Game Theory

The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

2011-11-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

I haven’t had much time lately to concoct compelling fantasy role playing universes, so in order to get my role playing back on track I decided to dig into some published modules and source material (which I have oodles of around the house). The first adventure that I decided to run was the classic Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (U1), one of the favorites of my youth. It tells the story of a spooky haunted house and what is really going on inside of the abandoned manor on the outskirts of the remote fishing village, Saltmarsh. Originally published for 1st edition, I decided to run it for 3.5 since that is the version that most of the players know the best. I saw that there were some 3.5 conversions of it out there but I figured I know enough about D&D to convert it on the fly. And besides, the whole point of a module was to save myself some time. Additionally the 3.5 Dungeons Masters Guide II has an example of a premade city, which just so happens to be Saltmarsh. So plenty of stuff for me to draw on.

The main reason that I am generally not into modules is that they require the players to follow a somewhat linear path, which is not really the way that I enjoy playing the most. Sure, I will lure the players in with hooks but I really like when they just sort of pursue the agenda that they are most into, which is usually killing things, rejecting authority, and then looting all the corpses that they have left behind. And yes, I actually play with adults. But it’s a lot of fun. So my hesitation in running a module is that they would break from it right away. But the Sinister Secret is a well thought out adventure and I though that they would be into it. And they were. At least the first half of it.

The Sinister Secret is actually the first in a series of three related modules (the U series of old D&D) but I planned from the beginning that I only wanted to run the first. The following two (Danger at Dunwater and The Final Enemy) are a little too heavy on dungeon crawling and require the party to act nobly in order to progress the story and I knew that was not going to happen. So I modified some of the background info and made the haunted house of Saltmarsh stand on it’s own as an adventure. For example; the smugglers are working closely with a merchant in town rather than selling weapons to lizardmen or sahaugins or whatever it is that they are doing in the published module. This way it can all wrap up neatly and the party can move on.

The module is broken up into two sections; the first is the investigation of the “haunted house” and subsequent uncovering of the smuggling ring; the second part is the taking of the smugglers boat with the help of some townsfolk, ultimately smashing the smuggling ring for good. The party that I played with had zero interest in the second half of the adventure. They knew that the boat was out there, but did not seem to care about it one way or the other. In fact, they never even told anyone in town that the house was actually filled with smugglers and not ghosts! Instead, they came back to town with some gold and confirmed that yes, the house was haunted and the townsfolk should continue to stay away from it. Hmm, I did not expect that. What it came down to was a desire to head off to a bigger city or a place with more opportunity. They came out of the house with some strange, and valuable, items like a skull made of solid gold and an apple that was also solid gold. They knew they couldn’t get good value for them in the small fishing village so they were on their way to greener pastures.

It has been a long time since I have run a 1st edition module and some things really jumped out at me as to how the game has evolved over the years. One of the most interesting involves the nefarious waghalter, Ned Shakeshaft. Ned is planted in the house to slow down the party, ideally he joins the party under the guise of being a thief that was waylaid when he came into the house and at some point attacks the party after earning their trust. Now, the way that the module is written makes it so that there is really no way for the party to prove that he is up to no good. Which I thought to be really odd and strange. First off, what sort of adventurers are not going to suspicious of this guy? His story sort of adds up, but come on? The text of the module says, “...it will not be possible for the party to unmask Ned simply.” He is well prepared to answer their questions and has a somewhat plausible story to tell them. Ultimately it comes down to what the party wants to believe and how they want to act towards him. It is sort of forcing the party into a metagaming role, I think. Basically, there is no mechanic to determine if he is lying or not, nor is there one to represent Ned’s obvious skill in weaving a tale to tell. Now, of course, 3.5 D&D has a mechanic for this. Sense Motive vs. Bluff is all about this. As it happens one of the party has a very high Sense Motive and used it in this situation (unfortunately for them Ned had a high Bluff and the party wound up buying his fishy story). I think I prefer this way. One of the other characters firmly believed that Ned was up to no good, but sort of fell in line when the investigator character said that Ned was on the up and up. This is a more accurate reflection of a character’s in game skills than just letting the player’s decide what is happening. I think it also encourages better roleplaying in the sense that the party will then have to play along with their perceived view of Ned, even if it is what they, as players, do not believe.

The adventure is designed for character levels 1-3, which is really nice. There seems to be a dearth of cool, low level modules that provide a decent challenge. However, it is also written for 5-10 players! Wow. That’s a lot of players. Again, it’s a reflection of the early days of D&D when a much larger group would gather for the game and probably play for an entire day. I’ve done the big group thing and I’m not much of a fan of it, but it was easy to alter it for a smaller group (four players). I do like the premade characters in the back of the book, especially Megaron the Bold and Gerald the Seeker. Who would name their character Gerald? Also strange is Caine the Despised, the Cleric/Magic User with a 17 strength and 10 intelligence. I see why he is despised.

One other aspect of the module that was top notch was the artwork. It wasn’t just generic fantasy work pulled from a neutral source, but actually detailed drawings of what was happening in the module. I thought that it was great and actually helped me understand the setting better since I could actually see what it was supposed to look like. An excellent inclusion.

The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is a really solid adventure. The plot is well thought out and makes a lot of sense. It is not just a group of bad guys hiding out and stocking up on magic items, waiting to be killed by adventurers and looted of their booty. It is through no fault of the module that the party did not follow it through to the end, they just had a different agenda. Which is really the beauty of D&D. The players can go anywhere and do whatever they want. And on that note, it’s on to Greyhawk! Which I am totally geeked about.

We Hardly Knew Ye: Newport the Goblin

2011-05-05T15:37:00.001-04:00

(One in a series about adventurers who were better off staying at home.)

Who was he? Newport was a third level goblin rogue. A sneaky little fellow with excellent lockpicking skills and some opportune sneak attacks, he endeared himself to his fellow party members with his brutal style of cold hearted murder, most exemplified by his savage killing of a town magistrate that wanted the party dead. Newport snuck into his house and waited outside of the nursery of the man’s child. When he exited the room Newport (along with his hobgoblin partner, Thatcher) ran him through with a sneak attack that quickly took out the adversary before he even had a chance to react. The party rejoiced. Previously, Newport had showed off his quick reflexes by grabbing a falling wine bottle in the cellar of the magistrate’s house, thus preserving the party’s under cover status as they snuck into the house.

Newport was a member of a society of somewhat civilized monstrous humanoids. One day while out hunting, they returned to find that their entire clan had been killed by adventurers! No good adventurers. Killed everyone they knew, took all of their possessions and then left the area. The party was on a revenge mission. Unfortunately for Newport, he will never get that satisfaction.

What happened? A bit overeager, Newport may have bitten off more than he could chew by foolishly charging into a fort occupied by some rangers. Generally it’s not a very good idea to have the rogue with eight hit points (he was wounded) be the first one into the melee, and this example just further supports that somewhat sound theory. Waiting for him was the Forest Warden, a burly fellow with a great axe who just so happened to have Goblin as his favored enemy. Newport may as well have been a pinata. He wound up killed with a single shot, a clean slice across his chest that left him chopped into two pieces. This spurned numerous Newport:Dead Without Pleasure comments from the players at the table.

It probably would have made more sense for the orc barbarian to charge in first, but no one ever said that these monsters were genuises. The orc happen to be outside lighting the fort on fire. The fort that Newport had just charged into. In defense of the orc he had just been introduced to the exciting world of burning down the homes of humans (it started with the Magistrate) and was clearly excited by the prospect of another arson.

Personally, I enjoyed Newport and was a bit sorry to see him go. It is somewhat ironic that the player had just told me the day before that he was really enjoying Newport and looking forward to seeing how he developed. Not going to happen now.

Master's Gallery review

2011-04-10T19:32:00.000-04:00

I’ve really enjoyed both Incan Gold and High Society from the Gryphon Games bookshelf series, so I though that I would give Master’s Gallery a shot, which is another game in the series of quick playing games. At first I was intrigued by what I thought was a pretty clever game mechanic and I enjoyed the quick play. However, subsequent games have left me a little bit disillusioned and feeling like the game actually lacks much strategy and that playing it is sort of like running through the motions without having to think very much. I know, it sounds like a real blast.

Master’s Gallery is a card game for two to five players played over four rounds. There is a deck of 95 Masterpiece cards, each of which is a painting from one of five famous artists; Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Vermeer, and Renoir. Players take turns placing a card in front of them on their turn, once a single artist has six cards out on the table (five in a two player game) from all of the players combined the round ends and the players score for that round. The artist with the most cards gets a three placed on their artist card, the second most gets a two, and the third gets a one. The other two artists do not score for this round. So, If I have three Van Goghs out when the round ends and each Van Gogh is worth two points I wind up with six points for them. Very easy. Almost too easy, actually. The scoring tokens earned each round stay with the artists for the entire game. Next round each Van Gogh card is already worth two points, plus whatever it may earn on each round. Because of this game mechanic cards are worth much more in the latter rounds of the game since they have been accumulating tokens from the previous rounds, which seems like it should matter a ton but I’m not sure that it does.

The problem is that every time I have played it the game seems to sort of go the same way. Something like this: Player A plays a Renoir, Player B plays a Vermeer, Player C plays another Renoir. It’s now my turn. I have a couple of Van Goghs in my hand that I would like to play, but it’s not really worth it since they will probably wind up with little value. However, if I play a Renoir it is all but assured of being the high valued artist for that round and I want my cards to be worth the most. So I play a Renoir. On the next turn A and C follow suit with another Renoir, as do I and then the turn ends (if it even makes it back to me) and we all share in the wealth of the high valued Renoir. Why wouldn’t I play a Renoir? So I can put down a single Van Gogh and get one point for it, when a Renoir is going to be worth three? It’s just sort of a system that doesn’t reward anything other than joining with the masses and trying to get in on the big score before the round ends. And it will continue each round because Renoir cards are already worth three points, so keep playing whatever Renoir cards that you have!

There are some cards that have an additional action attached to them when they are played, such as playing another card or putting an extra point token on an artist. These make the game even less interesting in a way because they seem to really determine who wins the game. Using the above example let’s say that on his first turn Player A played a Renoir with a symbol on it that allows him to immediately play another card of the same artist. So he has two Renoirs out now. This is just letting Player A end the turn even quicker and score even more points. I have played multiple rounds where one or two players only get to go once before it ends and wind up with practically no points, whereas some players have four cards down thanks to some special powers that they happened to come by randomly. I guess my complaint is that it’s just not very fun and frustrating, and not even in a good way because it made me think hard about strategy. But frustrating because I think I’m playing the game the same way that my cat would play, and that’s not a knock on my cat or myself.

One thing that I really didn’t like about this game is that the description of the game says that the players are art dealers and gallery owners involved with valuing the Old Masters. I didn’t feel that way at all. I just felt like I was putting cards on a table, the thematic implications of those actions were so removed from the game that I didn’t even think about it. Would it have been too much to give each player a sheet that looks like a gallery wall with empty frames? Maybe then I would have at least have had an idea of who I was and what I was doing, rather than just numbly placing paintings on the table. I mean, the word is gallery is even in the title of the game. In comparison Incan Gold is also a rather simple card game, but it tells a nice story and contains a narrative as you go. I felt none of that in Master’s Gallery.

I can’t really complain about the art in this game considering that it is done by some of the great painters in history. I’m not a real big fan of Impressionism, but I can’t really argue with Monet and Degas. Thematically the art is the focal point of the game, which is actually pretty cool. Honestly though, I find myself barely looking at the actual paintings, my focus rarely going beyond the colored border and the symbol that may be in the corner.

In the end Master’s Gallery falls short of being a good game. There just doesn’t seem to be much reason to play. It does only take about 20 minutes to play a game, so I suspect that it will find it’s way onto our gaming table from time to time just because we can play an entire game quickly. When a game’s best quality is that it ends quickly it probably isn’t all that good to begin with.

High Society review

2011-04-02T19:29:00.000-04:00

Once, deeded lands and blue blood were required to be among society’s elite, but now you can just buy your way into the upper crust! In High Society players compete to see who can squander their newly found riches the fastest by amassing a collection of expensive and ostentatious items. Gems! Yachts! A carriage! Okay, so the carriage isn’t quite as exciting but you do need some way to transport all of your new stuff I suppose. Obtain the most gaudy and frivolous wealth and you win! High Society is a quick playing card game for three to five players. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes to play.

Gameplay is very simple. Every player begins with a bundle of cash in a bunch of different denominations. At the beginning of each turn an item comes up for auction and the players take turns bidding on it, with the high bidder eventually winning the stained glass window or the champion thoroughbred. Each of the ten items is valued at somewhere from one to ten (the carriage is worth one, while the chateau on the lake is the most valuable). At the end the player whose items total the most in value wins. It isn’t quite that simple because there are some catches to how you can bid and score.

The real strategy comes in how you bid and spend your money. Each player has eleven money cards to spend, each of a different value from 2 million to 25 million. Once you bid on an item you can’t pull that particular bill from the table, you can only add to it. For example; if you bid 4 million on a painting and then your opponent bids 8 million, you are not allowed to replace your 4 million with a 10 million. You can add a 6 million to it for a bigger bid but that 4 million stays in place. It matters because you may find that you have used up all your small bills when you want some towards the end of the game. It may make sense to lead with a big bill and try to scare the other nouveau riche away from the bidding altogether.

The other tricky things are the negative cards that come up for auction. I’m not sure what sort of auction house allows a Mansion Fire to go up for bid, but unfortunately it is a reality of your situation. The negative cards totally suck for everyone. You are either going to wind up with something that really crushes your final score or you are going to spend a lot to not have to take it. Essentially players are paying to not have the negative event effect you. I actually think that this might be the best part of the game. And it’s also why you need to hang onto some of those small bills, so you can maybe get out of the negative auction without having to throw down some massive dollar amount. Wouldn’t you rather spend it on a castle?

The final twist comes when the game ends. The player that has the smallest amount of cash left in their hand immediately loses. It’s as if the crocodile from Cleopatra wandered over to 19th century America for a snack. So make sure you keep some cash in the bank or all of your worldly possessions mean nothing. The remaining players then add up their total value and adjust for whatever negative cards they have. Someone wins. I’ve seen players win with a single luxury item, often the big spenders find themselves eliminated in the crocodile round.

In some ways High Society has the same pitfalls as Incan Gold in that the art is sort of crummy. I would be way more impressed with the castle and inclined to spend millions on it if it just looked a little more extravagant. The game is really simple, which is why I think it could use a little boost from the art in the game. Don’t get me wrong, the art is not dreadful. But I do think that a game like this is fun when people get into the feel of the game and actually want the items. Which would be easier to do if they actually looked awesome. I like High Society. The best thing about it is that is quick and really easy, but that’s not a knock on it at all. The world needs game like this because sometimes you only have a half hour and still want to enjoy a game.

Castle Panic's Master Slayer, or Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water

2011-03-28T15:33:00.001-04:00

I had always sort of disregarded the Master Slayer aspect of Castle Panic, thinking of it as something of a novelty in an otherwise straightforward cooperative game. I now see that it’s actually the entire point of the game. Defending the castle becomes secondary because everyone suddenly has no interest in helping each other, only in collecting orc and troll skulls. I’ve mentioned before that I find the game fun, but exceedingly easy. This seems to solve that issue since you are once again pitted against other people, rather than some sort of easily defeated game mechanic.

Playing with the Master Slayer (which is actually the way that the game should be played, the more cooperative game is an alternative to it) gives points to the players for killing monsters. Tougher monsters are worth more points. Makes sense. But the game is really structured so that players trade cards and help one another out by planning together. The cards are even played face up on the table, the game presents the illusion that we are all actually working together to save this castle. Which now seems sort of ridiculous since everyone is in constant competition, hell bent on killing the Troll Mage. The thing that makes it odd is that the game is very short sighted. If you offer me a card for a Blue Archer I know exactly what you are going to do with it. You are going to shoot the goblin in the blue zone. I don’t want to help you kill that goblin. I suppose if you offered me a Green Knight that I needed it would be, at best, a zero sum exchange as we both get something that we need. And what’s really the point of that? In a game like Settlers of Catan or Bohnanza trading is a big part of the game, but you don’t necessarily know the extent that you are helping your opponent and can always tell yourself that you are getting the better end of the trade. In Castle Panic the entire board and all of the player’s cards are on display.

The real catch comes with what is now the possible game endings; either one of the players wins or nobody does. That’s interesting. The game ceases to be cooperative. Sure, you could look at it as somewhat of a victory if you successfully defend the castle but one of your partners is the Master Slayer, but who feels that way? Who wants to sort of win, when someone else wins a little bit better? The last time that we played I fell behind pretty early on in the game. The cards I had just weren’t matching up to anything good, and the other players were racking up the kills. At that point it was really in my best interest to let the castle be destroyed so that we would all lose. It wasn’t coming from a point of bitterness, but why would I help someone beat me? Three of us played this afternoon and within a couple of turns the castle was in shambles, orcs and trolls having caused numerous breaches in our walls. No one was looking to trade anyone a brick so that they could be a new wall for it, we were too busy reloading our crossbows. It certainly becomes much more difficult to actually win.

Well, the Master Slayer has addressed what I found to be the biggest fault with Castle Panic. That is, that the game is too easy. I guess I was wrong in writing the game off so quickly and probably should have played the game the way that the designers had really intended it to be played.

