Monthly Archives: May 2012

The Caves of Chaos!

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***Spoiler Alert***

I’m going to talk about particulars of what my playtest group did in the playtest adventure below. If you don’t want to ruin the surprise of what’s waiting for you inside the caves, don’t read the Play section below.

***You Have Been Warned***

About half an hour ago, we wrapped the first session of our D&D Next playtest. Short review: we had a lot of fun, and are planning on continuing for at least one more session ((Assuming we can slip it into the schedule, that is.)). Keep reading if you want the longer review.

The Playtest Goals

The stated goal of this phase of the playtest ((As laid out in The Caves of Chaos and discussed on the D&D Podcast.)) is to put the core mechanic through its paces, seeing how well it supports different styles of play. So, there’s no character creation rules and there’s a recognition that, mechanically, the balance between players and monsters isn’t where it needs to be. The core questions seem to be:

  1. Does this core ruleset let me play D&D the way I like to play D&D?
  2. Does it still feel like D&D?

These are the questions I’m focusing on as I discuss the first playtest session.

The Playtest Package

By now, pretty much anyone who’s even remotely interested in the next iteration of D&D has probably seen, or at least seen a description of, the playtest package, but I’m including a list of what you get here in the interests of completeness. The package contains the following documents, all in .pdf format:

  • A letter from Mike Mearls. This is just a cover letter, letting you know what’s in the package, and what to do with it.
  • How to Play. This is a pared-down rules set that covers the core rules you need to play the game.
  • DM Guidelines. This is an expansion on the How to Play document, aimed specifically at the DM. It’s got tips on adjudicating the rules, setting DCs, stuff like that.
  • The Caves of Chaos. This is the adventure, and it’s based pretty faithfully on the old module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands.
  • Bestiary. Detailed stat blocks of the monsters used in the adventure.
  • Pregenerated Characters. There are five: a fighter, a rogue, a wizard, and two flavours of cleric.

Save vs. Nostalgia

Okay, I knew the adventure was going to be The Caves of Chaos. I mean, it’s not like it was a secret. It’s what they used back at D&DXP. Still, I was surprised at how much nostalgia reading the adventure brought welling to the surface. Like a lot of gamers of my age, The Keep on the Borderlands was the first adventure I ever played, and the first adventure I ever ran. Reading over the updated descriptions of the various cave complexes really got me excited to run the game.

It’s also, I think, a brilliant choice for testing the flexibility of the rules. It is a cave complex with no external narrative attached by default, no required progression through set-piece encounters to a climax, no assumption that combat is the only option in the encounters. The DM can impose pretty much any structure he or she desires on the adventure setting, tailoring it for the group’s preferred play style.

For me, I felt it was lacking a little something. Well, not lacking, exactly, but I was inspired to expand and beef up the adventure to make it something more like what I remembered from the good old days ((Note: those days were not all that good, but they were a quarter century and more ago, so they’re definitely old. Also, they weren’t always days. I remember marathon all-night game sessions on summer vacation.)). See, one of my fondest memories of the original adventure was the table of rumours that you could dole out to the characters. Some were true, some were false, and the players didn’t know which were which. It was a bit of a running joke in the game that, whenever we’d tell anyone at the Keep that we were heading to the Caves of Chaos, they would respond, “The Caves of Chaos! A word of advice…” followed by some dice rolling, and the dispensation of a rumour.

It made such an indelible mark on my gaming memory that I dug out my old copy of B2 and decided to add a bit of adventure at the Keep ((Another reason for that was that it just didn’t feel right to me to have the adventure begin as the heroes show up at the Caves, and give them a prepackaged spiel about why they’re there. Adding the Keep would add a little context and provide some resources.)), along with an updated rumour table. While I was updating the rumour table, I saw that some of the rumours were specific to elements of the Caves, while others were more general, more like adventure hooks. I took a few of the more general ones, and elaborated on them, writing them out on index cards. Then I went through the rest of the rumours, tweaked them a little to better fit the current module ((One example: a rumour in the original adventure talks about the small dog men living in the lower caves. It’s meant to refer to kobolds, but kobolds have evolved away from dog men into small dragon men over the various editions. So I updated that.)), and wrote them out more as bits of overheard conversation, gossip, or stories. When we started to play, I handed out index cards at random to the players to give them some background reason for heading out to the Caves, and told them they could share the information with the others – or not – as they chose. Then, when they spent some time in the Keep, they could try and get more information, and I’d roll on my big list of rumours and tell them what they found out.

Play

We started with the company traveling to the Keep in the company of a merchant caravan. They’d been traveling with the caravan about a week, and it was the last night before arriving at the Keep, so the merchant was putting on a special meal, the bard was playing, and everyone was going to be sleeping in the next day because it was only four or five hours more to their destination. I got the players to introduce the characters, and they got to do a little roleplaying and sharing of information ((They all told each other everything they knew about the Caves from the little cards I’d given them. They’re very trusting.)). The dwarves even regaled everyone with a dwarven drinking song ((Is there any other kind?)), and didn’t embarrass themselves too badly.

