I don't like it either. These buildings don't move. They have to stay in the same place all the time.
We spent a cold night recovering from the wolves. It's a good thing Vared knows how to build a snow cave. It was the worst snow I'd ever seen. Aunold had had a vision...Mittens, no! You can't eat Aunold's familiar. He had a vision of the Elthani meeting with the Gallians at a meeting place, where the Gallians betrayed them and murdered them all.
We had to get out of the heart of the forest, and warning the Elthani had to be the right thing to do. We met them at one of the meeting places. They had previously spoken to the Gallians, and had a much more friendly encounter than Aunold's vision. I think we have them persuaded to stand with us against the wendigo now. Vared exchanged some dinosaur hides for sweet nuts.
We'd done all we could in the greenwood. It was time to go to the city and talk to the Gallians.
When we came close to the meeting place near the city, Aunold began to experience deja vu. He recognised the place from his vision. And when we reached it, it became obvious that we were too late to prevent what he had seen. Under the snow was the broken wreckage of the Elthani camp. I had a look around, a little further into the forest, and found an odd looking patch of snow. Too big for a latrine pit. Mittens was very brave and burrowed down into it to investigate - yes Mittens, you can have a dreamie - and found what I feared. The Elthani, dead and dumped in a shallow grave.
No, no, I can keep going. And we had to keep going. We met a Gallian there. Not the ones from Aunold's vision. They were wearing green, which is the colour for House Vexille. The people the Elthani had spoken to before wore blue, which we learned was House Orzel. I think a house is like a tribe, but with more difficult names. His name was Brendon and he didn't seem to be bad. He gave us one of the tokens people here like to exchange. Shiny and yellow like the sun. I didn't understand much of what he said. The others speak the common tongue, but I was struggling.
I asked Mittens to fly up and take a look around. She saw an area of forest further away, where all the trees had been cut down. We all know not to fell in the greenwood. But the Gallians are encroaching on land that is not there. There will be trouble from this.
We met some more Gallians on the way here, wearing yellow. They looked strong and carried proper weapons instead of the black powder machines that Gallians like. Tonk and me were quite impressed. I asked the others to find out if they were potentially interested in marriage. They seemed quite receptive, and gave flowers to Tonk and me, which I thought was rather nice.
We had a guide through the city. A boy. We passed House Vexille's place, which was a pleasure house. Apparently Tonk wouldn't be allowed in because she's too small. He took us to the place we were looking for. The house in blue. I don't remember the name. So many names. They talked in the common tongue. I need to learn it.
Then we were shown to this place. People sleep in these places. But it's not so bad really. The owner brought us lots of drinks that we could see through, which was weird, and some cheese, which was like drink but not runny, so also weird.
We had a visit from an enchantress with her face decorated to look like she'd been drinking blood. Apparently that is the only way a witch can get any respect here. This place gets stranger. I think Tonk likes her. Perhaps if I learn the common tongue I can tell her that?
Saturday 30 November 2019
Friday 29 November 2019
Diversity Hires, part 7: Roderick's Return
We decided it wasn't in anyone's best interest to know what happened
to Kazgar, sticking to saying that he was gone. Which was technically
accurate.
The crusade came to a temporary halt on the plains outside Altdorf, and we had a surprise visit from a gold wizard. He was very shiny. Burlok attempted to persuade him, with the full force of a dwarven miner's personality, to turn his beard gold. He declined. Frida reckoned that with some urine and camomile she could probably achieve something pretty similar. Burlok was not sold on that idea.
After some discussion and introductions, we got talking to one of the random team of guards who accompanied the wizard: an Estalian diestro by the name of Armando. There was quite a lot more to his name, but nobody could remember it.
Despite the fact that we were at this point supposed to be in custody after the recent mutant deaths, we convinced the higher ups that we should be sent to the city to arrange food to be sent out to the crusade. At last, we would be able to meet up with Roderick again. We made our way to the city gates, accompanied by Armando who was presumably following us mostly out of curiosity at this point.
We found Roderick in a pub, where we were able to get excellent beer and bread and very bad sausages. Mormacar enjoyed the spectacle of scantily clad men wrestling, while Frida complained that this was the first time she'd been disappointed by a sausage. Roderick himself was upstairs in a private area, guarded by a dwarf. After being bribed to let us in, the dwarf congratulated Burlok on being accompanied by 'so much vag'. We're not exactly sure who he was referring to.
We told Roderick of our adventures killing mutants and vampires, and convinced him that a general strip search for mutations of all important people on the crusade (important here defined as 'people with names') would be a good idea. After arranging for food deliveries and a brief shopping trip so Burlok could get the missing dwarf size pieces for his plate armour, we headed back to the camp.
The strip searching was a difficult sell, even with Mormacar entirely willing to undress himself, but we were distracted when we learned that Carl had gone missing. He was being taken away inside a coffin on a wagon, driven by a sorcerer and four hammer men.
The murder elves mounted their horses and rode to get ahead of the wagon. Frida, Burlok and Armando climbed onto Kazgar's wagon, and then remembered that Kazgar had been the only one who knew how to drive.
The sorcerer proved rather tricky to deal with, being apparently immune to conventional weapons, but Gildiril's magic missiles did work, and he began enchanting other people's weapons. Mormacar took a hit from some kind of magic rifle that left him close to death, but fortunately the sorcerer abandoned it after one shot and stunned Gildiril instead.
The hammer men proved significantly more vulnerable to Frida's tiny rocks, and shooting one of the horses in the leg effectively stopped the wagon. So we leave our party here, around a stationary wagon with Karl the scion of Sigmar/totally a demon stuck in a coffin, with a sorcerer to fight and a horde of cultists (probably) emerging from the gates of Altdorf. Will they survive long enough to actually make it to their next careers? Find out next time on Slightly Less Diversity Hires Now There's A Human.
The crusade came to a temporary halt on the plains outside Altdorf, and we had a surprise visit from a gold wizard. He was very shiny. Burlok attempted to persuade him, with the full force of a dwarven miner's personality, to turn his beard gold. He declined. Frida reckoned that with some urine and camomile she could probably achieve something pretty similar. Burlok was not sold on that idea.
After some discussion and introductions, we got talking to one of the random team of guards who accompanied the wizard: an Estalian diestro by the name of Armando. There was quite a lot more to his name, but nobody could remember it.
Despite the fact that we were at this point supposed to be in custody after the recent mutant deaths, we convinced the higher ups that we should be sent to the city to arrange food to be sent out to the crusade. At last, we would be able to meet up with Roderick again. We made our way to the city gates, accompanied by Armando who was presumably following us mostly out of curiosity at this point.
We found Roderick in a pub, where we were able to get excellent beer and bread and very bad sausages. Mormacar enjoyed the spectacle of scantily clad men wrestling, while Frida complained that this was the first time she'd been disappointed by a sausage. Roderick himself was upstairs in a private area, guarded by a dwarf. After being bribed to let us in, the dwarf congratulated Burlok on being accompanied by 'so much vag'. We're not exactly sure who he was referring to.
We told Roderick of our adventures killing mutants and vampires, and convinced him that a general strip search for mutations of all important people on the crusade (important here defined as 'people with names') would be a good idea. After arranging for food deliveries and a brief shopping trip so Burlok could get the missing dwarf size pieces for his plate armour, we headed back to the camp.
The strip searching was a difficult sell, even with Mormacar entirely willing to undress himself, but we were distracted when we learned that Carl had gone missing. He was being taken away inside a coffin on a wagon, driven by a sorcerer and four hammer men.
The murder elves mounted their horses and rode to get ahead of the wagon. Frida, Burlok and Armando climbed onto Kazgar's wagon, and then remembered that Kazgar had been the only one who knew how to drive.
The sorcerer proved rather tricky to deal with, being apparently immune to conventional weapons, but Gildiril's magic missiles did work, and he began enchanting other people's weapons. Mormacar took a hit from some kind of magic rifle that left him close to death, but fortunately the sorcerer abandoned it after one shot and stunned Gildiril instead.
The hammer men proved significantly more vulnerable to Frida's tiny rocks, and shooting one of the horses in the leg effectively stopped the wagon. So we leave our party here, around a stationary wagon with Karl the scion of Sigmar/totally a demon stuck in a coffin, with a sorcerer to fight and a horde of cultists (probably) emerging from the gates of Altdorf. Will they survive long enough to actually make it to their next careers? Find out next time on Slightly Less Diversity Hires Now There's A Human.
Thursday 28 November 2019
Crew of the Aliya, part 9: Door to Door
It was clear that we could benefit from the mechanical and archaeological talents of our absent crewmembers. We sent them a message to come and join us. With a trail already blazed through the forest, Lila and Hamsa effortlessly dodged the cliffs and macro-wasps to join us in the underground complex. We spent the time waiting for them making a thorough search of the rooms we'd unlocked so far, and found a very old skeleton in the corner of the temple, plus the remote control for the entry hatch. With some power cells and duct tape we got it working again.
Tahir explained his theories and ideas about the towers. Lila was insistent that under no circumstances were we going to destroy this ancient site by ripping off the sandstone rings.
Gurgeh made further use of power cells to get the door leading out of the workshop unlocked, and found some kind of office. Whiteboards hung on the walls, the writing on them obscured by dirt. Lila tried to remove the dirt, but couldn't do so without damaging the writing as well. But using the archeodrone's cameras, she was able to get some pictures. Shelves held some books. Hamsa tried picking one up, but found it to be on the point of crumbling into dust. A control panel was on the wall. Something to look at later.
We got another door open - the one leading from the storeroom where we came in. This lead to a long corridor with a number of doors. The first lead to a decent size bedroom with en suite facilities. The second was a canteen, with a dining table and chairs. On the wall was some writing. While he couldn't read it, Alqadi did recognise amongst it the iconography of his own icon, the Judge. Lila took a look at it, and identified a word - Kahan - that sounded familiar in a religious sense.
We split up to investigate the remaining doors. Behind the third was a bedroom. Sayah looked around and spotted something in the wardrobe. An oud, similar to her own, but ancient and richly decorated. The strings were on the point of crumbling into dust. She decided to leave it where it was for now, in case the wood was similarly fragile, and come back later when she could take proper care with it.
The fourth door also revealed a bedroom. Lila searched the room and found a chest, and despite shouts of 'mimic' from the other rooms, opened the lid. Inside was a pair of glasses that she recognised as spirit glasses, that would allow you to see things beyond normal vision. She took them with her.
Door five was another bedroom. Hamsa searched, but initially found nothing. Something about the wardrobe raised suspicion, however. He kicked it, and noticed a hollow sound. After a prayer to the icons for guidance, he pushed on the clothes rail, and found the back of the wardrobe swung open to reveal another room.
Inside he found a pair of scimitars, and a pair of rifles, both clearly very old, and a leather pouch. Inside was a stone, a good size for holding in one hand, decorated with engravings. Being very careful not to touch it he called for Lila to take a look. Her professional opinion was that it was a memory stone, and that the stored memories might be recoverable through meditation.
Behind the sixth door, Alqadi had found another bedroom with a desk and a shisha pipe, and most interestingly, some writing. It was in an unfamiliar dialect, but close enough to our own language that he could read it. He took a picture so as not to damage the fragile paper, and shared it with the others.
But before we could take a proper look at anything we'd found (or open the final door), the proximity sensors went off. Something was in the storeroom.
Gurgeh dispatched one of his drones to have a look, while Alqadi released the monkey that he'd been carrying around in a bag. It scampered back down the corridor. Moments later we heard a horrible shriek. Gurgeh looked at the camera feed from his drone. Nothing clear, but some kind of shadow was visible.
Lila donned her spirit glasses and followed Alqadi and Tahir down the corridor. They saw only a strange wisp of smoke, but she saw a curious long limbed creature that she recognised as a sentinel.
"Friend or foe?" Alqadi asked Lila.
"Foe." Alqadi immediately opened fire.
In the spray of automatic fire, a hint of the shape of the beast began to appear for everyone else. It was reminicent of the shadow creature we'd seen on the video from the cave. Tusks. Claws. Dripping with mucus. And throwing itself at Alqadi.
Lila fired her stun gun, but the shot fizzled out on the creature's carapace, leaving a stench of rot. Sayah ran down the corridor to grab Lila and drag her out of the creature's reach. Gurgeh turned on the lights of his drone to cause a distraction while Alqadi attempted to fight back.
Alqadi missed. The door to the storeroom went flying off its hinges. And a sudden wave of fear and dread swept across us.
Hamsa and Sayah fired, but both shots bounced off the creature's carapace. Lila took cover behind Sayah, and fired her stun gun again, this time managing to aim into a soft spot. Not enough to stun it, but enough to slow its movements. Gurgeh rammed his drone into the beast. It stumbled - and then stepped on the drone as it went for Alqadi again.
But while other shots went wide, Tahir got one solid shot into a weak point, breaking the creature's arm and driving it into horrific shrieks. A claw flew past Alqadi's face, barely missing him, but Alqadi had got his rifle reloaded and unloaded straight into the creature's eye. And with that, it dissipated into smoke.
Tahir explained his theories and ideas about the towers. Lila was insistent that under no circumstances were we going to destroy this ancient site by ripping off the sandstone rings.
Gurgeh made further use of power cells to get the door leading out of the workshop unlocked, and found some kind of office. Whiteboards hung on the walls, the writing on them obscured by dirt. Lila tried to remove the dirt, but couldn't do so without damaging the writing as well. But using the archeodrone's cameras, she was able to get some pictures. Shelves held some books. Hamsa tried picking one up, but found it to be on the point of crumbling into dust. A control panel was on the wall. Something to look at later.
We got another door open - the one leading from the storeroom where we came in. This lead to a long corridor with a number of doors. The first lead to a decent size bedroom with en suite facilities. The second was a canteen, with a dining table and chairs. On the wall was some writing. While he couldn't read it, Alqadi did recognise amongst it the iconography of his own icon, the Judge. Lila took a look at it, and identified a word - Kahan - that sounded familiar in a religious sense.
We split up to investigate the remaining doors. Behind the third was a bedroom. Sayah looked around and spotted something in the wardrobe. An oud, similar to her own, but ancient and richly decorated. The strings were on the point of crumbling into dust. She decided to leave it where it was for now, in case the wood was similarly fragile, and come back later when she could take proper care with it.
The fourth door also revealed a bedroom. Lila searched the room and found a chest, and despite shouts of 'mimic' from the other rooms, opened the lid. Inside was a pair of glasses that she recognised as spirit glasses, that would allow you to see things beyond normal vision. She took them with her.
Door five was another bedroom. Hamsa searched, but initially found nothing. Something about the wardrobe raised suspicion, however. He kicked it, and noticed a hollow sound. After a prayer to the icons for guidance, he pushed on the clothes rail, and found the back of the wardrobe swung open to reveal another room.
Inside he found a pair of scimitars, and a pair of rifles, both clearly very old, and a leather pouch. Inside was a stone, a good size for holding in one hand, decorated with engravings. Being very careful not to touch it he called for Lila to take a look. Her professional opinion was that it was a memory stone, and that the stored memories might be recoverable through meditation.
Behind the sixth door, Alqadi had found another bedroom with a desk and a shisha pipe, and most interestingly, some writing. It was in an unfamiliar dialect, but close enough to our own language that he could read it. He took a picture so as not to damage the fragile paper, and shared it with the others.
But before we could take a proper look at anything we'd found (or open the final door), the proximity sensors went off. Something was in the storeroom.
Gurgeh dispatched one of his drones to have a look, while Alqadi released the monkey that he'd been carrying around in a bag. It scampered back down the corridor. Moments later we heard a horrible shriek. Gurgeh looked at the camera feed from his drone. Nothing clear, but some kind of shadow was visible.
Lila donned her spirit glasses and followed Alqadi and Tahir down the corridor. They saw only a strange wisp of smoke, but she saw a curious long limbed creature that she recognised as a sentinel.
"Friend or foe?" Alqadi asked Lila.
"Foe." Alqadi immediately opened fire.
In the spray of automatic fire, a hint of the shape of the beast began to appear for everyone else. It was reminicent of the shadow creature we'd seen on the video from the cave. Tusks. Claws. Dripping with mucus. And throwing itself at Alqadi.
Lila fired her stun gun, but the shot fizzled out on the creature's carapace, leaving a stench of rot. Sayah ran down the corridor to grab Lila and drag her out of the creature's reach. Gurgeh turned on the lights of his drone to cause a distraction while Alqadi attempted to fight back.
Alqadi missed. The door to the storeroom went flying off its hinges. And a sudden wave of fear and dread swept across us.
Hamsa and Sayah fired, but both shots bounced off the creature's carapace. Lila took cover behind Sayah, and fired her stun gun again, this time managing to aim into a soft spot. Not enough to stun it, but enough to slow its movements. Gurgeh rammed his drone into the beast. It stumbled - and then stepped on the drone as it went for Alqadi again.
But while other shots went wide, Tahir got one solid shot into a weak point, breaking the creature's arm and driving it into horrific shrieks. A claw flew past Alqadi's face, barely missing him, but Alqadi had got his rifle reloaded and unloaded straight into the creature's eye. And with that, it dissipated into smoke.
Wednesday 27 November 2019
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 5: Wolves of Winter
We have a job to do, and we barely know where to start. I know, you'd help me if you could. Mittens! Spit that out! That's not nice.
We decided to wait until just after the howl, to give us as much time as possible to investigate. All our lives we've been told not to go to that part of the forest, and there we were walking right into it. The wendigo wants war, and the hobgoblins want to supply it, and how do you stop that without making war?
How has learning the path I was born to walk made me feel so lost?
We just have to hope that we're going in the right direction. Destroying the vile fetishes that the hobgoblins produce has to be the right thing, and destroying the hobgoblins at the same time probably doesn't hurt anything. And we were able to rescue someone. A Blood Druid, being dragged off to be turned into fetishes. We saved his life when we killed the hobgoblins.
We talked. War is the way of our people, and trying to persuade anyone, let alone the Blood Druids, that we need to set it aside to fight a greater foe, so that we might one day return to our ways, is extraordinarily difficult. But we have sown the seeds, and arranged to meet at one of the meeting places.
