+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

It's already at £80k so I think you are good.

It's free RPG day and we have a tin of stuff in the shop if anyone is looking for anything. We have The Expanse and DragonBane offerings.

Land of Eem too.

I'd be interested in the Dragonbane adventure. I want to run more of it, and official adventures are always good to have, if only to steal ideas from.

I'm sorry to say that DragonBane was the first to run out. I grabbed one though so you can have it after I've run it!

That'd be great, if you're okay parting with it!

Land of Eem too.

Is that the one split with Monty Python?

It… was…

It wasn't great. Both halves are short to be useful.

The Eem one is a truncated version of the quickstart adventure. I think Exalted Funeral cut both halves down to fit into the split format, which is really disappointing if it means they've both been neutered in the process.

I literally couldn't find the rules for how to play Monty Python.

Humble have a hell of an RPG bundle on at the moment. I own most of the stuff here that I'm interested in, but there are a couple gaps that make it very tempting even so…

That is a lot of stuff!

At long last, I've assembled enough people for The One Ring!

We've only done session zero yet, but characters are built, rules are explained, and it's looking like a good party - Elf, Ranger, Dwarf, and Hobbit all represented, and they've naturally fallen on a decent spread of skills. I'm now in the process of massively overthinking the campaign to follow, but first up is going to be the Star of the Mist landmark from the core book.

There are a couple of bits and pieces that I think I can use to hook into other plot threads from the other books, so fingers crossed!

Note to Self: Trolls are too tough for session one of The One Ring. I mean, they killed it, eventually, but it cost a lot of Hope, and made the next fight - against Just Some Guys - seem very underwhelming by comparison.

On the plus side, I remembered most of the rules, and everyone seemed to have fun. Looking forward to next session's semiaquatic zombie adventure!

We had a fantastic session of my Reach of the Roach God campaign last night,

The PCs were moving through four connected temple/schools around a mountain which were corrupted and fighting with each other. They found a round into the heart of the mountain and decided to head in, thinking that might lead them to the source of the corruption. It did, but it also led them to a sort of wizard and before long the PCs were low on HP and one party mage was deaf and the other blind. That session ended with them all huddled on a ledge in a vertical tunnel with a handful of HP between them and the enemy wizard still out there.
I really thought that they were all going to die at the start of last night's game. I was trying to think of anyone who could come save them, but decided that would be lame. Instead I spent the day trying to think of good ways to start the second half of the campaign with a new party (I soon realized that a full TPK would actually be easier to deal with than an almost-tpk)
Anyway the session started with one player realizing/revealing that he had bangles of earth shape which he wanted to use to make hand holds to climb. Great! I hadn't thought of that. Then the Demon PC had his sticky-on-command spider rope so he was fine. The third PC rode their giant snail beast of burden and the fourth PC is a monkey. Vertical stone wall defeated.
Things got interesting again when the rock-shape bangles broke and released a fire elemental. They negotiated a fire pillar/rocket ascent and then killed him (very lucky they got away with that). Then reached the peak of the mountain and attacked the final boss from behind.
One PC did not survive the fight, the only human in the party. But then they pulled out their scroll of resurrection and brought him back as a panther.
As mid-campaign unplanned climaxes go I was pretty pleased!

Is anyone else going to Tabletop Scotland this weekend? I'll be there on Friday, might be around on Saturday too.

Gah! I'm gonna be there with the kid on Sunday.

I definitely wont be there on Sunday because I'll be covering the shop while the rest of the staff are running events at the con.

The One Ring session 2: eight is too many zombies! Also didn't help that the dice didn't seem to be on anyone's side, so it devolved into a bit of a slog. The Company all survived, though, even if two of them have pretty long-term Wounds.

I'm still too new to the system, I think, so I'm concentrating overmuch on the rules and not narrating very well. Getting better, though!

I had fun at the con yesterday. Saw some friends, bought a couple books. I think last year's con was better with a lot more small press publishers selling weird little zines. Still, definitely worth the trip.

God, we're so close to ending this Dragonbane game, but scheduling has, once again, been the true villain of the campaign.

I was about 80% sure, going into last night's session, that I would see the defeat of Azrahel Koth and his demonic master, but alas. We had to stop partway through the climactic battle because one of the players was falling asleep (they have chronic issues and we'd run over our usual slot by close to an hour).

The final dungeon has been almost completely rewritten from the nonsense in the Starter Set book, and the players seem to have been enjoying it a lot; I've had a few weeks to prep and tweak and second-guess my plans, which also involved a lot more Foundry automation and fancy effects than is normal for my games. A few things I wasn't sure I'd even need (a dragon smashing down a wall, a toggleable portal effect, parallax scrolling images for a flight on animated dragonback) turned out to be big hype moments at the table, and I'm wondering if I should have been doing more of this all along.

(But then I remember that I hate preparing stuff, and regain my senses.)

I've got provisional agreement from a couple of players to pick up again next weekend (it'll be another month to wait, if we can't run then); hopefully they'll finish the fight and we'll have time for an epilogue.

Inevitable - maybe my favourite RPG that I've never managed to run - is DriveThruRPG's deal of the day - only £8!