When they got to the Keep, the priest of Moradin – who is also a knight ((From his background.)) – prevailed upon the Castellan for hospitality for him and his squire, the dwarf fighter. The priestess of Pelor saw some sick and injured people at the Chapel, and was offered a bed by the Curate. The halfling rogue used her cooking skill to get some temporary work at the inn, and listen in on kitchen gossip. And the elf wizard planted himself in the bar to eavesdrop on conversations that might offer some information about the Caves. They gathered enough information about the Caves from their various investigations that it seemed like it would be a) a good idea, and b) profitable to go check things out.

The next morning, after confirming one of the rumours about a reward for rescuing a merchant and his wife ((Also two guards, but they were worth less reward. Such is the life of a man-at-arms in D&D.)), they set out for the Caves. They had good enough directions that they were able to approach the ravine from the top of the south ridge, letting them look down on the expanse before plopping themselves right in the middle of things. I had done up a sketch map showing area, the elevations, the copses of trees, and the visible cave mouths ((Incidentally, I found this great map of the Caves of Chaos by The Weem. It’s much prettier and easier to read than the blue line version in my original module or the blue line version reproduced in the playtest package. Thanks, Weem!)), which I handed to the party, showing them where they were standing. After some discussion, they picked the nearest cave mouth and went in to start some trouble.

They were surprised, nicely silhouetted in the cave entrance ((Well, not the rogue. She was hidden in the shadows about fifteen feet inside by the time the gnolls heard the others.)) by the gnolls on guard, who proceeded to shoot arrows at them. The heroes closed on them fairly quickly and took out three of the four guards, but the fourth one ran off deeper into the complex, calling for reinforcements. The characters quickly looted the bodies, bound their wounds, and then found enough furniture and scraps to build a barricade across the top of a long stairway that the gnolls would need to come up to attack them.

They finished just in time to face off against a gang of ten gnolls. The barricade and the tactical position at the top of the stairs gave the PCs advantage ((Advantage seems to be a simple way to replace a lot of combat modifiers. It’s a pretty cool mechanic, so far, and is balanced by disadvantage. With advantage, you roll your attack or check twice, and take the better result. With disadvantage, you roll twice and take the worse result.)) and cover, so they were well able to hold off the gnolls, though the priest of Moradin decided he’d had enough hanging around and vaulted over the barricade ((And the burning oil the rogue had laid on the stairs in front of it.)) to attack, and got laid out by the gnolls ganging up on him.

At the end of the fight, we’d gone a half-hour past our end time, so we called the game there. We’re planning to continue for a session or two longer, though.

Assessment

I had a lot of fun with the game, and the players said they did, too. I asked them the two core questions above, and got a yes on the first question, and a resounding yes on the second question. Why not a resounding yes on the first question? Because there’s enough new stuff in the system, and the parts we’ve seen so far, are bare-bones enough, that there doesn’t initially feel like there’s a lot of mechanical support for doing some things. I think that this will evaporate – or at least lessen – as we gain experience with the system and see the freedom it offers. I’m starting to see that, and I think the players will, too.

For myself, I felt the game did both things quite well. It brought back memories of simpler, more permissive rulesets for D&D, and the old-school adventure reminded me of the freedom such things offer, with no imposition of expected character actions. I had a great time revisiting the Keep and the Caves, and found that the core system was easy to adjudicate, even when the characters did something unexpected ((“I pick up one of the burning stool legs and throw it into the gnoll’s face!”)).

Perhaps most important for me, combat was fast. We didn’t use a battlemap or miniatures, but even with five PCs and ten gnolls, it was no problem to keep track of relative positions and allow for interesting tactical choices, like the barricade ((Or like leaping over the barricade and the burning oil to pour a potion down the throat of the dying priest of Moradin. Just for example.)). In a four-hour session, we accomplished the following:

  • Got settled for the game.
  • Briefed the players on the rules.
  • Played through a night with a merchant caravan and the arrival at the Keep.
  • Played through five different scenes of the individual characters investigating and gathering information in the Keep.
  • Discussed tactics and objectives and shared information.
  • Traveled overland to the Caves.
  • Surveyed the area and picked a cave to enter.
  • Had a combat with gnolls.
  • Took a bit of a break to barbecue hamburgers and eat.
  • Searched the dead gnolls.
  • Set up a barricade.
  • Ate ice cream cake.
  • Had another combat with gnolls.

That’s a pretty full session by my standards.

Overall, it was a pretty positive experience.

What’s Next?

Well, I’ve been asked to run a playtest session at Imagine Games and Hobbies this coming Wednesday night. There are apparently seven people signed up for it, so it looks like we’ll be doubling up on some of the characters. There are some other people in my extended play group that have expressed an interest in trying the playtest, as well, so we’ll see if we can’t gather a few of them for a game at some point. And, as mentioned, this group wants to keep going for another session or two.

I’ll let you know how things go.