The yetis are dead. I don't know how or why. I wondered why they left the mountain early and perhaps now I will never know. But something has killed them, and left their broken bodies behind. No, I didn't see them. I hope I never do.
We need to talk to the Ulthani. They are more amenable to talk than the Blood Druids. If they can be swayed, we will be able to present a combined front to the Blood Druids, especially if the Gallian cloth wearers will also stand with us.
What? Yes, we are a bit of a mess right now. We met a winter wolf and some wargs on the way back. It was terrible. They were too strong for me or my fairy friends. They were too strong for all of us. I charmed one, but could not stop the others, and one by one I saw my friends fall under their claws and teeth and ice. I called upon the spirit of the Great Bear and transformed. I was strong and fast and powerful, but clumsy and awkward with the claws and teeth I had never used before. I tried so hard, but could barely scratch them. It was Turgut, standing beside me, who struck fatal blow after fatal blow. We owe him our lives.
Thank you, Mittens. You must know a lot about how to use teeth and claws. That would be very helpful. But now we need to rest.
We decided to wait until just after the howl, to give us as much time as possible to investigate. All our lives we've been told not to go to that part of the forest, and there we were walking right into it. The wendigo wants war, and the hobgoblins want to supply it, and how do you stop that without making war?
How has learning the path I was born to walk made me feel so lost?
We just have to hope that we're going in the right direction. Destroying the vile fetishes that the hobgoblins produce has to be the right thing, and destroying the hobgoblins at the same time probably doesn't hurt anything. And we were able to rescue someone. A Blood Druid, being dragged off to be turned into fetishes. We saved his life when we killed the hobgoblins.
We talked. War is the way of our people, and trying to persuade anyone, let alone the Blood Druids, that we need to set it aside to fight a greater foe, so that we might one day return to our ways, is extraordinarily difficult. But we have sown the seeds, and arranged to meet at one of the meeting places.
The yetis are dead. I don't know how or why. I wondered why they left the mountain early and perhaps now I will never know. But something has killed them, and left their broken bodies behind. No, I didn't see them. I hope I never do.
We need to talk to the Ulthani. They are more amenable to talk than the Blood Druids. If they can be swayed, we will be able to present a combined front to the Blood Druids, especially if the Gallian cloth wearers will also stand with us.
What? Yes, we are a bit of a mess right now. We met a winter wolf and some wargs on the way back. It was terrible. They were too strong for me or my fairy friends. They were too strong for all of us. I charmed one, but could not stop the others, and one by one I saw my friends fall under their claws and teeth and ice. I called upon the spirit of the Great Bear and transformed. I was strong and fast and powerful, but clumsy and awkward with the claws and teeth I had never used before. I tried so hard, but could barely scratch them. It was Turgut, standing beside me, who struck fatal blow after fatal blow. We owe him our lives.
Thank you, Mittens. You must know a lot about how to use teeth and claws. That would be very helpful. But now we need to rest.
Tuesday 26 November 2019
Embracing Failure
I've been playing tabletop RPGs for about fifteen years. Most of that time has been spent playing under the paradigm that success is good and failure is bad. Success means you defeat the monster. Success means you find the treasure. Success means you solve the puzzle. Failure means losing, whether it's your life, the treasure, or worst of all, the plot.
RPGs might not have winners and losers in the same way as board games, but winning and losing are both things that can happen. And that's felt pretty much the same whether we were playing D&D, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, Warhammer or Cyberpunk.
And then my gaming group slammed head first into Powered By The Apocalypse.
To say we didn't know what we were doing would be an understatement. Initially the confusion seemed to be from the way PBTA comes with a pile of jargon, starting with calling the GM the MC, and continuing with forward and hold and clocks. As we got to grips with that, however, the actual confusion started to surface: in PBTA games, failure isn't necessarily bad.
When I played Rapscallion, I failed almost every role I made. And it didn't matter, because the GM took every failed role as an opportunity to make the story more interesting.
Whether you're the GM or a player, PBTA games require a different set of skills to play than more conventional RPGs. Which isn't to say my group don't have those skills, but we certainly didn't know how to use them at that point.
One area where I think Forged in the Dark scores over PBTA is that it's a lot easier to get your head around how to work with a failed roll, especially from the GM chair. Six months after our first abortive attempt at PBTA we started on Blades in the Dark. With solid guidance on how to do consequences while still leaving room for creativity, we got into the swing of things a lot faster. When I got in the chair myself to run Scum and Villainy I found exactly the same thing.
PBTA games tend to come with an agenda and principles the GM is supposed to follow. They all tend to be written in the slightly weird style used in Apocalypse World, which I don't think we found particularly useful. It's taken me a while and playing in a more experienced PBTA GM's games to start to really understand it.
My suggestion for an agenda for PBTA and similar style games would be 'make failure interesting'.
And perhaps we could translate that over into more conventional RPGs as well? Just thinking of Lord of the Rings for a moment, there's moments like when Frodo fails his will save against the ring and suddenly the ring wraiths can find him, or when Galadriel gets a partial success and doesn't put the ring on but scares the hell out of everyone in the process...
No, perhaps it doesn't work so well in the more number-based games, where there's a solid pass/fail mechanic and failure tends to come with mechanical consequences. There's no point trying to play Pathfinder like it's Dungeon World, when you could just play Dungeon World. I'll continue to enjoy both games. They just have to be enjoyed in different ways. In the former case, enjoying it means understanding how my character and her abilities work and deploying them effectively. And in the latter case, enjoying it means, amongst other things, embracing failure.
RPGs might not have winners and losers in the same way as board games, but winning and losing are both things that can happen. And that's felt pretty much the same whether we were playing D&D, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, Warhammer or Cyberpunk.
And then my gaming group slammed head first into Powered By The Apocalypse.
To say we didn't know what we were doing would be an understatement. Initially the confusion seemed to be from the way PBTA comes with a pile of jargon, starting with calling the GM the MC, and continuing with forward and hold and clocks. As we got to grips with that, however, the actual confusion started to surface: in PBTA games, failure isn't necessarily bad.
When I played Rapscallion, I failed almost every role I made. And it didn't matter, because the GM took every failed role as an opportunity to make the story more interesting.
Whether you're the GM or a player, PBTA games require a different set of skills to play than more conventional RPGs. Which isn't to say my group don't have those skills, but we certainly didn't know how to use them at that point.
One area where I think Forged in the Dark scores over PBTA is that it's a lot easier to get your head around how to work with a failed roll, especially from the GM chair. Six months after our first abortive attempt at PBTA we started on Blades in the Dark. With solid guidance on how to do consequences while still leaving room for creativity, we got into the swing of things a lot faster. When I got in the chair myself to run Scum and Villainy I found exactly the same thing.
PBTA games tend to come with an agenda and principles the GM is supposed to follow. They all tend to be written in the slightly weird style used in Apocalypse World, which I don't think we found particularly useful. It's taken me a while and playing in a more experienced PBTA GM's games to start to really understand it.
My suggestion for an agenda for PBTA and similar style games would be 'make failure interesting'.
And perhaps we could translate that over into more conventional RPGs as well? Just thinking of Lord of the Rings for a moment, there's moments like when Frodo fails his will save against the ring and suddenly the ring wraiths can find him, or when Galadriel gets a partial success and doesn't put the ring on but scares the hell out of everyone in the process...
No, perhaps it doesn't work so well in the more number-based games, where there's a solid pass/fail mechanic and failure tends to come with mechanical consequences. There's no point trying to play Pathfinder like it's Dungeon World, when you could just play Dungeon World. I'll continue to enjoy both games. They just have to be enjoyed in different ways. In the former case, enjoying it means understanding how my character and her abilities work and deploying them effectively. And in the latter case, enjoying it means, amongst other things, embracing failure.
Monday 25 November 2019
Diversity Hires, part 6: Murder Elves
Thanks to illness I got a bit behind on the write-ups. When we last
saw our heroes they were in a fortified inn fighting off a hoard of
beast men, having temporarily teamed up with a group of mutants. As I
was really too ill to have been playing, the following session can be
briefly summed up as 'we won'. We pick up again a week later...
The team continued on their way, and finally caught up with the crusade. They spent some time getting to know people, got briefly mixed up in an attack by elves, had a few drinks, and found a vampire. For once, Frida's ineffective rock flinging actually proved effective, and the vampire was swiftly dispatched.
One of the important crusade people, Yan, asked the team to investigate some potential chaos evil stuff in the camp. Following a particularly dodgy type called Krieger, they found that he spent his nights visiting a camp follower rather than engaging in anything more nefarious. However, a trip to the nearby woods led to them finding a bunch of letters made of flies, and a sheep with baby hands, which resulted in a certain amount of insanity all round.
Returning to camp, they were arrested by Yan and his men for being evil chaos cultists. This seemed a bit unnecessary and implausible, and much arguing resulted. Krieger's men were also being arrested, in the sense that people who have been shot tend to have their movements arrested. Although given that they were all looking horribly diseased, this seemed like a reasonable approach.
Presumably it was the same disease that had afflicted a team of witch hunters who'd shown up earlier and then all died.
Frida noticed something going on in their tent. A woman who'd previously befriended them and ridden on their wagon for a while had thrown a flea covered dead rat into the tent and then ran away. Gildiril sent a magic missile after her, resulting in Yan yelling about him being a witch. Mormacar shot her, then made chase and dragged her back in one of his nets. She had clearly been afflicted with disease as well as having been shot with arrows and magic.
It was around this point that Mormacar and Gildiril became known as the 'murder elves'.
The team decided not to get involved in the fight any further, and all the diseased corpses were incinerated along with the infected tent. There was still a lead to follow up on though - some suspicious conversation at the butcher.
The butcher was in conversation with a guard when they arrived, and was thoroughly evasive. Frida had been hoping to try out her torture skills, but ultimately a fight broke out and the butcher was beaten and flailed to death. It turned out that he was a mutant with a mouth in his armpit, which spewed infected goo across Frida and Kazgar. Frida had also hoped to try out her skills on the guard, but it became apparent that a good wash was more important at this point.
The two of them stripped off and started washing, Frida was disturbed to notice Kazgar first start to drip some kind of corrosive substance and then catch fire. She scrubbed harder, managing to clear the goop before getting any kind of infection. Kazgar suddenly disappeared.
And thus was born the dark legend of Kazgar, the dwarf who would appear suddenly, wreathed in burning acid, wreaking death and destruction before disappearing as fast as he had arrived, leaving a trail of fire and demons in his wake.
The team continued on their way, and finally caught up with the crusade. They spent some time getting to know people, got briefly mixed up in an attack by elves, had a few drinks, and found a vampire. For once, Frida's ineffective rock flinging actually proved effective, and the vampire was swiftly dispatched.
One of the important crusade people, Yan, asked the team to investigate some potential chaos evil stuff in the camp. Following a particularly dodgy type called Krieger, they found that he spent his nights visiting a camp follower rather than engaging in anything more nefarious. However, a trip to the nearby woods led to them finding a bunch of letters made of flies, and a sheep with baby hands, which resulted in a certain amount of insanity all round.
Returning to camp, they were arrested by Yan and his men for being evil chaos cultists. This seemed a bit unnecessary and implausible, and much arguing resulted. Krieger's men were also being arrested, in the sense that people who have been shot tend to have their movements arrested. Although given that they were all looking horribly diseased, this seemed like a reasonable approach.
Presumably it was the same disease that had afflicted a team of witch hunters who'd shown up earlier and then all died.
Frida noticed something going on in their tent. A woman who'd previously befriended them and ridden on their wagon for a while had thrown a flea covered dead rat into the tent and then ran away. Gildiril sent a magic missile after her, resulting in Yan yelling about him being a witch. Mormacar shot her, then made chase and dragged her back in one of his nets. She had clearly been afflicted with disease as well as having been shot with arrows and magic.
It was around this point that Mormacar and Gildiril became known as the 'murder elves'.
The team decided not to get involved in the fight any further, and all the diseased corpses were incinerated along with the infected tent. There was still a lead to follow up on though - some suspicious conversation at the butcher.
The butcher was in conversation with a guard when they arrived, and was thoroughly evasive. Frida had been hoping to try out her torture skills, but ultimately a fight broke out and the butcher was beaten and flailed to death. It turned out that he was a mutant with a mouth in his armpit, which spewed infected goo across Frida and Kazgar. Frida had also hoped to try out her skills on the guard, but it became apparent that a good wash was more important at this point.
The two of them stripped off and started washing, Frida was disturbed to notice Kazgar first start to drip some kind of corrosive substance and then catch fire. She scrubbed harder, managing to clear the goop before getting any kind of infection. Kazgar suddenly disappeared.
And thus was born the dark legend of Kazgar, the dwarf who would appear suddenly, wreathed in burning acid, wreaking death and destruction before disappearing as fast as he had arrived, leaving a trail of fire and demons in his wake.
Saturday 23 November 2019
Diversity Hires, part 5: A Night at the Inn
After a brief delay while Kazgar had some holsters made for his new
pistols and attempted to convince someone to give him some powder and
shot, we set out again. Our party had now expanded to include Gretchen,
a remarkably sturdy peasant, whose job was to carry our stuff.
We followed the trail of poo and corpses left behind by the crusade, and it was late afternoon when we arrived at the inn. Unfortunately, there was nothing in the inn, not even beer, thanks to the passing crusade taking everything and everyone with it.
After a thorough search of the building we did discover a seriously injured wood elf who had never seen dwarves before and was somewhat disconcerted by our presence.
We planned a quiet evening in with some beer, but not long afterwards we were joined by another group of travelers, including a priest of Sigmar ranting about how the crusaders were all heretics, his scribe, and a couple of hammer wielding warriors.
Gildiril made conversation with the priest, while the rest of the group went out hunting. After a long, difficult and generally incompetent fight we eventually returned with a deer, carefully dressed to conceal just how much effort killing it had taken. Frida took it into the kitchen, and much to everyone's surprise emerged some time later with a pie, which was declared about as good as it was possible for a meal to be.
Frida was given the option of skipping watch that night, given that between hunting, cooking, looking after the injured elf and making sure everyone's hair was looking fly, she'd been quite busy. But she wanted to take her turn anyway, and it was while she was on watch that a band of mutants showed up, trying to get into the inn.
Frida woke up the rest of the party, and it was strongly suggested to the mutants that if they didn't want a fight that they should leave now and come back in the morning when we'd all left. They were unconvinced, however, and hostilities opened.
Not long after that, however, hostilities were temporarily ceased when a group of beast men showed up outside. The doors were closed, and we teamed up with the mutants to fend them off. Gildiril showed off that he'd actually managed to learn some spells by illuminating things and throwing magic darts. Mormacar was as brilliant and flamboyant as usual. Kazgar and Burlok overcame their natural dwarven reluctance to use ranged weapons. And Frida ineffectually threw rocks around before giving up on this combat business and going to heal some of the injured mutants in case they needed them again later.
We followed the trail of poo and corpses left behind by the crusade, and it was late afternoon when we arrived at the inn. Unfortunately, there was nothing in the inn, not even beer, thanks to the passing crusade taking everything and everyone with it.
After a thorough search of the building we did discover a seriously injured wood elf who had never seen dwarves before and was somewhat disconcerted by our presence.
We planned a quiet evening in with some beer, but not long afterwards we were joined by another group of travelers, including a priest of Sigmar ranting about how the crusaders were all heretics, his scribe, and a couple of hammer wielding warriors.
Gildiril made conversation with the priest, while the rest of the group went out hunting. After a long, difficult and generally incompetent fight we eventually returned with a deer, carefully dressed to conceal just how much effort killing it had taken. Frida took it into the kitchen, and much to everyone's surprise emerged some time later with a pie, which was declared about as good as it was possible for a meal to be.
Frida was given the option of skipping watch that night, given that between hunting, cooking, looking after the injured elf and making sure everyone's hair was looking fly, she'd been quite busy. But she wanted to take her turn anyway, and it was while she was on watch that a band of mutants showed up, trying to get into the inn.
Frida woke up the rest of the party, and it was strongly suggested to the mutants that if they didn't want a fight that they should leave now and come back in the morning when we'd all left. They were unconvinced, however, and hostilities opened.
Not long after that, however, hostilities were temporarily ceased when a group of beast men showed up outside. The doors were closed, and we teamed up with the mutants to fend them off. Gildiril showed off that he'd actually managed to learn some spells by illuminating things and throwing magic darts. Mormacar was as brilliant and flamboyant as usual. Kazgar and Burlok overcame their natural dwarven reluctance to use ranged weapons. And Frida ineffectually threw rocks around before giving up on this combat business and going to heal some of the injured mutants in case they needed them again later.
Thursday 21 November 2019
Diversity Hires, part 4: Vampire Hunters
With Frida keen to examine the baker's body and Burlok keen to do
some digging, the team got permission from both the widow and local law
enforcement and got to work. It wasn't particularly enlightening.
However, while the body was being examined, a local noble showed up, in
urgent need of a party of four to six adventurers to help 'rescue' his
brother from an evil cult.
Sure, why not? The cult were apparently meeting in a mausoleum, and since the one theory we had come up with for the missing animals that didn't involve stacking was that they had been eaten by a vampire, this seemed like a reasonable place to look.
We were joined by a couple of locals as well as the noble - the road warden who'd first met us, and one of the noble's blaublut friends. All were very relieved when the dwarves were willing to go first. As usual, Mormacar offered to be in the rear.
We descended into the mausoleum, discussing vampires, which didn't seem to reassure our companions at all. Frida assured them that if they really thought there were vampires down there, she wouldn't be there. While checking the desiccated corpses that lined the corridor for embedded wooden stakes.
Inside the mausoleum we found a complete dearth of cultists, but did find the noble's older brother lying on a stone table, a ceiling full of bats, and a mysterious figure lurking behind the table. On engaging him in conversation he turned out to be quite a personable vampire, of the family on the purple coat of arms we'd found earlier. We also found the remains of a rat, a chicken, a goat and a dog, which confirmed our earlier suspicions.
