eventually, they went back to The Hole in the Wall ((The bookstore/tattoo parlour owned by the O’Malley brothers.)) to rest and regroup. It was there that someone mentioned going to the statue of the Fates in St. Stephen’s Green to see if they could get any information from them.

They waited for nightfall, and then headed off through Temple Bar to get to the Green and the statue. Along the way, they spotted someone keeping pace with them on the rooftops, and so ducked through an open square to lose them. At the park, Nathan tossed a coin in the fountain, and opened his third eye.

He managed to get three questions from the Fates, in return for three favours to be specified in the future, swearing on his name ((And saying that name out loud, so now the Fates have his True Name. If they didn’t already, that is.)) and power to pay the debt. In return, he found out that the heart was soon going to be beating in someone’s chest, and the True Name of that person, and the True Name of the person giving the heart to him ((Liam Dalton and Moira Trevelyan. Yeah, the names probably aren’t correct for the period and place, but I hadn’t thought ahead far enough to come up with names, so these were the best I could do on short notice.)).

He also spent some Fate Points to be able to close his third eye after looking at the Fates with the Sight.

And then they made their way back. They were deliberately keeping an eye out for people on the rooftops, and when they got to the square they had crossed earlier, they spotted figures on the on one side. Things kinda went to hell, here, as Nate opened up with a flashbang spell on the figure, and was immediately shot by high-powered rifles from a couple of different sides. He went down – hard – conceding to stay alive and earn some Fate points.

There followed some manic scrambling that resulted in a big panic in the middle of Temple Bar. In the end, two of their opponents were down, including one dead and one dying. Our heroes beat a hasty retreat to The Hole in the Wall and barricaded themselves in for the night, after getting a doctor in for Nate.

In the morning, just after dawn, a small, pretty woman approached the shop, very carefully keeping her hands visible. In the tense, distrustful parley that followed, she explained that she represented the Malleus Maleficarum, and that it had been the Malleus on the rooftops, hoping that the gang would lead them to the stolen heart. Being trained to react instantly to magical attack, Nate’s spell caused them all to open fire on the obvious wizard ((After all, in a conflict between mundanes and wizards, these guys know that mundanes have to act fast and with overwhelming force to have a hope of surviving.)), and thus the event deteriorated into FUBAR territory.

Recognizing that the group and the Malleus had irreconcilable agendas, the visitor ((Who happened to be the hot nun mentioned by Aleister’s friend last game.)) proposed a hands-off approach, whereby each side would do its best to avoid interfering in the actions of the other. After some discussion, the group agreed to this, and Sister Mary Simon went on her way without having to resort to threats or force.

Once everyone was more-or-less recovered from the previous evening’s exertions, they cast a divination spell to lead them to the person who was supposed to be receiving the heart. With the True Name, it was pretty easy, and they wound up at a residential hotel. They saw some graffiti on the wall that read “Tá an rí-ard ag teacht!” which ((According to Google Translate, anyway. It’s not like I can actually speak Irish Gaelic. If anyone out there reading this spots an error, I’d appreciate hearing about it.)) means “The High King is coming!”

Up in the hotel, they met Liam Dalton and Moira Trevelyan, and Liam invited them to join his crusade to break the hold the faeries have on Ireland.

Fade to black for the end of the session.

So, now we’ve got to the beginning of the endgame. Next session, the gang will find out what joining Liam means, and will get to decide if they want to do that. Either way, I’ve got the big events of the last part of the game sketched out in my notes, and they’ll work no matter which side the PCs take.

It should be fun.

 

 

Dunael

By | | What's he playing?
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My buddy Clint has been running a D&D 3.5 campaign for about four and a half years, now, and I’ve been playing a warlock named Dunael ((I talk a little about him in this post.)). Tonight, Dunael died, and I want to take a moment to talk about how it was handled, because Clint did pretty much everything right. I want to remember how he did things, because I want to follow his example if I’m ever in his position ((I have been in his position before, you see, and haven’t handled it nearly as well. In fact, I completely bobbled one occasion when Clint’s character was killed, and I’m still kicking myself.)).

You need a little background ((And yes, I’m sorry, that means I’m going to tell you about my character.)) to understand why what happened was good, so here we go.

Clint’s game is full of home-brewed races and metaphysics and monsters and pretty much everything else. Dunael was a Blood Elf, a race of elves who believe that they help keep the world ticking by offering their blood in special sacrifices every day. Over time, this has made their blood stronger than that of other races ((For example, the vampires we’ve met have really liked trying to bite Dunael. Except for one who was the wife of another party member. Well, ex-wife, I guess.)), and this in turn has made them a little arrogant and superior to the other people in the world.

Dunael took that arrogance a step further, deciding that, instead of just sacrificing his blood to the world as a whole, and let the benefits trickle down to the minor spirits, he would sacrifice his blood to the minor spirits, and strengthen the world from the foundation up. This put him at odds with the rest of his family and his people, but he had more than the usual share of arrogance ((He viewed it as passion, and couldn’t understand why other people didn’t feel it the same way.)) and set out to prove them wrong.