Feints & Gambits: Tá an rí-ard ag teacht!

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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Last night was the latest session of Feints & Gambits. We were short two players, so the house was only moderately crowded.

The game picked up in a pub ((Pretty much the default location for this group.)), with Liam Dalton explaining his plan to put the faeries back in their place in Ireland. It was pretty simple, on the surface: he would become High King of Ireland, which gave him authority over the doings of the fey in Ireland by the rules of the Unseelie Accords. It wouldn’t give him any temporal, political power, but it would make him the mystical ruler of the island. With his lineage, he said he had a blood-claim on the title, and bet that, generationally speaking, he was senior to any other claimant, having died in 1263.

Mark questioned how he could assume the title; if he had been revived by the True Guinness, he probably only had a year of life before the effects wore off, based on how often the beer needed to be delivered to Padraig Pearse’s ghost. Liam said he had taken care of that, and tapped his chest a couple of times, and the gang realized that he had implanted himself with Saint Lawrence’s heart, and that it was keeping him alive now.

To allay his last misgivings, Mark soulgazed the man, and saw his noble, regal spirit. He fell down on one knee, tears streaming down his face, and swore his service to Liam. That meant that Nate agreed to help, as well.

The other three were more problematic. Rogan’s family of were-smilodons stretched back as far as Liam’s, but had always been separate from the human kingship. He told her he understood this, and did not ask for fealty, but only for aid. Rogan agreed to this. Kate’s from Canada, and this isn’t her fight, strictly speaking, but she told Liam should would stand by her friends, and he thanked her for that. Firinne, being half-fey, had, in Liam’s mind, divided loyalties, but she assured him that she would happily do anything that inconvenienced the Courts, and jumped readily aboard.

She also mentioned that Elga, the Warlord of the Winter Court, owed her a favour ((For finding and destroying the Ghoststone.)). And this reminded Nate that he owed a favour to someone on the Summer Court ((For letting him use the fire of the sun to blast the Chain Hound of Pussy’s Leap.)), which he confessed to Liam ((Strange that he didn’t mention the three favours he owes the Fates, isn’t it?)). Liam told the whole group that they were free to leave him at any time, but asked that, if they intended to change sides, they tell him and accept his safe passage away from his forces, because he had no stomach for treachery.

And then there was drinking to celebrate.

The plan to become High King required five things:

  1. An army. This wasn’t strictly necessary to become High King, but Liam felt that things would come to battle before this was over, and he would need a force – a more-than-mundane force – to hold off the combined might of the Summer and Winter Courts while taking the kingship.
  2. The Stone of Kings, one of the four treasures of Ireland.
  3. The Sword of Nuada, one of the four treasures of Ireland.
  4. The Spear of Lugh, one of the four treasures of Ireland.
  5. The Cauldron of the Dagda, the last of the four treasures of Ireland.

After some discussion with the group, it was decided that it would be imprudent for our heroes to act as envoys to Baba Yaga’s people that they had met in Hell, as that hadn’t ended well. Rogan agreed to broach the matter of an alliance with her mother; bringing the Pride on board would be a real advantage for Liam. Other groups discussed were the Ash Circle and the Malleus Maleficarum, both of which the group thought it might be problematic to approach ((Kate: We’re not really diplomats. Nate: That’s fer damned sure.)), so Liam said that his companions, the Thief, the Lady, and the Nun, would deal with that side of things if the others would retrieve the four treasures and assemble them at the Hill of Tara before Midsummer.

Then it got a little drunk out.

Next morning, they decided to start with an easy treasure: according to tradition, the Stone of Kings sits on top of the Hill of Tara ((One of the nice things about this section of the game is that I have pictures of a lot of the locations from my trip to Ireland last year. More about that here, if you’re interested.)), right there in front of God and everyone. All they had to do was go see if it was the real thing.

So, they drove out to Tara, and climbed the hill. Kate felt uneasy on the ground near the Mound of Hostages, a passage tomb on the hill, and moreso as she approached the summit, which had, in addition to the Stone, a memorial for the mass grave of men who died in the 1798 rebellion. This is due to her new aspect, Defiler of Graves, that she got for, well, defiling some graves under St. Michan’s church. The dead are a bit uneasy around her, now.

Anyway, she got to the top of the mound and opened her third eye to look at the Stone of Kings. She wound up having a fairly cultured conversation with a dapper older man who claimed to be the Voice of the Stone, and he convinced her that this was the true Stone they were looking for, and that he would proclaim the High King if the prospect was worthy. He then shifted and changed into a mountainous stone man holding her in the palm of his hand and demanded that she not fail to bring him a High King so he could fulfill his purpose. Kate collapsed in a seizure, and had to be carried down off the hill ((She failed the roll to close her third eye a couple of times, took some hits to the brain, and conceded to avoid being taken out.)). When she recovered, she told everyone what she had seen.