Grand Dames of Smallworld review

2011-03-21T18:07:00.000-04:00

If there is one thing that Smallworld doesn’t need it’s probably more Races and Special Powers. A better tray to organize them perhaps, but the Races and Powers have everything pretty well covered. Of course that did not stop me from indulging in the Grand Dames of Smallworld expansion, which focuses on several new all female races to make the game that much more expanded. Or something like that. It has three new Races and two new Special Powers, all of which fit well into the game. One thing that I do like about it is that none of the Races or Powers are particularly overpowering, which is frequently a pitfall of many expansions. This one is pretty good though. I also think it's fitting that two of the Races have powers centered around going into decline, since they are all female that is probably going to happen pretty quick with no one to reproduce with. So what do we have here?

The three races are the ghostly White Ladies, the pious and somewhat insulated Priestesses, and the wandering Gypsies. All of them are user generated contributions, apparently Days of Wonder had some sort of contest and got people to send ideas in to them and then made the best of them. They did a good job. The White Ladies are kind of tough to play, but can pay off in the right circumstances. Since they are ghosts they pretty much stick around forever, haunting your opponents with their ability to just sort of hang around. Their special power is that once they go into decline they become immune to conquests and powers, making them pretty much invincible. The winning combo here is Stout White Ladies to start the game. The big issue is that you only get two of them (plus the number from the power) and if they are not available early in the game they are not all that useful. But, if you can spread them out over a couple regions and then go into decline they can really pay off over the course of the game. Think about it, say you are able to conquer three or four regions over the first two turns and then go into decline. For the next six turns they will be paying out three or four coins a turn until the game ends. Not only will they pay better than any other declining race, you also don’t have to worry about defending them. But if they don’t come out early they are not all that useful.

Like the White Ladies, the Priestesses have a power that is triggered when they go into decline. When they throw in the towel all the holy women gather together into a single “ivory tower” in an occupied region. Each turn they score points equal to the number that are holed up inside this temple of learning. So they are essentially digging in and relying on each other for defense. The issue that I have with them is that they are just begging to be attacked. I can’t imagine that a single region that is generating six or seven gold a round is going to last for all that long. Smallworld is sort of all about being mean to one another. This tower has a huge target painted on the side of it. Unlike the White Ladies, it has no additional defense so the Dragon could wipe it out with one move. Ha ha, that sort of cracks me up. And the thing that I don’t understand is what happens to all of them? There is probably a rule somewhere that explains it, but I assume that they are all killed rather than the typical one in a conquered region. I mean, there is nowhere for them to go? I also don’t like the look on their face.

The Gypsies are my favorite of the Grand Dames. For one, sexy ladies in half shirts that are flipping knives in their hand are just sort of cool by nature. I think that we can all agree on that. And their power is original, productive, and really sticks to the stereotypical view of the vagrant gypsies. I am sure that there are many Roma out there who may take issue with them, but I think they are awesome. Every time a gypsy abandons a region they are given a coin for doing so, you just can’t reconquer it this turn. This is good on a bunch of levels. You can actually flee from superior forces, don’t need to worry about defense all that much, and can free up more forces for conquering. Winning! When they are combined with Flying they make one of the most formidable races in the game since they can abandon their area and just go to the most vulnerable spot around. They don’t work as well with powers that generate more coins for specific land types (Forest, Swamp, Hill) since by nature they will want to abandon them, but most powers work real well with them.

The new special powers are not as interesting as the races. Historian gives bonus coins for races that are in decline, going into decline, or when they go into decline. It is very circumstantial to be of any actual use. At most it will generate, what, five coins in a game? That doesn’t really seem to be worth it. Peace Loving goes against everything that Smallworld is about. If you go a turn without attacking an opponent you get three coins. Aside from not being fun at all, I just don’t know when this would work. How are you supposed to do anything without attacking the other rotten races that are trying to inhabit the world that is rightfully yours? No sense. Are you just supposed to sit there and occupy the same spaces all game? Apparently Days of Wonder were going to name this power Boring, but decided against it.

I think that the Grand Dames are a very worthy expansion to Smallworld, however it’s not all that necessary to making it a better game. There are so many possible Race/Power combinations that one could play for a long time before seeing them all. It is very cheap though (I think that mine was ten bucks) so I certainly couldn’t argue with someone who wanted to spice up their game of Smallworld.

Last Night on Earth: Escape in the Truck

2011-02-27T19:50:00.000-05:00

A classic scenario. The only way out of the zombie infested town is a single old pickup truck marooned in the center of the town. Unfortunately, it has no gas in the tank and the keys are lost somewhere in the town. Such is the life for the poor survivors in the Escape in the Truck scenario for Last Night on Earth. This is definitely one of my favorite scenarios in the game. It combines a good story with a clear, obtainable objective and is generally a lot of fun. It is also one of the few scenarios that the heroes can win quickly if they get a little bit of luck. Of course, if they get no luck they will be slowly torn apart as they continue their futile search for automotive supplies.

The goal is pretty straightforward in Escape in the Truck. The heroes need to find some gasoline and put fuel in the truck, then get a set of keys and two heroes into the truck and get out of dodge before the sun comes up. The challenge here for the heroes is to find the items and survive long enough, the zombies should focus on constant harassment of the heroes and be prepared for the showdown at the truck, which is when the heroes will be their most vulnerable. Like most of the scenarios in LNOE the advantage goes to the defender (in this case the zombies) but this one is a little more evenly balanced than most of the others. It is also one of the shorter scenarios, lasting only fifteen turns. So the heroes have little time to waste.

One aspect of this scenario that I enjoy is that you actually get to use some of the cool pieces that the game comes with. There are tractors, meteors, evil books and all sort of other neat little game pieces that rarely see the light of day because there is no actual use for them. But here, you at least get to employ the hard working old truck. Which looks like it is from the 50’s. I have a hard time believing that this is the only functional truck in town, but I’ll suspend disbelief for the sake of the game. But yeah, having an actual truck in the middle of the board is nice.

The board pieces that wind up being used don’t make a ton of difference in this game. The gas station is nice to have, but really only comes into play once you have already used the gas once. And you only need to use it once, so there. Should your gas carrier get killed (which is a possibility) it is convenient to be able to go pick up another quickly. Like any scenario that involves getting items Jake the Drifter is an ideal choice for the party to have. His ability allows him to cycle through cards twice as fast, doubling the possibility that the valuable keys and gasoline will make an appearance. The other hero that is very useful here is everyone’s favorite prom queen, Amanda. Why? Well, for a single turn one of the heroes is going to be an absolute sitting duck and she is the best choice for it. In order to gas the truck up a hero must begin the turn on the truck, sacrifice the gasoline, and do nothing else. It is literally a sign on the hero that says come and maul me to death, quickly. Which is what usually happens. But if the hero does not survive the turn the gas is lost and the truck still has no fuel. Amanda has the two wounds that is typical of the teens, but her Hide power allows her to cancel any fight with a good roll. I’ve seen her frustrate the zombies to no end with this. Make sure that she has a weapon and a hero card to help her out and she just may live to take the ride out of town. In the absence of Amanda try to get someone well armed to fuel it up. Like in most scenarios, Becky totally sucks.

It also makes sense for the heroes to work in pairs. One to do the searching, the other to lure them away and take shots with some sort of gun if they have it. The fact is that if the heroes are not constantly searching they are not going to do so well.

The zombie strategy should be to keep the heroes on the move, thereby not allowing them to search over and over. The more that they are on the move the less likely they are to get the stuff that they need. It’s sort of Zombie 101. The real key to this scenario is to not allow the truck to get fueled up. At some point the heroes have to go to the truck and wait out a turn there. There should be a horde of the undead waiting there for them, preferably equipped with every nasty Zombie card there is to just take apart the hero who is foolish enough to challenge them.

The actual escape is much easier to accomplish because the heroes can just show up there and end the turn in the truck. As long as the have some keys they are good to go, so the play here for the zombies is the fuel up period.

Last Night on Earth can be a complicated game at times. Some times the rules drag or are so obtuse that they seem counterintuitive to the rest of the game. When this is coupled with a more complicated scenario (such as Plague Carriers or Zombie Apocalypse) it can really slow things down. Escape in the Truck is simple and clean, it’s obvious what needs to be done and how to do it. The hard part is actually doing it. For the heroes it is very exciting and satisfying to see that truck pull away to victory (I wouldn’t fault you if you actually made an engine noise and physically drove the truck off the table), and the zombies should always elate in foiling the plans of the living.

Street Fighter prestige class

2011-02-14T18:18:00.003-05:00

In the exciting world of medieval fantasy role playing games, players can choose to be such heroic characters as dragon slaying cavaliers, wizards that bend the very fabric of the universe, priests who literally commune with their deities, and common street thugs. Hmmm…the thug does not sound so appealing in comparison to the others, which is the part that has always thrown me off about the Street Fighter prestige class. Not to be confused with Ryu or Zangief, the Street Fighter specializes in nothing in particular. But he is always spoiling for a good fight! Preferably in the street.

I like characters that are not really powerful, that’s not the issue. As long as the whole party is on board with it, it’s fun to be a group of rogues looking to run a criminal cartel. Not every party is striving to seal off extra-dimensional portals to prevent the hordes of the netherworld from overrunning a village of orphans and widows. Some people would rather extort money from those same orphans and widows. What I’m saying is that there is a place for the street fighter, I’m just not sure that they need to be a Street Fighter.

The Street Fighter is essentially a Fighter/Rogue hybrid, with the emphasis being on the martial aspect of the two. D8 hit die, 4 skill points a level, full base attack and a good fortitude save. And it goes for five levels. Nothing special, but not bad either. The requirements are also pretty straightforward and allow for several types of characters. To get into this prestigious class one must have a BAB of +5, Combat Expertise, Improved Feint and five ranks of Bluff, Intimidate, and Knowledge (Local). I think that the best approach to this is some sort of Rogue and Swashbuckler combo. The Swashbuckler has those loaded early levels which make it ideal to switch out of and this class screams out to be lightly armored. I just can’t picture the thug on the corner wearing platemail. It seems a bit out of place. Swashbuckler 3/Rogue 3? That seems to work pretty well.

If the class has a signature ability I suppose that it is Always Ready, because this guys is well, always ready. For mediocre combat I guess, but at least he is ready for it. Always Ready is an initiative bonus (starts at +1, goes up every other level) which certainly works well with any sneak attack, but it’s pretty weak for a key class feature. There aren’t many initiative boosting abilities so it has rarity on it’s side, and combined with a high Dex and Improved Initiative the Street Fighter can get the drop on opponents pretty regularly. At 2nd level they get Streetwise, which is nothing other than one of those feats that gives +2 to two skills. In this case Gather Information and Knowledge (Local). It is what it is.

Stand Tough is one of those class features that sounds real good when you first read it, but then you think about it a little and it gets worse and worse. It’s supposed to make the character a little more resilient and street tough, and it sort of does. But not really. For starters, the name is real lame. When the Street Fighter takes physical damage they can attempt to take half the amount of non-lethal damage by making a fort save against the total damage. So, let’s see. It is usable once a day (twice a day at fourth level) so it’s the sort of thing you want to save for when you really need it. Maybe. At 8th level (around when they first get it) it’s very feasible to be dealt 30 points of damage (actually, that’s on the low end). With a base fort save of, say, +11 that still means you need to roll a 19 or higher. That’s not too good. It’s probably better used for some low damage when it will actually have a better chance of succeeding.

The best thing that this class gets may actually be the +1d6 sneak attack at 4th level. Sneak attack is a great ability, but once in five levels is pretty weak. It does mesh nicely with the required Improved Feint. Uncanny Dodge at 5th level is a nice little reward for sticking it out until the end of the class.

An ability that would work really well for this class is the improvised weapons skills possessed by the Drunken Master prestige class. It's more cool that powerful, so it is certainly not game breaking by any means. And what says street fighter more than swinging a bench as a club or gutting an adversary with a mead bottle? Of course, I never really understood what kind of adventurer doesn't have a weapon, but maybe they ran into one of those awful sunder based builds.

The Street Fighter is not altogether useless, but it falls into the category of something that is easily replicated by a base class. Want to be a tough, street level character? Rogue with a little Fighter works great for that. The full base attack is nice for this character, it certainly makes him a little more lethal than his rogue brethren, but this guy is going to live and die by getting the drop on his adversaries not by out slugging them. I could see some uses as opponents to a party. If they can successfully Stand Tough against a PC they could at least scare them for a moment, unless the non lethal damage knocks them out anyway. Which would be very funny.

Shadowrun Campaign Wiki

2011-02-05T12:46:00.000-05:00

In the past I’ve really enjoyed keeping a campaign journal for D&D and Shadowrun. I find it’s a nice way to recap, keep track and sort of analyze our game sessions. With our new Shadowrun game starting up I wanted to do something again, but not quite the same old. Truthfully, keeping a journal can be rather time consuming. On top of planning for the next week and trying to maintain a game blog it often felt like a chore to make sure that I posted each week. After talking it over with the group we decided to create a campaign wiki to document what is occurring in the alternate world of our fantasy lives. I just got it set up and I must admit that I am sort of stoked on it. It’s located here.

One aspect that I really like about the wiki is that everyone in the group can contribute to it, rather than it just being a GM dictatorship. We sit at a round table so we should all be equal. I think that is the best practice for all, it’s all of our game. It’s cool to get the point of view of everyone involved rather than just a narration of events. I imagine there being conflicting accounts of certain things, which I think is great. Shadowrun is such a morally grey universe that nothing has an absolute truth to it. It does raise the question, though, of what it is that the players should be contributing. For now I have asked them to create character bios and some background info on their contacts. I did ask them to keep everything reasonable as far as their contacts are concerned. No megacorps presidents, dragons, or super generous wealthy benefactors. In the past I have always created their contacts (after they selected them) and I sort of see this as a challenge to me because I have to use and develop these NPC’s in ways that I need, but their origins are coming from someone else. I’m into it.

I am still struggling with exactly how game events will appear in the wiki. They can certainly pop up in an entry for a character and summarize their role in a certain situation, but that doesn’t really provide the big picture. I was thinking maybe anonymous Shadowland style posts about something that went down, or perhaps a media account from a third party. I was in a Shadowrun campaign years ago with a different group of players and one of the players would routinely write these newspaper style accounts of our runs and send them around. It was actually pretty cool. And I’ve already told everyone that I will be giving out karma for contributions, so that should give an incentive to put some work into it.

So what is the point of this whole thing? Well, it can keep track of NPC’s, give an additional platform for the players to flesh out their characters and is another method to include all sorts of superfluous info (or maybe it’s actually really useful info). I imagine that if it’s successful the players will be able to find pertinent information in there that can aid them in game. In a way it is some sort of ultra metagaming, but it is also realistic for the world that the party is in. Why wouldn’t they turn up some info if they snoop around about their latest Johnson? They could certainly just make a skill check and get the info, but this could be a little incentive to do a little more. In this case it’s my job to drop some “Easter Egg” style info into the game and see if it turns up when we meet at the table. One example so far involves the party shaman. In her backstory is some sort of corp character that she fell in love with. That’s all that had been decided. So I created an entry for this guy, gave him a name and a story and dropped it into the wiki. Now he exists and he has never really come up in game so far. It gives the player some info if she wants to pursue that storyline and it’s something to maker her ears perk up at the table if a certain name should come up. This is also opening the door for Shadowrun to occupy even more of our time, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

Another aspect that I like is that it gives some permanence to the game. Now I am not the most sentimental of people and I think that RPG campaigns are rather disposable in the grand scheme of things, but I actually really like the idea that this campaign can live on in the cloud of the internet. Anyone can read it, we can also reminisce about it and check in and laugh (or cry?) over these characters for years to come. Perhaps some other folks will even get some inspiration or ideas from something that they read there. Which is neat.

The most surprising part of it for me is how fun it is to include pictures in the entries. I didn’t really think about that and then one of the players added a picture entry to all of the PC’s. Totally awesome to see some imagining of who these people are that we pretend to be. They are just images taken from Google and plugged in, but they are completely our characters now. We never use miniatures in our game, rarely maps as well. So this is the most visual we have ever really been with characters.

I used Google Sites to set the wiki up, employing their wiki template to get started. I’m not the most tech savvy but I found it very easy to use. The appearance of the page still leaves a lot to be desired, as does the layout but these are both aspects that can be improved over time.

Cooperative Games Have Got Me Down

2011-02-03T11:46:00.002-05:00

These days Shadows Over Camelot routinely leaves the kingdom in shambles, the world is festering with disease and pestilence whenever the CDC leaves us in charge with Pandemic, even the lost treasures of antiquity rarely make it off of the Forbidden Island. Forbidden Island is a kid’s game! It’s for children! I used to think that cooperative games were great for bonding with my fellow gamers, but now they just leave me feeling hollow inside.

I don’t mind losing a game to friends. In fact, it happens all the time. I usually play games with a smart and savvy group and wins are distributed fairly evenly amongst us all. It’s losing to a game mechanic that I hate. And I don’t mean losing a game because of some sort of rule technicality, I mean when the game is actually the winner. Cooperative games have really got me down these days. We just seem to rarely win, and the silent gloating of the victorious game pieces looking up at me is almost more than I can bear. Whether it’s the stack of black cubes surrounding Mumbai and Tehran, or the hordes of siege engines massed in front of the castle makes no difference to me.

