Monthly Archives: October 2009

Central Canada Comic Con 2009

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Central Canada Comic Con 2009 runs this coming weekend, Friday through Sunday, at the Winnipeg Convention Centre. I’m going to be there, demoing board and card games for the good folks at Imagine Games and Hobbies on Saturday and Sunday.

What games? Well, here’s a list of what I’ll have with me:

  • Arkham Horror
  • Beowulf the Legend
  • Battlestar Galactica
  • Fury of Dracula
  • Gloom
  • The Stars are Right
  • Runebound
  • Anima
  • Deluxe Illuminati
  • The B-Movie Card Game

Tentative plan is going to be to do what I did the first time I did this, the year before last. Saturday, I run pick-up games of whatever people are interested in playing, except Arkham Horror. If there’s enough interest, and people commit to it, I set up Arkham Horror for a big, long game on Sunday. If there isn’t enough interest, Sunday is more pick-up games.

Why am I holding off on Arkham Horror? Because the game is huge, and it takes a long time to set up and tear down, and an even longer time to play. If I start Arkham Horror, I probably won’t be running anything else for at least four hours, more likely five or six. That means I only want to do it if people are really interested in playing it; nothing sucks more than having folks getting bored in the middle of a long demo.

So, if you’re at the con, stop by and say hi, or sit down and play a game or two.

It’ll be fun.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Been pretty quiet around here, hasn’t it? Don’t worry. Things should be picking up again fairly soon.

Anyway, last night we had the latest installment of the Storm Point campaign. We joined our heroes in the middle of the siege of Storm Point, after they had just failed the skill challenge to ward the city against magical assault, which allowed the enemy to summon in a squad of demons to wreak havoc in the town. Most of the characters were out of action points, having spent them for rerolls in the siege skill challenges, and several of them were down healing surges and suffering penalties to die rolls because of lack of sleep.

Now, the past couple of sessions were fairly abstract, dealing with things through skill challenges and roleplaying, with little actual combat played out. I decided that I wanted this session to open with a tough, knock-down, drag-out fight. As it turned out, because of several things*, the fight was all we had time for.

As I said, I wanted to make it tough, but I knew that the party was a little low on resources, so I created the encounter as 9th-level for 6 characters, with 3 canoloths, 3 runspiral demons, and a needle demon (2,200 xp total). I then scattered the runespiral  demons through the neighbourhood that I layed out using the very pretty city tiles from Rackham, put the canoloths in an open plaza, and hid the needle demon out of sight.

The party rode in on their hippogriffs, so I gave them perception checks to see if they could spot the demons, and they found them all except the needle demon. They decided to concentrate on the individual runespiral demons first, and swooped in on one. And, of course, that’s when the needle demon popped out and dominated a couple of them and had them leap from their flying hippogriffs head first to the paving stones.

Well, that got their attention, as did the fact that I had the unengaged demons set fire to buildings or eat civilians on their turns. They ganged up on the needle demon and one of the runespiral demons, while the ranger took on another runespiral demon from the air with his bow. Once they had put those three down, they went after the canoloths.

I had a string of crappy rolls in the fight, which made the remaining demons much less of a threat than they might have been, but it was somewhat balanced by the dazed cleric who could not roll a successful save, despite the extra opportunities granted by the warlord. In the end, the party defeated the demons and organized the citizens to put out the fires, and then we were done for the night.

I hadn’t expected the siege of Storm Point to last more than two sessions, but people still seem to be having fun, so I’m not too upset about it. Next session should see us to the end of the siege and (hopefully) the climactic battle with the commander. I’m willing to push it one session farther than that if I need to, but if it looks to run to three more sessions, I’m going to have to take some action to wrap things up.

But for now, it’s working, and people are enjoying it.

[[EDIT: Corrected name of the runespiral demons.]]

*Including the Winnipeg Zombie Walk, which went right by the store where we play. Back

Overdue DMG 2 Review, AKA Unwelcome Rant

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I’m a little behind on getting this review up. I’m usually quicker off the mark; this time, I’ve waited several weeks before posting my review.

The truth is that I’m very conflicted about the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2.

See, I knew that it was going to be much harder to produce this book than the PHB 2 or the MM 2.* The PHB 2 can get away with just adding some classes and races. The MM 2 can get away with piling on the monsters. But the DMG 2 is tougher, because it has two jobs: first, it is supposed to provide advice as to how to run games, how to manage your group, how to build adventures, all that good stuff. Second, it’s supposed to have lots of lootable bits, like traps and templates and other little surprises that the DM can just plunk right into his or her own game with minimal retooling.