Over the years of play, Dunael became more and more shamanic about the whole approach, dealing more with the various spirits, making short-term bargains with them, and generally becoming one of the world’s experts on the Waking Dream, as the Blood Elves called the spirit world. He learned a number of the secrets of the world, traveled to the underworld, brought back children stolen centuries before, freed a bound demon, became one of the people entrusted with the power of the Light, rescued a companion from eternal imprisonment inside a shadow creature, traveled up the Dragonspire ((Which is actually the physical body of a dragon god, as well as a volcano – Dunael has done his best to avoid waking the Dragon of the Spire.)) to learn the secrets of Truenaming from a sphinx, bluffed a powerful and ancient vampire out of attacking an army, and been made a minor noble in a land that’s not his own ((Of course, all the rest of the party were along for most of this stuff.)).

Well, tonight Dunael and his companions were engaged in an aerial battle around a castle with a group of manticores. Manticores in this world are much smarter, nastier, and bigger than in standard D&D, and are an entire group of powerful, dangerous species that have their own kingdom and take slaves from other races. We were hopelessly outmatched, having just come from a confrontation with the rest of the manticore army ((Wherein I made the ancient vampire, the Sallow Man, back down. Yeah, I’m kinda pleased with that.)) and being low on resources. We were able to do some damage to the manticores and their twisted elven riders, but then two of them started escaping with hostages.

Between us, we managed to stop one of the hostage-takers, not killing it, but distracting it long enough that a companion could snatch the hostage away, leaving Dunael floating there in front of the angry manticore with the rest of the manticores circling above, ready to pelt him with spikes. The manticore blustered, and Dunael blustered; the manticore threatened, and Dunael threatened back; the manticore spelled out very carefully what would happen to Dunael if he didn’t back down, and Dunael scoffed. The manticores attacked, and Dunael died.

Riddled with manticore spikes, at -14 hit points, I looked at Clint and said, “Can I use this sacrifice of blood for something?” Knowing me as he does, Clint was wary, but agreed to hear me out. I told him that I wanted to use it to wake the spirit of the Bleak Citadel, the castle we were defending, to defend it’s people. It was a famous, ancient castle that had been possessed by one noble family its entire existence, and I figured it must have some strong feelings about the kidnappings, etc.

Clint thought for a bit, then said, “Put it in words. What do you say as you try to wake the spirit?” So, I came up with an impassioned plea, and it was heard. Not by the Citadel, though.

By the Dragon of the Spire.

You see, we were on its lower slopes, and I had made enough spiritual noise to wake it. It agreed to save the people of the Citadel if Dunael gave his heart’s blood – his spirit, soul, blood, and power – to the Dragon. Dunael agreed.

Thus, a great stone dragon raised up out of the mountain and slew the manticores, rescuing the hostages. And Dunael died.

More stuff happened after that, but it doesn’t really touch on what I want to talk about. Here are the salient points about how Clint handled this:

  • Clint was very clear that, if I didn’t let the manticores leave, they would all attack me, and I would probably die.
  • He made sure I understood what was at stake, and gave me a chance to back out.
  • Once he saw that this was something Dunael was willing to die for, he didn’t pull any punches. He filled him full of manticore spikes, and let the dice fall as they would.
  • When I asked to do something that would give my death a little extra meaning, he not only allowed it, he took it a step farther, turning the event into the stuff of legend. Dunael died defending the Citadel ((The Lord of the Citadel, by the way, didn’t like Dunael and his friends much. There was a whole thing, there.)), and woke the Dragon of the Spire ((This is not necessarily a good thing. When the Dragon wakes, there are usually earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that follow.)).
  • He made it obvious to everyone that Dunael’s death was meaningful and not in vain.

There was some talk after the fact about how to resurrect Dunael, but I told the other players that this was a good, fitting end for the character. His story is done, and ended on a good note. He died being himself as hard as he could be, bluffing a tremendously powerful creature with nothing to back up his threats, and he still managed to do what he set out to do.

I’m going to miss him, but that’s the way his story should end. Thanks, Clint, for giving him the ending he deserved.

Now I’ve got to dig out my 3.5 books and make a new character.

The New New Avengers

By | | Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, What's he playing?
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**Spoiler Alert**

I’m going to be talking about the Breakout mini-event in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying rulebook. I’m not going to be giving too much away, I think, but if you’re planning on playing the adventure, I’d say don’t read the last couple of paragraphs.

You Have Been Warned!

So, a couple of weeks back, my friend Clint, who runs a couple of games I play in, was looking for an opportunity to play in a one-shot game that he didn’t have to run. I stepped up to volunteer, and set out a list of games I could run on short notice to the group who were interested, and got them to vote on what they’d like me to run for them. They voted for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying ((Well, actually, the vote was tied between MHR  and Dragon Age. We went with MHR because Clint voted for it, and as he generally GMs for this group, I gave his opinion extra weight. Also, I was currently obsessing about MHR and wanted another chance to run it.)).