We had a remarkably pleasant chat with the vampire, who really seemed quite reasonable compared to the noble who'd fed his older brother to a vampire, but ultimately we were forced to get rid of him. He was pretty tough and not easy to damage, but once Mormacar had thrown a net at him he was at least reasonably easy to hit. The corpses in the corridor unsurprisingly animated and attacked, but the road warden and blaublut held them back. The bats on the ceiling coalesced into a batman, but the road warden and Frida swiftly dispatched him.
After some hairy moments (Mormacar nearly died), the zombies were dealt with and the vampire was finally taken down. Well, maybe. He turned into a cloud of bats. Gildiril, for reasons that weren't entirely clear, threw brandy into the batnado. The batnado attacked, adding blood to the swirl of brandy and bats. Frida found this sufficiently terrifying that she left immediately.
Eventually everyone else emerged, not saying much about whether the vampire had actually been defeated or not, and the group headed back to the village. The noble, whose father had just died, making him the new ruler of the village, was very pleased to have his brother out of the way and the vampire (apparently) dealt with. He promised to get a new chicken for Gertrude, and granted everyone titles. More importantly, he also provided gold. Frida, concerned that there might still be a vampire in the mausoleum, suggested that the noble keep a close eye on his villagers.
Frida healed everyone's wounds except for Mormacar (she found his wounds just a bit more difficult than everyone else's for some reason) who was forced to resort to poultices and drafts. Everyone ate a lot of garlic, and we set out for the next leg of our journey. One which we were assured would end in an inn.
Sure, why not? The cult were apparently meeting in a mausoleum, and since the one theory we had come up with for the missing animals that didn't involve stacking was that they had been eaten by a vampire, this seemed like a reasonable place to look.
We were joined by a couple of locals as well as the noble - the road warden who'd first met us, and one of the noble's blaublut friends. All were very relieved when the dwarves were willing to go first. As usual, Mormacar offered to be in the rear.
We descended into the mausoleum, discussing vampires, which didn't seem to reassure our companions at all. Frida assured them that if they really thought there were vampires down there, she wouldn't be there. While checking the desiccated corpses that lined the corridor for embedded wooden stakes.
Inside the mausoleum we found a complete dearth of cultists, but did find the noble's older brother lying on a stone table, a ceiling full of bats, and a mysterious figure lurking behind the table. On engaging him in conversation he turned out to be quite a personable vampire, of the family on the purple coat of arms we'd found earlier. We also found the remains of a rat, a chicken, a goat and a dog, which confirmed our earlier suspicions.
We had a remarkably pleasant chat with the vampire, who really seemed quite reasonable compared to the noble who'd fed his older brother to a vampire, but ultimately we were forced to get rid of him. He was pretty tough and not easy to damage, but once Mormacar had thrown a net at him he was at least reasonably easy to hit. The corpses in the corridor unsurprisingly animated and attacked, but the road warden and blaublut held them back. The bats on the ceiling coalesced into a batman, but the road warden and Frida swiftly dispatched him.
After some hairy moments (Mormacar nearly died), the zombies were dealt with and the vampire was finally taken down. Well, maybe. He turned into a cloud of bats. Gildiril, for reasons that weren't entirely clear, threw brandy into the batnado. The batnado attacked, adding blood to the swirl of brandy and bats. Frida found this sufficiently terrifying that she left immediately.
Eventually everyone else emerged, not saying much about whether the vampire had actually been defeated or not, and the group headed back to the village. The noble, whose father had just died, making him the new ruler of the village, was very pleased to have his brother out of the way and the vampire (apparently) dealt with. He promised to get a new chicken for Gertrude, and granted everyone titles. More importantly, he also provided gold. Frida, concerned that there might still be a vampire in the mausoleum, suggested that the noble keep a close eye on his villagers.
Frida healed everyone's wounds except for Mormacar (she found his wounds just a bit more difficult than everyone else's for some reason) who was forced to resort to poultices and drafts. Everyone ate a lot of garlic, and we set out for the next leg of our journey. One which we were assured would end in an inn.
Wednesday 20 November 2019
Crew of the Aliya, part 8: Open Sesame
We spent some time shopping while still stuck on the station, picking up protective clothing for Gurgeh and Sayah just in case of another corpse attack. Sayah also restocked on opor.
Gurgeh took the hair samples that Sayah had retrieved from Jinna's room, and compared them with the samples he'd taken from Lavim Tamm's corpse in the cave. Definitely not the same person. He then compared them to samples from when Lavim had been on our ship, being treated for radiation poisoning. The hair samples had clearly got mixed up with hair from Jinna's roommate, but he was confident that the Lavim who'd been there was the same one we'd had on our ship, and the earlier samples didn't match the corpse. No identical twins here. One of them was a fake.
The adjudicator dropped by again to let us know that with no evidence of a connection between us and the death of Merez, we were free to leave. Gurgeh felt that there was no sense flying an empty ship down to Kua, so while Sayah negotiated a good price for the delivery of supplies to the other dig site, he put out an advert and got some passengers. A Coriolis guard and a civilian.
Sayah looked up the civilian based on facial recognition, and found out that he was a witness in a Syndicate case. She passed that on to the rest of the crew, then went to hide from the guard in her cabin for the duration of the flight, only emerging after we'd dropped off the passengers in the nearby coastal city. After a meal of gumbo, we returned to the valley.
Tahir once again made a perfect landing at the dig site, and we unloaded the supplies. Professor Ilhana invited us to stay for dinner, so we had a pleasant meal and a chat about the local conditions.
Some of us had concerns about the local wildlife. The river was reputedly full of big toothy reptiles called nahangs, the place was known for the semi-sentient primates known as Ekilibri, and even worse, there were supposedly djanna out there - spirits that would use glowing lights to lure people away into the forest and then feed on their fear as they died.
Lila, still not able to use her new arm, made the sensible decision to stay on the ship for the moment. Hamsa also stayed behind, to do some running repairs. So it was Tahir, Gurgeh, Sayah and Alqadi who set off together into the jungle. Gurgeh lead the way, using his environmental scanner to watch out for dangers. He successfully avoided leading us through a nest of fire ants or a hive of macro-wasps, and stopped us just in time to avoid falling down a massive hole.
Somehow we had managed to forget about the massive worms that also inhabited the jungle. It was obvious from the damaged foliage that it had been here recently. Tahir wanted to investigate the hole, but everyone else insisted on pushing on towards the stone towers.
We reached the towers shortly before dark, and had a quick look. They appeared to be constructed of giant rings of sandstone, and were covered with glyphs. They were similar to the ones we'd already seen on the amber cylinder, but more rounded, as if they'd been carved in a different way, or came from a different time period. The one thing we were sure of was that they definitely weren't the work of the first-come.
Looking around the base of the towers, we found footprints that doubtless belonged to Zhar Baghram on his previous visit to the site. They lead into a shrubbery, dotted with small stelae. Tahir used his jetpack to fly to the top of the towers. On top of the right hand tower was a dip, and inside it a large cube of a different type of stone, much harder than sandstone and also slightly cooler to the touch. The stone at the top of the tower was damaged and unstable, so he didn't hang around for long.
We made camp near the base of the towers. Gurgeh set up some motion sensors around the camp, and we kept watch in shifts. There we passed an uneventful, if noisy, night.
In the morning we investigated the footprints again, and after clearing away some of the shrubs we found a large octagonal plate in front of the tower. It was divided into triangles, alternately marked with scimitars and large gemstones - red, blue, white and black.
Gurgeh examined the stones. He found that the triangular segments looked like they could fold downwards, and that there were residues in the recesses around each gem. The red one appeared to be blood.
We looked again at the poem in Zhar Baghram's journal. He'd found enough clues here to get this door open.
One war took, led to his death
One a bird lifted over the high sea
One the hoary wolf broke with death
One, bloody-cheeked, a warrior hid in a hole in the ground.
Four keybearers. Surely this had to match up to the four stones? And one already mentioned blood. Tahir applied some of his own to the red stone.
Blue must be the sea. Would plain water do, or did it have to be salty? Gurgeh thought it might, and managed to get himself to shed enough tears to apply to the blue stone.
Sayah spotted the mention of the hoary wolf, possibly referring to frost. An ice pack from the first aid kit supplied that easily enough.
But what about the black stone? The first line of the poem was not particularly enlightening. Did black mean ash? Did we have to burn something? There was plenty of wood around, but wood ash did not have any effect on the plate. Did the mention in the journal of fighting a flying demon mean we needeed something with wings? Nobody fancied chasing down the macro-wasps. Alqadi thought it might be necessary to use one of the Ekilibri, and headed into the trees to catch one. The general party feeling was that we were morally opposed to killing these creatures, however, and we should at least try something else first. Surely there would be evidence left behind of how Zhar Baghram had opened the door?
We searched, and found the decayed remains of some kind of rodent that was missing one leg. We weren't sure entirely which part of it was required, but applying the remains to the black stone did result in the eight segments folding down to reveal a shaft with a platform some way below us.
Gurgeh sent down a drone. It looked fine - just some furniture. Tahir immediately climbed down, and found himself in some kind of ancient storage room, lined with shelves. Footprints on the floor showed the presence of the previous team.
On the wall was a control panel. Gurgeh and Sayah had joined Tahir, and Gurgeh tried pressing buttons to see what happened. One started closing the door. He quickly pressed it again, and the door opened again. Another button caused a wheezing noise, that appeared to be to operate the platform as a lift, although the platform itself didn't move. The last button did nothing.
Alqadi cleared up the remains of our camp and joined the others down the shaft. Leading off the room was a corridor on one wall and a metal door on the other. It looked old, yet the design appeared modern. There was a button beside it, but pressing it didn't open it.
The wide corridor led into a room full of workbenches. We saw the remnants of strange looking instruments. Were these some kind of ancient computer? We also found white stone cylinders and metal cubes, and a lot of stone and metal chippings. They put us in mind of the carved cylinder and cube that we knew were used to operate the frame in the other cave. Prepared blanks, perhaps?
There were also canisters. Inside was something grey and moving. These were quickly closed up again. Sayah wondered if that was what Zhar Baghram had meant in the video when he mentioned 'hot dust'. There was also the worrying prospect that this stuff might be responsible for the extra limbs we'd seen on Islir and Lavim's corpses.
The next room we found had a ring of eight pillars with a ninth in the centre, some of which had figurines on them. It wasn't exactly what any of us thought of as a temple to the icons, but nevertheless that was what it felt like. We looked cautiously at one of the figurines. A black monkey with wings.
Zhar Baghram had been on a time limit. There were doors here he hadn't opened. We were going to try to take a look. However, knowing that there was a fake Lavim Tamm on the loose, and that we'd potentially come into contact with the mysterious grey stuff, we agreed that none of us could be alone from now on. The idea of one of us being replaced by a clone seemed far more plausible than anyone was comfortable with.
Gurgeh took the hair samples that Sayah had retrieved from Jinna's room, and compared them with the samples he'd taken from Lavim Tamm's corpse in the cave. Definitely not the same person. He then compared them to samples from when Lavim had been on our ship, being treated for radiation poisoning. The hair samples had clearly got mixed up with hair from Jinna's roommate, but he was confident that the Lavim who'd been there was the same one we'd had on our ship, and the earlier samples didn't match the corpse. No identical twins here. One of them was a fake.
The adjudicator dropped by again to let us know that with no evidence of a connection between us and the death of Merez, we were free to leave. Gurgeh felt that there was no sense flying an empty ship down to Kua, so while Sayah negotiated a good price for the delivery of supplies to the other dig site, he put out an advert and got some passengers. A Coriolis guard and a civilian.
Sayah looked up the civilian based on facial recognition, and found out that he was a witness in a Syndicate case. She passed that on to the rest of the crew, then went to hide from the guard in her cabin for the duration of the flight, only emerging after we'd dropped off the passengers in the nearby coastal city. After a meal of gumbo, we returned to the valley.
Tahir once again made a perfect landing at the dig site, and we unloaded the supplies. Professor Ilhana invited us to stay for dinner, so we had a pleasant meal and a chat about the local conditions.
Some of us had concerns about the local wildlife. The river was reputedly full of big toothy reptiles called nahangs, the place was known for the semi-sentient primates known as Ekilibri, and even worse, there were supposedly djanna out there - spirits that would use glowing lights to lure people away into the forest and then feed on their fear as they died.
Lila, still not able to use her new arm, made the sensible decision to stay on the ship for the moment. Hamsa also stayed behind, to do some running repairs. So it was Tahir, Gurgeh, Sayah and Alqadi who set off together into the jungle. Gurgeh lead the way, using his environmental scanner to watch out for dangers. He successfully avoided leading us through a nest of fire ants or a hive of macro-wasps, and stopped us just in time to avoid falling down a massive hole.
Somehow we had managed to forget about the massive worms that also inhabited the jungle. It was obvious from the damaged foliage that it had been here recently. Tahir wanted to investigate the hole, but everyone else insisted on pushing on towards the stone towers.
We reached the towers shortly before dark, and had a quick look. They appeared to be constructed of giant rings of sandstone, and were covered with glyphs. They were similar to the ones we'd already seen on the amber cylinder, but more rounded, as if they'd been carved in a different way, or came from a different time period. The one thing we were sure of was that they definitely weren't the work of the first-come.
Looking around the base of the towers, we found footprints that doubtless belonged to Zhar Baghram on his previous visit to the site. They lead into a shrubbery, dotted with small stelae. Tahir used his jetpack to fly to the top of the towers. On top of the right hand tower was a dip, and inside it a large cube of a different type of stone, much harder than sandstone and also slightly cooler to the touch. The stone at the top of the tower was damaged and unstable, so he didn't hang around for long.
We made camp near the base of the towers. Gurgeh set up some motion sensors around the camp, and we kept watch in shifts. There we passed an uneventful, if noisy, night.
In the morning we investigated the footprints again, and after clearing away some of the shrubs we found a large octagonal plate in front of the tower. It was divided into triangles, alternately marked with scimitars and large gemstones - red, blue, white and black.
Gurgeh examined the stones. He found that the triangular segments looked like they could fold downwards, and that there were residues in the recesses around each gem. The red one appeared to be blood.
We looked again at the poem in Zhar Baghram's journal. He'd found enough clues here to get this door open.
One war took, led to his death
One a bird lifted over the high sea
One the hoary wolf broke with death
One, bloody-cheeked, a warrior hid in a hole in the ground.
Four keybearers. Surely this had to match up to the four stones? And one already mentioned blood. Tahir applied some of his own to the red stone.
Blue must be the sea. Would plain water do, or did it have to be salty? Gurgeh thought it might, and managed to get himself to shed enough tears to apply to the blue stone.
Sayah spotted the mention of the hoary wolf, possibly referring to frost. An ice pack from the first aid kit supplied that easily enough.
But what about the black stone? The first line of the poem was not particularly enlightening. Did black mean ash? Did we have to burn something? There was plenty of wood around, but wood ash did not have any effect on the plate. Did the mention in the journal of fighting a flying demon mean we needeed something with wings? Nobody fancied chasing down the macro-wasps. Alqadi thought it might be necessary to use one of the Ekilibri, and headed into the trees to catch one. The general party feeling was that we were morally opposed to killing these creatures, however, and we should at least try something else first. Surely there would be evidence left behind of how Zhar Baghram had opened the door?
We searched, and found the decayed remains of some kind of rodent that was missing one leg. We weren't sure entirely which part of it was required, but applying the remains to the black stone did result in the eight segments folding down to reveal a shaft with a platform some way below us.
Gurgeh sent down a drone. It looked fine - just some furniture. Tahir immediately climbed down, and found himself in some kind of ancient storage room, lined with shelves. Footprints on the floor showed the presence of the previous team.
On the wall was a control panel. Gurgeh and Sayah had joined Tahir, and Gurgeh tried pressing buttons to see what happened. One started closing the door. He quickly pressed it again, and the door opened again. Another button caused a wheezing noise, that appeared to be to operate the platform as a lift, although the platform itself didn't move. The last button did nothing.
Alqadi cleared up the remains of our camp and joined the others down the shaft. Leading off the room was a corridor on one wall and a metal door on the other. It looked old, yet the design appeared modern. There was a button beside it, but pressing it didn't open it.
The wide corridor led into a room full of workbenches. We saw the remnants of strange looking instruments. Were these some kind of ancient computer? We also found white stone cylinders and metal cubes, and a lot of stone and metal chippings. They put us in mind of the carved cylinder and cube that we knew were used to operate the frame in the other cave. Prepared blanks, perhaps?
There were also canisters. Inside was something grey and moving. These were quickly closed up again. Sayah wondered if that was what Zhar Baghram had meant in the video when he mentioned 'hot dust'. There was also the worrying prospect that this stuff might be responsible for the extra limbs we'd seen on Islir and Lavim's corpses.
The next room we found had a ring of eight pillars with a ninth in the centre, some of which had figurines on them. It wasn't exactly what any of us thought of as a temple to the icons, but nevertheless that was what it felt like. We looked cautiously at one of the figurines. A black monkey with wings.
Zhar Baghram had been on a time limit. There were doors here he hadn't opened. We were going to try to take a look. However, knowing that there was a fake Lavim Tamm on the loose, and that we'd potentially come into contact with the mysterious grey stuff, we agreed that none of us could be alone from now on. The idea of one of us being replaced by a clone seemed far more plausible than anyone was comfortable with.
Tuesday 19 November 2019
Does System Matter?
The big RPG Twitter discussion at the moment is 'does system matter?' so I'm going to weigh in on that one.
In short, yes. Of course system matters.
D&D 4e was very unpopular with fans of D&D 3.5, to the point where a bunch of us jumped ship to Pathfinder because we liked the system better. In my group at least, it wasn't because we liked Golarian better than the Forgotten Realms because we didn't use either setting.
The reason the only White Wolf game I've run is Scion is because it's the only one with a setting I like enough to overcome my hatred of the Storyteller System. And even then I'd far rather have been running it with Fate.