And the book does that. But I’m not sure I like the way it does it.

Because roughly 15% of the book (by page count) is stuff I’ve already paid for once.

I’m not talking about the preview stuff hosted on the WotC site, either. I’m talking about entire Save My Game, Dungeoncraft, and Ruling Skill Challenges columns plopped into the book. I’m talking about the bulk of the new section on traps being lifted from a Dragon article. I’m talking about a significant portion of the example skill challenges being pulled from published adventures and other sourcebooks.

Now, the stuff that’s been repeated is not bad – in fact, it’s quite good, most of it – but as I said, I’ve already paid for it once. It bothers me to find that I’ve paid for it again in buying this book.

Now, an argument can be made that repeating the material is a good thing, because it gives people who haven’t bought the other books or subscribed to DDI a chance to get their hands on the material.

Utter crap.

Firstly, it’s not my job to subsidize those who haven’t bought the other books by paying for some things twice.

Second, you can’t tell me that WotC wouldn’t rather get all those other folks buying the other books and subscribing to DDI. You know they would.

So, I am forced to conclude that WotC is double-dipping with this material either to cut corners or as a misguided attempt to lure those who have not already done so to give them more money by advertising the cool stuff available in other products. I say misguided because it strikes me as a bit of a slap in the face to the alpha-geeks like me who already buy all the 4E stuff that comes out.

I dunno. It just doesn’t seem like a good plan. Of course, the WotC .pdf sales policy proved to me that they don’t think things through very well at the best of times, but that rant is done, and no one wants to hear it.

So. Rant is done. You know my negative feelings about the book. How about the quality of the material?

It’s good. I like it. There is more of an emphasis, which I think is sorely lacking in 4E, on how to infuse your game with more story and roleplaying elements. The story branching section is very well done, and offers good advice to DMs both new and old. The section on Skill Challenges, though lifted almost completely from Mike Mearls’s column in Dungeon, is great, showing nice ways to use Skill Challenges and make them unobtrusive in the game. The section on Sigil has got me jonesing for a Planescape game. The new monster creation and customization rules look solid and easy. The traps and fantastic terrain examples are useful. And the advice on dealing with player motivations is very good.

One of the nicest things, though, are the little sidebar tips. These can add a little bit more information, or an example of what’s discussed in the main text, or just a little bit of advice from someone who’s been there. These are the things that stand out most in my mind after reading the book.

Well, there it is. I like the book, but am upset by the recycling of material I’ve already paid for. It hasn’t put me off WotC or D&D, but it does mean that I’m going to be checking the other supplements they publish to see if there’s enough original stuff in the book to warrant a purchase.

Because it’s good to know before I pay for it instead of after.

*Which I didn’t bother to review because it, like Adventurer’s Vault 2, is just a laundry list of things to add to the game. You’ll like some of the contents, and hates some of the others, and the ones you like or hate will probably differ from mine. Back

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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This past Sunday was the latest session of the Storm Point campaign, featuring the siege of Storm Point by an army of mixed humanoids led by shadar-kai heretics worshiping Vecna. We didn’t finish up the siege in one session, so we’ll have to get back to it next game.

I patterned the siege after the skill challenge I used for the defense of the mines last session. I varied it a little, because I wanted to accomplish a few very specific kinds of things:

  • Time pressure. I wanted the characters to feel that there just wasn’t enough time to do everything.
  • Resource pressure. I wanted the feeling of scant resources.
  • Random siege length. I wanted to have the actions of the characters determine just how long the siege goes on.

I also didn’t want to have the option each turn for the characters to kill attackers – in a siege this size, I felt that the impact of killing a few dozen besiegers just doesn’t tip the scales that much.

So, I decided to run the siege as a series of skill challenges, with eight-hour rounds. If a character worked more than a single round in a row, he had to start making Endurance checks – failure cost one healing surge and imposed a -1 (cumulative) penalty on all rolls. This, I felt, would make for some interesting choices, as the players try and decide whether they should take a nap or spend another eight hours manning the walls or whatever.

It worked, too, in that the players were all trying to push their characters as far as possible without sleeping, but saw their effectiveness diminish as they stretched too far. It also allowed for the Endurane skill to really shine for those who had good scores: Thrun the Anvil, for example, went three whole days before even starting to slow down.