No one else in the group had read the rulebook, so I was clear to run Breakout again. I approached it a little differently this time around because I was running it for my friends, in private, and not as part of the Launch Party event as a representative of anyone else. One of the things I did was to allow the group to select characters from the complete list of heroes in the rulebook ((Minus the Sentry, who is really more of a plot device than a character in the game. At least, in the first act.)). We wound up with an interesting mix: Black Widow, Colossus, Daredevil, Shadowcat, and Storm.

I had put together a kit for running the launch party, consisting of the laminated cheat sheets for the players, the laminated play mat for me, a bag of poker chips, a bag of red dice for the Doom Pool, a bag of green dice for everyone to share, the datafiles, some pencils and pens and post-its, and some flippable cards for tracking who’s gone in the turn sequence ((I carry this stuff – less the oversized play mat – in two organizer pouches from Tom Bihn. The dice and poker chips fit nicely into a Tom Bihn travel tray, which doubles as a bowl for the dice in play. Some time soon, I’m going to have to do a blog post about gaming bags, a much-neglected market in the luggage industry.)). For this session, I added index cards on which I had printed out all the villain datafiles, as well as the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent stats for the players. And I spent some time making custom flippable cards for each of the five players, featuring art of the hero each was playing ((Okay. Tangent. Searching for art for comic book characters online – especially female characters – will show you things you cannot unsee. It’s not good. And when you’re looking for a picture of a character to put on a card for the daughter of two of your friends, it becomes blindingly easy to see that most pictures of female comic book characters – even the non-X-rated ones – are all about the boobs and the butts. My point? I dunno. I just wish not every woman in a superhero comic was treated like a cheesecake model. I guess. As an aside, the art chosen for the MHR rulebook tends to avoid this kind of sexism, tends to more diversity than you normally see in mainstream comics. So, kudos to the gang at MWP for that.)).

I also decided to start the game by running the hook as a transition scene, giving the players a chance to do a little roleplaying and establish some assets for use later on. Only a couple took advantage of the opportunity to create an asset, because they each had only one plot point, and were worried about getting more. But Black Widow wound up with Expert on Raft Security Systems d8, and Daredevil came to the party with Bob Reynolds’s Legal Research d8. When everyone was ready, we went on to the action scene.

I had prepped a little better for this one than for the previous one, mapping out some choices for the big villains, and determining which minor villains I was going to use and where I was going to use them. Thus, the escalation of things, and the addition of more villains worked more smoothly than in the previous game I ran. The fact that I had all the villains printed out on index cards made it easier for me to track who had acted in the turn and who hadn’t, because I could just flip the cards over when the villain had finished his turn. I also kept a closer eye on the Doom Pool, using the dice more frequently ((Also more intelligently.)) than I had previously, and that helped the flow and build of the game.

Some highlights of the game:

  • Colossus wiping out a mob of villains in one attack by being dropped into their midst by Storm.
  • Storm whipping up the winds to create Storm-Swept d12 on the open landing deck.
  • Shadowcat using her intangibility and counter-attacks to essentially get Armadillo and Tiger Shark to beat themselves unconscious.
  • Black Widow using her S.H.I.E.L.D. squad, not to fight the villains, but to get the Raft security measures back online and send a distress call to S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ.
  • Daredevil locking Foggy Nelson in an empty cell to get him out of harm’s way.

I ended the scene by spending 2d12 from the Doom Pool ((Which held only 2d12, so that worked about right, as far as I’m concerned.)). Up until the distress call, I had thought the scene was going to be a real disaster for the characters, and was ready to narrate a pretty grim ending, but with the distress call, the scene ended with the arrival of reinforcements and the bulk of the villains being rounded up.

We finished up with another transition scene, as Black Widow kept Maria Hill from arresting the stray X-Men, and then interrogated the prisoners to find out who the target of the break-out was. When she found that it was Karl Lykos, the X-Men got a little worried, and were able to fill in the rest of the gang about the kind of threat he poses.

Everyone had a good time, and we’ve decided to run the second act in the next couple of weeks. So, this one goes in the Win column.

 

From the Armitage Files: New Blood

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

It’s been a while since the last Armitage Files game. Even though I’ve only got three players, getting them together in this recent season of deadlines and illness and travel has been a bit of a challenge. But we managed to get together last Friday night and play ((Though we ended a little early, thanks to the aforementioned illness.)), and it was good to get back to the game.

We opened a little slow – last session, if you recall, one of the characters died, and the opening of this session was introducing the player’s new character to the group. This is always a bit delicate, especially in a game of horror and conspiracy, where the current characters have every reason to distrust newcomers. Fortunately, we had worked out the basics of the approach at the end of the previous session, and my players are all more than willing to meet me half-way to make the game happen ((Thanks for that, guys!)).

