Read
Symbaroum, as discussed in the other thread.
A State, well actually listening to it I guess. It's a 300 page A4 book which I've been meaning to read for over a year, I realized that there are apps which can read it to me while I'm walking the dog. It's not perfect but it's good enough!
Adorablins! An entire PbtA game in a tin about the size of a packet of Oxo cubes. It's impressively concise and I thought it would be good to have on hand for the next time I am running for kids.
(Listen)
Really enjoyed the Natura1s Alien game.
Play
Delta Green is almost done, the GM reckons the next session will be the last, but we can't play till December!!!
GM
At the FLGS just now I'm four sessions into the Mothership adventure Desert Moon of Karth, but I'm running it with Troika! so it's a sort of surreal space western with comedy horror. It's running so well and every session I'm amazed at how much stuff has happened.
My 13th Age game which I was so excited to get going again basically immediately for cancelled. We might be starting up again on another evening though… We shall see.
Read
Still skimming Vaesen, trying to identify the rules I'll need to remember when running the thing in a couple of weeks. It's mostly pretty straightforward, but some of the stuff around healing, in particular, just doesn't seem to want to click.
Also looking at a lot of Dragonbane. I'm planning to run the boxed set campaign for my online group once we finish Rime of the Frostmaiden, and (as with all prepublished adventures I run) there's gonna be some changes 'round here… I've run it once before as an extended one-shot/intro for aniki, Sarah, and her sister, but I'm interested to see how it holds up online, and as a longer-term campaign.
Play
I don't generally spend a ton of time on the player side, but aniki ran Salvage Union for us over the last couple of weeks. Bit of a rough start, partly because it's a new system and partly because we picked a fight with the nastiest beast on the map in session one and didn't realise how badly it was going until we'd all suffered quite a bit. It was fun, though, and I'm definitely adding it to my list of games I want to write one-shots for.
GM
Nothing for a while - scheduling has been a nightmare the last few weeks. I think the last thing I ran was that Alien game Bri mentioned above (glad you enjoyed it, we had a lot of fun!). Looks like I'll hopefully get everything back on track from next week, though. 🤞
Read
A lot of Dragonbane, mostly just to make sure I know what's happening in the adventures before the players get to them. I'm not finding the pre-written stuff as difficult to track as I thought I would, but I'm also starting to think about what comes next, after this campaign path reaches its end.
I keep going back to Pathfinder 2e as well, though it's highly unlikely I'll ever get it to the table. It's a big change from the very lightweight stuff I ususally run, so it's mostly just a nice change of pace to look over something this crunchy.
Play
Our 5e game hasn't been happening, so really nothing outside of some character creation thought experiments in Pathfinder.
GM
Dragonbane is going well – the players have been responding really well to the system, and things are starting to pick up a bit. After a couple of realtively sedate sessions, they're back on the road following a questline! The place they've stopped for the night is the location for one of the less interesting acventure hooks in the book (the Road's End Inn, for Ninchilla) but I've tweaked the setup to tie it into some other stuff they've done and remind them of a couple of things that will offer options for the place they're headed towards.
The Avatar game has stalled a bit due to a lack of availability, but I've just this morning come up with a plot development that I'm very excited to reveal in a couple of sessions – reckon I'll have to drop some breadcrumbs before pulling it out, but I know how to get there.
one of the less interesting acventure hooks in the book (the Road's End Inn, for Ninchilla)
Ugh. Yeah. I think if/when I run Dragonbane, I'll either cut that one or hugely redesign it. It just doesn't make sense, but not in the way that a nightmare should.
I've gone a bit of a more straightforward route. Stare has been replaced by the sister of a retired farmer in Outskirt (he owns the barn that the troll was in from that random encounter) who moved to the Haunted Marshes years ago; the party have been asked to deliver her a message since they're headed out that direction.
Basic backstory is after she was blamed for some disappearances (actually just people getting lost in the marshes) and locked up by the innkeeper, who's also been getting rid of people who find out that she has this "marsh witch" captive.
The players, having shown up explicitly asking about the "witch", panicked the innkeeper who now wants to get rid of them.
Possibly complicating things further, the sister's gonna be a necromancer – I figure she'd reanimated some of the marsh's victims and the inkeeper spotted her.
I wrapped up my Troika/Desert Moon of Karth game last night. I said above that I couldn't believe how much happened every session, that continued right to the end of the campaign.
We played for nine weeks, I think a total of ten players passed through but with a core of three. The space western setting was a pretty easy sell for new players it also works as an easy canvas for just whatever Troika's very random PCs threw at it.
I got the news last weekend that one of the players in my online Frostmaiden game died. He was one of the players who started the campaign back with Phandelver… 3 years ago. Even though he lived relatively locally, I'd never met him IRL, and as I type this I realise I don't even know what he looked like; he was just a voice on Discord.
