Read
I have mostly been reading and prepping for my two new campaigns (see below). I have also been reading Tunnels& Trolls 5e from 1979 though. It's a lot of fun and unsurprisingly retro.
For example, "2 to 3 players with up to 4 characters each is ideal." Or, "For those with money to burn, there are two kinds of human auxiliary characters: slaves and hirelings." I actually love the idea of playing this with 2 or 3 players and around ten PCs!
I assume that T&T is the basis for the system used in the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. They have a lot in common (2d6 core, simultaneous combat rolls, a fairly central Luck stat) and at the time FF books were first being written T&T would have been fairly well known and the most successful example of solo RP.
Anyway, T&T looks like shonky fun. I'm tempted to give it a go.
Play
We just finished our year long Delta Green game. We were playing through the well regarded Impossible Landscapes game and I had a great time. Some of the group weren't so keen, and I guess I can see why. It's not really interested in logic and tidy endings.
GM
On Tuesday I'm starting a Blade Runner campaign. It wasn't my first choice for an RPG setting but one of my players is super keen (he bought me the book so that he could play) and I'm now looking forward to it. I guess I'd better get that investigation written up…
On Thursday I'm starting an a state open table in the shop. This is more future dystopia but more Dickens and Delicatessen than Gibson and Blade Runner. It's very Scottish too. The system is based on Blades in the Dark which is a new one for me. Can't wait!
Read
Still mostly flipping back and forth between The One Ring and Dragonbane.
Play
Haven't been on the outside of a GM screen since aniki ran Salvage Union for us, and not sure when the next time will be. I increasingly find that just being a player is less tempting a prospect than running a game, though.
GM
We're three sessions into Dragonbane now, and it's definitely the right kind of chaotic for this group. Last week they completely trivialised the basilisk encounter in Dead Eyes Cave by having the whole party (bar one) strap a chicken to their armor, meaning it effectively only had the catfolk thief for a target. On the plus side, she was a useful demonstration of the Rally rules, and succeeded at enough Death rolls to recover on her own. I do wonder how different the game would feel with a Healer (or any flavour of mage) in the mix, but none of the five players fancied grappling with a new spellcasting system yet. There are a couple who I think will give it a go if their characters meet an untimely end, though.
I'm feeling the beginnings of an urge to run Curse of Strahd again, but I might do it in Dragonbane. I think the slightly more brutal, swingy combat might go well with Strahd's grimy gothic horror schtick. I've even begun converting some of the monsters & NPCs where the Bestiary and core set have gaps.
GM
Vampire on Discord resulted in me writing this astonishing sentence:
Play
Warhammer Fantasy RPG - Shadows on the Bogenhaffen schaffenfest thing?
It's pretty good. We're managing to avoid every fight by having a nun.
Read
Flipping through Mausritter again, though unlikely to get it to the table anytime soon. Same with the Land of Eem, which recently got its final pre-print pdfs.
Play
Joined a late-stage 5e campaign for the last few sessions to make up the numbers, and thoroughly enjoying the Goblin Barbarian I've rolled. The build is very different from the usual stealth/perception stuff I usually go for, but the party was low on punching ability.
The other 5e game I've been playing in has had scheduling issues, but I'm looking forward to getting back to my unreasonably deadly Owlin Ranger soon…
GM
The Dragonbane game continues apace, with two of the four MacGuffins retrieved successfully. Reckon I'm gonna have to get more creative with the combat scenarios, though – they went through a group of bandits like they were paper tonight. (One of the mallards fed a bandit his own eyeball.)
They're planning to do some downtime next session so I'll be planting plot seeds and trying to draw them off the primary plot path they've been on so far, and I'm also giving them all another Heroic Ability to spice things up.
I'm glad everyone's having fun with Dragonbane. I still haven't had a chance to read it. I do love it's art though.
I finally got to actually run a state last night. We did session 0 a couple weeks ago and the players decided the game would be set in Project 97, a residential tower so big I doubt my game will ever need to leave it. The group hang out in the breaker room at the back of an enormous laundrette and social hub for much of the tower.
Last night's session involved saving a teenager who was going to be killed by three Daylight gang who are trying to to gain more territory within the Project. It was good fun but I had a little trouble keeping my head straight with the more structured processes of the FitD system.
Actually, we are a couple of sessions into Blade Runner now and it's going really well. I was worried that either I wouldn't be able to get the atmosphere or my investigations wouldn't be up to scratch, but so far it's been great.
My The One Ring game is starting to come to a head.
The secret Numenorian infiltration of Eriador has raised a physical head, a small group of pirates influencing the court of the Queen of Lon Daer, and my group has decided that cutting off their means of escape and sinking their boats, is their best way forward.