After that, they headed out to Rogan’s mother’s house, and Rogan tried to convince her to bring the Pride to stand with the High King in the battle. There was some pretty good emotional twisting in the scene, and some great roleplaying from Fera, but a misunderstanding meant we had to backtrack and redo part of the scene with clarified views of what was going on. In the end, Rogan’s mother has agreed to lend the Pride’s strength to Liam’s claim, but in return, Rogan must return to the pride and give up her outside allegiances when the battle is done.

Somewhere amidst the conversations, the players remembered that the Dagda’s Cauldron had been in Aengous’s care at the Guinness brewery, and that it had been the source of the True Guinness. And now it was missing, along with Aengous. So, they decided to go see if Macha could be convinced to tell them anything about Aengous’s whereabouts.

All Mark could get out of her on that score was that Aengous generally turned up when he was needed. Nate jumped in to help the discussion, and wound up fulfilling one of his long-term goals: getting Macha to toss him bodily out of the Silver Arm.

Not getting anymore about Aengous, Mark decided to take a chance and see if Macha knew anything about the Sword or the Spear. She just stared at him and said, “Ye been coming into my pub, called The Silver Arm, and it only now occurs to ye to ask about the Sword of Nuada of the Silver Arm? Well, I buried it with him, didn’t I?”

There was some stunned silence at that point, and then the players started kicking themselves ((I thought I had been pretty blatant with the hints – after all, the first adventure was them recovering the actual silver arm hanging outside the bar, and I had just told them the story of Nuada Airgetlam. And there are other clues, but they’re far more obscure. But it’s easy to see the connections when you’re the GM and you know what they mean, and it can be damnably hard when you have the limited view of the story that the players have.)). She explained that she had buried the Sword with her husband at Newgrange.

That’s about when we called it quits for the evening. Next time, we’ll see if they go chasing the Sword at Newgrange, or head up to the Giant’s Causeway, where rumours say the Spear was lost in a battle against the Formorians.

From the Armitage Files: Playing Defence

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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Bonus Warning

I try to keep this blog pretty inoffensive in terms of language and imagery. This session of The Armitage Files, though, took a bit of a surprising turn into a dark place. It was a wonderful bit of roleplaying on Sandy’s part that really stands out, and I’m going to talk about it below, but I warn you, it’s strong stuff. To give you the option not having those pictures in your head, I’m going to put the relevant section behind spoiler tags.

Read at Your Own Risk

**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**

Well, my players did not get back to me before the last session of The Armitage Files to let me know what they wanted to investigate, so that turned the evening into Opposition Action Time! I wanted to hit each of the characters separately, so I came up with a good threat for each of them, and went to town.

Aaron Moon, alone in his bookshop, had a disorienting moment of seeing his body from outside himself, and felt something trying to push its way into his consciousness. Being a paranoid who had read a lot of occult – and a few mythos – books, he immediately decided that something was trying to possess him ((He was right about that. It was the Mind Exchange spell.)), and ran to the basement, where a rather high-difficulty Preparedness roll revealed that he had a protective circle of salt ((Here’s the way the exchange went.

Moon: Okay. With my Occult skill, do I know what things can prevent possession? Like, a circle of salt, or silver, or things like that?

Me: According to Occult, all that kind of stuff works, as does prayer, crosses, and other symbols.

Moon: Great. I want to make a Preparedness roll to have a circle of salt in the basement.

Me: Hmmm. I’m gonna set the difficulty of that one at 8. It’s kind of a weird request, and it’s very specific to this unexpected attack.

Moon: Okay. I’ll spend some points, and I succeed!

There follows a few rounds of repeated possession attempts as Moon staggers down to the basement and collapses into the circle of salt.

Moon: There! Does the circle of salt help?

Me: Nope. Not even a little bit.

Moon: Bastard!)) laid out on the bare floor. When that didn’t seem to work, he wracked his brain ((And Cthulhu Mythos.)) to figure something else out, and wound up carving a protective sigil into the flesh of his chest. This allowed him to hold off the possession attempt, and he hurried over to Roxy’s place to warn her about the attack. On his way out, he noticed that there were tiny crystals scattered along the trail he had taken from the shop down to the basement.

Roxy Crane, meanwhile, had been out trying to track down a lead on the mysterious Kim Nak, and spreading word that Charlie had been killed and there might be a reward for anyone who could help find the responsible culprits ((She assumed Kim Nak was behind it, but with the overthrow of godfather Elio Marcuzzo, it could have been someone in the new mob hierarchy.)). She was met on the street by Austin Kittrell ((Last seen way back here, where he didn’t fare too well.)), who seemed quite chipper and eager to speak with her. He offered to buy her supper at a local club, and they retired there. In the midst of their conversation, with Kittrell dropping hints and asking leading questions showing that he had some knowledge of the kinds of things going on, he showed Roxy a drawing, asking if she recognized it. It was a quick, crude sketch of the crystal snowman that the gang has come to identify with Chaugnar Faugn. She confirmed that she recognized it, and asked him to destroy it, which he did. Then he asked her if she recognized another drawing, and showed her the symbol that had infected her mind in the Kingsport warehouse way back here.