Recently four of us were playing Shadows Over Camelot and we were doing really well. We had won the Grail Quest and several others and basically just needed to keep the siege engines at bay until the game ended. Two of our braves knights had returned to Camelot to do battle with the belfries and catapults of our foes, and they got mangled. Not just defeated, but really embarrassed. On three consecutive rolls the enemy rolled an eight (on a d8) and both knights were killed in successive turns. Undermanned, the remaining two were quickly overwhelmed and the kingdom was plunged into darkness. It was heartbreaking. The next time we played we were dead men walking. We didn’t stand a chance. Our fragile mindset, so recently elevated as we were on the cusp of victory, doomed us from the beginning. We overreacted to threats, jumped around the board like novice squires and bickered with one another. We had lost the psychological game to a non-entity, literally something that had no brain or psyche had gotten inside our head.

What I need to do is play more Castle Panic. That game is absurdly easy, maybe that’s why people seem to like it so much. Because they always win. But therein is the problem. If a game doesn’t present much of a challenge for the group than it’s not a very good game, it makes me feel a little bit like a bully. But if it’s too challenging and we just lose all of the time we feel like doormats. True, it does make victory all that much sweeter, but I’m beginning to forget what it tastes like at all.

Shadowrun: 2nd Edition Character Creation

2011-01-17T18:26:00.001-05:00

So you want to be a shadowrunner? More specifically, you want to be a Shadowrunner using the character creation rules from the early 90’s? Awesome. Let me help. Second edition Shadowrun uses a priority system to create runners. No rolling going on here. Players assign a ranking to each of the five categories; Magic, Race, Resources, Skills and Attributes. The priorities are A,B,C,D and E; A gets the most out of that category, while E provides the least. It can be tricky to figure out what is going to work. For starters, Shadowrun is definitely a game that rewards smart play. So you don’t need a great character to succeed. But it helps.

We will start with Magic, because it’s the easiest priority to assign. If you want to be a mage or a shaman it gets priority A. If you don’t want to be one of them, you can dump it to E. The only exception to this is a metahuman wielder of magic, in which case you can put priority B here, as long as you use A for your race. Magic is actually really powerful in Shadowrun. It has it’s limits, but the power that it makes available is a fair trade for your highest priority.

Race is the other easy priority to figure out. Metahumans require an A, if not you can dump it. It’s cool to be an orc, troll, elf or dwarf but is it a good move in a character building sense? If that’s who you want to be, then absolutely. Metahumans are very interesting in the world of 2050 (or wherever you choose to set this) and a party of all humans is sort of dull. There are humanist poli-clubs, metahuman terrorists and all sorts of great character hooks that come from being a nonhuman. That being said, it’s usually not a great deal to spend your highest priority to enter the metahuman club. The thing is they are each sort of railroaded into a particular type of character. I love the idea of a troll shaman, but the truth is that they are absolutely wretched in that role. The problem is that after spending A and B to be the troll shaman, they are going to wind up very deficient in one area. Yeah, it can work but they are probably going to start weaker than the rest of the party. A troll bruiser with a big mono-axe? Yes, that’s a serious character. Most of the races wind up with a net bonus in attributes, so it’s not a killer to have to move your Attributes priority down a little. The other bonus features can usually be recreated by cyberware. All this being said, I think that metahumans are way awesome and everyone should try playing one at some point.
For most characters the real decision comes down to Skills, Attributes and Resources for their A, B and C priorities. If you are a non-magical human this is the choice you have to make. So what will it be?

Skills are pretty much the lifeblood of a character and really define what they are more than anything. It’s shooting guns, driving cars, using computers, tricking people, just about anything that your character wants to do there is a skill connected to it. An E priority in Skills gets you a paltry 17 points, there is not much that you can do with that. On the other end of the spectrum, A gets you 40 skill points. That’s a whole bunch, but easily spent nonetheless. The other thing to keep in mind is that once the game starts skills are more expensive to raise then attributes, so the more you can get at character creation the better. A mage or shaman could get by with one of the lower priorities, but any other character is really going to struggle with only having 17 or 20 skill points. They are just going to be very limited in what they can do.

Unlike in some other games, Attributes do not dominate in 2nd edition Shadowrun. Usually a skill is more relevant when attempting to do something. Attributes are not really about what you can do, but rather about what other people can do to you. Resisting bullets, defending against a manaball, or taming a spirit are all related to attributes. Body is important for everybody, Willpower is really important for everybody since it is the chief way that you will defend against magic and magical defense is much harder to come by than body armor. Strength? Charisma? Very easy to get by with low scores in those. Priority E garners a measly 15 points for attributes. With six attributes (a minimum of one in each), you are looking at twos and threes for most of them. That’s tough to pull off. Cyberware can help with the physical weakness, but the mental ones will catch up to you at some point. Attributes also form the basis of reaction and combat pool, which is good for anyone who ever plans to get shot at or shoot at someone. Who should focus on attributes? Well, the one trick pony certainly should. A character that generally knows what their role is and what sort of situation they will find themselves. For example, the heavy gun specialist. He doesn’t need to know a lot of stuff. How to shoot some guns. Hmm…that might be it. They can benefit from the defense and combat pool that goes along with all the attributes. And should they need to do something on the fly they can default to an attribute and have a reasonable chance of getting lucky on a roll.

Resources are sort of the wild card of the priority process. Since money can pretty much fix any problem with a character it’s tempting to go all out with it. It’s like starting with all the magic items that you want. Priority A nets the character a whopping one million nuyen to squander on equipment and cyberware. Right off the bat you can create a very formidable character with that kind of bankroll, but it might be a little bit of overkill. First off, you should check with your GM about what they are going to allow you to purchase. A lot of the real high end stuff is military grade and may not be available at the onset. And unless you are buying a big vehicle, what are you going to spend all that money on? I could see why a rigger would go this route. A level three Vehicle Control Rig and a helicopter will cost you close to a million. But what would a street samurai do with it? Level three Wired Reflexes costs half a million, but it eats up pretty much all your essence, so you won’t be able to buy much else with your remaining loot. I suppose the right type of character could spend it on skillwires. With all this money you may find yourself in a Brewster’s Millions type of scenario, forced to spend money on all sorts of things. Priority B puts 400,000 nuyen in your pocket, which is more than enough to equip most characters if you want to have a ton of cyberware. Otherwise, priority C should be sufficient for most runners. Plus, if you have all this money up front what are you going to buy after you get paid from all those successful runs?

The other aspect of Resources is that it is also force points for the magically active, which allows them to purchase spells. Certainly you don’t want to go cheap on this, but going too high will create a mage that has no powers outside of magic. Is that a problem? Not really. Plus all the money allows for some starting spell locks or foci. And mages don’t really need a lot of skills. Sorcery and Magical Theory are a must, but other than that nothing is all the necessary. Magic can fill in all the gaps. Going lower than C creates a very narrow user of magic.

Since Shadowrun does not have character classes, character generation is a wide open process. More important that any priority assignment is having a picture in your head of what you want your character to be. The numbers will all fall into place afterwards.

More thoughts on All Flesh Must Be Eaten

2011-01-07T22:46:00.000-05:00

I recently wrote about some of my initial thoughts and impressions regarding All Flesh Must Be Eaten, a zombie themed horror roleplaying game. Well, we just finished up our second session of it and I have some more to say, having now actually played the game. I was pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable of a game it was. The whole group had fun and it was a nice change of pace from what we had been playing. However, I couldn’t see our group playing a whole campaign of it though, or at least I wouldn’t be interested in running one. Not because it isn’t fun (it is) but I think this genre is more conducive to a shorter, quick game. I also think it’s strength lies in the characters just being normal people, who may not live very long. AFMBE also has options for playing tougher “Survivor” characters and others who have magical powers. That doesn’t seem right for this game world, but longer term games are more geared to those types.

Since this game was not really going to have a strong central plot (it was more about survival and we only planned on two weeks) I wanted to keep the pace of the game rather frenetic and chaotic. If they stopped to rest there were zombies, every time they tried to go somewhere there was pressure to keep moving. In trying to create a panicked environment I thought that this was key. Keep them on their toes since death lurks around every corner! And the game mechanics work with this. Most things are resolved with a single roll and combat is fast. I’ll be honest, I barely learned the rules to the game but I knew enough to keep it going. The rules do seem pretty simple though. It uses something called the Unisystem, which is d10 based. Hey, whatever works for you.

As I had felt going into it, controlling a bunch of zombies is not necessarily the most fun tool in the gamemaster arsenal. I do like that they are virtually infinite, but none of them are all that memorable. Sure, some of them had on distinct outfits and made different noises but when it came down to it they were all sort of the same. The game does have options for making all sorts of zombies (some of which breath fire, are immune to all sorts of things, and really everything else) but I stuck to the basics for our first time. I did have one big showdown planned, but the party never went for it and I did not want to railroad them an unlikely scenario.

The real strength of AFMBE are the characters. We opted to go with the Norms, the least powerful of the options. Zombies are scary because you are just a regular person, if we had made some of the more powerful types I don’t think that we would have enjoyed it as much. It was interesting to see what everyone created, usually they are making some sort of character that is anything but the norm in society. But not here, that’s just what they were. We wound up with a stripper, a weed smoking butcher, a cocaine addicted homeless street performer, and a totally inept Lord of the Rings obsessed bus driver. What a crew! Everyone also did a good job roleplaying their characters. Those who had addictions made it a point of playing that up (such as breaking into a police station to get into the evidence locker for some blow). Sometimes they were cowards. And they were all realistic in their builds. Why would a bus driver know how to shoot a gun?

I think the best part of it was we set the game in present day Philadelphia, which is where we all live. This allowed them to draw upon actual knowledge of their environment and put it to use, rather than making a roll to see if they know where to find something. It was fun to see. They knew about the bus depot on Moyamessing, the gun shop in the Italian Market and the police station on 11th. Just like their characters would know. Blurring the lines of fantasy and reality indeed! This made it both easy and hard to plan for, definitely a mixed bag. In one sense I didn’t have to make much up, I really just drew on my knowledge of Philadelphia and zombified it. However, it was also impossible to predict where they were going to go and do. For example, in other games I have some control over that. If the party needs to get to another town I know that the only ways that they can go are through the forest, along the main road, or take a boat. I have some idea of what each has in store for them. In Zombie Philadelphia that’s not the case. Just going from South Philly to Center City they could choose a ton of options, right down to which block and where they were going to turn. And they all expected it to be realistic. It had the potential to be hyper detail oriented. In the end I just sort of made it up as I went, which I'm fine with in this type of game.

DM Theory: Total Party Kill

2011-01-03T23:17:00.000-05:00

In some campaigns it is merely a hushed whisper never given life, in others it is an all too harsh reality. The Total Party Kill. For the uninitiated it is just what it sounds like, the death of every player in the game and, by default, the current campaign. Now, I don’t think that a GM should ever kill a party deliberately, but I do think that there are plenty of situations in which the entire party gets themselves annihilated. Let us discuss.

At the end of one of our most recent Shadowrun sessions one of the players remarked, “I can’t believe that worked.” As a GM I liked that comment for a lot of reasons. For one, it was rewarding for the group to develop and execute a plan. They had a lot of fun with it and ultimately accomplished their goal. However, the reason that I really liked it was because it shows the outcome of the situation was genuinely in doubt. The players know that if they mess up there is a very real chance that they are all going to die. I can’t imagine playing in a game where the outcome is essentially predetermined, which I think is the case if there isn’t the actual threat of death hanging over their heads. I’ve talked to many fellow GMs over the years and I am shocked at how many of them never have PC death, let alone a total wipeout of the party. It blows my mind. Like I said, I don’t intentionally kill players but dungeon crawling and shadowrunning and exploring the far reaches of space are dangerous professions. If people aren’t dying from time to time then something is wrong. But the total party kill is more than just a death because it means the end of the game. But that’s just an opportunity to make new characters and get a new game started up. It’s like a forest fire. Sure, it seems like a gruesome and pointless thing, but in actuality it’s necessary in order to keep things healthy and moving along.

So, how exactly does a Total Party Kill come about exactly? Well, it’s just like one character getting killed but it happens a couple of times in succession. Which is actually plausible if you think about it. Characters rely on one another and they all fill roles, and sometimes if one or two of them are unable to fulfill their function (because they are dead) then the whole house of cards crumbles. It could be bad rolls that gets the ball moving against the party, or it could be a poorly executed plan. If it’s the result of the party coming up against a vast number of superior foes than I feel the DM is to blame. That seems like you are just setting up a party to be killed. Of course, running away is always an option but I find that it is one that players rarely go for. If the assumption on the part of the GM is that the party will recognize that they are outgunned, than it’s a bad assumption. But other times it just happens. Like I said, these are dangerous times.

I think that the biggest argument against the Total Party Kill is that it ruins everyones fun. Only a rotten GM would do such a thing. Essentially all of these nice people have gathered together to share in this fun, communal activity and now it is destroyed. All that they have worked for has been left unfinished, food for the crows of the battlefield (or the alligator filled pit or the underwater science lab, whatever it may be). So what? It’s a game and a new one can be started right away. But it gets back to the idea of accomplishing something in a roleplaying game. Now, treasure and levels and money and all the other rewards that players receive are all fake. We all know this. This is a game and none of it is real. However, success isn’t as fleeting when measured in accomplishments. If you don’t always win there is a chance for a real reward. Knowing that you and your friends looked at a problem and found a solution to a difficult situation is a lot of fun. So is getting some lucky rolls and feeling like you got by on the skin of your teeth. But sometimes it goes the other way. You can’t have one without the other.

And the other side of this is that “winning” does not necessarily mean you have had fun. Shockingly, I have seen smiles on the faces of characters as they are all being painfully killed one at a time, slowly becoming aware that their number is up. Everyone gets to go out fighting or empty their bag of tricks in a last ditch effort to save the day. Some die as brave heroes and others go out as chumps. But as players, rather than characters, we all get to try again some other day.

One final point is that campaigns, or any long term games, have to end somehow. I’m not a fan of the eight year campaign. Maybe it’s because we play every week and the idea of playing the same characters in the same world for that long would drive me insane. So assuming that a game has an end it really only leaves a couple of options. The players achieve what they were trying to do, the game just sort of dwindles away or everyone chooses to end it, or everyone dies. I have been involved in multiple campaigns of each variety and they all have their merits, but in some ways the TPK is the most memorable.

By the way, the Shadowrun game I mentioned above ended the following week with a Total Party Kill.

Macho Women With Guns!

2011-01-02T12:31:00.000-05:00

I decided to dust off the shelf and introduce the gaming group to another fun game from my youth. Wanting to change things up a bit and not commit too much to an intense game, we opted to go with the incredible Macho Women With Guns. MWWG is a thoughtful, delicate role playing game that requires tact and patience on the part of the players. That’s not at all true. It’s actually just what it sounds like. The players are essentially pissed off females with guns and knives, out to kill the oppressive and dumb males that rule society. It’s not meant to be serious (obviously) and seemed perfect for a single night of gaming. The version we played was the original from 1988. The rulebook is all of 12 pages. Totally awesome!

Character creation in Macho Women is a lot of fun for both it’s simplicity and humor. The entire game is actually really funny, but especially making the character. For starters it is just a point based system and allocating them is very intuitive and easy to do. You want your lady to look good? Put a lot of points in Looks. Is she strong? Then her Strength should probably be high. The best part are the skills. Not many roleplaying games offer such areas of specialty as Running In High Heels, Hit Things With Other Things, and Do Technical Stuff (my favorite). As if all of this wasn’t enough to get your inner teenaged boy excited, there is also a blank template to draw your character. Oh, the fun we had! Seriously, more games should encourage players to draw their characters. I’m sort of torn if this game is a parody of the fantasy and roleplaying depictions of women, or just about the most egregious example of such chauvinism. I mean, it’s not really a surprise that I discovered this game when I was thirteen. Our group is half female and they all thought it was funny, if anyone takes this game seriously they should probably be arrested.

This version of the game was made during the height of the Reagan years, and as such the Gipper is attributed to causing many of the world’s ills. With it being well into the 2000’s I didn’t think that was rather relevant or funny any more, but it was shockingly easy to update everything to George Bush era USA, so that is the world that our Macho Women were unleashed into. Throw in some hell gates, a little bit of mysticism and a blatant disregard for order and we were ready to go. Since the book is only 12 pages there really isn’t much source type information, which I found to be totally cool. If anything the book sort of gives mixed signals about the world. For example, the cover shows a woman with a baseball bat and a pistol fighting aliens. Yet, J Edgar Hoover and Puppies of Tindalos are listed among the main enemies. To me this said to just do whatever I wanted to. And I did. And I think that more people should take liberties with fantasy worlds and just shape them to be whatever you need them to be. This is a point that is clearly spelled out in just about every role playing game handbook, yet I feel that a lot of people cling to what is written in them as gospel. That’s too bad, but a rant for another day.

Since the point of all this was to have a quick, fun game I pretty much let the players have and do what they wanted. When we started one character was driving a monster truck and their weapon was an extension cord with a padlock at the end. Another was wearing a Soviet style thong bikini and fought with a hammer and sickle. Another was weaponless, armed with only a pink catsuit and her feminine wiles. It was an excellent crew and no one spent very long coming up with their character. Leaving us plenty of time to play. Which is a good thing because the session was filled with explosions, murder, a thrilling car race and an orgy with JFK and Taylor Swift. Wouldn’t want to run out of time on any of that.