I think my 'two games, one genre' posts illustrate this pretty well. Taking my favourite, cyberpunk, as an example, Cyberpunk 2020 and The Sprawl are pretty much identical, setting-wise, with the only difference being that the former includes large amounts of setting detail while the latter assumes you already know what cyberpunk looks like. You can play either of them in the same setting.
But you can't run a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign in The Sprawl, because the two systems promote radically different styles of play. Cyberpunk 2020 is all about the numbers, as you track your stats, skills, armour ratings, money, humanity loss and damn near anything else that could possibly be abstracted to a number. The Sprawl sits at the other end of the scale as a Powered By The Apocalypse game, where it's all about the fictional positioning and moves.
So perhaps what matters most is whether the system supports the play style. You can run an investigative horror game with Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu, but while you can run heroic fantasy using BRP, I can't imagine it working quite so well using Gumshoe because that's not what Gumshoe does.
If system didn't matter, people wouldn't keep coming up with new ones. We'd all still be playing original red box D&D regardless of setting and I wouldn't get a thrill each time I discover a new system that better supports a specific style of play. I barely know the setting of Blades In The Dark, as for some reason our GM wanted to keep us in the, ahem, dark. But the system was so innovative and exciting that it made me want to play more Forged In The Dark games, regardless of setting.
System matters. It's not the only thing that matters, or even the most important thing, but it's absolutely on the list. And in a future post, I will doubtless write that list.
In short, yes. Of course system matters.
D&D 4e was very unpopular with fans of D&D 3.5, to the point where a bunch of us jumped ship to Pathfinder because we liked the system better. In my group at least, it wasn't because we liked Golarian better than the Forgotten Realms because we didn't use either setting.
The reason the only White Wolf game I've run is Scion is because it's the only one with a setting I like enough to overcome my hatred of the Storyteller System. And even then I'd far rather have been running it with Fate.
I think my 'two games, one genre' posts illustrate this pretty well. Taking my favourite, cyberpunk, as an example, Cyberpunk 2020 and The Sprawl are pretty much identical, setting-wise, with the only difference being that the former includes large amounts of setting detail while the latter assumes you already know what cyberpunk looks like. You can play either of them in the same setting.
But you can't run a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign in The Sprawl, because the two systems promote radically different styles of play. Cyberpunk 2020 is all about the numbers, as you track your stats, skills, armour ratings, money, humanity loss and damn near anything else that could possibly be abstracted to a number. The Sprawl sits at the other end of the scale as a Powered By The Apocalypse game, where it's all about the fictional positioning and moves.
So perhaps what matters most is whether the system supports the play style. You can run an investigative horror game with Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu, but while you can run heroic fantasy using BRP, I can't imagine it working quite so well using Gumshoe because that's not what Gumshoe does.
If system didn't matter, people wouldn't keep coming up with new ones. We'd all still be playing original red box D&D regardless of setting and I wouldn't get a thrill each time I discover a new system that better supports a specific style of play. I barely know the setting of Blades In The Dark, as for some reason our GM wanted to keep us in the, ahem, dark. But the system was so innovative and exciting that it made me want to play more Forged In The Dark games, regardless of setting.
System matters. It's not the only thing that matters, or even the most important thing, but it's absolutely on the list. And in a future post, I will doubtless write that list.
Monday 18 November 2019
Diversity Hires, part 3: Chicken or Death
With everyone now properly dressed and equipped we set out towards
Altdorf to follow the army of cultists. The journey was pleasant and
uneventful right up until we approached the village of Pfeifeldorf and
were stopped by a road warden. Much to his confusion we conversed
relatively civilly with him, given that he was accusing us of being
criminals. He had a drawing that he claimed was a picture of Mormacar.
While it was definitely a picture of an elf, Mormacar felt it didn't in
any way do him justice, and Frida agreed that the hair didn't look
nearly good enough.
We asked him for his credentials, and he revealed a signet ring that Frida identified as belonging to the Speier family. ("Who would have thought that skill would come in useful?") His rather generic pictures of another elf, two dwarves and a halfling didn't convince us that anything was on the up and up here, and we weren't particularly keen on the idea of being arrested, but agreed to accompany him to the village once we learned it had a pub.
We were assured that the whole matter could be easily cleared up if we dealt with a small village matter of a missing chicken. He reckoned it had been eaten by the passing crusade, but its owner, Gertrude, insisted that it hadn't.
Gertrude, a very tall woman, paused her current activity of cleaning graffiti off her house and showed them the hen coop, where they found signs of forced entry and some purple fibres. Gertrude's neighbour, an insane old man whose farm had been destroyed by the crusade, was found using a purple handkerchief, which on closer inspection had been torn from a larger piece of cloth like a cloak or tabard. It even had some heraldry on it, which Frida was unable to identify.
Missing animals seemed to be an issue in Pfeifeldorf, with a young boy missing a rat and someone else missing a goat.
We paid a visit to the town scribe, a person of proper height (dwarf edition). Alas, without a name he was unable to determine much about the heraldry on the purple fabric. We promptly went to the pub.
Unsurprisingly, the landlord was missing a dog. (Was someone stealing animals to stack them into a nice statue?) We also encountered the bailiff and a female friend, and engaged in a nice game of cards that Mormacar won. The bailiff was drinking water, something perceived as an act of great bravery by all present.
Finally, we paid a visit to the baker's wife, along with a bottle of brandy as a gift so she would be allowed to accept visitors, and Frida turning on her best halfling charm. The baker had recently committed suicide, which we all found highly suspicious, and said suspicions looked confirmed when Gildiril noticed that the splinters on the beam from which he supposedly hanged himself were pointing the wrong way, as if he'd been hoisted up there by someone else.
After assuring Frau Schimdt that she was in no way responsible for her husband's death, we learned that Schimdt the baker had been doing some research into heraldry himself, shortly before his death, and managed to get a name to go with the purple crest. Schmidt had also joined the crusade very briefly, but she had not wanted to go with them.
We left the house. Clearly we needed to visit the library again to learn more about the name and the crest. It would also be worth digging up Schmidt to see if we could work out how he died. (Burlok was very excited at the prospect of digging.) And now we had four missing animals on the list and still no idea of what that was all about.
Still, at least there was a pub.
We asked him for his credentials, and he revealed a signet ring that Frida identified as belonging to the Speier family. ("Who would have thought that skill would come in useful?") His rather generic pictures of another elf, two dwarves and a halfling didn't convince us that anything was on the up and up here, and we weren't particularly keen on the idea of being arrested, but agreed to accompany him to the village once we learned it had a pub.
We were assured that the whole matter could be easily cleared up if we dealt with a small village matter of a missing chicken. He reckoned it had been eaten by the passing crusade, but its owner, Gertrude, insisted that it hadn't.
Gertrude, a very tall woman, paused her current activity of cleaning graffiti off her house and showed them the hen coop, where they found signs of forced entry and some purple fibres. Gertrude's neighbour, an insane old man whose farm had been destroyed by the crusade, was found using a purple handkerchief, which on closer inspection had been torn from a larger piece of cloth like a cloak or tabard. It even had some heraldry on it, which Frida was unable to identify.
Missing animals seemed to be an issue in Pfeifeldorf, with a young boy missing a rat and someone else missing a goat.
We paid a visit to the town scribe, a person of proper height (dwarf edition). Alas, without a name he was unable to determine much about the heraldry on the purple fabric. We promptly went to the pub.
Unsurprisingly, the landlord was missing a dog. (Was someone stealing animals to stack them into a nice statue?) We also encountered the bailiff and a female friend, and engaged in a nice game of cards that Mormacar won. The bailiff was drinking water, something perceived as an act of great bravery by all present.
Finally, we paid a visit to the baker's wife, along with a bottle of brandy as a gift so she would be allowed to accept visitors, and Frida turning on her best halfling charm. The baker had recently committed suicide, which we all found highly suspicious, and said suspicions looked confirmed when Gildiril noticed that the splinters on the beam from which he supposedly hanged himself were pointing the wrong way, as if he'd been hoisted up there by someone else.
After assuring Frau Schimdt that she was in no way responsible for her husband's death, we learned that Schimdt the baker had been doing some research into heraldry himself, shortly before his death, and managed to get a name to go with the purple crest. Schmidt had also joined the crusade very briefly, but she had not wanted to go with them.
We left the house. Clearly we needed to visit the library again to learn more about the name and the crest. It would also be worth digging up Schmidt to see if we could work out how he died. (Burlok was very excited at the prospect of digging.) And now we had four missing animals on the list and still no idea of what that was all about.
Still, at least there was a pub.
Saturday 16 November 2019
Diversity Hires, part 2: The Inevitable Sewers
With the mutant problem dealt with, the team turned to more mercenary matters. Gildiril acquired a certain amount of clothing, narrowly avoiding a lice infestation in the process. Frida was excited to find a set of manacles.
They returned to town without significant incident, and headed for a pub where they hoped to follow up a lead. The person they were looking for wasn't there, owing to being a bit dead, but they did manage to track down the people responsible.
There was also a visit to a leather crafter, who thought he was about to be able to retire until the dwarves found out how much gloves actually cost and cancelled the order.
They needed to pay a visit to a bakery. Frida said you could always trust a halfling to find a bakery, and sure enough was able to lead them straight to it, despite it having been abandoned long ago.
Down a hole at the back of the bakery they found themselves in an underground tunnel system. Things encountered included a team of surprisingly friendly sewer mutants, an encounter which did not actually result in significant violence. They also ran into a deranged cultist in a cage, who they decided it was best to leave in the cave.
Finally they encountered a pool containing a hideous tentacled horse thingy, a sight so horrific that some of the team were completely unable to act in the face of it. Not that Frida being unable to throw pebbles vaguely near it was going to make much of a difference. A bit of help from the sewer mutants, on the other hand...
Back on the surface it was time for a shopping trip so everyone could change career, and more importantly, dress like people who hadn't just been down a sewer full of mutants and tentacles.
Friday 15 November 2019
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 4: Homecoming
Yes, little ones, I've come home!
We're moving the tribe. It's not safe to stay any longer, not with the darkness in the forest. Vared is accompanying them for the first leg of the journey.
We have a name for the darkness now. Wendigo.
Shamen Aunold thought we should head closer to the heart of the forest, to see what we can learn and to deal with any hobgoblins we found. They were not always as they are. Once they made fetishes to ward off the evil, like the yetis do. Now they are a part of it.
We camped alongside a group of Ulthani for the first night. Yes, Mittens! The holes are important. Do you want to go accidentally treading in that? Yes, it is a good point, especially for someone who washes their feet with their tongue. The morning was strange. There was music as we awoke - or was that a dream? Really, Mittens? Then it can't have been a dream.
People acted strangely. The Ulthani made a horrible drink with hot water and bitter leaves. Aunold said very cryptic things to one of them. His familiar has a new hat. Yes, Mittens, I'll ask him to make you one too, but I thought you considered clothing to be demeaning? Well, if you say so.
We found the hobgoblin camp we were looking for. I summoned a grig to play some lovely music while Tonk played her drums. It was a lovely party. Yes, most of them died covered in ice. Tonk can do that too. Aunold talked to one of them afterwards, but I don't know what he said. I don't speak goblin.
While Aunold was doing his ritual I looked after Taint. He was quite badly hurt, but I found some good leaves to rub him with and he felt much better afterwards.
I was going to treat Turgut next, but then we were attacked by ettercaps. I know, I don't like them either. One webbed me and I couldn't run away when it hit me, but then I charmed it and it left me alone. It was terrible what they did to the others. I thought they were going to kill Turgut. But we made it somehow, and then the green lady found us.
Aunold thought she was my sister, but she says she isn't. I think she's my mother. Yes, of course I'll ask. The others were surprised my father didn't tell me anything, but they couldn't know that he never spoke.
I understand now, about the blood of the bear, and the blood of the forest. Our ancestors made mistakes when they tried to contain the wendigo's power, and created the ghouls. We have to do better. All these years people have asked who I am, when they should have asked why.
Yes, Mittens. Sleep now. You can keep me warm.
We're moving the tribe. It's not safe to stay any longer, not with the darkness in the forest. Vared is accompanying them for the first leg of the journey.
We have a name for the darkness now. Wendigo.
Shamen Aunold thought we should head closer to the heart of the forest, to see what we can learn and to deal with any hobgoblins we found. They were not always as they are. Once they made fetishes to ward off the evil, like the yetis do. Now they are a part of it.
We camped alongside a group of Ulthani for the first night. Yes, Mittens! The holes are important. Do you want to go accidentally treading in that? Yes, it is a good point, especially for someone who washes their feet with their tongue. The morning was strange. There was music as we awoke - or was that a dream? Really, Mittens? Then it can't have been a dream.
People acted strangely. The Ulthani made a horrible drink with hot water and bitter leaves. Aunold said very cryptic things to one of them. His familiar has a new hat. Yes, Mittens, I'll ask him to make you one too, but I thought you considered clothing to be demeaning? Well, if you say so.
We found the hobgoblin camp we were looking for. I summoned a grig to play some lovely music while Tonk played her drums. It was a lovely party. Yes, most of them died covered in ice. Tonk can do that too. Aunold talked to one of them afterwards, but I don't know what he said. I don't speak goblin.
While Aunold was doing his ritual I looked after Taint. He was quite badly hurt, but I found some good leaves to rub him with and he felt much better afterwards.
I was going to treat Turgut next, but then we were attacked by ettercaps. I know, I don't like them either. One webbed me and I couldn't run away when it hit me, but then I charmed it and it left me alone. It was terrible what they did to the others. I thought they were going to kill Turgut. But we made it somehow, and then the green lady found us.
Aunold thought she was my sister, but she says she isn't. I think she's my mother. Yes, of course I'll ask. The others were surprised my father didn't tell me anything, but they couldn't know that he never spoke.
I understand now, about the blood of the bear, and the blood of the forest. Our ancestors made mistakes when they tried to contain the wendigo's power, and created the ghouls. We have to do better. All these years people have asked who I am, when they should have asked why.
Yes, Mittens. Sleep now. You can keep me warm.
Thursday 14 November 2019
Diversity Hires, part 1: Boat Trip
We played the Warhammer FRP adventure, The Thousand Thrones. Well, kind of.
The campaign makes certain assumptions about the party, not least of which is that there's at least one human player character. This was not the case. In fact, the reason I played a halfling is that I wasn't there for the first session and it became very rapidly apparent they needed someone in the party who had a personality and could do stuff like talking to people.
The GM gave us a lot more XP than the campaign says. This did not in any way result in our characters becoming overpowered. He also skipped some bits that he didn't think were interesting, plus there were times we made party decisions that the book had not accounted for.
And we only actually played as far as the end of chapter six, for, um, reasons.
Anyway, spoilers ahead for The Thousand Thrones.
The party:
Kazgar - a dwarven mercenary. Unusually slender for a dwarf, occasionally mistaken for a halfling. Has tattooed letters on his knuckles, but being illiterate, doesn't know what they say. Literate members of the party feel no need to enlighten him.
Burlok - a dwarven miner. One of the least tough dwarves ever born, despite being more conventionally built than Kazgar.
Mormacar - an elven mercenary. Gay and fabulous, absolutely lethal with a longbow.
Gildiril - an elven scribe. Gets very excited about books.
Frida - a halfling barber-surgeon. Roughly spherical. On a mission to remove everybody's eyebrows, while keeping their hair looking fly.
The team work for a witch hunter by the name of Roderick. Recently there has been a bit of a skill drain in the local area due to a lot of peasant types heading off on a crusade with a child who they seem to think is Sigmar reborn but who is quite clearly a manipulative demon in disguise. As such, a lot of basic jobs like policing are not getting done.
Enter the team.
So far the more martial team members have been on an investigation mission (which completely coincidentally led them through several pubs and an opium den) while the barber and the scribe, who both have the kind of personalities that allow them to interact successfully with other people and the ability to write down anything they hear have been off attending parties on the witch hunter's behalf.
However, the martial team needed to investigate a possible cult in an old fortress in the swamp, and having someone capable of having a conversation with them seemed like a good idea (not to mention the benefits of an extra longbow and the suspicion that Frida's talents might extend beyond conversation and hairdressing.)
Step 1 was to recruit a guide through the swamp, given that nobody had any idea how to survive outdoors. Jekel was friendly and incredibly cheerful, despite (or perhaps because of) having a large chunk of his brain missing. Gildiril purchased one of his pamphlets on the many wonderful and exciting things to be found in the swamp, and everyone went to buy rations. Gildiril bought a selection of alcohol for the journey. Frida brought her own personal barrel of beer on top of that.
They set out through the swamp in two boats. The two elves got in the front boat with Jekel, while the dwarves and halfling (or 'team normal height', as they styled themselves) brought up the rear. Jekel regaled them cheerfully with tales of the many horrifying monsters they could expect to be eaten by in the swamp. They stopped off briefly at some interesting flowers surrounded by bones. Frida was initially going to collect some of their nectar herself (she reckoned it would be useful for medicine) but realising that she was likely to succumb to their effects due to being a fragile halfling asked for someone else to do it. Burlok volunteered, and promptly fell asleep after collecting the nectar. He was dumped back into the boat and the journey continued.
Stopping off at a small island to spend the night, the party were lucky enough to get a good night's sleep thanks to Jekel remembering how to build a proper shelter out of boats and a tarp. Frida spent her watch attempting to shave Gildiril's eyebrows, but unfortunately woke him up and had to stop. She also spotted a large white worm curled up between Burlok and Kazgar for warmth, but having woken up Burlok to deal with it, didn't bother staying awake any longer.
In the morning, Gildiril went to investigate the rotting corpse at the other end of the island, and narrowly avoided being horribly diseased as he retrieved the corpse's equipment.
The second night passed less comfortably, as Jekel had forgotten how to build shelters. Fortunately there were no interruptions, and the next morning they continued to the fortress to investigate the cult.