The idea was that the new character, a parapsychologist named Malcolm Crosby, had a book that he wanted to sell, and took it to Moon, the bookseller, to handle the sale for him. I asked what the book was, and got a request for a treatise on the weird automata that the gang had found in Emigrant. “Fat chance of that,” I explained, “Pick something else, you cheater.” ((Okay, maybe I didn’t put it that way.)) The next request was, I believe, for The Tears of Azathoth, which is a big clue and MacGuffin in the campaign ((If it wasn’t Tears, then it was another big clue tome. Sometimes, my players think they’re being sneaky.)). Again, I gently advised, “Stop trying to cheat, you cheating bastards!”

I suggested instead that the item in question not be a book, but a collection of letters from the Fox sisters. These would be quite valuable to collectors of spiritualist paraphernalia, and Moon’s expertise in authenticating such items and his contacts in that community would both be useful in getting top dollar for the letters.

There was some good character interaction between Moon and Crosby, and I played a little bit with Moon’s time-perception problem, and Moon called on Roxy to bring him a book he had left at her place with examples of the Fox sisters’ handwriting ((A very nice use of the profession’s special ability to have a handy item “in stock,” I thought.)), so they managed to all get together in one place a little quicker than I had feared.

Anyway. Moon did his authentication of the Fox letters, and spent a point on it, so I gave him something interesting – I told him that the letters seemed to be partial palimpsests, where portions of the page had been scraped down to remove what had been written there,and then something new had been written on the newly blank sections. He figured that he could recover some of the text that had been scraped off ((Using book science! Also, GM fiat.)), but that it would likely be a destructive process, ruining the chance of reselling the letters.

Moon explained this to Crosby, who was more intrigued by what might be hidden in the letters, quickly gave his consent, and Moon went to work. After a few hours ((Which seemed much longer to Moon, thanks to his distorted temporal perception.)), Moon managed to piece together a few little snippets of text: “hotep,” “little glass snowmen,” “Cho-Cho,” and “ears of azat.” That was enough to get them all fired up ((At this point, I started rapidly skimming the Wikipedia article on the Fox sisters, because I realized that I had just put a big story hook in front of the players without any idea what the actual story was. “All hook and no plot,” as one might say. I had visions of the group going haring off after the secrets of the Fox sisters, and me not having any idea what they might be. Fortunately, they decided to stick to the original plan.)), and Moon and Roxy wound up telling Crosby all about all the weird stuff they’d been doing, and Crosby got all excited and wanted in on the investigations ((Moon spent some time – well, quite a bit of time, actually – trying to talk Crosby out of getting involved. Great roleplaying, but man, don’t try so hard to kick the new character out of the party, dude!)).

Next day, Roxy went by Miskatonic University to talk to Dyer, with some plan to have Crosby granted faculty status there. Dyer explained that that’s not how things worked, and that MU was unlikely to give a position to a charlatan like a parapsychologist ((I’m not sure exactly what she wanted to accomplish with this, beyond trying to get the same access to University resources that the late Dr. Solis had.)), so that didn’t work out.

Then it was off to Kingsport ((Lovely, lovely Kingsport. The gang has had such fun there.)) to try and track down Lars Fargerberg, a linguist who might have a line on The Tears of Azathoth. The document they were following up on led them to a clip joint in a seedy part of town, where Moon and Crosby were rapidly divested of a point of Credit Rating each by the charming hostesses. Roxy, more worldly, found a contact there, and got some information on Fargerberg using a story about Moon having paid for a book from him that he never received.

They found that Fargerberg hadn’t been around lately, but that he had a room in one of the boarding houses nearby, though no one knew which. Roxy went to the police looking for more details, spinning the same story about Moon’s payment for a book, and Moon wound up primary suspect in Fargerberg’s strange disappearance ((After all, he was the first person they’d found with a motive, however fake, for wanting something bad to happen to the linguist.)) and spent a few hours answering questions.

While he was being detained and Roxy was wrangling a lawyer for him, Crosby hit up the newspapers ((Quote at this point: “I can’t believe it took us this long to look something up in the newspapers. Isn’t this a Chtulhu game?”)) and found the original story about Fargerberg’s disappearance, along with his address. With Moon sprung, they went to talk to Fargerberg’s landlady, who told them that she had already cleaned out Fargerberg’s room, and that a junk man had carted off all of the linguist’s books.

They tracked down the junk man, and found that he had several of Fargergerg’s books still, but had sold off about half of them already. He seemed to be holding back some information about who he had sold various things to, but did admit that he had sold a big bible to the pastor of a nearby church, and that’s where the gang decided to head next.

But at that point, Moon’s player was succumbing to his nasty cold, and we called it a night. Hopefully it won’t be another two months before the next session.

Feints & Gambits: Heart and Hell

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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In the last Feints & Gambits session, I was gifted with a wonderful news story to incorporate into the ongoing saga of Dredenified Dublin – the theft of the heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, the patron saint of Dublin, from Christchurch Cathedral. Now, this story came out of left field, but it’s such a brilliantly gameable idea that I had to use it. It required a bit of backfilling behind the scenes to tie it into the things that were going on in the campaign, but that all happened out of the players’ line of sight, so as far as they’re concerned ((Or at least, as far as they were concerned up until I spilled the beans just now.)), nothing has changed.