I’ll admit that I’m not sure if Macho Women is actually even a roleplaying game, it seems like it may be more of a table top game (later versions of it certainly are). Regardless, there are very few rules and the ones that do exist are either really easy or real easy to ignore. I found that rolling a character’s Macho was about the most important thing and frequently came up in interactions with the characters. This is not a game for rule lawyers. They will find precious little to work with. Everyone really enjoyed it and I am certain that it will find it’s way back to the table when we are between campaigns again. I do not really see this as being a long term campaign type of game, and I’m sure the designers would agree with me. But not everything needs to be. Macho Women With Guns is perfect the way that it is.

All Flesh Must Be Eaten initial thoughts

2010-12-27T11:55:00.001-05:00

With our current Shadowrun campaign having ended we’ve decided to play a couple of other games over the next several weeks before we start up another. Next up on the agenda is the zombie horror game All Flesh Must Be Eaten. No one in the group, including myself, has ever played this before so it will be a new experience for all of us. Character creation is scheduled for this week so I’m trying to learn the rules since I will be adding Zombie Master (ZM) to my resume. Going into the game I do have some concerns about how the game will go. Before proceeding I would like to say that All Flesh Must Be Eaten is the greatest name in the history of roleplaying games.

The zombie genre is characterized by hordes of mindless combatants overpowering a group of survivors who are, most likely, at each other’s throats. To me that does not sound like a great game to run. Except for the players being at each other's throats. Why? Well, for starters the main enemy that I will be throwing at the party is mindless. Not even mindless in the way that gnolls and robots are mindless, but more like masses of gelatinous cubes coming after the party. What do I do with that? I mean, I love gelatinous cubes. Once every other campaign it’s great for an unsuspecting rogue to get trapped inside and have their equipment eaten. But if the vast majority of the opposition are all cubes? Even the occasional ochre jelly wouldn’t be enough to spice it up. It’s hard to play it dumb. I’ve always taken the approach that I place enemies in the world and they have an agenda and then they just sort of do their own thing. Sure, I’m controlling them but they are really like windup toys unleashed against the players. I think with All Flesh Must Be Eaten I need to take a more active role in things happening to the party in relation to what they do. Normally I wouldn’t do that, but I think it might make for a better game. More dead ends when being chased (as opposed to Path A being a dead end, and Path B leading to freedom), more crumbling staircases, more party strife and the like. I think I would also like to experiment with more “smart” zombies, but that is a little further down the road.

The other aspect that really concerns me is combat. In general combat against great numbers of weak foes is about the most boring approach. It takes a while, the party is never really in danger, and there is not much reward for it. From time to time it’s fun to do and allows the party to kick some ass. Right when that wizard gets Fireball or the rigger picks up a new autocannon, hordes of enemies are great to just mow down like target practice. But when that’s the norm? I’m not so sure. But that’s the thing about zombies. They are scary because they are essentially endless. You can never kill all the zombies. I hope that the party doesn’t try to. And I realize that an adventure in AFMBE isn’t about killing the boss, it won’t be structured that way but I would hate to see things drag as a result slow combat. And since this is the first time that we are playing I imagine that things won’t be running at top speed.

I like games and I always excited to try new ones, as is the case with AFMBE. If nothing else we have a fun group of players and I’m sure that we will enjoy the game. There are several types of characters in the game, ranging from norms (just what it sounds like) to Inspired (who have magical powers). We have chosen to play norms because it seems most representative of the actual genre. I think it’s also worth noting that no one in our group is a total zombie fanatic (not that I know of), so I don’t feel a ton of pressure to adhere to the genre to a tee.

Incan Gold review

2010-12-26T17:23:00.000-05:00

There is an awful lot of exciting adventure contained in this small card game. Incan Gold casts the players as members of a team exploring the tunnels of an Incan ruin, searching for gold and the rumored treasures of a lost civilization. Like in Forbidden Island, I’m not sure if I am taking on the role of a grave robber and looter, or someone with more idealistic views. I’m not sure it matters, I’m comfortable with both. What I do know is that Incan Gold is a ton of fun and is probably the best “fast” game that I’ve played. Three to five players can get in on it and a whole game can easily be completed in fifteen minutes.

The game is simple. Each round players decide if they are going to return to camp and keep what they have found, or they are going to try to find more treasure by continuing in the tunnel. Players reveal their choices simultaneously, so predicting what others do is a part of the strategy. If you go to camp everything that you have found so far is safely banked (or tented, as the case may be) and you are done until the next tunnel. If you bravely light up that torch and keep going, then the next card is flipped over and everyone still exploring splits whatever loot they find. This is usually a room of a variable amount of treasure. There are also artifacts that have a value determined by when they come up in the game. Sometimes there are mummies though! And also spiders, cave ins, fire, and snakes. Once a pair of the same hazard comes out the tunnel is done and anyone still inside loses everything that they have found that round. The game is played over five rounds.

One of the aspects that makes Incan Gold so much fun is that because it is so fast it gets you in the mood to gamble, which is when the excitement really comes in. Knowing that you are going to have another shot in a moment makes even the most conservative gamer want to roll the dice. Sure, the tunnel may be collapsing and filled with snakes, but the lure of gold is very hard to resist. The fun really starts when one or two players have headed back to camp like the wimps that they are, leaving the remaining players to get a larger share of the loot. I shouldn’t be so quick to judge, discretion is the better part of valor after all. And there are some clear advantages to bailing early and leaving your friends at the mercy of giant spiders. For one, you get to keep all your treasure. That’s big. And you also get any treasure that has been left out in the tunnel. When treasure is divided it is rounded down and any of the leftovers stay in the tunnel to be picked up by whoever gets to them first. This is also how artifacts are obtained.

Since players are really just making one decision over and over (stay or go) there is not a ton strategy, but the concept of greed is as ancient as mankind and doesn’t appear to be losing steam. It’s about how far you think you can push it. As more and more hazards pile up the chances of pairing one become much greater. As a result player leave, the shares get bigger and someone always gets greedy. I love it. And you think that you know who is going to do what, but your friends will surprise you.

I like the pieces of treasure in the game. They are turquoise, obsidian, and gold and it’s fun to put them inside of your own little tent. Other than that the game is just cards. The art is mediocre, but it doesn’t bother me much in this game. They are never in your hand, turn over real fast, and it’s just the same couple of designs over and over. Except for the artifacts.

Artifacts of the Incans

About the only aspect of Incan Gold that I do not like is the quality of the artifact cards. As far as I understand this game was originally released as Diamant, the only difference between the two games is the inclusion of the artifacts in Incan Gold. Thematically I like the artifacts, it’s always fun to have a little bonus pop up along the way and see how the players fight over it. However, the art on them is really just of odd. There is not a ton of art or production that went into Incan Gold, it’s a card game that doesn’t require it. But if you are going to include the artifacts then they should be cool. As it is, I don’t even know that they are. There is the weird tetris block looking man, some sort of crummy necklace that looks like it would behead you if it was worn, something that looks like a rocket ship with eyes, and a gold cup. A cup! Come on, the Incans must gave been hoarding better treasure. I don’t know. Yes, I am picking nits but I think that Gryphon Games blew an opportunity to do something fun with them.

Incan Gold is an awesome game. It’s fun for a casual, quick night of gaming when you play games. It’s great for new players since the rules and concepts are so simple. It’s great for kids for the same reasons. And it’s relatively cheap. A worthy addition to any game library.

Cleopatra and Society of Architects review

2010-12-19T16:42:00.000-05:00

Ever the fickle diva, Cleopatra has demanded a brand new temple to honor her and has gathered a group of architects to construct the marvel. In Cleopatra and the Society of Architects players take on the role of the architects. Using a variety of materials they must construct the temple and impress the Queen when she comes to inspect it, lest she feed you to her crocodile! The game is for three to five players and takes about an hour. Like many games with a lot of components it appears somewhat daunting at first, but it is actually a very easy game to play. And a lot of fun.

Days Of Wonder have outdone themselves with the components of this game. The best part is clearly the actual temple, which is constructed over the course of the game. It consists of columns, obelisks, sphinxes, a throne and other parts that are culled from the local quarry in the hopes of pleasing the Nile Queen. I have to say, it’s actually really cool to assemble the temple piece by piece. There are a million games where things are constructed and usually the most that one can hope for is some cardboard pieces that represent the construct. This far exceeds that. The way that the game box is incorporated is very clever, the pieces looks great and they even fit well into the box when it’s all over. Well done. My only complaint is that due to the height of the palace grounds (built on top of the game box) it is hard for all of the players to see what is going on (I had a similar problem when trying to take a picture of it). The non-palace pieces are mainly little cardboard chips that represent points and corruption amulets (more on that later) and they are fine. There are also little statues of Anubis that each player gets. Who doesn’t like little statues of Anubis?

In many aspects the game plays a lot like Ticket to Ride (a favorite at our gaming table) in the sense that there are only two actions available to a player each turn; get resources, or spend those resources to build something. The resources come from the Market, which are three stacks of cards that the player can choose from. Players can take one stack, after which an additional card is placed on each of them. When the game is setup the deck is shuffled in a strange way so that some of the cards are face up and others are face down, meaning that the market stalls have face down cards in them so that you don’t always know what you get. Interesting. Throughout the game the stacks are usually of varying sizes, but you don’t always want to take the most resources because some of them are tainted. Yes, there are corrupt merchants out there and Cleopatra frowns on your association with them. Apparently the black market for Lapis Lazuli was thriving in ancient Egypt.

The other available action for players is visiting the quarry and building a part of the temple. Each temple piece costs some combination of resources (this is very similar to Settlers or Starfarers of Catan) to build. For example; building a sphinx costs a player one artisan, one stone and one marble. Completing a temple piece is also worth talents, (the fancy name for points) which ultimately decide the winner of the game. There are only a certain amount of each temple part available and this determines when the game ends. Each time a part is exhausted Cleopatra gets a little closer to her inspection. When five (of six) are completed the game ends and Cleopatra passes her final judgment on the glorious temple that has been built to honor her. The game ends rather abruptly, there isn’t a final go around or even much warning so it’s important to pay attention to what is left in the quarry or you may be left with a bunch of unspent resources in your hand. And that does not make Cleopatra happy.

Choosing which pieces of the temple to build appears to be one of the key strategies of the game. Some of them are just worth a lot more than others. The throne, for example, gets a player twelve talents, whereas a sphinx may only get you two. Huge difference. Building up some resources early on and then going for the high value pieces is the way to do it. Like TTR, it makes more sense to go for the big ones rather than an accumulation of smaller parts. There are also additional talents to be won when placing the mosaic tiles and the column walls, so competition to get these is the right spot adds another element to the strategy.

Throughout the game players get corruption amulets whenever they engage in shady building practices by using tainted building materials, dealing with characters like the Vizier and Courtesan and by hoarding more cards than the ten card hand limit. Each player has a little pyramid with a coin slot in it that the amulets go into, they stay hidden from the other players. I like having my own private pyramid that hides my shame from the other players, and the reveal at the end is rather tense. When the game ends the most corrupt player is eaten by Cleopatra’s crocodile and loses the game automatically. I think that’s a great feature. I also like that it’s fine to be corrupt, as long as you are not the most corrupt. I think there is a lesson in there.

I think I’ve said this before but I really like what Days of Wonder are doing these days. The games that they make are consistently fun, the rules are well presented and easy to understand, and the games usually have great components and themes. Cleopatra is another excellent addition to their catalogue. It doesn’t seem to have the depth of a great game, I’m not sure that there is really a variety of styles that can be rewarded. To me, a great game allows players to play in a variety of styles and be successful. Ticket to Ride and Starfarers of Catan are the first that come to mind, but Cleopatra is still a very good game and one that I think is good for luring in novice gamers.

DM Theory: The Goblin Cave

2010-12-05T12:33:00.003-05:00

It’s easy to think of role playing games as sprawling, epic adventures in which the fate of the very universe hangs in the balance. The players are heroes (or villains) in the utmost, with each of their actions sending ripples through the entire world that they inhabit. And while that can be true, there is also nothing wrong with the Goblin Cave (or as it known in some circles, Bargle the Wizard). Often players and DM’s get caught up in these gigantic story arcs that ultimately crumble under their own lofty ambitions, thus squashing a game before it ever has a real chance of succeeding. To those games I say, have you been to the Goblin Cave?

The Goblin Cave can take many forms but at it’s heart it is a straightforward adventure that allows the players to make decisions, roleplay, learn something about their characters and have a good time. It goes like this: the party is somehow hired to kill the bandits that are stopping the local caravans. They lay in wait, defeat the goblin bandits, find some way to track them back to their cave lair where they kill the leader of the crew. They probably find something in the cave (a map, a hostage) that plants the seeds for the next adventure. I know, it sounds totally simplistic and it is. But it’s also fun. And for new players and DM’s it is a great way to play the game in a relatively closed environment and figure out what it is all about. Think of the opening scene of a lot of action movies. In many cases it is just a way to meet the characters and highlight some key traits that will pop up later on. This is just like that!

Another nice aspect of the Goblin Cave scenario is there is no pressure to create some sort of lasting villain that always gets away and continues to harass the party at every turn. The leader of the goblins dies in the goblin cave and then he is looted by the party. He is recognizable only by his slightly better weapon than the one’s wielded by his minions (perhaps a short sword to their clubs?). Maybe he yells out to the party just as the melee is joined. If he needs to be a little more memorable than sometime earlier in the adventure the party can learn his name and a little physical description, so that the party knows who he is when they go up against him (“The goblin with the short sword and long red hair, that must be Greasy Garth!”). There is a sense of accomplishment when he is defeated, knowing that he had been wreaking havoc on the townsfolk and now that has been ended by the actions of the party. It’s an immediate reward for the group.

I’m a big fan of promoting discussions amongst the party regarding their motives and intentions. To me it’s kind of what makes a roleplaying game so much fun and different from video games and board games. And the Goblin Cave has many opportunities to get the players talking and learning about their characters. Why are they taking on this assignment? Is there a bounty on the goblin bandit? Do they feel the need to protect the community and undertake the mission for altruistic reasons, or do they just love violence and despise goblins? What happens when they find stolen merchant cargo in the cave, is it returned to the original owner or is it claimed by the party as loot? The point is that there is a lot that can go into such a seemingly simple adventure.

Ticket to Ride: The Sade Express

2010-11-28T13:24:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite destination tickets in Ticket to Ride is Los Angeles to Chicago, also known as the Sade Express. Ever since I first heard the Sade classic song “Smooth Operator” the lyric “coast to coast/LA to Chicago” has stuck out to me for the simple fact that it makes no sense. LA to Chicago is not going coast to coast. I suppose that Chicago is a coastal city but invoking LA and traveling to the other coast really conjures up an east to west continental journey. While the lyric may be silly, the route is certainly a winner. A favorite of mine, that Sade Express.

What makes it a good ticket? Well, it’s worth sixteen points which makes it one of the more valuable tickets in the game. There are certainly tickets worth more than that, but I think that the Sade Express might be better than all of them because of the fact that you don’t have to enter into the labyrinth of small, time wasting connections that begin once you head east of the Windy City. The only tricky thing about the route can be getting out of Los Angeles, which can frequently get clogged up early in the game. Aside from exiting LA there are a myriad of ways to get from one way to another, and it is also possible to pass very close to many of the other major cities in the game and have a multitude of tickets contained within the Chicago to Los Angeles route. I’d like to think that Sade knew all of this when she penned Smooth Operator.

DM Theory: Planning Too Much?

2010-11-24T17:37:00.001-05:00

Running a successful, long term gaming campaign is a lot of work, and there is no guarantee that it is going to be worth it in the end. I’ve seen many games that lasted less time than a goblin in padded armor. So, what can you do to make your game fun and lasting? Well, there are a near infinite amount of ways to approach gaming but I can’t talk about all of them here. One that I would like to comment on is the amount of preparation that goes into a single session and into the ongoing campaign. Contrary to popular opinion it is possible to plan too much for a game, sometimes to the detriment of all involved.

If you are (un)fortunate enough to be the GM, DM, Keeper or whatever for your group there is no need to burden yourself with additional planning and long term masterminding that may never come to pass, or even worse, be forced upon the group of players. In my experience one of the worst things that a game master can do is to plan too far in advance, have the whole arc of the campaign scripted out before the first dice are rolled. It’s important to realize that the Game Master is just one half of the equation, with the players comprising the more volatile, explosive part of the game and the GM providing the framework that it can all exist inside of. It has to be a collaborative effort or it’s going to fall short. A couple of years back I was running a D&D campaign and when I was putting together my initial thoughts on the story I had in mind a plot involving the poisoning of the land by a clan of evil blighter type druids. Ultimately I assumed that the players would battle the druids and find their way to a mystical isle of legend where they could find the cure for the blighting that would be tearing through the land. I had some plot hooks that would interest all of the PC’s, but the PC druid was going to sort of be the driving force as to why they were getting involved in all of this. Well, guess what? The druid totally sucked as a character (she was fun and everyone liked her, but grossly ineffective) and wound up getting killed halfway through the campaign. But even before that I was able to adjust where the game was going by letting the players steer the course and in the end we had what may have been the best long term game that the group had experienced. It was a ton of fun. However, if I had spent a month writing up NPC’s, drawing maps and creating monsters I think that I would have been much more hesitant to scrap it. And this allowed me to adjust to what they did want to do, rather than just going along with what I had planned.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that sourcebooks are there to help you. Honestly I’ve never been a big fan of the D&D books for specific locales (Greyhawk being the major exception) but the Shadowrun ones are great, as are a lot of other games. Use them, make it easy on yourself. Especially if you are new to running a game, piggyback on what others have done before you and play around and see what you and your group are most into. No need to reinvent the wheel.