Roxy had been dealing with strange, watery dreams ever since, and seeing the symbol again knocked her right into one of them, where she was swimming down into the depths, where a light awaited her, escorted by strange fish-frog-men. In this dream, I kicked in a little more horror ((Drawing a bit on Alan Moore’s Neonomicon.)), I told her that her swimming was hampered somewhat by her advanced state of pregnancy. She fought off the lure of the depths and swam up to the surface instead, to find that a vast, beautiful and terrifying city was rising out of the sea.

Spoiler
She climbed up on top of a big, basalt mound, which continued to rise out of the water. I told her then that she felt the contractions starting. She grabbed a shard of obsidian and said, “I cut it out.”

“Okay,” I said, “you slice into your pulsing belly…”

“No, not that way. There’s all sorts of organs and things that I might damage cutting in that way. I know right where it’s coming out, so that’s where I’m going in to abort it.”

Things got pretty quiet at that point, and we all stared at her with shock and admiration. She’d taken the horrific moment I had created for her, and run with it to the next level, deepening the personal horror and nastiness of the situation. Which is what playing in a horror game is all about, in my opinion. So, that’s what she did.

She awoke, bloody and without coat, shoes, or handbag, in an alley in the predominantly black section of Arkham. It took some doing to find a bar where she could make a phone call to have her cousin come and get her.

Malcolm Crosby ((I forgot to mention something from last session. Along with the Tears of Azathoth, the gang found a red lacquered box that buzzed in the warehouse. Remembering the warnings about Moebius wasps and the dangers of opening the Red Box from the early documents they had read, our heroes decided to destroy it, burning it in Moon’s furnace. When they tossed it into the fire, it buzzed louder and the metal puzzle clasp that held it shut began to work itself open. Crosby reached into the fire and held the box closed until the buzzing stopped and the whole box was aflame, burning his hand terribly in the process.)) was headed over to Moon’s shop to do some research, seeing if he could learn more about tcho-tchos and/or Kim Nak, when he felt a little sting in his neck. Having heard the tales of the investigators’ run-ins with tcho-tchos and their poisoned weapons, he ran as fast as he could ((Taking a few more blow-gun darts in the process.)) to a busy street to hail a cab. He had intended to have it take him to Moon’s shop, but when the player was reminded that they no longer had any tcho-tcho antidote and no one to make more, he changed his mind and went to the hospital. He made it there before passing out, and was able to give the dart to the doctor to help make the antidote.

Once everyone was back and safe, they repaired to Moon’s shop to work out a plan ((Also, an objective.)). Some research and Cthulhu Mythos led them to make some connections between Chaugnar Faugn and some recent thought experiments by Danish theoretical physicists, implying that the attention of the Eater of Tomorrows collapsed the waveform of a person’s life and future into one of absolute entropy, thus killing the person, and extruding part of the Eater into the three observable dimensions as the crystalline snow men that they had witnessed before. They also discovered that tcho-tchos were the degenerate descendants of the miri-nigri, amphibious creatures created by Chaugnar Faugn in the ancient past.

The things that attracted Chaugnar Faugn’s attention included ritual sacrifices and worship, but it was also drawn by incidents of non-linear time, and that it increased the occurrence of such incidents as it collapsed possibilities into entropy, and surviving possibilities tended to expand into extremely improbable quantum events in the possibility vacuum thus created ((This is, of course, all crap that I made up, trying to blend my feeble understanding of higher-dimensional physics and quantum theory with horrific ideas from the neighbourhood of the Cthulhu mythos. I think it sounds suitably plausible – certainly plausible enough for a Cthulhu game.)). This led to some speculation about Moon’s irregular temporal perception and visions, and through there to the idea that the documents, coming as they seem to from the future, might be the cause of the very catastrophe they try to prevent.

And that’s when they started thinking that they needed to kill Armitage to prevent him ever sending the documents.

After some discussion, they decided that killing Armitage would be Plan B, with Plan A being to run away and hide for a bit, then come after Kim Nak with everything they had. To that end, Crosby decided to read A Discussion of Higher Dimensions, the single tome that they haven’t destroyed ((Yet.)), and that they obtained from Edwin Carsdale’s farm.

When they went to Roxy’s place to pick up her luggage and some money, they found that Roxy’s husband and wife butler/housekeeper team were dead in their bed ((Why am I picking on Roxy’s servants? Simple. She’s the only character that has created any NPCs around her – friends, family, servants, whatever. The other two tend to be brooding loners.)), their blood turned to a brittle, rusty solid in their veins.

And that’s where we left the game. I figure two more sessions to wrap things up.

The New Centurions, Issue #16 – City Under Siege

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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It’s been some months since the last installment of The New Centurions – what with some travel, some work responsibilities, and general life interference, it took some time to get everyone in one room to play again. Even so, Falkata was unable to join until later in the session. But we were happy to get back to the game.