Three normal looking people were walking past. Attempts to have a conversation with them were hampered when the elves decided to open said conversation with arrows, culminating in Mormacar shooting one man's arm right off. Attempts at interrogation went poorly. Whether they were actually involved in the cult could not be established. Frida patched up the two men who weren't dying from sudden loss of limbs.
They paid a brief visit to the men's fishing boat, which proved similarly unenlightening, then headed back to the fortress.
Inside the fortress they saw a man covered in hair with big crab claws for hands. Aha. Now they were on safer ground. These were definitely mutants and could therefore be killed.
Or at least, they could be killed if you were Mormacar, Gildiril or Kazgar. Frida completely failed to hit anything with her sling, and even Burlok was finding it remarkably difficult to hit anything. On the other hand, the mutants completely failed to damage Frida, while making a substantial hole in Gildiril. Frida patched him up, resisting the urge to remove his eyebrows in the process.
The campaign makes certain assumptions about the party, not least of which is that there's at least one human player character. This was not the case. In fact, the reason I played a halfling is that I wasn't there for the first session and it became very rapidly apparent they needed someone in the party who had a personality and could do stuff like talking to people.
The GM gave us a lot more XP than the campaign says. This did not in any way result in our characters becoming overpowered. He also skipped some bits that he didn't think were interesting, plus there were times we made party decisions that the book had not accounted for.
And we only actually played as far as the end of chapter six, for, um, reasons.
Anyway, spoilers ahead for The Thousand Thrones.
The party:
Kazgar - a dwarven mercenary. Unusually slender for a dwarf, occasionally mistaken for a halfling. Has tattooed letters on his knuckles, but being illiterate, doesn't know what they say. Literate members of the party feel no need to enlighten him.
Burlok - a dwarven miner. One of the least tough dwarves ever born, despite being more conventionally built than Kazgar.
Mormacar - an elven mercenary. Gay and fabulous, absolutely lethal with a longbow.
Gildiril - an elven scribe. Gets very excited about books.
Frida - a halfling barber-surgeon. Roughly spherical. On a mission to remove everybody's eyebrows, while keeping their hair looking fly.
The team work for a witch hunter by the name of Roderick. Recently there has been a bit of a skill drain in the local area due to a lot of peasant types heading off on a crusade with a child who they seem to think is Sigmar reborn but who is quite clearly a manipulative demon in disguise. As such, a lot of basic jobs like policing are not getting done.
Enter the team.
So far the more martial team members have been on an investigation mission (which completely coincidentally led them through several pubs and an opium den) while the barber and the scribe, who both have the kind of personalities that allow them to interact successfully with other people and the ability to write down anything they hear have been off attending parties on the witch hunter's behalf.
However, the martial team needed to investigate a possible cult in an old fortress in the swamp, and having someone capable of having a conversation with them seemed like a good idea (not to mention the benefits of an extra longbow and the suspicion that Frida's talents might extend beyond conversation and hairdressing.)
Step 1 was to recruit a guide through the swamp, given that nobody had any idea how to survive outdoors. Jekel was friendly and incredibly cheerful, despite (or perhaps because of) having a large chunk of his brain missing. Gildiril purchased one of his pamphlets on the many wonderful and exciting things to be found in the swamp, and everyone went to buy rations. Gildiril bought a selection of alcohol for the journey. Frida brought her own personal barrel of beer on top of that.
They set out through the swamp in two boats. The two elves got in the front boat with Jekel, while the dwarves and halfling (or 'team normal height', as they styled themselves) brought up the rear. Jekel regaled them cheerfully with tales of the many horrifying monsters they could expect to be eaten by in the swamp. They stopped off briefly at some interesting flowers surrounded by bones. Frida was initially going to collect some of their nectar herself (she reckoned it would be useful for medicine) but realising that she was likely to succumb to their effects due to being a fragile halfling asked for someone else to do it. Burlok volunteered, and promptly fell asleep after collecting the nectar. He was dumped back into the boat and the journey continued.
Stopping off at a small island to spend the night, the party were lucky enough to get a good night's sleep thanks to Jekel remembering how to build a proper shelter out of boats and a tarp. Frida spent her watch attempting to shave Gildiril's eyebrows, but unfortunately woke him up and had to stop. She also spotted a large white worm curled up between Burlok and Kazgar for warmth, but having woken up Burlok to deal with it, didn't bother staying awake any longer.
In the morning, Gildiril went to investigate the rotting corpse at the other end of the island, and narrowly avoided being horribly diseased as he retrieved the corpse's equipment.
The second night passed less comfortably, as Jekel had forgotten how to build shelters. Fortunately there were no interruptions, and the next morning they continued to the fortress to investigate the cult.
Three normal looking people were walking past. Attempts to have a conversation with them were hampered when the elves decided to open said conversation with arrows, culminating in Mormacar shooting one man's arm right off. Attempts at interrogation went poorly. Whether they were actually involved in the cult could not be established. Frida patched up the two men who weren't dying from sudden loss of limbs.
They paid a brief visit to the men's fishing boat, which proved similarly unenlightening, then headed back to the fortress.
Inside the fortress they saw a man covered in hair with big crab claws for hands. Aha. Now they were on safer ground. These were definitely mutants and could therefore be killed.
Or at least, they could be killed if you were Mormacar, Gildiril or Kazgar. Frida completely failed to hit anything with her sling, and even Burlok was finding it remarkably difficult to hit anything. On the other hand, the mutants completely failed to damage Frida, while making a substantial hole in Gildiril. Frida patched him up, resisting the urge to remove his eyebrows in the process.
Wednesday 13 November 2019
Crew of the Aliya, part 7: The Plot Thickens
Hamsa carried Lila out of the caves and back to the ship, where Gurgeh got her into a stasis pod to keep her stable. Tahir checked his email, and found a general broadcast from a Professor Ilhana requesting aid as her party's supply drop hadn't arrived and they were short of food. Sayah vanished into her cabin to 'do unwise things'.
Tahir flew the Aliya across to Professor Ilhana's camp to drop off a couple of days' worth of food. He got the name of the person who should be delivering their supplies, who they'd lost contact with - Nivrod Motiwali. He then set a course back to Coriolis, where we could find both Motiwali and some high level medical treatment for Lila.
Once we'd docked at the station, Gurgeh managed to wake Lila up for long enough to get some emergency contact details from her. He contacted her family to arrange transfer to a suitable facility, and managed to convince the people who came to collect her that he needed to go with her.
Sayah emerged from a slightly smoky cabin, looking significantly less stressed, and plugged the camera drone they'd retrieved from the caves into Suleiman. With his help she was able to retrieve further video from it, from a few minutes before what they'd been able to watch already.
Not quite trusting her own perception in her altered mental state, Sayah called Tahir and Hamsa over to watch it with her. It showed the team getting the drone into position to fly around the frame, moving the large cylinder that we'd seen pictures of close to the frame, and plugging in the cube. There were a couple of notable points. First, Zhar mentioning not knowing how long the 'hot dust' they found would last. And second, something odd in his eye, like an inky black cloud passing across it.
Hamsa contacted Jinna and learned that Lavim had gone missing. Just walked away, right after dinner. Along with Sayah he went to visit her to see if they could look learn anything there. After a brief and unenlightening chat, Hamsa asked for the toilet, in the hope of being able to retrieve DNA samples while he was in there. Unfortunately, Jinna insisted on accompanying him to show him the way, but this did mean Sayah had the opportunity to collect some hair from the pillow. With Jinna's hair being green, it was easy to know which bed was hers, although there was no way to be certain whose hair we'd actually picked up.
Jinna mentioned one odd thing. Lavim had been demonstrating a new interest in the rimward reach. Magdan was found there, used for anti-gravity, along with some very old ships.
Tahir went to talk to the port officials to see if he could find out if Lavim had left the station. With some guidance from the Traveller he was able to learn that he'd left on a private ship - the Fatima's Bounty.
We met up again back at the ship, but when we arrived, adjudicators were waiting for us. They had questions about Merez. He was dead, and appeared to have grown some extra limbs. Tahir told them what little we knew, being sure to mention the Fatima's Bounty. We were given instructions not to leave the station for 48 hours.
Not long afterwards, Gurgeh got a message that Lila was on her way back. She now had a bio-sculpted arm, and instructions not to use it for the next six days.
We had some time to fill. Sayah did an image search for Islir's tattoo but couldn't find anything. Gurgeh had a look at the samples from the mutated body parts we'd found in the cave, and found that they still appeared to be human. He checked himself to make sure. Still definitely human.
For once, we were on Coriolis at the same time as our patron, Doctor Wana. She invited us to dinner, and we told her about Merez and the shadow monkey. That was when we found out that Merez didn't get our name from her - which made sense, given his syndicate connections. We also told her about the dig site and the frame. Lila explained her theory about it being portal builder stuff, and showed her the cylinder and the camera video. Doctor Wana agreed on seeing the glyphs.
We told her about how we believed there was a second dig site, based on Zhar Baghram's journal. We talked about the keybearers that it mentioned, and she told us about a strange sect with that name, and showed us a keybearer symbol that we recognised as Islir's tattoo. We also told her about Merez and his unfortunate demise. She wasn't entirely upset about that, and said he worked for our Nemesis, Lea.
Many questions still remained. What was the mystic plague we'd heard about? Where were all these extra limbs coming from? Who was the Z.K. who'd been emailing Islir, and was he also a keybearer? Why were there two Lavim Tamm's and what did the alive one want on the Fatima's Bounty? What was in Sabetha's crates of 'medical supplies'?
And how were we going to occupy ourselves for another day on Coriolis when most us were itching to get back to the dig site but weren't allowed to leave?
Tahir flew the Aliya across to Professor Ilhana's camp to drop off a couple of days' worth of food. He got the name of the person who should be delivering their supplies, who they'd lost contact with - Nivrod Motiwali. He then set a course back to Coriolis, where we could find both Motiwali and some high level medical treatment for Lila.
Once we'd docked at the station, Gurgeh managed to wake Lila up for long enough to get some emergency contact details from her. He contacted her family to arrange transfer to a suitable facility, and managed to convince the people who came to collect her that he needed to go with her.
Sayah emerged from a slightly smoky cabin, looking significantly less stressed, and plugged the camera drone they'd retrieved from the caves into Suleiman. With his help she was able to retrieve further video from it, from a few minutes before what they'd been able to watch already.
Not quite trusting her own perception in her altered mental state, Sayah called Tahir and Hamsa over to watch it with her. It showed the team getting the drone into position to fly around the frame, moving the large cylinder that we'd seen pictures of close to the frame, and plugging in the cube. There were a couple of notable points. First, Zhar mentioning not knowing how long the 'hot dust' they found would last. And second, something odd in his eye, like an inky black cloud passing across it.
Hamsa contacted Jinna and learned that Lavim had gone missing. Just walked away, right after dinner. Along with Sayah he went to visit her to see if they could look learn anything there. After a brief and unenlightening chat, Hamsa asked for the toilet, in the hope of being able to retrieve DNA samples while he was in there. Unfortunately, Jinna insisted on accompanying him to show him the way, but this did mean Sayah had the opportunity to collect some hair from the pillow. With Jinna's hair being green, it was easy to know which bed was hers, although there was no way to be certain whose hair we'd actually picked up.
Jinna mentioned one odd thing. Lavim had been demonstrating a new interest in the rimward reach. Magdan was found there, used for anti-gravity, along with some very old ships.
Tahir went to talk to the port officials to see if he could find out if Lavim had left the station. With some guidance from the Traveller he was able to learn that he'd left on a private ship - the Fatima's Bounty.
We met up again back at the ship, but when we arrived, adjudicators were waiting for us. They had questions about Merez. He was dead, and appeared to have grown some extra limbs. Tahir told them what little we knew, being sure to mention the Fatima's Bounty. We were given instructions not to leave the station for 48 hours.
Not long afterwards, Gurgeh got a message that Lila was on her way back. She now had a bio-sculpted arm, and instructions not to use it for the next six days.
We had some time to fill. Sayah did an image search for Islir's tattoo but couldn't find anything. Gurgeh had a look at the samples from the mutated body parts we'd found in the cave, and found that they still appeared to be human. He checked himself to make sure. Still definitely human.
For once, we were on Coriolis at the same time as our patron, Doctor Wana. She invited us to dinner, and we told her about Merez and the shadow monkey. That was when we found out that Merez didn't get our name from her - which made sense, given his syndicate connections. We also told her about the dig site and the frame. Lila explained her theory about it being portal builder stuff, and showed her the cylinder and the camera video. Doctor Wana agreed on seeing the glyphs.
We told her about how we believed there was a second dig site, based on Zhar Baghram's journal. We talked about the keybearers that it mentioned, and she told us about a strange sect with that name, and showed us a keybearer symbol that we recognised as Islir's tattoo. We also told her about Merez and his unfortunate demise. She wasn't entirely upset about that, and said he worked for our Nemesis, Lea.
Many questions still remained. What was the mystic plague we'd heard about? Where were all these extra limbs coming from? Who was the Z.K. who'd been emailing Islir, and was he also a keybearer? Why were there two Lavim Tamm's and what did the alive one want on the Fatima's Bounty? What was in Sabetha's crates of 'medical supplies'?
And how were we going to occupy ourselves for another day on Coriolis when most us were itching to get back to the dig site but weren't allowed to leave?
Tuesday 12 November 2019
Convention planning
My convention calendar for the first half of next year is currently looking like this:
12th January: Role Play Games Day (Northampton)
8th February: Spaghetti ConJunction (Birmingham)
22nd-23rd February: Dudley Bug Ball (Dudley)
14th March: Concrete Cow (Milton Keynes)
9th-10th May: North Star (Sheffield)
30th-31st May: UKGE (Birmingham)
The 'do more conventions' plan is looking pretty good so far. I plan to offer a game at most of these, so I'd better have some ready.
Scum and Villainy
While I love my Firefly scenario, I've run it four times now, so really should write something new. (Although I'll keep it on hand for North Star where I'm likely to meet people I haven't played with before.) Fortunately the other half has given me an idea, so now I'm writing a scenario for a bounty hunter crew. It's technically a sequel to the first game, although it doesn't matter whether anyone has played the previous one or not. Should be fun.
Don't Rest Your Head
I'm writing a scenario using my own setting for this, The Witching Hour. This is a tough one, as the nature of the game means I actually need to make pre-gens, which I've never bothered with for S&V. Also it's going to be horror, not a genre I have a lot of experience in. But there's only one way to fix that.
Delta Green
The bundle I bought came with a bunch of adventures, and they've got good reviews. Since I'm pretty new to Delta Green, it seems like a good idea to run something tried and tested before attempting to write my own.
Coriolis
I love this game and its setting, and I think I could come up with something entertaining and unusual. I'm not sure what that's going to be yet though. Something to think about.
Cyber+Punk
I have the outline of a scenario set around Christmas/New Year for this. I need to get it written so I can try it out around Christmas this year and make sure the game actually works.
That should do for now.
12th January: Role Play Games Day (Northampton)
8th February: Spaghetti ConJunction (Birmingham)
22nd-23rd February: Dudley Bug Ball (Dudley)
14th March: Concrete Cow (Milton Keynes)
9th-10th May: North Star (Sheffield)
30th-31st May: UKGE (Birmingham)
The 'do more conventions' plan is looking pretty good so far. I plan to offer a game at most of these, so I'd better have some ready.
Scum and Villainy
While I love my Firefly scenario, I've run it four times now, so really should write something new. (Although I'll keep it on hand for North Star where I'm likely to meet people I haven't played with before.) Fortunately the other half has given me an idea, so now I'm writing a scenario for a bounty hunter crew. It's technically a sequel to the first game, although it doesn't matter whether anyone has played the previous one or not. Should be fun.
Don't Rest Your Head
I'm writing a scenario using my own setting for this, The Witching Hour. This is a tough one, as the nature of the game means I actually need to make pre-gens, which I've never bothered with for S&V. Also it's going to be horror, not a genre I have a lot of experience in. But there's only one way to fix that.
Delta Green
The bundle I bought came with a bunch of adventures, and they've got good reviews. Since I'm pretty new to Delta Green, it seems like a good idea to run something tried and tested before attempting to write my own.
Coriolis
I love this game and its setting, and I think I could come up with something entertaining and unusual. I'm not sure what that's going to be yet though. Something to think about.
Cyber+Punk
I have the outline of a scenario set around Christmas/New Year for this. I need to get it written so I can try it out around Christmas this year and make sure the game actually works.
That should do for now.
Monday 11 November 2019
The Player Massacre of 2010
Looking back over my notes and journals, I think the official name of the campaign was 'the search for the eight-fold key', but it wasn't long before it got the name by which it's been known ever since: The Player Massacre of 2010.
There are some valuable lessons to be learned from this campaign, which I'll discuss at the bottom of the post, but first, here's how it all went down...
Month 1
We started out as a party of five:
Ari the halfling sorcerer
Volrek the human summoner
Anya the human oracle
Lyzara the elf witch
Zid the elf rogue
We should have realised how things were going to go when early on we encountered an entire village of werewolves. Session 3 is where we lost Zid the rogue, killed by a really medium werewolf.
Volrek got retired at this point (the player was bored of playing cheerleader to his eidolon), and we also gained an extra player.
Month 2
We now had a party of six:
Ari the halfling sorcerer
Anya the human oracle
Lyzara the elf witch
Zordlon the human wizard
Victor the TBD (I forget his class and race due to what happened to him later.)
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Session 6 saw us encounter a giant exploding poison zombie snake, which is where we lost my character, Lyzara the witch, and by extension, all the plot the GM had been planning for her.
At this point we made a new rule for the GM, who we already knew was a little too fond of stacking templates after the fiendish albino vampire winged drow in the previous campaign. He was not allowed to use any monster with five or more words in its description.
Month 3
The current party:
Ari the halfling sorcerer
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard
Victor the see below
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Jekila the elf alchemist
In session 11, Victor ended up turning into an evil skeleton in order to save Tanuruk's life. Technically not quite dead, but not entirely alive either.
Lyzara's replacement, Jekila, lasted exactly as long as her predecessor. She was exploded by a rakshasa's fireball in session 12, along with Ari.