It’s also very useful to have some key plot points or NPC’s that can be used in any location, that is to say that they are not tied to a certain inn or an event that will only happen if the party decides on a certain course. For example, the party is looking for a piece of information while investigating the disappearance of a college professor. You know that the info that they need is inside the head of a colleague of the professor’s. Now maybe that guy is usually hanging out at a certain watering hole, but he doesn’t have to be. Guess where he is going to pop up? That’s right, wherever the PC’s wind up. That seems simple, but look at it from the player’s standpoint. You have not railroaded them anywhere, they have been free to check out a whole bunch of places and ask around for this guy, which is good. Players don’t want to be told where to go. But in the end they find what they have been looking for and also get explore the location a bit. And you’ve really just created one NPC (of course, you are going to need to be able to adlib your way through some social encounters. If you can’t do this, you may be in the wrong line of work.)

In the end nothing is more important than understanding the group that you play with, and it takes time to breed that familiarity. But I know that I like to game every week and I don’t always have 10+ hours to set aside for preparation so I’ve learned to get by on less and less prep time. And some of the best sessions we’ve every had came as a result of having virtually nothing planned (don’t tell the players that) because it becomes a real group effort with everyone contributing to the action.

Castle Panic review

2010-11-01T13:14:00.002-04:00

Building your castle right in the middle of the forest was probably not the smartest idea, so you shouldn’t be all that surprised that monsters are coming out of the woods to tear it down. Such is the dilemma of Castle Panic, from Fireside Games. Castle Panic is a cooperative game in which the players must defend their castle from hordes of goblins, orcs and trolls. The monstrous horde reigns victorious if they are able to destroy the castle, the players are triumphant if they defeat the entire gang of monsters laying in wait. Castle Panic is for one to six players and takes about 45 minutes. I think that it's a fun game and a great introduction to cooperative board games due to it's simplicity, but ultimately it lacks the depth and strategy that would allow it to be a great game.

The castle consists of six towers in the middle of the board surrounded by six walls that help to defend it. Working from the inside out the castle is surrounded by several colored rings; swordsmen, knights, archers and the forest. Monsters in the forest are in wait and can’t be attacked until they emerge, monsters in the other rings can be attacked by the appropriate soldier. Example: a troll that has moved into the Knight ring in the green section can be attacked by a Green Knight card. Monsters are randomly placed in the forest when they come into the game and on each turn they move one step closer to the castle, ultimately destroying the walls and moving onto the towers. There are 49 monster tokens in the beginning of the game and the players have to defeat them all in order to achieve victory. The game sort of works as a puzzle as the players attempt to piece together the best offense by anticipating where monsters will wind up on a given player’s turn.

Each turn the players have a chance to trade cards with one another, and if the game has a key strategy it is trading cards between castle defenders. The strategy is simple to grasp and, unfortunately, does not get much more complex which does not bode well for repeated plays of Castle Panic. Most of the moves are self evident. If there is a goblin in the Red Archer zone and one of the other players has a Red Archer, you should trade for it. You can only trade once per turn so it is important to prioritize and make sure that the trade you make is the best one available. Aside from that you should just kill anything that you can reach.

The oddest thing about Castle Panic is the Master Slayer. When a player defeats a monster they claim it’s monster token and at the end of the game players total these up and the one with the most points is given the title of Master Slayer. So, everyone wins but one player wins more than the others? That seems real weird to me and does not mesh all that well with the team dynamic. I suspect that the designers probably added this to increase the competition in what is generally a pretty easy game. But I’m not so sure about it.

The game components are simple and do the job. There is not much to the game. Castle Panic consists of some towers, some walls, monster tokens and a deck of cards. The art is just okay. I would like to have seen some variation amongst the creatures that are attacking. The orcs all look the same as one another, they must have some real military discipline going in on those woods to get the traditionally chaotic creatures to all agree to the same uniform. I do like the Boss monsters that lead the others. The best components are the actual walls and towers. They are on little stands and lend some depth to the board. They fall into the unnecessary but enhances the game category. The board is sort of bland and the one I have is a little crinkled around the edges. I would like to have seen maybe some enemy encampments, siege engines, or really anything else put on the board just as a meaningless detail. As it is it is just a big field with circles on it.

I think that the biggest issue I have with Castle Panic is that it seems to be pretty easy. Actually, it seems to be real easy. I’ve played the game about a half dozen times now and only once did I actually feel panicked, which I sort of assumed to be the signature emotion of the game. A cooperative game needs to be hard. It is one of the reasons why Pandemic is such a success, most of the time you are probably not going to win. It’s creates tension and drama and a nice feeling of accomplishment when you finally succeed. Same thing with Shadows Over Camelot. There are suggestions in the instructions about making the game harder, the most difficult of which is the version in which the castle starts with no walls, just the towers to defend. It was close, but we were able to defeat that one as well and I’m just not sure where we take the game from here. I’m not sure how much our game group will continue to go back to this game since we will keep winning. I don’t need the ego boost that comes with continued winning, I’d prefer the challenge that makes a great game.

The Game of Real Life

2010-10-25T16:29:00.001-04:00

I was given the Game of Real Life by a friend, who had it given to them by someone else. Other than Hot Potato a game should not be passed around this much, so I was a bit leery about this game from the start. The Game of Real Life is a more realistic approach to the Game of Life, the classic game of happy endings. Apparently real life is filled with nothing but drugs, prostitution, early death and pain. I suppose that’s not entirely false and actually makes a decent premise for a game. Honestly though the game is not much more than a “roll the dice, move your mice” with some colorful details and some options along the way. But, like real life, much of the decision making is really out of the player’s hand. The game is for two to six players and should not take more than a half hour, considerably less if a couple players meet unfortunate endings. Which they probably will.

The best part of the game is the diary. All the players are given a diary sheet to keep track of their life events. It’s nothing all that special, but I like that the game creators wanted to put some sort of element into it that gives it some life. It’s nice to be more than just the sum result of some dice rolling and a score at the end. The problem is that you think that the diary will be a nice, flowing narrative of your character’s life when it is actually just a bunch of short sentences summarizing what happened to you. The game turn is very quick (just roll and read) so it does not leave you with much time to create flowery prose.

The object of the game is to be the player who has the most happy faces at the end of the game. Living for a long time helps because it allows you more time to collect happiness, but it is possible to win even if you die early if those are some real happiness filled years of youth. Happy faces are gained by all sorts of activities; marriage and kids, vacations, and many other things such as your own pizza, catching leaves on a fall day and seeing a unicorn in the forest. Strangely, the single biggest happiness provider in the game is found on the heroin chart. Granted, some of the other heroin uses create disastrous situations, so it’s not always a happy ending. It’s really not a happy ending in most situations. Cris, Mike and I played the other night. Mike was a drug addict witness to an infant having their throat slit, Cris was a prostitute that died in World War III and I perished in a nightmare of a nursing home. At least I made it to old age, not bad for someone who was disowned by their family, shot in a drive by and had some bad experiences with LSD.

The board itself is a blur of lines, small type, colors and some drawings. It is very confusing and the fact that the print is so tiny and facing off in all directions makes it very hard for the player to read what is going on. What space am I on? Can you read that for me? And the game pieces are rocks. Actual rocks. I suppose they are little bit glossy actually. I don’t mind the low-tech approach to the game, but the design of the board could have been a lot better. It’s not just that it does not add a ton to the game, but I would say that it actually detracts since it slows things down as you try to figure out the space that your rock just landed on. And the spaces are very little. Also, maybe we had too much wine when we were getting started but it took us several minutes just to locate the starting point on the board. Not a great sign.

The Game of Real Life is fine if someone wants to give it to you, but I’m not sure that I would recommend buying it. If you are used to Life and Monopoly than it will probably be exciting and funny and perhaps an impetus to look further into the world of board games, which is a great thing. I’m not saying that I will never play it again, but it is not at the top of the list.

Sage Advice: An Archive of Bizarre Questions and Answers

2010-10-14T19:15:00.000-04:00

In my formative role playing years I was a big fan of Dragon magazine. What I liked best about it were the insights into the games of other players. I really enjoyed the letters column and Sage Advice, where gamers would write in and ask questions of the gurus at TSR. Most of the time they could easily be answered by anyone who actually owned any of the books for D&D, but other times they were totally off the wall and represented, what I felt was, the real way that people play the game. Fortunately for all of us someone has taken it upon themselves to post years worth of Sage Advice and put it out there for all to read. Thank god for the internet.

This glorious page can be found here:
http://jgrimbert.free.fr/add2/advice/?order=id&debut=0

I’ve spent some time reading through it and I am happy to say that it is as entertaining as I remember. Some of my favorites include the following questions: “We are having an argument over an issue that has us divided. My friends say that with a ring of telekinesis they can make an arrow spin at the speed of light and then release it, having it do between 100 and 600 points of damage to their target. I say this is impossible! What do you think?” The Sage answer sides with the questioner, in case you were wondering it is not possible to do such a thing. Apparently the arrow would disintegrate if it was to spin that fast. Hmm.

Another: “What is the difference between chain mail and plate mail armor?” What kind of a question is that? There are dozens of books that describe both of them in detail. No one at this gaming table was able to answer this question? They had to write to a magazine? I love it.

Some more: “Will a monster join a character party if invited?” There are a lot of these subjective questions going on as well. Some of the others include “Is my character dead”, “What is behind the secret door” and “Is the sword I found magical”. The Sage Advice guy was a lot kinder with these questions than I would have been.

This also got me thinking about some of the questions that my game of 13 year olds would have asked back in the early 90’s. One of them would definitely have been, “Is a wish spell capable of giving the character an army of water breathing minotaurs? And, if so, what needs to be done to insure their loyalty? Is the promise of pillaging enough?” That was big in our game. Very important. I’ve also always wondered about “How many ballistas can fit onto the deck of the boat that my party stole at the end of the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh?” If you are a player of a certain age the answer to just about any question should be yes. It just makes sense to try to do everything. And, in a way, it’s easy for the DM because they all lead to murder and treasure.

There is something inherently strange about asking questions about D&D, since there are specific rules for the game and the DM’s word is law for anything not covered under those rules. But at the same time I am so glad that people ask these questions.

Prime Runners: Shadowrun 2nd Edition

2010-10-04T15:47:00.005-04:00

Lately I’ve been pretty obsessed with second edition Shadowrun. There are just so many things about the world and the game that I really like, as a result I’ve been buying up pretty much every second edition book that I can get my hands on. Some are replacements for ones that I had a teenager (that have all gone to some sort of abyss of old role playing material, my contribution to this netherworld is substantial) and others are new to me entirely. One of the best parts of this is that not many people seem to be playing second edition these days so the books usually cost more in shipping than to actually buy them. The point is that I have been reading a ton of these things lately and, while many of them are excellent, the one that most stands out to me is Prime Runners.

Prime Runners is a sourcebook, but it is not location specific. It is essentially a book of NPC’s of all types. When I purchased it I had assumed that it would just be page after page of elite runners, which seems pretty cool to me. I like reading about badass futuristic mercenaries. But it is actually way better than that and gives such an interesting view into what makes the Sixth World really tick. There are runners contained in it’s pages, but there are also talismongers, journalists, fixers, writers, athletes, and pretty much anything else that you can come up with. To see how a world really lives and breathes it would be not all that useful to just see the runners that operate in it’s seedy underbelly. But to see how many powerful people in the world interact with and use this seedy underbelly is something else altogether. How did that fixer with the suitcase nukes get to be that guy? Why has that journalist been able to survive and thrive in the most dangerous places in the world? It’s all in there chummer.

Like all the Shadowrun sourcebooks, Prime Runners is presented as the work of someone else. In this case two runners who decided to compile a directory of people that other runners would need to know. Good concept. And like other books it is filled with comments from others who have read and commented on the entries. I love that. Usually the comments present various opinions on the person in question and bring up rumors about them as well. Aside from that all the entries have the character’s motivations, history (or what is known of it) and hooks to get the players involved with them. It is well written, smart, interesting and funny. If you can’t get something out of this as a GM then you should probably retire your dice.

One other thing that I really liked about the book was that it showed what a really tough character looks like. Since Shadowrun does not have a level system for characters it is sometimes difficult to know exactly when someone is very powerful, so much of it depends on the particular situation that they are in. And the location sourcebooks rarely have the stats of actual characters in them, that just seems to be how they are. But this books peels back the curtain and shows you how a real wiz runner scans. Take for example Teachdaire, the elven assassin. This guy is no joke. Skills as high as 13, all custom delta-level cyberware and rating six hydraulic leg jacks. Okay, the leg jacks are weird but I would not tell him that. But that is what elite level looks like. Two things really stuck out at me as I read his entry. One, in a standup fight he is virtually invincible. Super fast, skilled and deadly. And two, that with a good plan he can be killed with one shot just like everyone else. And that’s what makes Shadowrun so cool. At least one of the things.

Another runner I would not cross is the combat mage Sukie Redflower. She is totally absurd, both in attitude and ability. But the book is filled with compelling characters. As I was reading through it I was thinking with each entry how I would fit that NPC into our campaign, and it wasn’t stretch for any of them. When I finished the book I had a year’s worth of adventures planned. Isn’t that what a good sourcebook should do?

Ranking the Pandemic Roles

2010-09-12T17:25:00.001-04:00

Pandemic is a tough game. In addition to the horrendous surge of disease that is plaguing the world, there are also the questionable hiring practices of the CDC. Sure, some of the staff I understand, but others I really wonder about. How did they get a job with an organization that seems responsible for saving the world? And wouldn’t the CDC just send out the people best suited for the task? Maybe they were on vacation and no one could get a hold of them. However, the variable roles in the game are also one of the best aspects of the game so I’ve decided to rank all of the roles, including the ones that are introduced in the On The Brink expansion. Unlike the characters in Last Night on Earth none of the roles are wretched, they all have some use. Though the gap between the best and worst is still pretty large.

Dispatcher- In my eyes the unquestioned number one in the game. One of the most important tactics in Pandemic is to be able to trade cards between players and no one makes this easier to do than the Dispatcher. The ability to dispatch any player to another player makes so many things possible when it comes to trading cards. And on top of that they can also move other players around with their own actions, usually setting people up to be in a good position when they start their turn. Any group with a Dispatcher gets a big leg up when it comes to winning. Ideally the Dispatcher never even leaves the greater Atlanta region. The only downside is that the Dispatcher can be hard to use, often requiring the player to think a couple of turns ahead. Which I actually consider to be pretty fun.

Medic- The medic will not help you win the game in the curing sense, but no role is as productive when it comes to keeping the world safe. Being able to clear off all the infection markers with a single action is really strong, assuming that you can get them to the trouble spot. Once a cure is found they can also wipe out all the cubes without spending an action, making them the perfect partner for the Dispatcher to run them through an infected region and clean the whole mess up.

Researcher- Who doesn’t like the Researcher, the most giving of all CDC employees? Seriously, the Santa Claus of Pandemic is a welcome addition to any crew. For one action per card this lady (I think it’s a lady) can give city cards to other players as long as they are in the same place. One of the best tactics is to give away their initial cards on the first turn when everyone is in Atlanta, it’s a good way to get some direction early and maybe snuff out a color in the first two rounds if the cards cooperate a little bit.

Scientist- The object of the game is curing diseases and the Scientist does it better than anyone else. Needing only four cards (instead of five) makes them the ideal candidate to get the job down. However, they still need to get those cards and possess no ability to help with that. The Researcher, Dispatcher and Scientist make an awesome combo should you be so lucky to get them all together.

Field Operative- My favorite of the expansion Roles, the Field Operative has a cool mechanic that makes them very useful in finding cures. Once a turn when they remove cubes from a city they can put one of the cubes on their card. When they have collected three cubes of the same color they can then cure that color for only three cards. Awesome. I like this for a couple of reasons. Obviously it’s pretty powerful, it just takes a bit to develop. But I also like that it makes sense. This guy is out there collecting samples and then can use that evidence to find a cure. Though I am a bit concerned about their haircut, it looks like blonde noodles springing forth from their head.

Troubleshooter- The best preventative role in the game, whatever that means. The Troubleshooter works best in a game with four or five players when they can play the role of freelance operative, flying around and preventing outbreaks. The ability to peek at the upcoming infections is really handy, but if that is all they are doing they are nothing more than middle of the pack. The secondary ability of not discarding city cards to fly there is also useful, especially when it comes to trading since they can fly to a city that they have a card of. Makes it easier to trade.

Containment Specialist- Ultra specialized character that can be very helpful, though at times it’s power will go unused for long stretches. Perhaps the best character at preventing those horrid chain outbreaks, you just need to make sure that he is in the right location to take advantage of his unique skill set. Another character that works well with the Dispatcher, though really everyone does.