We picked up the game right after our last victory against the corrupted citizens and the recovery of the tower fragment. One of the local heroes popped up to return Paladin to our group, and then rushed off to deal with a heavily magical threat in the South End ((We didn’t accompany her, because S.P.E.C.-T.E.R., Widowmaker, and Paladin are all pretty heavily technologically dependent, and the magic aura interferes with our abilities. Sometimes severely, as we found out later.)). After some futzing ((Huh. How about that. “Futzing” is in the WordPress dictionary.)) about, we managed to teleport ((“Teleport,” however, is not in the WordPress dictionary.)) the bit of tower back to the site of the explosion. We then proceeded to roam about, trying to gather the other extant bits of the tower back together before they did too much damage.

And that’s when we saw the dragons.

Like any self-respecting superheroes, we made a beeline toward the dragon attack. Widowmaker tried to teleport us there, but the magic interfered enough with her powers that we wound up scattered individually over a few blocks. We all rushed to where the dragons were, assuming that the rest of our group would be doing the same.

Once we got to the scene, there was another surprise for us tech heroes. We immediately had to start making the equivalent of Soak rolls with our Mind stat to resist the magical interference. Failure imposed greater or lesser penalties on our actions, depending on how badly we had failed. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was able to use his predictive algorithms to maintain functions by rerouting critical systems through undamaged portions of his neural network and anticipating and incorporating mechanical interference and glitches into his actions ((In game terms, I spent a Hero Die to get a power stunt allowing me to use my Mind Boost for Clairvoyance to make the save.)). Despite the difficulties, we managed to trounce the dragons and continue trying to recover the tower bits.

S.P.E.C.-T.E.R.’s predictive algorithms, coupled with Death Nell’s knowledge of London, led us to the London Stone, which seemed to be growing as the magic in the area increased. Inside it, we saw an army mustering, apparently for an invasion. The heroes were able to disable the portal, but not before a huge warbeast made its way through to begin rampaging through the city, with a squad of monsters mounted in a large howdah on its back.

It was getting pretty late by that point, so we called the game in the midst of the running battle with the creatures on the beast’s back. Next time, we need to finish off the crew and then figure out how to stop this 70-foot-tall horror.

It’ll be fun.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | 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.

Last Sunday saw us return to Belys, and the matter of ghuls stealing families from their homes. When we last left our heroes, they were wandering the sewers, trying to find the source of the ghuls. They overheard a whining, sycophantic voice in one sewer byway that seemed to be making excuses to another person, trying to explain why he had failed his blessed friend.

When the group charged into the room, they found that it had changed between one breath and the next, from a narrow, dark sewer to a vast, decaying necropolis. A pile of skulls sat in front of them, a number of shattered stone sarcophagi lay off to one side, and the floor was split in a number of places with deep chasms. Amid the sarcophagi was a tall, defaced statue, and a figure in red and black robes sat at its feet, conversing with a being that looked like a disembodies shadow and called itself Mouw Awa ((I had statted up Mouw Awa, starting from a shadow demon I found in the Compendium, and tweaking his powers and abilities. He’s not the Mouw Awa from the books – different origin, and different powers – but I loved the fauning, venomous nature of his character from the book, and the wonderful, wheedling voice and speech patterns from the audiobook, so I kept those.)).

There was also a whole bunch of earth ghuls and fire ghuls. And everyone rushed to attack.

My plan was to have the fellow in red and black escape the fight, and Mouw Awa and the ghuls keep the characters busy while that happened. It started out pretty well but on the first turn, Thrun managed to make his way all the way across the battlefield and knock the boss on his butt. All of a sudden, his great defensive position was much less great. I managed to get Thrun off him ((No easy feat. Thrun is a Dwarf Fighter, and is built to stick and hold to any bad guy he gets up against.)), and he made his ignoble escape, but it was a much closer call than I might have liked.

Once he was out of the way, Mouw Awa proved to be just the kind of pain-in-the-ass nasty villain I wanted – he kept possessing whoever looked most interesting and attacking party members, all the while keeping up a running commentary on how he was going to feast on the souls of the characters for daring to threaten Mouw Awa’s blessed friend. The ghuls – a mix of minions and standard ghuls – proved to be effective in the large numbers ((Since I’ve decided to forgo the experience and advancement system, I’m worrying less about building “balanced” encounters for the game. I eyeball the encounter, think about what purpose it serves in the narrative, and then fill it with what looks cool. So far, it’s working.)) to keep the PCs from using their mobility to best effect, and I actually had the fighter to within 30 points of being dead. That’s the closest I’ve got him in many a session.

But we were approaching the hard stop time of the evening, so I had Mouw Awa declare that his blessed friend was safe, and then he fled. All the ghuls collapsed into dirt and maggots and cinders, and we called it an evening.

The purpose of this encounter was two-fold: first, to show them that they’re dealing with something of larger scope than they had first thought, and second, to make them hate Mouw Awa, because he’s one of the coolest villains I’ve read in some time. Success on both counts.