Month 4
A couple more replacements later we had:
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard
Victor the evil skeleton
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Ariadna the half-orc inquisitor
Ugruk the gnome rage prophet
Anya was acting as party brain, as the only person who actually remembered anything about what this quest was actually about.
Two sessions later, Victor died properly, after being chewed up by a giant flying worm with legs. I should have called the GM out on that one. That's five words.
Month 5
Only one change this time:
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Ariadna the half-orc inquisitor
Ugruk the gnome rage prophet
Valreon the human summoner
Things went relatively well until I missed a session and came back to find Ugruk and Tanuruk had both died, Zordlon had been turned into a statue, and Valreon had been arrested for grave robbing.
Month 6
With Valreon's player having to quit the game the party now consisted of:
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard (we managed to get a scroll to fix him)
Ariadna the half-orc inquisitor
Vizier Khan the human sorcerer
Utah the human monk
Right at the end of the final session, six months after we started this game, Anya was finally killed. Thankfully, by this point we were able to bring her back.
---
The over-arching storyline of this campaign was supposed to be collecting eight magical daggers. I have no idea why. Trying to maintain any kind of consistent story when the characters kept being replaced with new ones with no idea what was going on just didn't work. If you want to run a long-term plot that the PCs are advancing rather than just reacting to, they need to have some investment in it, and none of us did.
Character development was also minimal. I had plans for Lyzara, and so did the GM, but then she was gone, and all her story with her. I tried again with Jekila, and the same result. My goal with Ariadna was no longer to create an interesting character with plot hooks the GM could work with, but just to create a character who could actually survive the amount of damage being thrown her way. If you want to run plot that's personal to your PCs and allows them to develop, you need to let them live long enough for that to happen.
We did enjoy the game (we played it for six months, after all) but looking back I can't help but feel a little sad for all the stories that got suddenly cut off.
The chief lesson the GM learned from all this is that in a heroic type game like D&D or Pathfinder, not every encounter has to be challenging. It's fine for most encounters to finish with the players victorious and not all on the brink of death. Because unless you've actually signed up to play the Tomb of Horrors, D&D and Pathfinder aren't about the GM versus the players. They're about telling the stories of heroes.
There are some valuable lessons to be learned from this campaign, which I'll discuss at the bottom of the post, but first, here's how it all went down...
Month 1
We started out as a party of five:
Ari the halfling sorcerer
Volrek the human summoner
Anya the human oracle
Lyzara the elf witch
Zid the elf rogue
We should have realised how things were going to go when early on we encountered an entire village of werewolves. Session 3 is where we lost Zid the rogue, killed by a really medium werewolf.
Volrek got retired at this point (the player was bored of playing cheerleader to his eidolon), and we also gained an extra player.
Month 2
We now had a party of six:
Ari the halfling sorcerer
Anya the human oracle
Lyzara the elf witch
Zordlon the human wizard
Victor the TBD (I forget his class and race due to what happened to him later.)
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Session 6 saw us encounter a giant exploding poison zombie snake, which is where we lost my character, Lyzara the witch, and by extension, all the plot the GM had been planning for her.
At this point we made a new rule for the GM, who we already knew was a little too fond of stacking templates after the fiendish albino vampire winged drow in the previous campaign. He was not allowed to use any monster with five or more words in its description.
Month 3
The current party:
Ari the halfling sorcerer
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard
Victor the see below
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Jekila the elf alchemist
In session 11, Victor ended up turning into an evil skeleton in order to save Tanuruk's life. Technically not quite dead, but not entirely alive either.
Lyzara's replacement, Jekila, lasted exactly as long as her predecessor. She was exploded by a rakshasa's fireball in session 12, along with Ari.
Month 4
A couple more replacements later we had:
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard
Victor the evil skeleton
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Ariadna the half-orc inquisitor
Ugruk the gnome rage prophet
Anya was acting as party brain, as the only person who actually remembered anything about what this quest was actually about.
Two sessions later, Victor died properly, after being chewed up by a giant flying worm with legs. I should have called the GM out on that one. That's five words.
Month 5
Only one change this time:
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard
Tanuruk the half-orc barbarian
Ariadna the half-orc inquisitor
Ugruk the gnome rage prophet
Valreon the human summoner
Things went relatively well until I missed a session and came back to find Ugruk and Tanuruk had both died, Zordlon had been turned into a statue, and Valreon had been arrested for grave robbing.
Month 6
With Valreon's player having to quit the game the party now consisted of:
Anya the human oracle
Zordlon the human wizard (we managed to get a scroll to fix him)
Ariadna the half-orc inquisitor
Vizier Khan the human sorcerer
Utah the human monk
Right at the end of the final session, six months after we started this game, Anya was finally killed. Thankfully, by this point we were able to bring her back.
---
The over-arching storyline of this campaign was supposed to be collecting eight magical daggers. I have no idea why. Trying to maintain any kind of consistent story when the characters kept being replaced with new ones with no idea what was going on just didn't work. If you want to run a long-term plot that the PCs are advancing rather than just reacting to, they need to have some investment in it, and none of us did.
Character development was also minimal. I had plans for Lyzara, and so did the GM, but then she was gone, and all her story with her. I tried again with Jekila, and the same result. My goal with Ariadna was no longer to create an interesting character with plot hooks the GM could work with, but just to create a character who could actually survive the amount of damage being thrown her way. If you want to run plot that's personal to your PCs and allows them to develop, you need to let them live long enough for that to happen.
We did enjoy the game (we played it for six months, after all) but looking back I can't help but feel a little sad for all the stories that got suddenly cut off.
The chief lesson the GM learned from all this is that in a heroic type game like D&D or Pathfinder, not every encounter has to be challenging. It's fine for most encounters to finish with the players victorious and not all on the brink of death. Because unless you've actually signed up to play the Tomb of Horrors, D&D and Pathfinder aren't about the GM versus the players. They're about telling the stories of heroes.
Saturday 9 November 2019
Crew of the Aliya: A friend in need.
Another between-games vignette. I write these to get a deeper insight into my character's motivations, whereas the main write-ups are more about the story, and reminding us all what happened at the previous session.
The Gambler holds out a hand, inviting you to roll the dice. To take a risk. To take a chance.
She'd taken a risk, going down that tunnel. She'd taken a Vulcan carbine too. But it had been going pretty well until they found the first corpse.
Was it the first dead body she'd seen? Right now she wasn't even sure. But it was definitely the first one she'd seen with a third arm, scaly and clawed, growing out of its chest. She'd hung back while the others investigated, and managed not to throw up, although if she hadn't been distracted by that damaged tabula, it might have been harder to avoid.
By the time they got to the third corpse it was almost a relief. Just a dead person, stabbed, with no abnormal appendages. And by now Lila had found something that interested her, and her infectious excitement was enough to keep Sayah going.
But then Tahir started acting strange. Cautious. And while Sayah hadn't noticed anything else untoward, Mr Reckless himself acting cautious meant something very bad was about to happen. She tried to stop Lila doing what she was doing and get her away from there. But what was the point of trying to get between Lila and portal builder technology?
And then the corpse started to move, and every instinct was screaming at her to get away, but it was already reaching out for Lila. And so she had embraced the Gambler. She took a risk. She took a shot.
Her hands were shaking. The gun felt heavy and unwieldy. She couldn't afford to miss now. At best, the thing would keep going, and at worst, she could hit Lila. She offered a desperate prayer to the Gambler, to let this risk pay off.
The shot landed. Not good enough. The thing was hurt, but still moving, and now it had Lila by the arm, teeth and claws rending through flesh and sinew.
Take a risk. She fired again, and this time there was no wavering. Her aim was true, and the thing collapsed back to the floor, even as Lila was going into shock as the blood poured from her ruined arm.
A voice, which turned out to be her own, screamed for Gurgeh. She didn't even care that there was another mobile corpse that the others were dealing with. It didn't take a medicurge to see that Lila was bleeding to death.
After a few of the longest seconds of Sayah's life, Gurgeh was at their side, staunching the flow of blood. She let out a breath she didn't even know she'd been holding. Lila was safe, for now, so long as they could get her back to the ship straight away.
Which was when the first corpse made another appearance.
Her first shot went wide. But by the second she'd found her eye again. The others had weakened it, and her shot found its mark. The corpse fell, lifeless once more.
She had embraced the Gambler, and the Gambler had blessed her. But Lila had not been so lucky. Sayah wasn't strong, but Lila was slight enough for two people to carry her between them without too much strain. Blood spattered and sick with both worry and nausea, Sayah was already thinking longingly of the Aliya. The medlab, and the washroom, and the chapel. And her stash.
She hadn't expected to need it. This should have been a nice quiet archaeology expedition. It had been a moment's whim, while out shopping for an oud, that had sent her in search of less wholesome pleasures than music. Now she was grateful for that whim. Relief awaited them on the Aliya, in the medlab for Lila, and for Sayah, in the sweet smoke of the opor pipe.
The Gambler holds out a hand, inviting you to roll the dice. To take a risk. To take a chance.
She'd taken a risk, going down that tunnel. She'd taken a Vulcan carbine too. But it had been going pretty well until they found the first corpse.
Was it the first dead body she'd seen? Right now she wasn't even sure. But it was definitely the first one she'd seen with a third arm, scaly and clawed, growing out of its chest. She'd hung back while the others investigated, and managed not to throw up, although if she hadn't been distracted by that damaged tabula, it might have been harder to avoid.
By the time they got to the third corpse it was almost a relief. Just a dead person, stabbed, with no abnormal appendages. And by now Lila had found something that interested her, and her infectious excitement was enough to keep Sayah going.
But then Tahir started acting strange. Cautious. And while Sayah hadn't noticed anything else untoward, Mr Reckless himself acting cautious meant something very bad was about to happen. She tried to stop Lila doing what she was doing and get her away from there. But what was the point of trying to get between Lila and portal builder technology?
And then the corpse started to move, and every instinct was screaming at her to get away, but it was already reaching out for Lila. And so she had embraced the Gambler. She took a risk. She took a shot.
Her hands were shaking. The gun felt heavy and unwieldy. She couldn't afford to miss now. At best, the thing would keep going, and at worst, she could hit Lila. She offered a desperate prayer to the Gambler, to let this risk pay off.
The shot landed. Not good enough. The thing was hurt, but still moving, and now it had Lila by the arm, teeth and claws rending through flesh and sinew.
Take a risk. She fired again, and this time there was no wavering. Her aim was true, and the thing collapsed back to the floor, even as Lila was going into shock as the blood poured from her ruined arm.
A voice, which turned out to be her own, screamed for Gurgeh. She didn't even care that there was another mobile corpse that the others were dealing with. It didn't take a medicurge to see that Lila was bleeding to death.
After a few of the longest seconds of Sayah's life, Gurgeh was at their side, staunching the flow of blood. She let out a breath she didn't even know she'd been holding. Lila was safe, for now, so long as they could get her back to the ship straight away.
Which was when the first corpse made another appearance.
Her first shot went wide. But by the second she'd found her eye again. The others had weakened it, and her shot found its mark. The corpse fell, lifeless once more.
She had embraced the Gambler, and the Gambler had blessed her. But Lila had not been so lucky. Sayah wasn't strong, but Lila was slight enough for two people to carry her between them without too much strain. Blood spattered and sick with both worry and nausea, Sayah was already thinking longingly of the Aliya. The medlab, and the washroom, and the chapel. And her stash.
She hadn't expected to need it. This should have been a nice quiet archaeology expedition. It had been a moment's whim, while out shopping for an oud, that had sent her in search of less wholesome pleasures than music. Now she was grateful for that whim. Relief awaited them on the Aliya, in the medlab for Lila, and for Sayah, in the sweet smoke of the opor pipe.
Friday 8 November 2019
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 3: Darkness Awakens
I was a bit ill for parts of this game, so did miss a bit. The GM magically revived me with sugary coffee.
Gather round. We spoke to the tribe elders about Gunther FrostTouched. We asked the gnome too, Tonk...yes, I like her too. It was long ago for us, but elves live a long time, and there is one in the mountains who is old enough to remember.
No, the journey was fine. Two days to get there. We didn't see the yetis. We spoke to the elf who was a friend of Gunther back when he was alive. He knew about the darkness and the curse. I was right. When we destroyed the ghouls, the darkness was able to awaken again. But what could we do, when they were dragging people away and eating them? No, I don't want to be eaten either.
The elf was leaving his cave to follow the yetis down the mountain. No, I still didn't see them. They're very hard to find in the snow. On the way I heard a strange noise. Like birds, but angrier. I summoned a gremlin to help me but the poor thing had so much trouble with his darts. Once Turgut had dealt with the big dinosaur, the little ones ran away, so I gave the gremlin a hug to comfort him before he had to go.
There was trouble when we got back to the forest. Blood Druids were walking parallel to us. No, they weren't friendly like the Ulthani. They all charged at Turgut, so I summoned a sprite to dazzle them all. It worked a bit too well, and Turgut got dazzled too, but Aunold sent most of them to sleep and then I just had to charm the leader to get him to talk. Yes, he was quite nice really. But I went to play with my sprite while the others killed him.
Then I heard a terrible noise. I can't describe it. It was the worst thing I ever heard. I was so scared I ran away. Yes, of course they came after me. We're a tribe. I know, some of them think I'm strange. But they are my people. Just like you.
Gather round. We spoke to the tribe elders about Gunther FrostTouched. We asked the gnome too, Tonk...yes, I like her too. It was long ago for us, but elves live a long time, and there is one in the mountains who is old enough to remember.
No, the journey was fine. Two days to get there. We didn't see the yetis. We spoke to the elf who was a friend of Gunther back when he was alive. He knew about the darkness and the curse. I was right. When we destroyed the ghouls, the darkness was able to awaken again. But what could we do, when they were dragging people away and eating them? No, I don't want to be eaten either.
The elf was leaving his cave to follow the yetis down the mountain. No, I still didn't see them. They're very hard to find in the snow. On the way I heard a strange noise. Like birds, but angrier. I summoned a gremlin to help me but the poor thing had so much trouble with his darts. Once Turgut had dealt with the big dinosaur, the little ones ran away, so I gave the gremlin a hug to comfort him before he had to go.
There was trouble when we got back to the forest. Blood Druids were walking parallel to us. No, they weren't friendly like the Ulthani. They all charged at Turgut, so I summoned a sprite to dazzle them all. It worked a bit too well, and Turgut got dazzled too, but Aunold sent most of them to sleep and then I just had to charm the leader to get him to talk. Yes, he was quite nice really. But I went to play with my sprite while the others killed him.
Then I heard a terrible noise. I can't describe it. It was the worst thing I ever heard. I was so scared I ran away. Yes, of course they came after me. We're a tribe. I know, some of them think I'm strange. But they are my people. Just like you.
Thursday 7 November 2019
First time playing online
Until this week, all of my tabletop roleplaying has been done face to face, most of the time literally at a table. (I've done play-by-post type games on forums, but it's not really the same thing.) However, on Monday I had my first go at playing a tabletop RPG online.
We normally play on Tuesdays at the MK RPG club, but this week the GM was unavailable, so we agreed to try a remote game the night before. We already had a Discord set up, which handled the voice chat. Everything else was done on Fantasy Grounds.
I was slightly concerned about the chat, it being more difficult to deal with interruptions and people talking over each other when you can't see anyone in person. But it actually worked well, and had the additional benefit that Discord lets you adjust each person's volume individually, so I had the quiet people turned up to the max and the loud people turned down a little. I could hear everyone clearly without seeing their faces.
The only problem was recognising voices. While the GM has a distinctive accent, and I obviously know my husband's voice, telling some of the others apart was a little tricky at times.
The GM uses a lot of handouts in this game, and that's the area where Fantasy Grounds really helped. Rather than having to print everything out, he could just push the images onto our screens. Eventually my screen became so littered I was starting to wish I had a second monitor, but it was certainly better than sharing one paper copy between the table. (We are absolutely the kind of group who like to over-analyse images.)
Fantasy Grounds also provides a battle map, which the GM had decorated in advance. We were all able to move our own tokens around, and didn't have to worry about anyone with twitchy legs suddenly shaking the table and knocking everything awry. (You know who you are.) Along with a turn order display, this all helped make the combat go smoothly. Turn order displays are something we could really do with in actual tabletop games, but I've rarely seen a GM actually use one. Something to think about if I run a game with turn based combat.
The dice roller also worked well, and it was very convenient just being able to click a button on the character sheet to set the correct number of dice rather than having to count them each time. The RNG hated us, while absolutely adoring the GM's monsters - but it's not like that kind of thing doesn't happen with real dice.
To me, the biggest downsides are the amount of work the GM had to put in on top of the normal game prep, and the fact that he had to have the Ultimate version of the software to be able to host a game for the rest of us using the demo version.
Being at my computer the whole time I found both a negative and positive thing. On the one hand, it's full of distractions, even more so than my phone, and there was a bit of extra effort required to keep focussed on the game screen. On the other, it made it very easy to make brief notes throughout the session, meaning I got the game write-up done in record time and didn't have to keep adding bits I'd forgotten.
While I can't see any of this replacing the cameraderie of getting around the table, it worked better than I expected, and I feel confident that I could enjoy playing online games in the future.
We normally play on Tuesdays at the MK RPG club, but this week the GM was unavailable, so we agreed to try a remote game the night before. We already had a Discord set up, which handled the voice chat. Everything else was done on Fantasy Grounds.
I was slightly concerned about the chat, it being more difficult to deal with interruptions and people talking over each other when you can't see anyone in person. But it actually worked well, and had the additional benefit that Discord lets you adjust each person's volume individually, so I had the quiet people turned up to the max and the loud people turned down a little. I could hear everyone clearly without seeing their faces.
The only problem was recognising voices. While the GM has a distinctive accent, and I obviously know my husband's voice, telling some of the others apart was a little tricky at times.