Generalist- That’s not a real job. How did they get hired? I wonder if the position was posted as Generalist on a government job site. “We are looking for someone who doesn’t do anything all that well but it useful to have around.” Each turn they get an extra action. It is what it is. Some turns it is very useful, other times it won’t make that much of a difference. About as average a character that you can be. And what it she holding in her hand? Is it for injections?

Epidemiologist- The ability to trade cards easier is very good, but the Epidemiologist gets the short end of the stick as far as this ability is concerned. The issue is that it is capped at being usable once per turn, which is okay but definitely inferior to the Researcher. Also, being able to give cards seems to help more than being able to take cards from players (which is what the Epidemiologist does). This is one of the roles that I’ve just never seen be all that useful during the actual course of the game. Additionally the fact that the woman’s face appears to be melting makes me nervous.

Operations Expert- It’s not so much that the Operations Expert is bad, being able to easily build stations is actually really nice, but the problem is that he becomes quickly obsolete. Once they build a couple of stations they can’t really do all that much. If you happen to have the New Assignment special event it works great here; build some stations and then bring in someone who can still do their thing. The added ability to discard any card at a station to fly somewhere is nothing all that great, but at least it let’s you put a station anywhere that you want. Oh yeah, it’s the On the Brink version that we are discussing here. The original killed himself in shame.

Archivist- Weak. A hand limit of eight cards instead of seven is okay, but it really doesn’t stack up to just about any other power in the game. The more useful ability is the one that allows the Archivist to bring a city card back from the dead, but it’s really an ability that takes a lot to make it work. Chances are it is something that you will want to use during the end of the game when you need a certain color. In order to yield some results the Archivist has to get to the correct city, get the card and then get it to the appropriate player (assuming it is not the Archivist) and give it to them (or more likely have the player come to them and take it). That’s a lot of work in a very time sensitive game.

Forbidden Island review

2010-08-30T14:18:00.002-04:00

Without knowing much about it I picked up Forbidden Island for a couple of reasons. It was cheap (only $16, which is stupidly cheap for board games), had very nice packaging and it was by Matt Leacock, creator of the awesome Pandemic. I was a little hesitant because it was purchased in a toy store that had pretty much just stuff for little kids and I’m 31 years old. But I bought it anyway and I’m very glad that I did. The premise is neat; a group of adventurers travel to the infamous Forbidden Island to loot it of it’s four treasures. The only problem is that the ancient civilization that guarded the treasures has booby trapped the island, making it a watery grave for anyone who tries to steal the valuable artifacts. It is for two to four players, should take less than a half hour and is very simple to learn and play.

When I started to read through the rules one thing became clear right away. This game is Pandemic, just with a different storyline. Honestly, it plays almost exactly the same. Instead of curing the four diseases the players have to find the four treasures by using four matching treasure cards. Instead of outbreaks and infections in cities certain island tiles become flooded. Instead of Infection cards we have Waters Rise, which causes the deck to be reshuffled and increases the number of flooded tiles each round. Even the player roles are very similar. It may not be the most original game concept, but that does not take away from the fun of it at all. It’s a great game.

One thing about Forbidden Island that is top notch is the art and packaging. The game comes in a nice looking tin and everything fits easily inside of it. The island is comprised of randomly placed tiles (so the layout is different each time) and the art in them is super cool. They are all sort of ominous and forbidding (maybe that’s where the island’s name comes from…) and each one unique. They are not generic things like mountains and coast, but Breaker’s Bridge and the Cave of Shadows. The Coral Palace may be my favorite. Seriously very cool. Everyone that I have played with has commented on the art. But the best part is the actual artifacts that you have to collect. Each one of the four is represented by a little figurine and, like the tiles, are really very nice. I think that my favorite is the Ocean’s Chalice because of the tentacles on the stem of the goblet, but I would listen to arguments for all of them. One aspect of them that I really like is that they are in the game just to be a nice addition, they are not necessary at all. They could easily be represented by cards, but the makers chose to throw in a nice feature that really enhances the game (this does not always work, see Hera and Zeus). It’s nice to see the creators go the extra bit and also not gouge the consumer for it.

The game itself plays very quickly and does a remarkable job of creating tension and a total feeling of hopelessness. Great. If an island tile becomes flooded after already having been flooded once it is then removed from the game, causing a gap in the island. Depending where the hole in the board is it could prove lethal for our intrepid band of adventurers (though depending on how you look at it, they could easily be called robbers. I sort of like the grey morality of just who these people are). One of the mechanics of the game that I really like is that in order for the players to win they not only need to get all four treasures, but then the entire group needs to make it back to the helicopter and fly off the island together. If there is one thing I’ve always felt was odd about Pandemic it was that the game just ends when the fourth cure is found, it seems sort of abrupt. Not so in Forbidden Island. It also reinforces the camaraderie that is necessary to win the game. These adventurers are not leaving anyone behind, even if it means their death as they wait for the Diver to get there. The Diver, by the way, is the Operations Expert of Forbidden Island. That is to say that they are the character that no one wants to be.

So far we have played four games of Forbidden Island and as a group we have two wins and two losses. For what it’s worth both wins came with three players and both losses came with four, so maybe the game is harder with more players (which I think is also true of Pandemic). I kind of went into playing thinking that it would be easy, but it’s not. Much like Pandemic there are numerous ways to lose and only one way to win. The game can be enjoyed by older players but it is also a great introduction to games for a younger player. If I knew any 10 year olds I would buy this for them in a second.

Zurich is a Trap: More Thoughts on TTR Europe

2010-08-16T15:52:00.004-04:00

I’m sure that Zurich is a beautiful city and it’s residents lovely people, but to me it is nothing more than a horrid trap encased by mountains. At least as far as Ticket to Ride Europe is concerned, which is more and more becoming the lens through which I view geography.

At first glance Zurich seems so appealing. It has four routes that run through it and it connects to a bunch of major areas, it has a great location. So why is it such a trap? Well, for starters every one of the routes that run into it is a tunnel which means that you will probably not be getting a real good return on those trains you put down. Plus, they are all real short. Three routes of two and another of one. No thanks. Like I’ve said in the past I think that TTR-Europe is really a game of board control and getting value out of each of your 45 trains. Not to say that tickets are not important, just not as important as in the original version of TTR. Zurich can be part of a winning plan as long as you just dip into it and get out, spending three turns or so placing trains through the mountains definitely puts you at a disadvantage.

The two games (TTR and Europe) are virtually the same, so why the difference in strategy? Well, the map of Europe is sort of a mess and certainly uneven. There are some very strong regions to claim (mainly the upper right section of the board) and others that are not very conducive to winning (such as Zurich and the surrounding mountains), and if you can lay claim to the high value areas it gives a distinct advantage when it comes time to tally those points. More and more my strategy is to get three or four tickets that work well together and end the game. It’s been working well for me lately. Being the player who initiates the end game is more valuable than an extra ticket or two, at least I think so. If I don’t get one of the 20+ point tickets in my initial draw I try to end the game quickly by focusing on routes of four or more trains, anything less than that may not always be worth it. Of course the chance of all of your tickets fitting neatly into four train routes is nonexistent, but I use that as a guideline when trying to figure out where I am going.

Shadowrun Campaign Journal #3

2010-08-01T14:53:00.004-04:00

After a session which consisted mainly of downtime investigation and off color jokes the party was eager to make something happen. Bring a little action to the shadows of the Outer Edge. Gathered in Mr. White’s warehouse they discussed their options and worked out some potential plans. The ultimate goal was to flush out the Trashcan Man and free themselves of his blackmail, but being the wily raccoon shaman that he is that was not going to be easy. They checked in with their contacts again but not much was moving on that front so they decided to set a plan in motion. Puppy picked up the waitress at the local Long John Silver’s, but she did not yield as much information as Puppy was hoping that she would.

The party assumed that if they made some sort of move on the drug dealer Dark Cloud that Trashcan Man would be in the area watching it go down. Why would he be doing that? Well, his covetous nature made them think that he would want to be involved in whatever was happening, but also as a blackmailer he would probably want to record the whole situation as a future source of income and manipulation. With this in mind the party rolled over to the area of Dark Cloud’s warehouse, not entirely sure of what was going to happen.

Most of the party sort of had their own desired outcome for what they wanted to happen and how it was going to happen. They considered trying to have a face to face with Dark Cloud and let him know that there was a hit out on him. They also toyed with the idea of ignoring him all together and looking for an alternate way of getting Trashy to make an appearance. There was also some debate about the use of the infamous autocannon. Katsin was dead set about not using it, while Mr. White was extremely anxious to bust it out and mow down some degenerates.

Here was the setup that was settled on. Katsin and Puppy snuck up to the rear of the building and were going to keep an eye on the rear exit. Mr. White was going to stay in the van of equipment and monitor the area and provide whatever kind of backup was required. Phil the Kill was going to sneak his way into a nearby building and set up a sniper’s nest, keep an eye on the front entrance of the building and see what happens from there. Before settling into his nest Phil also placed a mobile camera on the roof of the building adjacent to where he was. Mr. White would use this to monitor the area from the van. Seemed like a solid perimeter that they had going on. But what were they going to do with it?

After watching the door for a little while Phil spied a junkie approaching the door of the drug dealing warehouse. He knocked and a couple of moments later two men came to the door. A short transaction went on between the junkie and the two men and then shots rang out. Phil took the open shot and the head of one of the guards exploded like a ripe pumpkin. The junkie grabbed something from the corpse and started to book it down the street, the second guard was taken out by another shot from Phil. The junkie got about 50 feet from the door of the building when he shredded apart by automatic rifle fire. Four men with assault rifles had emerged from the front door and ripped him to pieces in the middle of the street. One of the men came up to the van of Mr. White which was slowly creeping onto the scene and pointed the gun in his face, telling to get out of the area. He complied.

Alerted by the sounds of gunfire Katsin and Puppy came charging from the back of the building and engaged in a brief firefight with the assault rifle wielders. The fight did not last that long and was ended when Mr. White ran several of them over with the death mobile. Katsin was injured in the fracas. Glancing at the monitor in the van he noticed something on the roof of the building that Phil was in. Nothing showed up in the regular display, but the thermographic readout showed a human sized figure crouched on the roof watching the fireworks below. Mr. White radioed to Phil that there was “snow on the roof”, whatever that means. Reading between the lines Phil figured out what was happening and started to make his way up the fire escape to take out the new target.

Everyone was a little on edge at this point, knowing that Phil was alone to face the biggest threat that was out there. His climb up the fire escape was hindered by a Spirit that caused the ladder to move away from Phil, however his quick reflexes saved the day and after dangling from the side of the building for a second he pulled himself up to face his foe. I did not work out so well. Phil was immediately blasted with a Manabolt that shook his brain around quite a bit. His foe dropped the invisibility that he was using and Phil got a clean look at him. A scruffy, dirty looking man with dark goggles around his eyes and black gloves, he eyed up Phil as he was getting ready to finish him off. Phil was able to get a shot off with his Ares Predator wounding the shaman, but was hit with another Manabolt and dropped, seemingly dead. Mr. White was watching all of this from the monitor. He saw Trashcan Man run over to the body and quickly search Phil, stripping him of anything of value in a matter of seconds. Clearly not the first body that he stripped.

Mr. White pulled the van around and picked up the rest of the party and sped over to the building to help out Phil and take out the Trashcan Man. By this point there were various neighbors in the street watching the festivities, nothing anonymous going on here. Several locals were exiting from the building and Katsin scanned them for magical auras, one of them glowed and showed obvious signs of magical power. Katsin and Puppy made a move for the magic man and he bolted back through the alley. Katsin threw some magic at him, but he did a good job absorbing the damage. He dropped his illusion and revealed his true form, it was the same guy from the roof. His magic targeted Puppy, forcing the troll to lose control of his mind and he shot Katsin in the back, seriously wounding the combat mage. A Power Bolt was more than Katsin could handle and she dropped dead on the sidewalk. The celebration was short lived for Trashy as the hum of the autocannon filled the air and tore his body apart. Jumping from the van Mr. White ran up to the roof and checked out Phil and got ready to do some medic work. But it was too late for Phil. The sniper was dead. With half the party now worm food the survivors got into the van and headed back to the safehouse.

And this concluded our first Shadowrun mini campaign. I designed it to go for three weeks, which is exactly what it did, and I felt that it was a lot of fun. It was great to play a game other than D&D and I think that the whole grouped like it. It was the first non D&D game for all of them and it was cool to see them all learn a new system and get into their characters.

I thought that the arc of the story was a good introduction to Shadowrun. To me the game has always had a couple of central themes. And one of those is the double cross and I wanted to make sure that I got that into the plot. No one likes to be manipulated and it was fun to watch how it all played out. Plus we had big firefights, nonsensical plans and death. That pretty much sums up Shadowrun right there.

I’ll admit that I am a little bummed out that the campaign ended, I was just starting to really get into it. Mr. White has already expressed some interest in continuing the game and I suspect that at some point Puppy and Mr. White will recruit some new runners to round out their team. Like I had said previously the rules of the game are really not as bad as I remember them, things actually flowed pretty easily once we got going. I give the experience two thumbs up.

Shadowrun Campaign Journal #2

2010-07-29T14:08:00.003-04:00

The party started the night in Mr. White’s warehouse, licking their wounds from the previous encounter. Both Puppy and Phil the Kill had serious injuries so they decided to hole up a while and do some healing. Mr. White did some computer recon to learn about the fallout over the shootout at Morpheus’ Throne. Apparently the police thought it was the work of some amateurs considering the haphazard way that everything seemed to go down. The party seemed to get a kick out of that, especially since the police were right. There was a mention of some military grade weaponry used in the fracas, this seemed to be of some concern to the local police force.

After a couple of days of laying low they decided to contact Zapper and get their payment for killing Handsome Dick. Phil and Katsin met up with a grim faced Zapper who had some bad news for them. First, he informed them that they had all been had by his employer. The “Aztechnology” corp man does not exist, Zapper thought the whole thing was a setup and that there was no money for any of them. Someone just wanted Handsome Dick, and perhaps all of the Silver Streaks, dead. Secondly, he played them some video footage on a small player of the incident with the Silver Streaks. Clear as day they watched Mr. White unload with the autocannon, reducing some gang members to red mist and tearing apart a section of a building in a hail of lead. There was also footage of the inside of the bar showing the rest of the crew doing work. Zapper told them that the footage was going to be released to the police unless the party cooperated with the wishes of the mysterious client. Zapper apologized to the group and assured them that he had no part in this and was very sorry that they were being manipulated this way. After a perception test Katsin believed him, but the party seems unlikely to ever trust Zapper again.

With the blackmail in place the party was assigned a new job. In the Outer Edge section of Seattle (the same area that housed the once semi-prominent Silver Streaks) there is a drug dealer named Dark Cloud. He is to be killed. They were given the address of his warehouse but not much else. Now is where things started to get interesting…

Shadowrun is a very different game than D&D. Aside from the worlds and the rules, they are also played very differently. For the most part D&D is a structured, linear game. Even in sandbox style campaigns the party moves from A to B, killing and looting along the way. Dungeons usually have one entrance, the party has an overall goal and actions are somewhat dictated by the moral compass of alignment. Not so in Shadowrun, which is a game that the players have a lot more say over how events occur. For the first adventure I purposely gave the party a very clean, narrative path to follow. They were hired to kill somebody, they knew where to find him and how to get there. They went to that place and killed him. It was meant to be a tutorial in a sense. Now, however, it was up to them to create what happened next.

They were confronted with a couple of issues and regrouped at Mr. White’s safehouse to go over their options. They were being blackmailed by an unknown person and they were contacted for another assassination job. Those were about the only certains that were going on. Since none of them had ever played Shadowrun before they were fairly unfamiliar with what their characters were capable of and how to conduct business in the fast paced futuristic world of cyberpunk mayhem. I tried to help them out by letting them know about their capabilities, I explained their contacts to them and occasionally helped them out with some other info. But I love listening to players scheme and plan and was more than content to sit back and see what they came up with. Which was not much. They tried driving slowly through the neighborhood but that yielded little other than a trip to Long John Silver’s and a conversation with a bum. Phil the Kill staked out the drug dealers hideout for a couple of days from a nearby tenement and gleaned some info about Dark Cloud’s day to day operations in moving around the street drug Rush. He also had a radio transmission intercepted and wound up killing two gunmen who came after him.

But the central issue remained. What were they doing? Were they trying to locate their blackmailer? Were they going to kill the drug dealer, and if so, then what? How would they keep Mr. White’s itchy trigger finger off the autocannon? So many questions to be answered. Eventually they started hitting up their contacts, which is what I was hoping they would do. Puppy called his buddy over at Lone Star, a man named Burbank that he knew from bodyguard work. He plugged him for some info on the Outer Edge neighborhood and learned about the drug trade in the area. Phil pulled in a favor from a city official named Masterson, and Katsin paid a visit to his talismonger named Spooky Sal, a bear shaman with a little shop. All their legwork yielded some clues and they were able to piece together that a dude named Trashcan Man was back in town. A raccoon shaman, Trashy had left Seattle a couple of years back after living in the Outer Edge for a while. The rumor was that he had returned to the area. Katsin has some magical theory knowledge and knew that raccoon shamans are typically greedy and covetous. They threw all this info in a pot and came up with the following conclusions. Trashcan Man, being the greedy man that he is, came back to town and wanted his old neighborhood back. He tricked the party into wiping out the Silver Streaks (the gang that now occupied the region) and now was blackmailing them into killing the local drug lord. Seemed like a solid conclusion. But how do they flush him out?