What I needed to do to fit this into the storyline that had developed was to decide who had stolen the heart, and why. I started by trying to figure out what made the most sense, but then decided to abandon that tack. See, I wanted this to be a bit of a mystery for the players, and by choosing the person and motive that made the most sense, I would make it too easy for the players to figure out. Instead, I started looking at the faces already in play, and trying to decide what would make the most interesting story ((This is something I’m trying to learn to do more regularly, more automatically, and more creatively. I have a tendency to fall back on basic logic for building my storylines, planning forward from what already exists, when more satisfying stories can be built by deciding the most interesting thing that can happen, and constructing the logic backwards to fit into the current state of the campaign. This allows for more surprising twists that still make sense.)).

Once I had picked the who, I figured out the why, and then the how ((No, I’m not going to give it all away in the blog, you whiny players.)). I was pleased with how it fit nicely into the campaign as it stood, and what it suggested for the endgame of the story. I think it will develop in interesting and satisfying ways. It’s given me some interesting ideas about the final stages of the game, and reshaped some of the behind-the-scenes stuff in cool ways.

The actual session got off to a bit of a rocky start, which is entirely my fault. I had printed out a copy of the article about the theft from the Internet, and handed it to the players as we were about to start. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it clear that this article was something that they had found in-game; they just assumed I was showing them a cool article I had found. So, they passed it around, went, “Cool!” and proceeded to ignore it. When it finally occurred to me to tell them this was something their characters had found in-game ((After a few WTF moments of complete bewilderment on my part.)), they glommed onto it pretty quickly, and the game got rolling.

Things started with Kate trying to find the missing mummies, thinking that the fact that they had gone missing might be tied to the missing heart, but the only real link she had to them was the remains of a bottle that had held the True Guinness that Padraig Pearse had given to the mummies ((Or so the group thinks. I’m not saying one way or the other, except that it fits the evidence they have.)). The bottle and cork had a stronger link to the brewery than to the mummies, though, so that didn’t work out very well.

While Kate was doing that, Aleister and a couple of others met with a contact of Aleister’s from Christchurch. He wasn’t able to offer much more information than was in the papers, except that a nun had come asking many questions about the occurrence. The only description they got of this nun was that she was attractive ((This led to a strange conversation about where one could go to pick up hot nuns in Dublin.)). Aleister figured that this was just the Malleus Maleficarum showing an interest in the missing holy relic, and he didn’t want to go talk to them about it – the last meeting he had with their representative did not encourage him to renew the acquaintance.

Next, the gang decided to go to the Moore Street market – what the gang calls the Goblin Market – to see if anyone there knew anything. They found members of the both the Snowbirds and the Sunshine Boys there ((These are the young changeling and fey gangs allied with the Winter and Summer Courts respectively.)), and almost got them to come to blows by getting each group to accuse the other of the theft. Only the presence of Constable Fergus ((An ancient, powerful troll tasked with keeping the peace in the market.)) kept things from escalating.

In the midst of all this, Nate spotted a figure in colourful clothing in one of the third-floor windows overlooking the street. He remembered seeing a similar figure in a tree at St. Michan’s church during their first abortive attempt to get into the crypts, and decided he wanted to have a chat with the fellow.

Now, Nate’s an evoker. He’s got tonnes of power, enough control to keep his head from exploding ((Mostly.)), and that’s it for him. So, to pursue the figure, he decided to use his earth evocation to launch himself up at the window the man was watching from. I explained to him that this was not a safe thing to do, and would result in him being launched like a cannonball in the general direction he wished to go, but that he’d need to make an Athletics roll to go where he wanted to, and even then, he’d probably wind up bruised and bloodied.

Five shifts of power later, he misses his Athletics check by one point, and I tell him he’s going to slam into the wall beside the window and then fall. He tosses in a Fate Point, invoking his Tricks Up My Sleeve aspect, and asks to go through the window, instead. I told him he’d still take some stress from the glass, and he said he was fine with that. And thus Nate went barreling through the closed window and sprawled on the floor in front of his target ((This led to the following conversation between myself and Nate’s player – Me: And that’s why wizards don’t use evocation to fly. Chris: *I* understand that, but as far as Nate’s concerned, that worked PERFECTLY.)).

Nate got up, brushed himself off, and was about to make his introductions to the fellow ((I believe said introductions would have been along the lines of, “Right, ye fecker. Ye got some questions to answer.”)) when the man in question whistled and Nate blacked out ((I fudged the effect of this a little bit. It was a mental maneuver, inflicting the aspect Sound Asleep on the target, which might be a bit over-the-top for a maneuver. Probably better as a consequence from a mental attack. But I didn’t want to draw this bit out, and I thought it would be more interesting if the guy got away. So. Yeah. I cheated a bit here.)). When the rest of the gang made it up to the room through more conventional means, the colourful guy was gone.

A little bit of research turned up that someone dressed in colourful clothes with a magic ability to whistle might, in fact, be Nightingale the Robber, which hinted that the non-Irish monsters and spirits living below the city ((And led by Baba Yaga.)) might be responsible for the theft. Rather than rush off to confront them right away ((And what’s up with that?)), they decided to check out Christchurch Cathderal.

