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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.