Next, they’re going to need to figure out where they are, and what’s really going on.

13th Age Playtest – Actual Play

By | | What's he playing?
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This is the second half of my report on our playtest of 13th Age from Pelgrane Press. You can see the first half here. I concentrated on character creation in the previous post; this time, I’m going to talk about the actual play of the game.

Our GM, Michael, ran two different adventures for us: the first was a simple investigation into goblin raiders, and the second was a longer quest chasing after a stolen sword. Between the two adventures, we wound up playing three sessions, and it gave us a pretty good view of the entire game. It was a good time.

The goblin raider adventure was designed specifically to showcase combat and give us players a chance to learn the ins and outs of fighting in this new system. It consisted of a simple hook and short trek to get us to the goblins, then a lengthy fight to defeat them and their hobgoblin allies. Along the way, we had the opportunity to try using our backgrounds a few times, but the focus was really on the fight at the end.

Combat is interesting. We ran into some strange math anomalies in some of the stats and a couple of odd corner-cases that the rules didn’t quite cover ((All of which has been dutifully reported to the good folks at Pelgrane Press.)), but overall things ran smoothly. There are some intriguing new mechanics to speed combat, including using a d6 – called the Escalation Die – to encourage heroic action by giving the PCs an attack bonus for consecutive rounds of pushing the assault.

The system doesn’t use a battlemap or grid for movement and positioning and, while it didn’t make much difference in our initial combat, we found that in later combats ((That is, in the next adventure.)), our tactics were a little lacking after our long conditioning to the combat grid. That is, we didn’t take care to state that our fighter-types were protecting our squishy wizard ((Also known as ME!)), which led to some good opportunities to test out the dying and recovery rules.

Those work pretty well, thankfully.

I want to stress that this is not a fault in the system; it’s just something you need to keep in mind when you play the game. It’s easy to make this mistake, if you’ve played a lot of D&D; the game feels enough like D&D that you can get tripped up by the little differences. You don’t get the visual cues from the minis to see what lines of assault are open, and who’s exposed to attack, so you need to think about that when you describe your action. There’s a discussion in the playtest document about using minis to show loose, relative positioning, and I think that might have helped alleviate this issue, but we didn’t try it out.

The first adventure went pretty well – we located the goblins’ hideout in a ghost town, managed to not be surprised by the hobgoblins, and even tried to negotiate with them ((That didn’t work. Goblins are dicks.)). When the fight broke out, we managed to tip things in our favour pretty early, though the fight was still pretty tough.

The second adventure was more involved, and featured more non-combat elements of play. It saw us trekking through the Empire to a magical site in order to see a magical sword get enchanted ((Quick digression here: Apparently, the sword was the standard hook written up in the adventure, which is fine. What’s awesome is that, as my character’s One Unique Feature, I had him receive a sword from a mysterious stranger at his birth, so the GM used that as the sword in question. This is just one example of the ways that the interesting features from character creation that I talked about last time come back to inform and enrich the adventures during play.)), then chasing the thief of that sword to a ruined city and finally wresting the blade from him. We ran this adventure over one short evening and one longer evening, mostly because we kept breaking to discuss our impressions of the system and how it was working at any given time. I’m pretty certain we could have crammed the whole thing into a single longer session.

The system showed to pretty good effect overall. It handled us remembering information, making friends ((One thing we didn’t wind up trying was using the Icon relationships we had established in character creation. They just didn’t really come up, as I recall.)), spotting dangers, navigating, negotiating, figuring stuff out, threatening, working magical rituals, running up and down ((And, in two cases, jumping off.)) a two-hundred foot tower, standing off a dragon, and fighting assassins, wolves, dragon-men, and the end boss ((Not gonna tell you what that was.)). There are mechanics in place to encourage pushing on in an adventure rather than falling back to rest and recover, and they work pretty well to keep things active and interesting. Combat can be very suddenly deadly ((As I found out. Twice.)), but the rules for death saves allows for some heroic and cinematic recoveries, so that’s okay. We even tried the leveling up mechanics, and found them to be surprisingly quick and simple, even for multi-class characters.

There’s a lot of stuff in the game that’s left to GM adjudication. That’s not a complaint, because mostly ((It’s still just a playtest draft.)) the rules provide enough support with examples and simple general rules that it didn’t seem to slow our GM down much. It allowed more freedom for the players to try interesting stuff, while giving the GM the tools needed to handle it.

The main things I was looking for were a cinematic feel to the action in the game, and for combat not to dominate all the play time. The game delivered on both of these things, in spades, so I count it as a success. Now, there were still some rough edges to the system – including the aforementioned weird math anomalies in combat – but as this is the first round playtest, I fully expect those things to be worked out by the time the game is actually released.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the final version of the game.

From the Armitage Files: Azathoth Weeps

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**

I’m really behind on this update for the Armitage Files campaign ((Lots of reasons, boiling down to me just not doing it when I should have.)). What’s finally prodded me to write the damned thing is the fact that the next session is this Saturday, and the players deserve a recap. It’s gonna be a quick one, though.