Some initial investigation of the scene led the magicky types in the group to determine that the heart had been a key component in some kind of mystic construct in the church. Rogan’s keen nose led them down into the catacombs from the main floor. The catacombs of Christchurch Cathedral are all nicely finished for tourists to see. Our heroes poked around for a bit and discovered a magically concealed door.

Behind the door, a passageway led down into the tunnels below the city, which were historically called Hell ((Or so I am informed by the Ghost Tour I took in Dublin.)), and ran from a gate – now bricked up – near the city gate at Cook Street to the catacombs of Christchurch. As they followed the tunnel, they were attacked by a Ruselka hiding in a stream flowing along the ceiling of the tunnel, but Rogan’s nasty roar managed to frighten it off before it had a chance to do much more that soak a couple of the stragglers.

When they reached the underground River Poddle, they found that Nightingale was on the far side, along with thirty or forty other Slavic, Asian, African, and South American fey creatures. Nate opened up with a flashbang spell before anyone had a chance to say anything, but the flowing water of the Poddle grounded the spell, preventing it from doing anything more than fizzle.

There followed an intense confrontation across the width of the river, our heroes demanding information and access to the tunnels on the far side, and Nightingale refusing to allow them into what he said was his home. After the spell, tempers were running high, and the foreign creatures were not in the mood to trust these demanding, presumptuous folks who came down to their territory and treated them like invaders.

Eventually, the characters retreated back up to Christchurch ((With some discussion of whether they should collapse the tunnel. They decided against it.)), and whipped up a divination spell that showed two other figures coming to the door, one going in to steal the heart, and then the two figures retreating back down the tunnel to a boat on the Poddle which they took downstream towards the Liffey. Some evidence ((I forget exactly what. Maybe the fact they were speaking old Church Latin.)) made the group conclude that these two were two of the mummies they had been seeking.

That’s about where we left things for that session. Next time, we find out what our heroes intend to do about all this.

Assembled! My Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Launch Party

By | | Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, What's he playing?
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Last weekend, I got the chance to try running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. I’ve already talked about playing the game, and about reading the game, so it seems like coming full circle to talk about what it was like to run it.

It was the launch party event at Imagine Games & Hobbies. I had brought in a sign-up sheet a couple of weeks previous, hoping to get a gauge of how much interest there was in trying the game. On Monday before the game, all eight slots ((The launch party event is set up for six players, but is really easy to scale, so I put in a couple of extra slots, figuring I could handle an eight-player table if need be.)) were filled, and there were others expressing interest. I was lucky to get in touch with someone else who was willing to read over the rules and adventure and run a second table, so I expanded the available slots to twelve.

Well, when game day rolled around, we had eleven people signed up. And the other Watcher volunteer was hit by the murderous cold that’s been going around ((I did my time with it, and I know it’s a bad one. So I don’t begrudge him.)). But, as is common for Saturday events, not everyone who signed up showed up to play. And one extra person who hadn’t signed up did show up to play. I wound up running a single table of seven players.

Everyone ((Including me, and a few people who stopped for a couple of minutes just to listen in.)) had fun with the game, and lots of cool things happened, and at least one person went and bought the .pdf immediately after the game, so I count the session as a success. That’s the short version of the review.

Here are some specific observations.

Learning Curve

When you’re starting out, just learning the game and just teaching it to others, the first few rounds are going to be slow ((Especially if you’ve got a large group. Like, f’rinstance, SEVEN people. Just as an example.)). Resign yourself to that fact. There will be a discussion with every character on every action about what dice get added to the dice pool, how and when to spend plot points, how to determine your total, what your effect die means, and how the Doom Pool works. This will pretty definitely happen on each hero’s first action, almost definitely happen on each hero’s first reaction, and is likely to happen for each hero once or twice more as they try different things.

This is the learning curve of the game. As Watcher, you’ll go through it, too, but you’ll be muttering under your breath and looking at the rules when you do, rather than having someone else walk you through it.

But don’t sweat it. The way the game narrative works, and the turn sequence, even though each round will take a fair bit of time, players and characters are involved and enjoying most of it. I’m not going to say the round flies by, but there is enough interesting stuff going on that those who are not involved in a given action/reaction cycle will still be interested in listening to the cool things the dice mechanic tells you are happening. And, with the fact that all rolls are opposed, it’s quite possible that each hero will be the centre of the action twice in a round – once on his or her action, and once on a reaction to something a villain does.

Once the mechanic clicks for a player, you can see the lights go on behind the eyes, and things start to speed up. It’s still not a speedy game, round by round, but a lot more happens and changes in a round of MHR than in, say, D&D, so it doesn’t feel like it’s dragging at any point ((Well, it hasn’t to me, anyway.)).

Spotlight Time

Part of the GM’s job in any game is managing spotlight time for the characters: making sure everyone gets a moment to shine in play. MHR actually comes pretty close to automating distribution of spotlight time.This is the product of two things: the narrative nature of assembling the dice pool, and the brilliant turn sequence system.