The GM uses a lot of handouts in this game, and that's the area where Fantasy Grounds really helped. Rather than having to print everything out, he could just push the images onto our screens. Eventually my screen became so littered I was starting to wish I had a second monitor, but it was certainly better than sharing one paper copy between the table. (We are absolutely the kind of group who like to over-analyse images.)
Fantasy Grounds also provides a battle map, which the GM had decorated in advance. We were all able to move our own tokens around, and didn't have to worry about anyone with twitchy legs suddenly shaking the table and knocking everything awry. (You know who you are.) Along with a turn order display, this all helped make the combat go smoothly. Turn order displays are something we could really do with in actual tabletop games, but I've rarely seen a GM actually use one. Something to think about if I run a game with turn based combat.
The dice roller also worked well, and it was very convenient just being able to click a button on the character sheet to set the correct number of dice rather than having to count them each time. The RNG hated us, while absolutely adoring the GM's monsters - but it's not like that kind of thing doesn't happen with real dice.
To me, the biggest downsides are the amount of work the GM had to put in on top of the normal game prep, and the fact that he had to have the Ultimate version of the software to be able to host a game for the rest of us using the demo version.
Being at my computer the whole time I found both a negative and positive thing. On the one hand, it's full of distractions, even more so than my phone, and there was a bit of extra effort required to keep focussed on the game screen. On the other, it made it very easy to make brief notes throughout the session, meaning I got the game write-up done in record time and didn't have to keep adding bits I'd forgotten.
While I can't see any of this replacing the cameraderie of getting around the table, it worked better than I expected, and I feel confident that I could enjoy playing online games in the future.
Wednesday 6 November 2019
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 2: Mushroom Mushroom
The game is a little slow at the moment because we're all learning Pathfinder 2e together. Things will probably speed up in future games.
Hello, little ones. Yes, it's time.
We went back to the barrow, with the priest this time, but he couldn't read the stone slab either. He made a copy to look at later.
There were many fungus leshy around the barrow. I'd never seen so many at one time before. The others found them unsettling, but I though they were beautiful - yes, just like you. Some leaf leshy joined us. I asked Mittens to climb a tree and tell us if she could see anything interesting, but the leaf leshy made her fall down again. No, that wasn't very nice. Poor Mittens.
We left the barrow and found a hobgoblin camp. Yes, very big and scary, and they had a giant pig with them. But the hobgoblins were mostly asleep and the pig was away from their fire, so we attacked them. Yes, they're all gone now. My poor mitflit got flattened when the pig charged in though.
What did I do? Well, of course I charmed the pig and lead it away into the woods where it could be free and not trample anyone else to death.
The writing? Yes, we all looked at it when we got back. I think we have it worked out now. It's about how our tribe once fought the Broken Skull tribe. And then a darkness awoke at the heart of the Greenwood. Maybe the Broken Skull were the people who became the ghouls in the barrow? There was something about a curse, and something about the blood of the forest and the blood of the bear entwined.
I know. I'm scared. But I have to learn more.
Hello, little ones. Yes, it's time.
We went back to the barrow, with the priest this time, but he couldn't read the stone slab either. He made a copy to look at later.
There were many fungus leshy around the barrow. I'd never seen so many at one time before. The others found them unsettling, but I though they were beautiful - yes, just like you. Some leaf leshy joined us. I asked Mittens to climb a tree and tell us if she could see anything interesting, but the leaf leshy made her fall down again. No, that wasn't very nice. Poor Mittens.
We left the barrow and found a hobgoblin camp. Yes, very big and scary, and they had a giant pig with them. But the hobgoblins were mostly asleep and the pig was away from their fire, so we attacked them. Yes, they're all gone now. My poor mitflit got flattened when the pig charged in though.
What did I do? Well, of course I charmed the pig and lead it away into the woods where it could be free and not trample anyone else to death.
The writing? Yes, we all looked at it when we got back. I think we have it worked out now. It's about how our tribe once fought the Broken Skull tribe. And then a darkness awoke at the heart of the Greenwood. Maybe the Broken Skull were the people who became the ghouls in the barrow? There was something about a curse, and something about the blood of the forest and the blood of the bear entwined.
I know. I'm scared. But I have to learn more.
Tuesday 5 November 2019
Crew of the Aliya, part 6: Going Underground
Amongst the possessions of the dig team, we did find one interesting item. A diary. It described finding and opening an entrance, finding the shadow monkey statue that Lavim had had, and also a cylinder covered in writing that was described as Builders' script.
We decided it was time to investigate the third tunnel. Leaving Alqadi behind, we descended into darkness.
We first came to a large diamond shape room, which lead into a corridor. The floor appeared to be some kind of black marble, streaked with blue. Our path took us down a series of long curved paths, with either pebbly, blue streaked or gold streaked marble, and short straight paths of plain black stone. It seemed like we were doubling back on ourselves several times. There were also some sticky pads and tape on the floor, as if someone had been trying to leave some kind of marking. What did it mean?
The corridor walls were extremely smooth. No tool marks, no seams. It seemed like the stone had somehow been melted and moulded rather than carved. Who had the technology to create something like this?
Remembering the game of Dungeons and Dragons they'd played while in transit on the Aliya, Sayah suggested it might be a gelatinous cube. Did those really exist? We all hoped not.
Lila deployed her environmental scanner, after noticing some odd features of both the tunnel and the sticky pads. She found that there was a slight heat differential between the wall and the floor. We were beginning to suspect that somehow these tunnel sections could move.
Gurgeh's drone was scouting ahead when its camera picked up something unusual. A corpse.
Tahir, wearing his exosuit, went in to investigate. The man was dressed for digging in overalls. He looked dry and dessicated, but more obviously, had a third arm growing out of his chest with scaly greyish skin and three long clawed fingers. The name badge he wore identified him as one of the dig team, Islir. There was also a strange tattoo on his arm, which Lila thought looked familiar, and a small amber cylinder in his hand with markings that Gurgeh thought looked like those on the stone cylinder that the dig team had found.
Gurgeh and Sayah, the latter of whom was refusing to get any closer to the corpse than necessary, found a damaged tabula on the floor. With some work they managed to get it up and running sufficiently to break into its messaging app. The tabula had clearly belonged to Islir, who had been messaging someone identified only as Z.K.
Z.K. appeared to have some kind of ulterior motive, whoever they might be. From the messages, it looked like they were paying Islir to scare away the others once the artefact had been found. Islir's instructions were to activate a cylinder, then wait for the others to panic and leave. Islir was concerned that whatever it was might not prove effective on the guard, but was reassured by Z.K. that he only had to fire on the others to make them fear Sarcophagoi and flee.
Obviously things had not gone according to plan for Islir.
We were approaching the centre of the spiraling tunnel now. Tahir thought about the Kuan system, and realised that the long curved passages could match up with the planets and asteroid belts orbiting the star. Realising that the tunnels with the pebbly floors matched up with the asteroid belts convinced us that he was correct. Perhaps this entire tunnel system could move?
We had reached the centre. A large, long room with eight tall pillars, and at the end of it a strange frame covered in glyphs. And more corpses.
The first was by the first pillar. A gun lay beside him, and one of his legs had turned into a tangle of tentacles with hooked suckets. It looked like he'd attempted to shoot the tentacles, but judging by the marks on his throat, the tentacles had attacked and killed him.
More worryingly, he looked exactly like Lavim Tamm.
The second corpse lay by the frame. A woman this time, presumably Frolia from the dig team. No extra body parts on her, just a massive stab wound. And nearby we found a camera drone.
The battery was almost dead, but Hamsa had one in his knife that would do the job. We watched the recording. Islir shouted something about something being 'in the walls'. Then a shadowy form appeared, stabbing Frolia, attacking Lavim and Islir. And Zhar falling out of the picture as the lights went out.
Something terrible had happened here. We needed to find out what.
Lila, fascinated by anything related to the portal builders as usual, examined the frame. The glyphs looked familiar, similar to the ones on the amber cylinder. There was an indentation on the frame, meant to hold a cube, and the video had shown a cube on the frame. Sayah suggested searching the two corpses to see if they had it (while refusing to go near them herself). No luck, but with some careful use of the cylinder, Lila managed to get some of the glyphs on the frame to light up.
Tahir and Hamsa were struck with a sudden sense of foreboding. Sayah felt fine, but seeing the normally fearless Tahir acting nervous made her worry too, and she attempted to persuade Lila to put down the cylinder and walk away. But it was too late. The corpse of Frolia sat up and grabbed Lila's leg.
Frolia wasn't the only corpse to wake up. The tentacled remains of Lavim got up and went for Tahir, who was very glad to still be wearing his exosuit. While Gurgeh and Tahir battled Lavim, Sayah shot Frolia, but was unable to stop her from biting off Lila's arm. Hamsa joined the fight, and Sayah finally finished off Frolia while yelling for Gurgeh to come and help Lila.
With Lavim's corpse dealt with, Gurgeh dashed over, and with the aid of Tahir's trauma kit, was able to stabilise Lila. All the same, it was critical that we got her back to the Aliya's medlab as soon as possible. So it's unfortunate that at this point the corpse of Islir came charging into the room.
Everyone (except Lila) opened fire. It threw itself at Hamsa, but being made of slightly sterner stuff than Lila he survived the assault long enough for the others to finish taking it down, destroying one of its legs in the process.
We were still a corpse or two short of a full dig team. We would just have to hope we didn't meet any more of them before we got back to the Aliya.
We decided it was time to investigate the third tunnel. Leaving Alqadi behind, we descended into darkness.
We first came to a large diamond shape room, which lead into a corridor. The floor appeared to be some kind of black marble, streaked with blue. Our path took us down a series of long curved paths, with either pebbly, blue streaked or gold streaked marble, and short straight paths of plain black stone. It seemed like we were doubling back on ourselves several times. There were also some sticky pads and tape on the floor, as if someone had been trying to leave some kind of marking. What did it mean?
The corridor walls were extremely smooth. No tool marks, no seams. It seemed like the stone had somehow been melted and moulded rather than carved. Who had the technology to create something like this?
Remembering the game of Dungeons and Dragons they'd played while in transit on the Aliya, Sayah suggested it might be a gelatinous cube. Did those really exist? We all hoped not.
Lila deployed her environmental scanner, after noticing some odd features of both the tunnel and the sticky pads. She found that there was a slight heat differential between the wall and the floor. We were beginning to suspect that somehow these tunnel sections could move.
Gurgeh's drone was scouting ahead when its camera picked up something unusual. A corpse.
Tahir, wearing his exosuit, went in to investigate. The man was dressed for digging in overalls. He looked dry and dessicated, but more obviously, had a third arm growing out of his chest with scaly greyish skin and three long clawed fingers. The name badge he wore identified him as one of the dig team, Islir. There was also a strange tattoo on his arm, which Lila thought looked familiar, and a small amber cylinder in his hand with markings that Gurgeh thought looked like those on the stone cylinder that the dig team had found.
Gurgeh and Sayah, the latter of whom was refusing to get any closer to the corpse than necessary, found a damaged tabula on the floor. With some work they managed to get it up and running sufficiently to break into its messaging app. The tabula had clearly belonged to Islir, who had been messaging someone identified only as Z.K.
Z.K. appeared to have some kind of ulterior motive, whoever they might be. From the messages, it looked like they were paying Islir to scare away the others once the artefact had been found. Islir's instructions were to activate a cylinder, then wait for the others to panic and leave. Islir was concerned that whatever it was might not prove effective on the guard, but was reassured by Z.K. that he only had to fire on the others to make them fear Sarcophagoi and flee.
Obviously things had not gone according to plan for Islir.
We were approaching the centre of the spiraling tunnel now. Tahir thought about the Kuan system, and realised that the long curved passages could match up with the planets and asteroid belts orbiting the star. Realising that the tunnels with the pebbly floors matched up with the asteroid belts convinced us that he was correct. Perhaps this entire tunnel system could move?
We had reached the centre. A large, long room with eight tall pillars, and at the end of it a strange frame covered in glyphs. And more corpses.
The first was by the first pillar. A gun lay beside him, and one of his legs had turned into a tangle of tentacles with hooked suckets. It looked like he'd attempted to shoot the tentacles, but judging by the marks on his throat, the tentacles had attacked and killed him.
More worryingly, he looked exactly like Lavim Tamm.
The second corpse lay by the frame. A woman this time, presumably Frolia from the dig team. No extra body parts on her, just a massive stab wound. And nearby we found a camera drone.
The battery was almost dead, but Hamsa had one in his knife that would do the job. We watched the recording. Islir shouted something about something being 'in the walls'. Then a shadowy form appeared, stabbing Frolia, attacking Lavim and Islir. And Zhar falling out of the picture as the lights went out.
Something terrible had happened here. We needed to find out what.
Lila, fascinated by anything related to the portal builders as usual, examined the frame. The glyphs looked familiar, similar to the ones on the amber cylinder. There was an indentation on the frame, meant to hold a cube, and the video had shown a cube on the frame. Sayah suggested searching the two corpses to see if they had it (while refusing to go near them herself). No luck, but with some careful use of the cylinder, Lila managed to get some of the glyphs on the frame to light up.
Tahir and Hamsa were struck with a sudden sense of foreboding. Sayah felt fine, but seeing the normally fearless Tahir acting nervous made her worry too, and she attempted to persuade Lila to put down the cylinder and walk away. But it was too late. The corpse of Frolia sat up and grabbed Lila's leg.
Frolia wasn't the only corpse to wake up. The tentacled remains of Lavim got up and went for Tahir, who was very glad to still be wearing his exosuit. While Gurgeh and Tahir battled Lavim, Sayah shot Frolia, but was unable to stop her from biting off Lila's arm. Hamsa joined the fight, and Sayah finally finished off Frolia while yelling for Gurgeh to come and help Lila.
With Lavim's corpse dealt with, Gurgeh dashed over, and with the aid of Tahir's trauma kit, was able to stabilise Lila. All the same, it was critical that we got her back to the Aliya's medlab as soon as possible. So it's unfortunate that at this point the corpse of Islir came charging into the room.
Everyone (except Lila) opened fire. It threw itself at Hamsa, but being made of slightly sterner stuff than Lila he survived the assault long enough for the others to finish taking it down, destroying one of its legs in the process.
We were still a corpse or two short of a full dig team. We would just have to hope we didn't meet any more of them before we got back to the Aliya.
Monday 4 November 2019
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 1: Ghouls and Ghasts
Introducing Ylva Ulfsdottir, my new Pathfinder 2e character. She's a fey-blooded sorcerer. Or 'forest witch', as she prefers to put it. Our GM is aiming for something a bit more dark and gritty than your typical Pathfinder adventure - although with us lot involved, who knows how it's going to go?
It's at least twenty-five winters since Ulf went hunting in the greenwood and disappeared.
Parties went out looking for him when he first failed to come home. One of the tribe's best trackers managed to pick up his trail, and for a while was making good progress, but as the tracker got further off the beaten path, he and his companions found themselves increasingly confused, and ultimately had to abandon the attempt and follow the setting sun until they got back home. Ulf was given up for lost.
Imagine everyone's surprise when a few years later he reappeared, carrying a little girl.
Ulf never spoke of what happened in the woods. In fact, he never spoke again. The girl was too young to give any coherent account, beyond saying that her name was Ylva. She looked enough like Ulf that nobody had any doubt who her father was, although there was much speculation about her mother.
Ylva grew up as part of the Winter Bears, cared for by Ulf and other members of the tribe. As she approached adulthood it became obvious there was something a little odd about her beyond her strange origins. Nobody was going to argue too much with the girl who could tame wild animals, although sometimes when they thought she wasn't listening, people would refer to her in less than flattering terms.
Suspicions were raised when Ulf disappeared again, within a few days of Ylva being declared an adult, but she seemed quite unconcerned. Once again, attempts to track him ended in confusion. Many people expected Ylva to follow suit, and disappear after him. But as yet, she seems quite content to be a part of the tribe.
---
Hello little ones. It's me, Ylva. I know you're listening.
We left the camp today. We didn't go far. Just to the meeting place. It felt good to walk in the forest.
There were Ulthani there. I know, but they are not unfriendly to us. Listen. They had seen a ghoul. Yes! Of course we did. My companions are quite skilled. More came in the night, burrowing through the earth. They tried to take the Ulthani, but we stopped them.
Yes, we were very brave. Thank you. We went in search of the ghouls and found a barrow. There was writing on the top. I don't know what it said. It was written in the oldways. We dug it up to get to the sleeping ghouls. But when it got dark, a terrible creature appeared.
Yes, it was scary. Let me finish! I summoned a mitflit to help us fight. No, I didn't get hurt, although some did. And we won. Remember that shriek? That happens when we defeated the creature and the stone tablet cracked in two.
Shh. Sleep now. More stories later.
It's at least twenty-five winters since Ulf went hunting in the greenwood and disappeared.
Parties went out looking for him when he first failed to come home. One of the tribe's best trackers managed to pick up his trail, and for a while was making good progress, but as the tracker got further off the beaten path, he and his companions found themselves increasingly confused, and ultimately had to abandon the attempt and follow the setting sun until they got back home. Ulf was given up for lost.
Imagine everyone's surprise when a few years later he reappeared, carrying a little girl.
Ulf never spoke of what happened in the woods. In fact, he never spoke again. The girl was too young to give any coherent account, beyond saying that her name was Ylva. She looked enough like Ulf that nobody had any doubt who her father was, although there was much speculation about her mother.
Ylva grew up as part of the Winter Bears, cared for by Ulf and other members of the tribe. As she approached adulthood it became obvious there was something a little odd about her beyond her strange origins. Nobody was going to argue too much with the girl who could tame wild animals, although sometimes when they thought she wasn't listening, people would refer to her in less than flattering terms.
Suspicions were raised when Ulf disappeared again, within a few days of Ylva being declared an adult, but she seemed quite unconcerned. Once again, attempts to track him ended in confusion. Many people expected Ylva to follow suit, and disappear after him. But as yet, she seems quite content to be a part of the tribe.
---
Hello little ones. It's me, Ylva. I know you're listening.
We left the camp today. We didn't go far. Just to the meeting place. It felt good to walk in the forest.