I have a battle planned with pirates and soldiers, and if they survive, a hidden spy - who will open up the rest of the story for them.
I’ve also come up with what I think is a great Old One, as part of the battle - a little inspiration from Jason and the Argonauts, I intend to bring to life the squid like carvings at the prow of the boats - not a carving at all but a numenorian tool for their ships!
Started planning out backstory/worldbuilding stuff for the next phase of our Dragonbane game, which is looking likely to be a completely fresh setting and characters. I'm not all that interested in trying to contain them to the Misty Vale from the starter kit, or attempting to build out a whole world around it, so instead I've decided to rip off Skies of Arcadia wholesale after I mentioned it during the last session and some players got very excited about air pirates.
I suspect I'm at least 6 months early, but at the same time I like to have time to obsessively rewrite and tweak things before letting the players loose.
The Misty Vale feels like a pretty restrictive setting; it's not that big, and hasn't got a ton of variety in terms of monsters or environments. I'm playing the Dragon Emperor adventure to get the hang of running the system longer-term, but if I was going to keep running Dragonbane, I'd probably also homebrew something.
…or run Strahd, which I think I've about finished converting now. And yes, Barovia is only about as varied as the Misty Vale (and is, itself, a misty vale), but it's at least a more coherent, singular experience than Dragon Emperor's 12 largely-unrelated oneshots.
I've really injured my shit pretty hard which makes writing fairly challenging. This has put a slowdown on my Vampire game. We're reaching the end of Act 3 though. Act 1 was about introducing the world and finding out who our players were, act 2 was about giving them a view into horror and an eventual release in power fantasy. Act 3 is where the knife goes in and twists. Act 4 is where the schism of the group happens. Act 5 is where the pieces explode and we see where everything lands.
I'm playing in a Mini6 game that's been a lot of dumb fun.
I'm still playing a monthly game of WFRP Enemy Within which is good but we're really bumping up against the edges of the pre-written module. There's a lot of 'we expect the players will kill this guy so don't worry about what happens after that,' the insane priest in the shitty north part of Boggenhaffen is a particular 'wait, you… saved him? Oh fuck, now what' moment for our GM.
I wounded two of my four players! In the end I took pity on them and had the Old One take out the last Soldier, before allowing them to detain a spy who tried to slink away from the pirate boat.
The whole two hour session was one fight - but against eight foes and a squid
Additional/addendum Read:
The alpha PDF for Moria: Through the Doors of Durin (TOR2e) finally released a few days ago, and I've been poking through it. It's a pretty big book, almost the size of the core rulebook, and like all the other One Ring books, is gorgeous. There's a ton of extra lore, monsters, locations, and (perhaps most useful of all), a disclaimer that a Moria campaign shouldn't be just a dungeon crawl.
I don't know if or how I'd ever run it; it definitely seems aimed at a fairly experienced party. Maybe when my Dragonbane campaign ends, I'll try and scare up a regular One Ring group, start off with Ruins of the Lost Realm and Tales of the Lone-lands, and see if it ever gets there.
It's a Gar Hanrahan book isn't it? His sandbox campaigns tend to be emotions and excellent.
Yeah, it is. Not sure how much of a campaign I'd call it; there are suggestions for how to use it, and a bunch of plot hooks and NPCs, but (like most of TOR) it's for the party to explore and choose their own objectives (chiefly, survive!).
I ran a one-shot game of The Land of Eem RPG for the kid yesterday morning; I've been trying to put something together in Foundry to run it for my usual group, but it was very useful to see it in action.
I just used the adventure from the quickstart, so even though it was pretty short I had my usual problems running pre-written material, but the kid had fun and keeps asking me when we're going to do the next one.
We rolled him up a gelatinous goo dungeoneer, but a lot of the class-specific mechanics got kinda forgotten about as I tried to grasp a new ruleset on the fly and he wasn't really reading his sheet much. I also had to pull some punches in combat too make up for the fact that he didn't have a party with him, but I'm pretty sure he didn't notice.
Yet another one for the Read pile:
Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
(yes, we saw Dune Part Two on Monday, and I thought it was very good)
It's not a very well-written book (read: Modiphius) and the art is of pretty wildly variable quality, but it leans into political intrigue in a way that I don't think a lot of the other RPGs I own do. I've had half a mind to run a one-shot in it for a while, but the only thing I've really decided for sure is that it wouldn't involve Arrakis at all. The details would probably have to depend quite a bit on the House the players built during creation.
Yeah, I grabbed that mainly for Houses of the Landsraad, since the bundle was cheaper than getting just that PDF from Modiphius.