Each turn, each hero gets the spotlight handed to him or her to do something cool. And building the dice pool – picking the dice you want from your various die categories – creates a narrative image of what your hero is doing. It’s pretty much guaranteed to be cool. You may even get to do this a couple more times during the game, as your hero reacts to a villain’s action.

In addition, the way the turn sequence works ((I’m not going to go into detail about it here. Fred Hicks covered it in detail over on his blog, so go read that.)), it’s primarily the players who are determining who gets the spotlight next. The game plays like a team-up comic book, with each hero getting his or her glamour spot, and then passing it on to another hero. It works wonderfully smoothly ((Except that I need to be better about keeping track of which villains are up and around.)).

The Doom Pool

This is such a fun mechanic. It does a lot to gamify a great deal of what used to be just GM whim, giving license to adjust dice rolls and otherwise “cheat” the players, all within a carefully defined and codified structure. It adds a little resource management mini-game to the Watcher’s job, but it does so in a way that removes other concerns that take up a GM’s attention.

Like what? Well, like deciding when to bump up the bad guy’s attack roll, and how to do that. By making the choices available dependent on the dice in the Doom Pool, and giving clear guidelines on how to spend them and how to regain them, the choices become much more focused and structured. I bump up the attack roll if I’ve got the dice in the Doom Pool to do so, and I’m not saving them for something specific.

Aside from this mechanical benefit, the way the Doom Pool grows and shrinks builds mounting tension into the game. The players can all see the dice in the Doom Pool, and they know that they’re going to get used for something nasty. Adding dice or stepping them up increases tension, and spending them gives a cathartic moment of tension relief. Really, it follows the peaks and valleys of a rising tension chart pretty well.

That is, if you use it properly. I found that I had a tendency to hoard the dice rather than spending them. This had a few problems:

  • It cheated the players out of that cathartic relief moment when a die or two gets spent.
  • It gave fewer opportunities for plot points to move to the players for adding spent Doom dice back into the pool.
  • It made it hard to grow the size of the dice, because when you step a die up, you need to step up the lowest die in the pool.
  • It reinforce the idea that the heroes’ best course of action was directly attacking the villains, because acting against the environment meant that I could roll an ungodly mitt-full of dice against them.
  • It disadvantaged the villains, making them easier to take out, thus lessening the sense of peril in the session.

So, lesson hopefully learned: spend those Doom Pool dice and make the players wish you hadn’t.

The Cheat Sheets

The .pdf of the game ((And the .pdf package for the launch party.)) comes with two cheat sheets: one for players and one for Watchers. I followed Cam Banks’s example – I printed them out and got them laminated. They are very handy tools.

The player sheet gives a basic rundown of the rules the players need to know: how to build your dice pool, how to use plot points, etc. The Watcher sheet is twice the size of the player sheet, and gives an overview of building Watcher dice pools, using the Doom Pool, and so on. It also has a little square on one corner marked Doom Pool where you can put the Doom Pool dice, letting the players keep track of how it’s growing. Below that is a list of lines where you can record the names of the villains and how much stress they’ve taken. This last I found incredibly handy. I used a dry erase pen on the laminated sheet, entering and erasing names and marks as needed.

The idea of the Watcher’s play mat instead of a screen actually speaks to an important point about the game that is subtle and easy to miss. You don’t want a screen because all rolls are opposed rolls, and should therefor be made in the open. The Doom Pool gives you your mechanic if you find you need to fudge a roll – well, I say fudge, but it’s not fudging in this system. It’s using the system as written to skew a roll as required, providing you’ve got the dice for it.

I strongly recommend spending the ten or fifteen bucks to get the play mat laminated. It’s very useful. The one thing I wish it had on it was a quick rundown of what the Watcher gets when he buys an opportunity from a player with a plot point. I just don’t know what I’d take off to fit that in.

An Important Rule to Remember

This is something I kept forgetting, and it’s not a good rule to neglect.

When you beat your opponent’s total by five, you get an extraordinary success. That lets you step up the effect die on your action. For every five points you beat the total, you can step up the effect die again, even going past d12.

Why is this so important? Because without this rule, you can’t stress a character out unless he or she already as a d12 of stress. Without this rule, the attack that really matters is the first attack, because that will determine how many more successful attacks you need to stress the target out. Hit him with a d8 of physical stress? Then you’ll need at least two more attacks, more likely three ((Target has d8 physical stress. If the next attack does less than a d12 stress, then the stress jumps to d10. Next attack will raise it to d12, and the attack after that stresses the target out. If the attack does a d12 stress, then the next attack stresses the target out. So, two or three attacks, and nothing can change that. Except this rule.)) to stress the target out.

By remember and applying this rule, you give more reason for the players to spend plot points in order to increase their dice totals, because there’s more benefit to getting a high total. It makes the action less rigid and mechanical ((The bad kind of mechanical.)), gives more options to the players, and creates some great moments for the take-out blows.

It also, incidentally, lets you one-shot a character. Had I remembered this in the game, Daredevil would have been able to talk the Sentry into joining the fray before the end of the scene.