The siege itself I broke into two phases: preparation and the siege itself. I set up a range of skill challenges in the preparation phase, each of which granted an advantage during the siege phase; things like training a command squad, laying in stores, reinforcing the walls, seeding the surrounding area with traps, and scrying on the approaching army. I gave them three days to get as much accomplished as they could, and they managed all of the preparatory challenges.

There was a longer challenge available, as well, one that I expected to run through the bulk of the siege. The Wizard was researching a mystical weapon created by the Bael Turathi tieflings in their war against Arkhosia. It was a set of runestones that could be used to unleash violent destructive energy in a wide area, and was called The Lightbringer. The DC on this challenge was tougher, and the Complexity higher than the other challenges. The swordmage and the cleric jumped all over this challenge.

And botched it. The experiment blew up, badly wounding the characters and killing the Wizard. The party paid to have him resurrected, but all the research notes and volumes were destroyed in the explosion.

Once the siege was established, I gave the party a list of nine different tasks that they could spend their time on, each one a skill challenge. This was stuff like planning, wall defense, blockade duty in the harbour, magical defense, leading a sally party, maintaining civil discipline, etc. The catch was that, every task they didn’t work on in a given round, automatically failed. When they succeeded in a task, they could either take the success or erase a failure. Failures also imposed some minor penalty, like costing a healing surge or giving a penalty to another roll.

To help alleviate the inevitable mathematical downslide this set-up produces, one of the tasks (Command) allowed the characters to remove a failure previously acquired in another area, and didn’t suffer from the possiblity of failure. Their success in the preparatory phase also gave them a command squad that they could assign to one of the tasks.

Now, the accrual of three failures on any given task results in something bad happening, but not in the failure of the siege. A certain number of challenges (which I’m not going to spell out here) need to fail for the siege to break the city. But, for example, if the party acquires three failures on the Magical Defense task (which they did just as we wrapped up for the evening), a band of demons is conjured into the city and begins wreaking havoc. They’re going out to fight them, now, and a few of the characters are very tired.

Breaking the siege will happen if they manage to succeed in a few key tasks, which will trigger the final battle, or after a certain amount of time, when off-stage developments will catch up with things.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way the set-up has been forcing the party to make some hard choices during the siege, and dealing with the consequences. The players seem to be having a good time with it, too. We went all evening without a single combat, and everyone was engaged and involved in the game.

Of course, next time starts off with a nasty demon fight just to make up for things.

One Shot, Part Three: Brother Puddler Saves Humanity

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Okay, maybe I’m revealing a little bias in the title.

Saturday, we had the third and final installment of the Robot Wasteland one-shot that I’ve talked about here and here.

We managed to save Junkyard, flying in on our scavenged hovertransport at about the same time as the Devourer army reached the walls. My character, Brother Puddler, was flying, because the others were better at shooting things with the transport’s weapons or with some recovered beam rifles tied into the transport’s targeting assist.

We went after a few of the bigger Devourers first, because we had limited ammo and wanted to do as much damage as possible  before we ran out. Unfortunately, the shooting rolls did not favour us, and then one of the big grinders chewed the cockpit off the transport. There was just enough of it left for Brother Puddler’s divine powers to cobble the control systems back together again, and then we blew one of the control Devourers apart as we headed back to the no-man’s land.

Why were we heading back there? Because our psychic had spotted a small band of humans on a small hill surrounded by ravager Devourers. We flew in for a quick pick-up and dust-off, saving the wounded and driving off the attacking Devourers long enough for the survivors to get inside a bunker. I also managed to bash the crap out of the transport with a bad piloting check, but it still presented a great cinematic image: a hovertransport, with the cockpit shredded and open to the sky, a heavily-armoured warrior holding the controls intact through sheer willpower, swooping in to a rough landing on top of a pillbox, the passengers blasting away at six-legged catlike robots the size of bears, snatching up the the wounded, and blasting off back to Junkyard.

Then the folks in the bunker activated the bombs hidden in a long line through the battlefield, blasting a fifty-foot wide, twenty-foot deep ditch about a third of a mile long through the advancing robots.

After dropping off the wounded, we asked the defenders where they needed us, and they suggested helping to reclaim one of the cannon emplacements on the wall. We shot up there, but were running short on energy for the weapons. The two folks with beam rifles tried to clear the cannon tower of little raider Devourers, while the gunner on the ship’s guns kept firing downrange at the advancing larger Devourers currently trying to cross the ditch. When she ran out of power, she took the ship’s controls and Brother Puddler leapt down onto the tower with his chainsword to show the upstart metal a thing or two about the will of man.