The game picked up pretty much where the last session left off, with the investigators deciding to go check out what the junk dealer had told them about a big bible he had sold to a local pastor. The gang was suspicious of that ((Along with everything else. This is a Cthulhu game, after all.)), so they figured they’d pay him a visit and see if the bible was a valuable book that the linguist, Lars Fargerberg, might have been kidnapped for. The upshot of the investigation was that no, it was just a nice, old family bible that the pastor used to replace the water-damaged one he had been using.

I messed up a bit, at this point. See, the new character in the game is a parapsychologist, and his player asked me if he could make an Occult spend in the church to see if he could sense any psychic emanations or auras. I blinked at him a bit and said, “Sure.” Then I proceeded to spin a completely false psychic impression for him based on his character’s current emotional state – as played by the player. So, his nervousness and apprehension after starting to glimpse the horrible truth behind the world made him feel that there was some dark, evil stain on the church, a horrible foreboding that hinted at destruction and death.

He lapped it up. And he tried using the ability a couple more times during the adventure. Each time, I asked him for an Occult spend, and then lied to him about what he was sensing.

Why would I do such a thing? Isn’t it a huge dick move?

Yeah, it kinda is ((Sorry, Tom.)). In my defense, it was the result of differing expectations of the metaphysics of the game. I was operating on the assumption that the player shared the standard understanding of in-game supernatural powers: it all stems from horrible mythos sources, and you only get access to it through reading mind-shattering tomes. So, when he asked to take a psychic reading on the church, I just assumed it was a roleplaying thing – he was playing Crosby as believing that he had these psychic powers.

Well, as the evening went on, it became more and more obvious to me that the player wasn’t operating on my assumptions. He figured that, since I had let him do what he had asked for, it was real information his character was getting. When I finally made that connection in my head, I told him what was going on, and apologized for screwing him over. I then talked about how the supernatural stuff usually works on Cthulhu games, and how I was sticking with that for my game. So, we sorted it out.

Anyway.

After no clues turned up at the church, and they exhausted all the investigation they could do about the red herring church psychic miasma ((Sorry, guys.)), the gang decided to go see the main crime boss in Kingsport: Elio Marcuzzo. Fargerberg had owed some money to the Marcuzzo family, so our heroes figured that they might have something to do with his disappearance. With Roxy’s criminal connections, it was pretty quick work to arrange a meeting, and Marcuzzo and company pointed ((Rather obliquely; they’re not stupid, after all, and the investigators have come to the attention of the police on more than one occasion.)) to an Asian crime syndicate operating around the docks. They also told Roxy a little bit about Kim Nak ((This is, as far as I know, not a real name in any Asian language. I wanted to convey the flavour of an indeterminate south-east Asian culture without drawing directly on any particular one. After all, I’m gonna add tcho-tchos to the mix, and that’s not a nice thing to do to any real culture.)), who was sort of a bogeyman enforcer for the gang, reputed to use demon-possessed children to do his dirty work.

A little more investigation led the intrepid sleuths to a warehouse down by the docks. The doors were locked, and I think I put a couple little booby-traps in place ((It was a while ago. I can’t remember for certain.)), but the place had no tcho-tchos or criminals or, indeed, any creatures in it. A safe in an upstairs office had a strange book in it – the much-sought-after Tears of Azathoth.

Moon almost convulsed with ecstasy at having finally got his hands on the book. They grabbed it and burned the warehouse down ((Fire. They use it for everything.)) before running back to their hotel. At the hotel, they found that they hadn’t got away clean, after all: Roxy’s faithful driver, Charlie, had been killed and left in the car for them to find ((What can I say? It’s a horror game. And sometimes the best way to scare and hurt the players is to mess with their favourite NPCs.)). They abandoned that car, stole another one, and fled back to Arkham.

There followed much soul-searching and debate over what to do with Tears. Initial investigation showed that it was a very dangerous book ((Though I’m starting to think I’m losing my touch. I don’t think Moon has failed a Stability check in the last three sessions. Gonna have to do something about that.)), and they finally decided to burn it. As soon as they had made that decision, the book vanished ((There’s a whole reason for this stemming from my interpretation of the write-up for Tears in the campaign book.

Spoiler
Basically, the book exists in potentia until certain things happen to bring it fully into existence. I extrapolated from that to give one of the characters visions of it previously, always snatching it away before he could read it. Once he finally had the thing in his hands, and decided not to read it, the Schroedinger’s Cat waveform of the book collapsed into the book’s non-existence. So, he wound up never having possessed it.
)).

And that’s where we left the game.

We are now on the last few stages of the campaign. I have three more sessions scheduled for the game, and plan to have things wrapped up by the end of June. We may wind up ending the game one session sooner or later, but I’m betting on three to bring things to a close. It’s been a tremendously fun game to run, and has really helped me stretch my GMing improvisation muscles. I’m going to be sorry to see it go.

But I’m eager to run something else, too.

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.