The majority of the night was spent brainstorming ideas, very little actually happened. I found it to be fun, I hope that they did as well. Previous to the first session I had told them that Shadowrun is a game that invites lots of planning, and this sort of stuff is what I was referring to. It is completely up to the party how they want to accomplish a particular goal, which can be both exciting and horrifying (for players and GM). The party also needs to decide what their goals are, there are no goblins robbing traveling merchants around here. The idea that there is an enemy out there is sort of scary for them when they have no idea where he is.

I also really enjoy GMing Shadowrun, it is such an open world that I feel like I can do anything I want with it and the spontaneity of it all keeps me on my toes. Plus, there is a really exciting element to it because of the potential for massive explosions, deadly guns, and a hefty bodycount. Who doesn’t like that?

Shadowrun Campaign Journal #1

2010-07-19T13:34:00.002-04:00

I’ve decided to run a Shadowrun mini-campaign over the next couple of weeks. It has been a couple of years since I have played Shadowrun and probably 15 years since I have been a GM for the Seattle based cyber punk RPG. I’m looking forward to it. I also don’t feel like buying some new books for a game that is only going to last a couple of weeks so I am sticking with the one book that I have; the 2nd Edition basic book. Also, none of the players in the game have ever run the shadows before and Shadowrun (especially 2nd Edition) is not the most novice friendly game. So I’ve decided to do a stripped down easy version of the rules with an emphasis being on quickness of play and a good time. We will see how it goes.

For the sake of brevity I made all the characters ahead of time. Yes, I understand that creating a character is a ton of fun. But so is playing and I wanted to get down to it. We only have a couple of weeks before D&D picks back up. We got together and the players decided to randomly pick the people that they were going to be playing. I gave everyone a basic history of the Shadowrun world so that they understood exactly where they were in time and space. Everyone seemed into it. In my opinion the strength of this game has always been the universe that it exists in. It’s just pretty awesome and has a ton of possibilities for adventure. I also explained that there was really no such thing as alignment and as good and evil, just varying shades of grey. I think that they liked that as well, knowing that they were free to indulge whatever they wanted to without having to adhere to some sort of ideology that may or may not apply to their situation. After the intro we stacked silly amounts of six sided dice on the table and I distributed the characters. Let’s meet the party.

I put together the stats for the runners (old school on lined paper, no character sheets for us) but it was up to them to come up with names and backgrounds. We wound up with: Phil the Kill, a motorcycle riding sniper hopped up with a bunch of twitchy cyberware; the manaball throwing combat mage Katsin; Puppy the troll, a former bodyguard turned shadowrunner; and Mr. White, best know for owning a van with a cannon and a warehouse full of equipment. I answered some questions about what was what on their sheets, but I pretty much left out anything related to the rules of the game. They would figure it out as we went. I’d help. And we were off…

Phil the Kill got a call from a Mr. Johnson associate of his by the name of Zapper. Zapper wanted to meet up at a well known club on Seattle’s west side called Purgatory. They split into pairs; Katsin riding with Phil on his motorcycle, and Puppy taking shotgun in Mr. White’s death wagon and headed over to the place to meet their contact. They had no trouble getting in and soon enough were parlaying with Zapper about his latest deal. A high up corp type in Aztechnology was looking for a little help with a dirty job, the type of work that runners excel at. Turns out this guy’s daughter fell in with a go gang on the outskirts of town, an outfit called the Silver Streak. The daughter comes home knocked up, the suit says enough is enough and now he wants this gang to pay. One chummer in particular, a man by the name of Handsome Dick. The pay is 40,000 nuyen for proof of his death, Zapper would take his usual 20% for bringing in the work. Deal? The party agrees and set off into the night in search of Dick and company.

They had the name of a bar that the gang hung out at, Morpheus’ Throne, and a general location of where to find them. A little computer investigation by Mr. White turned up a single mention of Handsome Dick. A police report that was a couple of weeks old mentioned that he was questioned and released by the cops in relation to a robbery. Aside from that the intel produced no info so they decided to head over to the area and check out the scene. Perhaps it was Handome Dick’s night to die. We all got to go sometime.

Speeding down the road the party spotted a roadblock up ahead. As they neared they saw that it was a security contingent from a company called Steel City Security. Using his Etiquette (Street) skill Phil scored a couple of successes and seemed to remember hearing that this company was mixed up in a high profile murder case a couple of years back and subsequently went out of business. With this in mind Phil and Katsin cautiously approached the roadblock, expecting some trouble. Mr. White and Puppy hung back in the van. Five men in security uniforms informed them that they had been contracted to guard this area, and with grins they said that passing through was going to cost 2500 nuyen a person. Since this was the first real encounter that any of the players had ever had in Shadowrun they weren’t really sure how to act. Though I assumed that it would escalate to violence pretty quickly. And it did. While Mr. White got on the PA system in his van and was telling the “guards” to get out of their way, Phil the Kill lived up to his name and drew his pistol and began firing at the five men.

Their first combat was an absolute bloodbath. Before the guards even had a chance to act they were mowed down by Phil and Katsin. These thugs were about as weak as you can get, this encounter was just about learning how some combat works. I walked them through the basics of target numbers and modifiers, what power and damage codes mean, and all that other stuff. I kept it pretty simple, which was good for everyone. Myself included, like I said it has been a while since I ran this game. After they looted the thugs (and Mr. White kept the three undamaged uniforms) they continued until they were within a couple of blocks of their destination.

Morpheus’ Throne was a crummy biker bar in a low rent district. The outside was littered with motorcycles and junkies. They tossed around various plans to find and kill Handsome Dick but ultimately settled on the direct approach of walking into the place. Mr. White waited across the street in the van and kept some surveillance on the surroundings while the others were inside. They went in and had a drink and were approached by a Silver Streaker who said that his name was Wonderdog, and that he was the baddest dude around. Wonderdog was a bit hostile and things got heated. There was almost a bike race between him and Phil, but that never happened because Phil shot him first and triggered a messy close quarters firefight, truly a staple of Shadowrun. I had told the party ahead of time that Shadowrun is a lethal game and that anyone can be killed at anytime. Clearly they were not listening to my warnings.

The Silver Streaks were mainly low class thugs, though two of them (Wonderdog and another) exhibited the twitchy tics of someone a little tougher. The party fought pretty well; Phil used some grenades and his Ares Predator to good effect, Puppy did some serious damage with his monofilament whip and one liners, and Katsin cleared out the cannon fodder with several manaballs. It was a battle of attrition though as both Puppy and Phil wound up with serious wounds from the fracas. While this was all going down Mr. White noticed several members of the gang leave the bar and head into a building a couple of doors down. They emerged soon after with a third member, who he recognized from a photo as Handsome Dick. Unable to control his bloodlust, Mr. White opened fire on them with the ultra powerful autocannon that he has in the van. Handsome Dick was reduced to a fine red mist, never again will he impregnate the daughter of someone wealthy and spiteful. Fortunately Mr. White was recording all of this with his cybereye as proof that Dick was dead.

When I was describing what different items and abilities were in the beginning of the session I made a point to mention that Mr. White’s autocannon was some serious military grade hardware. The type of weapon that gets noticed when it is used, like noticed by GMC Banshee panzers that will come looking for it. Everyone was a little bugged out that it was used on an open city street.

With the mark taken care of it was time to head out. Quickly. Because of the injuries everyone piled into the van (including Phil’s motorcycle) and they sped off into the night. As they were nearing the safe house they heard and saw some helicopters searching the area that they had just come from. They had snuck back into the shadows just in time…

I thought that the session went really well, especially considering that none of the players had ever played the game before. They all took to their new personas and took the characters in directions that I was not expecting, which is totally awesome. And honestly my biggest concern was that the mechanics would bog the game down, but they were not as cumbersome as I assumed they would be. And when they started to be I just moved things along. The system is not as bad as I remember it to be, and as a bonus their seems to be tons of places online selling 2nd edition Shadowrun books for pennies. Score!

One aspect that I thought that was really cool and was also approved of by Puppy was that things get harder when you get banged up. Of course that seems logical, but in D&D your barbarian swings that ax just as hard when he is injured and when he is dancing on death’s door. Not so in Shadowrun. It makes being injured exponentially more dangerous since not only are you closer to death but you are not going to be on the top of your game either.

All in all I’d say that it was a great session and I am really looking forward to next week and getting a little deeper into things.

Some Thoughts on Ticket to Ride: Europe

2010-07-08T20:30:00.000-04:00

Having played Ticket to Ride until the board was literally torn apart we decided to segue into Ticket to Ride: Europe and try our railroad baron skills on the continent. The Europe version is not that different from the US version. Obviously the boards are different, with the European one being slightly more confusing and seemingly possessing an abundance of small routes (the avoidance of which may be a key to victory). The European version also has cards that are meant to be held by actual human adults, unlike the original version which was presumably played by pixies and hobbits. It is shocking what a difference the size of the cards makes, it is a huge improvement. The major differences in the two games are the European inclusion of tunnels, ferries and stations. Tunnels and ferries make it a bit harder to grab a certain route, while stations finally provide a solution for when one of the jerks that you play with gets a route that you really wanted. And there is an eight train route!

Tunnels are routes that are marked with a black outline, almost like brackets going around the train cars. Typically they are routes that run through mountain regions, though this is not always the case. When a tunnel route is claimed the top three train cars from the draw pile are flipped over and for each one that matches a train used to claim the route, the player must pay an additional train of that color to make it through the tunnel. Since any flipped locomotives are an automatic match it usually winds up costing an additional train card for the route, though sometimes you get lucky and don’t have to pay anything additional. The other night I got hit hard when all three matched and I didn’t have enough to cover the newly inflated cost. If that happens all the cards go back to your hand and your turn ends. In a game that is so dependent on the economy of actions it is devastating to lose a turn. It also stinks to have to pay four trains to claim a route that is only worth three trains. Personally I try to avoid the tunnels for those reasons, but there are plenty of them on the board and almost impossible to get around without needing to use some of them. Looking around the board many of the tunnel routes are in prime strategic locations, so essentially you are paying for nice real estate.

England has to be connected to the rest of Europe in this game and since there are no trains that run on water it’s time to board a ferry to get there. It’s not just England though, numerous ferries dot the landscape of Europe and, like the tunnels, require a higher price for their services. Rather than requiring trains of a certain color to claim the route, ferries require a certain amount of locomotives (wild cards) in addition to matched colored trains. This certainly puts a new spin on the wild card, which was always great to have but never a necessity. I always hated having to pick a wild from the board since you only get one card instead of two, but with ferries they become much more valuable. My least favorite route is now London to Amsterdam, a measly two train route that requires two wild cards to claim it. Really? I spend two wild cards and all I come away with is two points. Though, like with the tunnels, it’s interesting to see how real world geography is impacting the game. Think of how different the original version would be if Denver (which is about the most popular city in TTR) only had tunnels running out of it. If nothing else it certainly changes things, which is what a board game sequel should do.

Of all the additions in this game the only one that I really don’t like are the stations. Each player begins the game with three stations and they can be placed on any city in the game for a cost in train cards (one for the first, two matching for the second, etc..). Having a station in a city allows that player to use any one route of another player’s coming out of that city for completing a destination ticket. It does not count towards getting the longest train, but it helps a player get a route that they may not otherwise get. To me Ticket to Ride has always been sort of a cutthroat type of game. If you sit on your cards for too long you get screwed out of the routes that you really need. Balancing when to build routes, hoarding cards, and exposing your routes and intentions have always been essential to playing a winning game. The stations provide a way around that. Maybe I’m just mean but I sort of like it the other way better. Unused stations are worth four points each at the end of the game so there is an incentive to not use them up. I do also think that the European map is much more cluttered than the US one, so it is more likely to result in people getting screwed out of a route. Edinburgh and the southern part of Spain are both very limited areas and being denied there can really mess your game up, so I could see why players would use stations. I just don’t like them.

The other interesting aspect of the game is an eight train route, exciting because the original version did not have anything larger than six. The route runs from Petrograd to Stockholm and if eight trains seems too easy it is also a tunnel. Meaning that it could conceivably cost as much as eleven trains. Ouch. It is worth 21 points so on a per train basis it is worth about the same as the six train route. Is it worth it? I think the best thing about it is being able to get eight trains out of your hand at once, that can really end the game in a hurry. Being able to catch your opponents off guard with incomplete routes is a great way to win the game and this helps with that. A lot. Say it is nearing the end of the game and you have 15 trains left to put down. You get that Stockholm to Petrograd tunnel up and running and suddenly the game can be over in two more turns with the right cards. Much sooner than people were expecting I would wager. Strategically it is not the greatest route, mainly because going through Sweden and Denmark is sort of difficult, it is normally prized real estate. If you only need to get to Stockholm it can work out pretty well for you. Eastern Europe has the best routes in the game so Petrograd links up with all sorts of good stuff.

Ticket to Ride:Europe is certainly a worthy sequel to the original. I would still recommend the original to someone who had never played either, but only because it is slightly simpler to learn. Not that either of them are difficult. Plus, it’s nice to brush up on my turn of the century European geography. I also feel that the two have different strategies, what works in one game may not work in the other. I am still learning the nuances of the European board and the destination tickets, which are very different. The original game has an even mix of points on destination tickets, ranging from small to very large. The Euro game has primarily smaller valued tickets with only six routes being worth 20 or more points. Scoring from trains on the board becomes more valuable in the Euro game because of this, which is why those short routes will really slow you down. But, like I said, it’s an excellent game.

The best and worst of Shadowrun

2010-06-27T15:58:00.002-04:00

After D&D the first role playing game that I ever got into was Shadowrun. I don’t remember what got me started, I assume I saw it at the game store or read about it in Dragon or something, but I immediately thought that it was a super cool system and such a great counter to D&D. So much about it was very different and new, but it had some consistent anchors to the familiar world of fantasy gaming that I knew. There were orcs and magic and rumors of dragons, but there was also dermal plating and boosted reflexes. Something called a rigger and street samurais. I’ve played in a bunch of Shadowrun campaigns over the years and the game is always a good time, but I have to be honest that the mechanics of the game are pretty awful. Sometime in the semi near future I plan on running a mini campaign when our D&D DM is away so I have been doing some thinking about it lately. Here is my list of the best and worst aspects of Shadowrun.

The best:
1) Cyberware. Totally bad ass. Internal implants that link your eyesight to the barrel of your gun? Check. Air filtration built right into your respiratory system? Awesome. Boosted reflexes that keep you twitchy and three times as fast as anyone else? Required for any chummer to survive when the drek hits the fan. Essentially the magic items of Shadowrun, cyberware allows your character to far surpass what a normal human is capable of.

2) Native Americans. When magic returned to the world of Shadowrun one of the first people to get on board were the Native Americans. Embracing their shamanic past, America’s first people reclaimed the heartland of America and now wield more power than ever before. It’s not just the Indians though, the history of Shadowrun is well thought out and interesting. Dragons appearing in Japan, corporations running the show behind the curtain of glass and steel skyscrapers, and Goblinization. This is a very engaging and fully formed world that Shadowrun exists in.

3) Lethal combat. If a bunch of jacked up, cyber enhanced gun jockeys are having it out in the street with flechette loaded assault rifles people are going to die. And they do. In mass quantities. Lethality in Shadowrun is no joke. Even if you are heavily armored Troll with dermal plating, two well placed shots are going to take you out. It is not easy to keep a character alive in this game, which I’m fine with. This is a risky line of work. If you can’t handle character death I suggest that you leave the shadow running to someone else and go play 4th edition D&D.

The worst:
1) Too many D6’s. I have a lot of D6’s, more than any reasonable human being could possibly have a need for. Except if you play Shadowrun. Since the game only uses the D6 and most checks are opposed successes it requires an obscene amount of dice. More than most players would have. More room to roll them than most tables have. When dice are cutting into space that could otherwise be used for food, there is a problem. And that is a lot of math that tends to slow the game down. Now in it’s 4th edition, the game continues to stubbornly stick to this clumsy system. I don’t get it. I’m not sure what advantage it is providing. Though it is sort of fun to roll that many dice at once.

2) Deckers. You can’t have a futuristic cyberpunk game without computer hackers, known in Shadowrun as deckers for the hooked up cyberdecks that they carry. I get it, in the future information is a big commodity and these guys know how to get it. What they also know how to do is slow down the game for everyone else while they spend a half hour hacking into some mainframe and fighting lethal programs as the rest of the party stands around. In the last couple of games that I played in everyone agreed to just sort of outlaw deckers for that reason and either have an NPC replace their skill set or just make all computer type stuff kept to a minimum. And really, who wants to be a decker? They make clerics look popular.

A couple of years ago I was awakened real early one morning by a phone call from an unknown number. I answered it and was met by a cold voice saying, “You ready to run the shadows?” It was silent as they awaited my response. I was clueless but eventually put together that it was someone that I had played Shadowrun with years ago inviting me to join him in a new game. Unfortunately at the time my schedule was not very conducive to another weekly game so I declined, but I always loved that phone call. That is one of my favorite aspects of Shadowrun.