And he was promptly pulled down and had his arm mangled. Again. Critical hit by a raider coupled with a critical failure on my Dodge roll. The rest of the raiders dogpiled him.

But a lucky Strength roll let him burst to his feet, tossing one of the raiders over the battlements, and grab a plasma cutter tossed to him by one of the other characters. He drove off the bulk of the raiders, supported by beam rifle fire from the transport, and then used the cannon to take out one of the huge Devourers that happened to be crossing the ditch by the simple expedient of walking across on the back of another huge one that was stuck in the ditch.

At this point, the Devourers were starting to flee, and had less cohesion than they had previously displayed. That’s when we figured that the first one we had killed was probably some sort of Devourer brainbot leading this unprecedented army.

So, we wrapped up the game, and we each got to say what our characters were doing five years later: we had wandering scouts and troubleshooters, a research team set up in the old weapons cache we had found, and Brother Puddler leading a chapterhouse of the Cult of Iron, working with the tech cult to understand and use the transport and other tech devices we had uncovered.

All-in-all, a most enjoyable one-shot, for all that it expanded to three nights.

Thank you, Clint, for the enjoyable game.

And thank you, Penny, Fera, and Tom, for saving Brother Puddler so many times.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Friday was the penultimate session of Post Tenebras Lux.

After what I felt was a fairly disappointing performance by me in the previous session, I decided to spend the session trying to say yes to the players, and generally trying to facilitate the game and story a little more, rather than focusing on the inner life and desires of the NPCs.

So, to that end, when the single combat of the evening came up*, I threw some thorn bushes on the map, and, when my players asked, I told them that any creature in a thorn bush space was restrained until they saved. They liked that, and wound up using it to take out one of the krenshars in nice little concerted tactical action.

I also decided that the final tribe they were seeking – the Blood Hawk tribe, halflings who raise a variety of predatory birds – were very willing to join the struggle, but were distrusted  by the other tribes. No one had to convince them of anything, but the party had to prove that they had a hope of pulling off the kind of military action they were advocating. The characters managed to prove that fairly easily, and then they had the halflings, along with their considerable wealth of intelligence gathered by spying, on their side.

We flashed forward a few days to the meeting, and the party had to persuade the tribes that they should unite to drive the gnolls and the Ghostlord (or whoever’s pretending to be the Ghostlord) out of the Thornwaste. Their success with fighting the gnolls, as displayed by the large collection of ears they had claimed, brought the Grass Dragons on board fairly easily, but the Stone Swimmer shaman continued to lobby for leaving the area.

In fact, he essentially usurped the chieftain’s position, telling the council that the Stone Swimmers were going to leave. The party managed to persuade most of his backers that doing so was cowardly, and kept the Stone Swimmer chieftain in power. When the shaman walked, he took only three of the warriors with him.

The next bit of wrangling involved trying to cobble together a plan of attack that had a chance of working, and played to the strengths and prejudices of the three tribes. I didn’t handle this as well, unthinkingly calling for a skill check to come up with the plan, which failed. They tried again with a different plan, and that succeeded. What I should have done is had the characters come up with the plan, and then use skill checks to get the tribes to adopt it.

Oh, well.

It ended up with the Blood Hawks planning to infiltrate the enemy camp before the attack, and then rise up behind the lines as the Stone Swimmers and Grass Dragons came in with a pincer attack at the main mass of gnolls.

Now, I wasn’t sure what kind of final session my players wanted – taking part in a big, climactic battle, or smaller-scale action with the Ghostlord, so I left it up to them. In-game, I had the Blood Hawks trot out their big secret: they had a scroll of linked portal and the sigils for the Ghostlord’s teleportation circle. They suggested that a small group of warriors be sent through the teleport circle right into the Lion Tower to deal with the Ghostlord and his power source.

I told the players out of game that the decision was up to them: either they went through the circle to the Lion Tower, or they led the armies and sent a commando squad through the circle. They opted to go themselves.

So, next session will see the barbarians of the Thornwaste going up against an army of gnolls, krenshar, witherlings, and a few oni, while the valiant New Heroes of Brindol strike right to the heart of the evil threatening the Elsir Vale.

And then the campaign is done.

*Four gnoll minions and four krenshars, 900 xp, a level 3 encounter for 6 characters. Back