There were Ulthani there. I know, but they are not unfriendly to us. Listen. They had seen a ghoul. Yes! Of course we did. My companions are quite skilled. More came in the night, burrowing through the earth. They tried to take the Ulthani, but we stopped them.
Yes, we were very brave. Thank you. We went in search of the ghouls and found a barrow. There was writing on the top. I don't know what it said. It was written in the oldways. We dug it up to get to the sleeping ghouls. But when it got dark, a terrible creature appeared.
Yes, it was scary. Let me finish! I summoned a mitflit to help us fight. No, I didn't get hurt, although some did. And we won. Remember that shriek? That happens when we defeated the creature and the stone tablet cracked in two.
Shh. Sleep now. More stories later.
Saturday 2 November 2019
Noghri Death Squad, part 8: Celebration and Revelation
Personal log, Zatti.
No time for whiskey. Agent Flamingo got in touch to give us our orders. We only had one day before the arrival of the royal party, and we needed to be ready. Queen Stefani was going to attack her own citizens, then disappear. We had to make that happen.
We came up with a two-pronged approach, meaning that if one part went wrong we still had the other to fall back on.
Plan A was to drug the Queen. Voahk had spotted some tranq rifle darts for sale in one of the shops, and Wuzu was confident he could find out some kind of drug that would send her into a murderous rage. He went off to engage in some bribery and shopping, while Voahk went shopping, returning with the darts, but inexplicably without the tranq rifle to actually shoot them out of. Something about them being sold out.
With any attempt to insert drugged darts from close range liable to result in flat Noghris, we decided the best approach was to throw the darts from the water tower as the procession passed by. Clearly this would need practice. We got Voahk onto a suitably tall roof and he got to work. Naturally this attracted attention from the bread helmets. I was going to try to talk them into believing this was a completely harmless cultural practice, but before I got the chance, Voahk decided to talk to them. I quietly sloped off instead. They all showed up again later, so presumably they wriggled out of trouble somehow.
Plan B was to hack into the Queen's wheelchair, allowing us to control her remotely. The communications tower from where I broadcast those holovids seemed like the best place to send the hack from, as it would have high signal strength and good range, but I didn't particularly want to be there during the procession. So Aoghri and me tried to sneak in.
We proved significantly less sneaky than in the daytime, so it was quite a relief, rather than a hinderance, when the rest of the group showed up. The space port guard questioned us. Once again Voahk tried to explain himself, but I shoved him out of the way and apologised to the guard, explaining that my friends were all really stupid and I was just here to take them home.
He didn't buy it. Amazing, given the great efforts the team were making to sound like idiots, but fortunately Wuzu showed up at that point and distracted them.
"What do you mean? They can't speak."
He must have short circuited something in the guard's brain. I wasn't complaining. In fact, I was not speaking at all, while Gax made weird chattering noises.
With the guard now convinced that we were a group of brain damaged children on some kind of school trip, we were offered a tour, which Wuzu accepted. It was a very interesting tour, pointing out all kinds of exciting pieces of communication technology, which the others entirely failed to appreciate, but they did manage to cause enough of a distraction that I was able to get my remote hack installed while the guard was looking the other way.
With plans A and B both ready, there was just the small matter of getting Voahk onto the water tower without causing suspicion. I suggested bunting.
I have to admit, my team have hidden depths. Not only is Aoghri a superb artist, but it turns out Voahk has a real talent for making bunting. It was beautiful, with alternating images of bread helmets and hearts, and occasional slogans like 'We love Queen Stefani' and 'Down with Wanksy'.
The morning of the procession dawned and we got into position. I was in the shuttle, connected to the space port communications tower, with Wuzu for backup. Gax and Aoghri were positioned in the crowd, with Gax keeping an eye on the area of the water tower and Aoghri ready to follow the Queen if necessary. Voahk had his bunting and was ready to climb the water tower.
Guards showed up, wanting to know what he was doing. I'd made sure that he had the drugged dart concealed in the bunting. He handed them the other bundle of bunting to examine, and they were so impressed by his skilled depiction of their bread helmets that they bought his story and let him climb up and start decorating.
With much fanfare, the royal party arrived. Queen Stefani emerged from the ship, with her hair skillfully styled into the shape of a bicorn hat and her wheelchair gleaming. Her handmaids followed, each wearing a superbly crafted bicorn decorated with such detail that even over the remote link I was using, I think I could see the individual strands of hair.
I watched as the procession approached the water tower. The moment came for Voahk to throw the dart and...nothing. He missed! Even after all that practice! How in the name of Lord Vader did he miss?
I saw Gax bend down to pick something up off the ground and throw. And moments later Queen Stefani began frothing at the mouth.
It was really very impressive, all the things she could do with that wheelchair. As she fired rockets into the crowd, I began the hack to take control of it. Getting into the arms and primary weapon systems wasn't too hard, although disappointingly by the time I did she was all out of rockets.
Gax and Aoghri now had to dodge the derranged Queen as she activated her disruptor nipples and began firing blasts into the crowd. I was at work on the legs and secondary weapons, which proved to have a significantly more tangled architecture. All I could do to help at this point was to move the arms to cover the disruptors, incidentally making her look rather modest.
I was still wrestling for control when I realised she'd deployed yet another weapon. With Gax now facing down her crotch gun I moved an arm again to cover it, making her look even more modest. At least until she fired anyway, and shot her own arm off.
I was down to only one arm and no weapons at this point, but finally I managed to figure out what was going on with the legs and took full control. I steered her away from Gax, through the shanty town and out into the desert.
We gathered once more at the shuttle. It was time to get off this horrible little moon.
Gannis the slicer dropped by. He'd hacked the data tablet and pulled a bunch of interesting information about our home planet. He was also interested in changing ships.
Wuzu negotiated the sale. Gannis got the lambda shuttle we'd been using (with some recent repairs to the rear). We got a Firespray, and a pile of cash. We climbed aboard and took off, making only a brief stop in the desert to pick up what was left of Queen Stefani.
As we flew away we saw the lambda shuttle take off, and shortly afterwards, explode from a shot we didn't even see coming.
Having confirmed with Agent Flamingo that we had completed our mission successfully, we spaced Queen Stefani and had a decent look at the content of the data tablet. Which made me glad I still had that whiskey.
I had always believed that Lord Vader was working to restore the ecosystem of Honoghr, so that some day we could return home. On the tablet was evidence that Vader's restoration teams were really there to ensure the planet stayed poisoned, so that we would remain bound to his service.
And at that point, the strange cube that we'd picked up in Ford Harrison's office began talking to me. And what it said was one word.
Vengeance.
No time for whiskey. Agent Flamingo got in touch to give us our orders. We only had one day before the arrival of the royal party, and we needed to be ready. Queen Stefani was going to attack her own citizens, then disappear. We had to make that happen.
We came up with a two-pronged approach, meaning that if one part went wrong we still had the other to fall back on.
Plan A was to drug the Queen. Voahk had spotted some tranq rifle darts for sale in one of the shops, and Wuzu was confident he could find out some kind of drug that would send her into a murderous rage. He went off to engage in some bribery and shopping, while Voahk went shopping, returning with the darts, but inexplicably without the tranq rifle to actually shoot them out of. Something about them being sold out.
With any attempt to insert drugged darts from close range liable to result in flat Noghris, we decided the best approach was to throw the darts from the water tower as the procession passed by. Clearly this would need practice. We got Voahk onto a suitably tall roof and he got to work. Naturally this attracted attention from the bread helmets. I was going to try to talk them into believing this was a completely harmless cultural practice, but before I got the chance, Voahk decided to talk to them. I quietly sloped off instead. They all showed up again later, so presumably they wriggled out of trouble somehow.
Plan B was to hack into the Queen's wheelchair, allowing us to control her remotely. The communications tower from where I broadcast those holovids seemed like the best place to send the hack from, as it would have high signal strength and good range, but I didn't particularly want to be there during the procession. So Aoghri and me tried to sneak in.
We proved significantly less sneaky than in the daytime, so it was quite a relief, rather than a hinderance, when the rest of the group showed up. The space port guard questioned us. Once again Voahk tried to explain himself, but I shoved him out of the way and apologised to the guard, explaining that my friends were all really stupid and I was just here to take them home.
He didn't buy it. Amazing, given the great efforts the team were making to sound like idiots, but fortunately Wuzu showed up at that point and distracted them.
"What do you mean? They can't speak."
He must have short circuited something in the guard's brain. I wasn't complaining. In fact, I was not speaking at all, while Gax made weird chattering noises.
With the guard now convinced that we were a group of brain damaged children on some kind of school trip, we were offered a tour, which Wuzu accepted. It was a very interesting tour, pointing out all kinds of exciting pieces of communication technology, which the others entirely failed to appreciate, but they did manage to cause enough of a distraction that I was able to get my remote hack installed while the guard was looking the other way.
With plans A and B both ready, there was just the small matter of getting Voahk onto the water tower without causing suspicion. I suggested bunting.
I have to admit, my team have hidden depths. Not only is Aoghri a superb artist, but it turns out Voahk has a real talent for making bunting. It was beautiful, with alternating images of bread helmets and hearts, and occasional slogans like 'We love Queen Stefani' and 'Down with Wanksy'.
The morning of the procession dawned and we got into position. I was in the shuttle, connected to the space port communications tower, with Wuzu for backup. Gax and Aoghri were positioned in the crowd, with Gax keeping an eye on the area of the water tower and Aoghri ready to follow the Queen if necessary. Voahk had his bunting and was ready to climb the water tower.
Guards showed up, wanting to know what he was doing. I'd made sure that he had the drugged dart concealed in the bunting. He handed them the other bundle of bunting to examine, and they were so impressed by his skilled depiction of their bread helmets that they bought his story and let him climb up and start decorating.
With much fanfare, the royal party arrived. Queen Stefani emerged from the ship, with her hair skillfully styled into the shape of a bicorn hat and her wheelchair gleaming. Her handmaids followed, each wearing a superbly crafted bicorn decorated with such detail that even over the remote link I was using, I think I could see the individual strands of hair.
I watched as the procession approached the water tower. The moment came for Voahk to throw the dart and...nothing. He missed! Even after all that practice! How in the name of Lord Vader did he miss?
I saw Gax bend down to pick something up off the ground and throw. And moments later Queen Stefani began frothing at the mouth.
It was really very impressive, all the things she could do with that wheelchair. As she fired rockets into the crowd, I began the hack to take control of it. Getting into the arms and primary weapon systems wasn't too hard, although disappointingly by the time I did she was all out of rockets.
Gax and Aoghri now had to dodge the derranged Queen as she activated her disruptor nipples and began firing blasts into the crowd. I was at work on the legs and secondary weapons, which proved to have a significantly more tangled architecture. All I could do to help at this point was to move the arms to cover the disruptors, incidentally making her look rather modest.
I was still wrestling for control when I realised she'd deployed yet another weapon. With Gax now facing down her crotch gun I moved an arm again to cover it, making her look even more modest. At least until she fired anyway, and shot her own arm off.
I was down to only one arm and no weapons at this point, but finally I managed to figure out what was going on with the legs and took full control. I steered her away from Gax, through the shanty town and out into the desert.
We gathered once more at the shuttle. It was time to get off this horrible little moon.
Gannis the slicer dropped by. He'd hacked the data tablet and pulled a bunch of interesting information about our home planet. He was also interested in changing ships.
Wuzu negotiated the sale. Gannis got the lambda shuttle we'd been using (with some recent repairs to the rear). We got a Firespray, and a pile of cash. We climbed aboard and took off, making only a brief stop in the desert to pick up what was left of Queen Stefani.
As we flew away we saw the lambda shuttle take off, and shortly afterwards, explode from a shot we didn't even see coming.
Having confirmed with Agent Flamingo that we had completed our mission successfully, we spaced Queen Stefani and had a decent look at the content of the data tablet. Which made me glad I still had that whiskey.
I had always believed that Lord Vader was working to restore the ecosystem of Honoghr, so that some day we could return home. On the tablet was evidence that Vader's restoration teams were really there to ensure the planet stayed poisoned, so that we would remain bound to his service.
And at that point, the strange cube that we'd picked up in Ford Harrison's office began talking to me. And what it said was one word.
Vengeance.
Friday 1 November 2019
Two games, one genre: Star Wars
As the current Noghri Death Squad series draws to a close, let's look at some Star Wars games.
Despite not being a massive Star Wars fan, I've played a few Star Wars games. The first one was d6 Star Wars (which I think is officially called Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game) and second was Star Wars: Saga Edition. But since I only played a couple of sessions of each (I was more of an occasional cameo in that group that a regular player, due to living in a different town) I don't remember enough about them to say anything particularly useful.
More recently, I've tried a couple more.
If I ever want to know if a system is prone to being min-maxed there's one guy in the home group I can count on. I forget what type of alien he was playing. All I remember is that he took so many abilities/drawbacks/whatever Savage Worlds calls them that affected his movement speed that he could barely move. Fortunately, as a Jedi, he was able to force push himself around significantly faster than he could walk.
I had a lot of fun with this campaign, and was pretty sad when it stopped. A big part of that was the character I'd created. Min-maxing issues aside, the options presented were very helpful to me, not a massive Star Wars nerd, in creating an interesting character. While it was years ago now, I still have fond memories of Tamaga, my Twi'Lek former slave, who'd accidentally killed her owner because she didn't know blasters has a kill setting as well as stun, and couldn't read the switch on the blaster because her owner hadn't allowed her to learn to read.
The Savage Worlds rules themselves, however, I don't feel added much. They're functional, because Savage Worlds is a perfectly reasonable generic system, but unless you're particularly keen on it, there's no real reason to pick this particular version of Star Wars.
It's got a setting that's so big and complicated that I feel completely lost in it. It's got a ton of splatbooks, and massive lists of aliens with completely meaningless (to me) names. The character sheets go on for several pages. It uses my least favourite dice mechanic, dice pools. And not just any dice pools, it's the weird narrative dice that nobody liked in Warhammer FRP 3e. It only needs a ton of marginally different types of equipment to...oh look, it's got that too.
It's like someone tried to shove all my least favourite RPG things into one massive bloated monstrosity. And somehow came out with a really enjoyable game.
Zatti, my constantly stressed out Noghri thief, might not be as conceptually well realised as Tamaga, but the game mechanics are somehow serving to build her story as the game progresses. I doubt she's in any way an optimised character build, but I feel like she's got her place in the group all the same.
Part of what's making it work, I think, is the restrictions the GM has put on us. Obviously the group is mostly Noghris. He's also restricted which books we can use for buying equipment, which as someone whose head explodes when faced with the Cyberpunk 2020 Chromebooks (and not just because of the cover art) I really appreciate. He knew the story he wanted to tell, and set things up to make it work.
EotE can do pretty much anything, which could lead to trying to do everything. But so long as you know what you want to do, and can keep focused on that, you can be reasonably confident it'll do it.
Despite not being a massive Star Wars fan, I've played a few Star Wars games. The first one was d6 Star Wars (which I think is officially called Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game) and second was Star Wars: Saga Edition. But since I only played a couple of sessions of each (I was more of an occasional cameo in that group that a regular player, due to living in a different town) I don't remember enough about them to say anything particularly useful.
More recently, I've tried a couple more.
Savage Star Wars
I can't tell you which of the many fan-made Star Wars conversions of Savage Worlds we were playing. What I can tell you is that despite a sterling effort not to make Jedis overpowered, all but one of us ended up playing them anyway (although that was partly a side effect of the campaign brief).If I ever want to know if a system is prone to being min-maxed there's one guy in the home group I can count on. I forget what type of alien he was playing. All I remember is that he took so many abilities/drawbacks/whatever Savage Worlds calls them that affected his movement speed that he could barely move. Fortunately, as a Jedi, he was able to force push himself around significantly faster than he could walk.
I had a lot of fun with this campaign, and was pretty sad when it stopped. A big part of that was the character I'd created. Min-maxing issues aside, the options presented were very helpful to me, not a massive Star Wars nerd, in creating an interesting character. While it was years ago now, I still have fond memories of Tamaga, my Twi'Lek former slave, who'd accidentally killed her owner because she didn't know blasters has a kill setting as well as stun, and couldn't read the switch on the blaster because her owner hadn't allowed her to learn to read.
The Savage Worlds rules themselves, however, I don't feel added much. They're functional, because Savage Worlds is a perfectly reasonable generic system, but unless you're particularly keen on it, there's no real reason to pick this particular version of Star Wars.
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (Fantasy Flight Games)
This is a game I absolutely should not like.It's got a setting that's so big and complicated that I feel completely lost in it. It's got a ton of splatbooks, and massive lists of aliens with completely meaningless (to me) names. The character sheets go on for several pages. It uses my least favourite dice mechanic, dice pools. And not just any dice pools, it's the weird narrative dice that nobody liked in Warhammer FRP 3e. It only needs a ton of marginally different types of equipment to...oh look, it's got that too.
It's like someone tried to shove all my least favourite RPG things into one massive bloated monstrosity. And somehow came out with a really enjoyable game.
Zatti, my constantly stressed out Noghri thief, might not be as conceptually well realised as Tamaga, but the game mechanics are somehow serving to build her story as the game progresses. I doubt she's in any way an optimised character build, but I feel like she's got her place in the group all the same.
Part of what's making it work, I think, is the restrictions the GM has put on us. Obviously the group is mostly Noghris. He's also restricted which books we can use for buying equipment, which as someone whose head explodes when faced with the Cyberpunk 2020 Chromebooks (and not just because of the cover art) I really appreciate. He knew the story he wanted to tell, and set things up to make it work.
EotE can do pretty much anything, which could lead to trying to do everything. But so long as you know what you want to do, and can keep focused on that, you can be reasonably confident it'll do it.
Conclusion
Edge of the Empire is the first game that's really made me feel excited and enthusiastic about playing Star Wars. Being a massive Star Wars nerd probably helps if you're the GM, but as a player, the system will lead you through it. It may be huge and complicated, but somehow actually playing it isn't hard. I thoroughly recommend this game.
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