One Last Tip

Most of the villain datafiles in the core book print out quite legibly on index cards. I ran the game at the launch party using my iPad for the rulebook, and printed out the actual adventure on paper so that I could scribble on the villain datafiles. Unfortunately, this led to me cluttering up my space with sheets of paper as I paged back and forth to the different datafiles. For the next time I run this ((Which will be next Saturday for one of my regular game groups who wants to give the game a try.)), I’m printing out the datafiles on cards. They’re still going to get shuffled and mixed, but they’ll take up much less space.

Final Words

The game runs a lot more easily and smoothly than I had even hoped when I played it and read it. There is, to be sure, a learning curve for both players and Watchers, but it’s not all that severe. It starts slow, but there’s enough going on to keep people interested in more than just sitting and waiting for their turn. And the speed comes with practice, as with all things.

I’m really looking forward to running the game a second time to see how it goes with a little practice.

‘Nuff said.

 

 

 

Feints & Gambits: The Mystery of St. Michan’s

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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So, I’m a bit late to the party with this post. I was planning to finish it last night and get it posted, but stuff came up ((The Reapers invaded and took Earth. Maybe you heard about that?)). Anyway, I’ve got to get it posted this morning, because this evening is the next Feints & Gambits session.

Last session was a small group ((Four people. In most games, that’s the size I like. In this game, that’s just over half the players.)) and I’d been having a rough couple of weeks with work deadlines. I managed almost ten whole minutes worth of prep for the game, and warned the players about that. In fact, I gave them the option of playing Marvel Heroic Roleplaying instead ((I hadn’t had any more time to prep that, but I was familiar with the Launch Party adventure from playing it. And, as a one-shot, less pressure on me to do something worthy of previous adventures.)). They decided to push ahead with F&G, though, so that’s what we did.

I filled in a little more background on what things were like now that Aengous was gone and the True Guinness was no longer being made and added to the regular Guinness. They did some poking around about that, but he’s gone, and I tried to make that very clear. After all, he warned them there would be a price.

Their main goal this session was trying to figure out who the guy in the track suit, ski mask, and sunglasses was that tried to cut their heads off in the Guinness Brewery. They had his sword, which turned out to be a reproduction. Kate cast a tracking spell and, once they crossed the Liffey, they were able to trace the sword to a pawn shop. The shop had it’s windows boarded up, obviously covering broken glass. Rogan decided to go in and ask the pawnbroker about any missing swords, but her lack of a cover story, her upper-class attitude, and her direct questions made him suspicious, and he didn’t want to tell her anything ((I should have paid her a plot point for that, in retrospect, compelling her Bloodline of Power aspect. Oh, well.)). Kate came in and rescued her, with a line about medication, and off they went, but not before Rogan managed to spot a whole shelf of replica weapons, including some swords very similar to the one the group had.

The gang regrouped at the Silver Arm, and seemed pretty blocked. Nate broke down and went to Macha and tried to get information out of her by buying her drinks. She wasn’t all that forthcoming, but did ask why the gang weren’t doing anything about what had gone on at St. Michan’s ((This was a bit heavy-handed of me, but there had been a couple of clues earlier that hadn’t been obvious enough, and I didn’t want the whole night mired down in flailing about for a lead.)). The group grabbed hold of that and scampered off.

I gave them a bit of a run-down on St. Michan’s and the mummies ((With some fictional bits thrown in to fit what I’m doing in the game.)), and then told them that the crypt tours were not currently running. They investigated to find out why, and were told that they were closed for renovation – some masonry had dropped on a visitor, and they wanted to get the vaults properly shored up before resuming the tours.

Sort of kitty-corner to the church is Bridewell Garda Station and Jail. Kate wanted to look for ghosts and, the churchyard being consecrated, I decided that there were ghosts of hanged prisoners around Bridewell ((I seem to remember being told on my Dublin tour that they hanged people in Bridewell. I don’t know for sure if it’s true, but it’s true as far as the game goes.)). She found a chatty one that spoke of the ghost of Padraig Pearse going into the church with bottles of beer, and coming out with four solid figures.

At that point, it became obvious that the gang was going to burgle the church crypts to find out if the mummies were still there. When they did, I shot some arrows at them from outside the churchyard, and we had a bit of a fight with fey archers. They also spotted some sort of colourful figure up in a tree near the church, but couldn’t get a good look at it. With the gardai from Bridewell now heading over to see what the noise was ((Nate has a flashbang rote that is very effective. Also, loud.)), our heroes embraced the better part of valour and scarpered. Next night, they went back and broke into the crypts and determined that the mummies were, indeed, missing ((Kate also opened all the other crypts and rooms. I asked her several times if she wanted to do this, and she said “Yes.” Then she looked a little hurt when I told her to add the aspect Violated the Graves to her character sheet. We’ll see what she does with it, being an ectomancer and all.)).

And that’s about where we left things. Tonight, an adventure pulled from the headlines and twisted into shape to fit the ongoing story of Feints & Gambits.