+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

I am gonna be there on Saturday hooray.

Excellent!

Yes! I remember going there so long ago I think, uh, Killzone 2 had just come out? Hapi was complaining that it was infecting all of his WHFRP writing.

I thought Haley's Comet returning made me feel old.

Had a great time at Conpulsion over the weekend. I ran a couple light PbtA games for a mix of kids and adults. I bought a bunch of cool RPG books including some weird OSR stuff, and the James Bond RPG. I bought a two player mini wargame called The Cousins War which I then played and it was awesome and kind of exhausting!

I had lunch with Luscan which was lovely. I was in a panel where the audience almost outnumbered us 2:1. Me and my friends had a massive, heated, alcohol-fuelled debate about the nature of games and RPGs. And then we won the pub quiz!

The players finally engaged with the cult stuff propertly in this week's Dragonbane session, but are starting to second-guess their enthusiasm for helping the "paladin" hanging out in the town bar after her religious fervour came out full-force in an extremely quick (and maybe too brutal?) battle.

Spoiler - click to showAfter capturing a cultist last time, the Mallard Bard let slip to the paladin that there was a cultist in the town jail. The paladin headed immediately to the jail to execute the captive, but was followed by another cultist who attempted (along with his mates) to ambush the paladin when she came out (having failed to convince the sheriff's deputy to allow the execution). The bard and thief tried to stop the mugging, but I'd underestimated how powerful this knight is; she shrugged off the cultists' attacks and decapitated one in a single hit. To avoid her rendering the players useless, she continued to beat the corpse on her next turn while the mallards dealt with the second mugger.

The paladin has now been arrested for attempting to murder a fourth (officially only "suspected") cultist in front of the deputy. Next session I want to emphasise that she's one of the more reasonable ones, and have her superior arrive to complicate things even further.

They're still on the fence about the precise alignment of their would-be employer – is she part of the cult, or just doing things that happen to align with their wishes? – so I'm trying to figure out how to manoeuvre her so that they can't get a firm grip just yet.