It's still kind of a vague shock, and I don't know at what point it'll really sink in. Probably if/when the group gets together again, though we've not discussed that yet.
That can't be easy. It might be worth getting the group together just to chat for an hour. Just to help process. It's likely that everyone in the group will be feeling similar to you about it.
Yeah. We weren't due to play this week, but I wanted to talk to them at some point about whether we continue with Frostmaiden, or just draw a line under it and start something new.
Had a chat with the party, and we're doing a session zero for Dragonbane tomorrow. One of them is probably going to end up playing Kermit the Frog, because I made the mistake of mentioning aniki/Dafty Duck's pet pig.
Still, I'm excited to be regularly running something that's not D&D - I've had at least two 5e campaigns on the go for the last couple of years, and only managed a couple of one-shots in other systems. Fingers crossed this goes well!
Something that I'm very interested to see in action is character progression. This group are real chaos gremlins, and in 5e they were all seemingly trying to outdo each other's broken-ass multiclass builds.
Dragonbane has a much less power-creep-y approach, so while I think they'll get along well with the combat and moment-to-moment gameplay, I'm not sure how they'll manage without eventual godlike power.
My players are pretty high chaos at times, though they're not so power-hungry with the builds I've seen them play, and they've had nothing but positive things to say about the progression stuff.
Everybody gets at least one increase every session, so even though there's not a big level up ceremony they're getting better all the time.
The one thing I've not figured out yet is how and when to give them new Heroic Abilities - particularly whether GM-granted stuff needs them to meet the requirements. (I guess that's up to me?)
@Ninchilla If I'd been playing I'd have tried Spore Druid/Monk for loads of punches and kicks all doing extra spores damage and additional spore damage as a reaction.
We are setting up a new regular group in January. I'll be running Blade Runner, Troika! and Monster of the Week initially then maybe I'll run a longer campaign of something or someone else might run something.
That's the plan anyway.
The one thing I've not figured out yet is how and when to give them new Heroic Abilities - particularly whether GM-granted stuff needs them to meet the requirements. (I guess that's up to me?)
I took it to mean that you're able to reward them with the opportunity to choose a Heroic Ability, rather than "the GM decides what they get and they'll like it". If you're deciding the heroic ability for them, I don't imagine prerequisites matter (unless not having the prerequisite somehow makes the HA less effective).
The book says "After a grand heroic deed, the GM … can reward you with a heroic ability", which I took to mean they give you something related to that "grand heroic deed". The other reason I assumed the GM picks is that skill level unlock specifically says "you immediately gain a new heroic ability of your choice" (emphasis mine).
I think it makes more sense as well that they get something related to how they're playing the game – if someone's consistently describing themselves as carrying two weapons, give em Dual Wield, or give a consistently social character Insight – rather than letting them just pick something and everyone going for Robust.
I also like the asymmetry of it, where not everyone necessarily gets something together. It lets me very publicly reward good roleplay or clever thinking, but because the skill advancement is already quite individual and there's an additional WP cost to most Abilities it doesn't feel as unbalancing as something like a 5e feat.
I don't think that's an invalid reading. I suppose I just interpreted it like a milestone levelling kind of deal.
More Dragonbane prep:
Looking at the Road's End Inn (again), and trying to find something to do with it that I like. Similar to aniki, I'm jettisoning the book's "nightmare realm" concept entirely, and instead I'm going to try an Assault On Precinct 13-style defense scenario, where the dead witch' s curse is summoning undead from the swamp to enact her vengeance in a more direct manner. The party can either hold out against them, or try to find a way to put the witch's spirit to rest (though I haven't figured out how they might do that yet).
Punting the mystery element was the first thing I did, though I should probably have done some more work to figure out what the crypt area was for; with the witch as a living prisoner rather than the undead master of the place, quite a lot of it made even less sense than it did as written.
I eventually just admitted that I'd rebuilt a diversion out of the bones of something I didn't like, and the players thankfully found in-character reasons to stop ransacking the place and move along pretty quickly.
with the witch as a living prisoner rather than the undead master of the place, quite a lot of it made even less sense than it did as written.
I dunno; the witch's illusory prison for the people who wronged her contains two magical items: one which deals additional damage TO HER, and another which overcomes the darkness that acts as her main defense. And she's chained up. It's already ludicrous.
Hit Chapter 3 in an ongoing Vampire 5th edition game I've been running. The players seem to be having fun and I'm apparently twisting the knife in all the right ways.
This year I'm going to be running a megagame in Newcastle if people are interested. It's shaping up to be very exciting and will be a semi-historical reenactment of the collapse of the National Wrestling Alliance from 1984 to 1988. Run a company like you're in the mafia, book matches like you're trying to turn chicken shit into chicken salad, or play as a steroid powered cocain elemental.