Mindbender prestige class

2010-06-13T19:19:00.002-04:00

Similar in ability and methods to the Cobra villain of the same name, the Mindbender prestige class puts an emphasis on manipulation of all sorts. It is certainly not the most powerful class out there, but damned if it is not one of the coolest.

Gaining to access and unlocking the secrets of the Mindbender is not all that difficult, especially for a character that has an interest in what they have to offer. Non good alignment is a must, as are four ranks in Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate and Sense Motive. It is also required that the prospective Mindbender be able to cast Charm Person and have a caster level of 5th. The obvious choice here appears to be the Beguiler since they actually have the skill points to get what is required, however they actually make pretty poor Mindbenders. Truthfully all full casters do, which we will discuss below in a moment.

I really like this class a lot, but it would require a Mindbender to convince me that the vitals of this class are not among the worst in the game. Ready for this? Poor base attack, two good saves, 2+ skill points, d4 hit points, and spell casting advanced at every other level. That’s a tough pill to swallow, especially the spell casting. (This is the best class that there is, trust me.) Powerful class features can certainly make up for this, the problem is that everything that the Mindbender gets is not as good as the Enchantment spells they are missing out on by losing the spell levels. (High levels spells are a waste of your time.)

At 1st level the Mindbender gets telepathy, usable as much as they want. Awesome. Telepathy is a powerful ability (though not over the top) and in the hands of the right player/character can be a lot of fun and really enhance some role playing. Unfortunately the lure of this at 1st level seems to make this class a one level dip for that ability. Which is too bad because there are some good opportunities for the right character at higher levels. The Mindbender has two signature abilities, the first of which comes at 2nd level and is called Push the Weak Mind. It is essentially Suggestion which a longer range and duration that can be communicated telepathically. Now we are getting into some serious Jedi type stuff. (Like I said, it’s a phenomenal class.) That is actually pretty powerful since it has long range and can be sent right into their head it allows the Mindbender to stay hidden and work their manipulations from afar, free from danger. Or from a crowd. Or from right next to the person. 2nd level also brings a skill boost of ½ the Mindbender level to Buff, Intimidate, Diplomacy, and Sense Motive. It’s good to see that they are not relying solely on their magic as their power grows. I know that the bonus is not huge, but Bluff and Diplomacy are two of the very best skills in the game, so who wouldn’t want some free points in them?

The other signature ability is Eternal Charm at 4th level, which is Charm Person with no duration. In a heavy role playing game, or one in which the PC’s return to areas and deal with NPC’s repeatedly this is a cool ability. Knowing that someone in town is always on your side is nice. Especially if it’s a shopkeeper or an informant, someone who can help out. As the levels increase the Mindbender can have more and more people under his influence. (Like you.) The bottom line is that Charm Person is not all that strong though. I sort of think that at this level a good Diplomacy check can probably accomplish the same thing. I do really like the somewhat arrogant and aggressive name of the ability though.

Other abilities come as well. Mindread, some Dominate, increased caster level for enchantments. (What a plethora of incredible powers. I’m impressed.) But ultimately the lost caster levels rule this out for anyone wanting a real powerful character. So, is the Mindbender doomed to be a one level dip or an NPC, or can it fit into the role of a PC? In the game I am currently playing I am a Hexblade, serving as the secondary melee combatant for the group, as well as the primary “face.” I still have a couple of levels to go before I qualify (caster level 5th is a drag) but I am considering (will be) taking a couple of levels of it. The way that I look at it is that the lost caster levels aren’t going to kill me since the Hexblade casting is so crummy to begin with, and by the time I reach 10th I will have pretty respectable combat skills and can afford to lose a little base attack. I really like the telepathy, the skill boost, and all the charms should work well for me once I use the Hexblade curse on unsuspecting villagers. If I was the main melee character or a full caster I’m not sure I would consider it, but it works with the role that my character seems to be taking on in the party.

In conclusion I think that the Mindbender is a tricky class but also (the best prestige class available to anyone. Why would someone play something else? I have no idea.) one that seems like a ton of fun to play. Much like the Green Star Adept and Duskblade synergizing so well, I think that the same can be true of Hexblade and Mindbender. They just sort of blend well together.

Smallworld review

2010-06-06T18:49:00.008-04:00

This tiny peninsula just isn’t big enough for all of us. Or even a couple of us. Such is the premise of Smallworld, another excellent offering from the active minds over at Days Of Wonder. In Smallworld 2-5 players vie for control of a small piece of land by using the races of the area to control patches of earth and spread around the region. The catch is that races quickly become overextended and forced into decline, which is really just a reason to dip into the supply and introduce some new genocide to the region. Great family fun! The game is played over a set number of turns and the winner is determined by who has the most points (gold). It should take about an hour and a half to two hours.

This game is all about the over crowding of a small environ- ment and the actual board does a great job of presenting that concept. Actually there are four boards for the game depending on how many players there are (okay, it’s really two double sided boards), each with fewer and fewer number of regions to conquer. And an actually physically smaller board as well. By the second turn of the game pretty much everything has been conquered and it’s time to start making some enemies by bullying people out of there turf. Land changes hand pretty frequently here. The artwork on the board is good, each different land type is clearly represented and there are a bunch of little details that breath some life into the landscape. I especially like the magical towers that dot the world, ringed with arcane energy it’s not very hard to imagine devious wizards concocting foul schemes within. The races themselves are all represented by small counters, colorful little tiles also with nice depictions. The reverse side of the tile is primarily grey and is used when a race goes into decline. The Ghouls might be the best looking of the bunch (don’t tell the Amazons I said so), though they are all pretty good.

The game turn is very easy and really only consists of two phases. First, a player deploys their forces over the board and conquers new territory, which is just about numbers. An uninhabited land requires two tiles to take over, add an extra for each occupying force on the space. Those hills with two Halflings on them? That will require four of your Giants to take over. Once a turn a player can also call in reinforcements in the form of a die that may allow you to take over a land that you were otherwise short on. When conquering is done, rearrange your forces for defense. The second part of the turn is scoring, which is usually a point for each occupied territory plus any bonuses that may result from a Racial or Special Powers.

One of the great things about this game (and something that really appeals to a strategy/analysis nerd like myself) is the endless combination of Races and Special Powers. And by endless I mean 280 possible combinations. There are 14 Races and 20 Special Powers which are randomly paired with one another as the game progresses. Some combinations are really great (like Flying Sorcerers) and others make world domination an uphill battle (such as the Hill Tritons). It’s really up to you, make the best of it. There is something exciting about the initial draw and the six combinations that come up for choosing. The catch is that for each Race that you pass up on to get to another you have to pay a victory point. Is it really worth paying four gold for those Pillaging Orcs when you can have Underworld Elves for no cost? Hmmm.

Going into decline is a key part of the game, an interesting mechanic, and really what separates this game from being a fantasy version of Risk. When you’ve decided that the glory days of your current race are behind you, you may choose to send your race into decline and choose a new one. When in decline the race loses the Special Power attached to it, though it stays on the board and continues to gain points for you for as long as it is alive (which probably isn’t going to be too long now that you’ve abandoned them). However, you may no longer move them around or conquer any new lands (the Ghouls are the exception to this. Ferocious undead that they are, they continue to feast upon the living even once their creator has written them off). The bad part of going into decline is that choosing to do so is your turn for that round, except if your current race has the Stout Special Power (yes, Stout Ghouls are pretty awesome), so it’s the only thing that you will do. It seems that over the course of a game you will probably play three races. Figuring out which Races and Special Powers work best at different phases of the game is a key ability in Smallworld.

I do really appreciate that some attempt was made at organ- ization in the game design. Too often it’s just not considered in game design and games with a lot of pieces wind up being a mess (see Pandemic and Last Night on Earth). Smallworld could very easily have gone down this road. Instead they did two things right that really enhance the game experience. One is a tray to organize the multitude of game pieces (Flying Frog games, I am staring directly in your direction). There are 14 races and each has around 11 little tiles, that’s a lot of pieces to just be floating around. Since they are constantly used it is important that a player can access them easily. A well organized tray makes a huge impact on the game, and cuts down drastically on set up time. The other time saving organizational aspect of the game is a little more obtuse, but appreciated none the less. This game has a lot of pieces which were all punched out of larger sheets. In the instructions for the game it recommends if you store your games upright or if you travel with them upright that you should place these extra sheets at the bottom of the box. What this does is raise all the trays and boards by about half an inch, thus making them flush with the top of the box. The result is that the loose pieces don’t move around as much. I can’t say that it is perfect, but it’s better than it would have been. As someone who frequently travels with games I really like it. It also makes me think that the designers are actually players and care about this stuff.

I think that Smallworld is a really fun game. Like most games from Days of Wonder it is above all things playable. What does that mean? Well, to me it means that a casual night of gaming meshes really well with it. The rules are easy, play moves quickly, it doesn’t take hours to complete, and most of all it is fun. I know that seems like common sense but some games seem to get so bogged down in a weighty mechanic or too many actions that all the good aspects of the game get buried under the bad parts. It’s not good for anyone. Games shouldn’t be about a designer trying to prove that they have come up with a way to revolutionize the field, they should be about getting together with your friends and enjoying it. The group of people that I play with usually meet on week nights, like to have a couple of drinks during the game, and don’t want to spend hours interpreting abstract concepts (though we certainly have). Days of Wonder has a formula that works really well and I hope that they stick to it.

Green Star Adept review

2010-05-17T20:28:00.002-04:00

I’ve thought for a while about how to say something positive about the Green Star Adept, the much maligned and very bizarre prestige class that slowly transforms the character into some sort of weird green robot like monster. It has awful requirements, an odd assortment of abilities, and really does not do anything all that well. It’s not a full caster, has virtually no skill points, and does not particularly excel at combat. As far as I can tell it’s pretty good defensively, so at least it has that going for it. And it gets to turn green by eating metal.

My biggest issue with the Green Star Adept is that I just think it is really lame. Who would want to be this character? I suppose that if you have played every other type of character it would be an interesting role to get into, but other than that? I just don’t know. Eating metal? I think that it just falls very far from the realm that I view as medieval type fantasy. Then again I also do not understand why anyone would want to be a Warforged either.

The requirements at first seem like standard fare for a caster/melee gish; +4 base attack, Combat Casting, and Arcane caster 1st. Just like the Abjurant Champion! Unfortunately the similarities end there. It also requires 2 ranks of Decipher Script, Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), Knowledge (Geography), and Knowledge (History). Plus, 8 ranks of Knowledge (Arcana). Seriously, this is one knowledgeable character. But to what end I have no idea since the class has nothing to do with any of those skills. Especially Decipher Script. You would think that such a wordly individual would know to not each metal. The tough thing here is finding a class that can get into at a reasonable level. A wizard seems like the best choice, except taking this class as a caster is a horrible waste of time. It’s not as bad as a melee class, but which one? Since it requires arcane casting the options are really Hexblade and Duskblade. Dipping into another class to meet the requirements really seems like going down the wrong path. Duskblade has all those skills as class skills so it probably makes the most sense (we will just pretend that taking this class makes some sense), unless your human Hexblade has a high intelligence. Our earliest entry is looking like Duskblade 5.

The other strange requirement is consuming several ounces worth of Starmetal, a magical metal infused with power and the source of the Green Star Adept’s myriad of mystical abilities. I would hope that any DM running a game with a Green Star Adept would make sure that the metal is obtainable, especially since the character needs to continue to consume Starmetal in order to level up. Though it would be really funny if a character got all the requirements for the class only to find that they existed in a world devoid of Starmetal. Sounds like the basis of a great campaign.

Now that we’ve navigated the treacherous waters of class entry, what happens now that we’re there? In general not too much, but paired with the right class it is much better than I had initially given it credit for. As a class the Duskblade is a front loaded powerhouse with fragility problems. The Green Star Adept matches up pretty well with it, really the only good match that it has. Our green friend has a medium Base Attack, d8 hit die, a good Will Save, increased casting at every other level, and 2+ skill points. It’s like a lot of other classes, nothing special there. It also receives a slew of other abilities that continue to scale upwards as the character grows in power.

The best of them is probably Damage Reduction/Adamantine equal to the class level. That’s pretty solid, no pun intended. For a “glass cannon” style class like the duskblade it becomes even more valuable. At 1st level it also adds it’s entire GSA level to it’s caster level, which is very nice for some of the variable effects that go along with spells. It sort of softens the blow of losing five caster levels in order to turn into a statue.

Star Metal Rigor has the character trading some agility as they slowly transform into a construct. Basically dexterity goes down while both strength and natural armor go up. It caps at 10th level with a total gain of 6 strength and natural armor, and dexterity decreased by 3. Unless you are a ranged character or a rogue that’s a pretty fair trade. It also makes up for the loss of a couple points of base attack.

The other really nice class skill is the fortification which gives immunity to sneak attacks and criticals. It starts at 25% and moves up over the levels. Both sneak attack and criticals can mess a character up in a hurry so it’s a bonus to not have to worry about those all that much, especially since I think that the awkward green man is not going to be hiding from many rogues. They also get something called Unnatural Metabolism which gives a +2 saving throw bonus to a variety of effects. Among these poison and death effects are the best. The bonus increases to a maximum of +6.

Additionally there are also some other perks that they get along the way; a natural slam attack, darkvision, immunity to sleep and drowning, and no longer needing to sleep, eat and breathe. The slam attack is totally worthless but the others have some use in game. But mostly they just add to the whole living statue gimmick that the class has going on.

At 10th level the Green Star Adept receives it’s capstone ability Emerald Perfection. This ability is not just useless, but it has a negative effect on the character. Really, this class should be looked at as a 9 level prestige class. At 10th level the transformation has been complete and the character is now fully a construct. It gets immunity to all of the same effects that tie into Unnatural Metabolism (which is like taking a retroactive dump on that class feature), fortification becomes 100%, immunity to any Fort saves, and no longer ages. That’s an allright set of class features. However an equal amount of horrible things happen as well. They lose their constitution score (and all associated hit points), die immediately if reduced to 0 hit points and can’t be healed by cure spells. No thanks.

The Green Star Adept is not as bad as I initially thought it was, but it is still completely uncool. I could see it as an NPC, maybe some sort of guardian keeping an engineering ancient artifact safe in exchange for a steady diet of Starmetal. Or an obsessed artist looking to create the ultimate artwork…himself! But as a PC? I don’t think I could do it.

Guillotine review

2010-05-10T19:32:00.001-04:00

Historically the French Revolution seemed like a chaotic mess of death and mob rule, yet Guillotine puts an orderly spin on it. In this card game usurped nobles wait patiently in line for their date with Madame Guillotine. As the heads fall the players collect them, gaining more points for such high valued nobility as Marie Antoinette. The game is played over three days of slaughter and at the end of this time the player with the most points wins. It is for two to five players and should take about a half hour, though it can certainly go faster than that. I had just finished reading the Scarlet Pimpernel and felt that I should buy this game. So I did.

Like with a lot of card games the game play of Guillotine falls into the very easy category. Basically the cards are shuffled and then a row of 12 cards are dealt out on the table. This represents the daily menu of nobles that are being led to execution. Each unfortunate member of the upper class has a point value, as well as a colored border which represents their background (church, military, government, etc..) Player are also dealt a starting hand of five cards. Each player gets to play one action card from their hand, and then takes the card at the front of the line. That’s it. The action cards wreak havoc on the line order, give bonus points for certain types of cards, and all sorts of other things that really make your opponents mad. The day ends when there are no more nobles queued up, and then it starts all over again for two more days.

I’ve done fairly well at Guillotine, but I will be the first to admit that this game is more skill then luck. The cards in your hand make all the difference, and while you can certainly play them poorly you can’t do all that much if you were stuck with a beat hand. I always prefer a good mix of luck and skill in games, but I think that Guillotine tilts things a little too far in the luck department.

The art of Guillotine is very nice and bubbly, in stark contrast to the rather grim nature of the game. It’s actually rather easy to forget that one is collecting heads in this game, the smiles on the faces of everyone almost makes it seem as if you are just making new friends. They are also on nice, thick paper and shuffle very well. You know, it’s really the little things that go a long way. The cards also have a great sense of humor. The actions cards in particular got a couple of chuckles out of me.

I am also a fan of extraneous game components and in this regard Guillotine does not disappoint. It comes with a charming little pop up guillotine that goes at the end of the line to serve as a reminder of just where it is that the nobles are headed. It also folds back up very easily and fits back into the game box without a problem.

I do like Guillotine a lot but that never stopped me from having a couple of criticisms of the game. One is that for a card game it takes up an awful of space on the table. It shrinks as each day goes on but a row of 12 cards is bigger than you may think. A good aspect of card games is that they usually travel well and have a small footprint on the table. Apparently the French Revolution is a bit more high maintenance than that. My other gripe with this game is that it is only for five players. The two best things about this game is that it is quick and that it is really easy to learn. It just screams out to be a party game, but since it can only support five players it falls a little flat in that area. I’m sure that you could probably squeeze in a sixth, but anything more than that and I suspect that the game card supply will be exhausted before the player’s hunger for blood.

Who Goes First?

2010-05-09T15:23:00.000-04:00

Going first in a game usually affords an advantage to that player, though it is not substantial and most likely normalizes over the course of the game. But still, an advantage is an advantage and most games recommend that for the sake of fairness the players roll a die and the highest roller will kick things off. This is fine, and usually the preferred method in the games I play in. However, some games do recommend alternate methods of deciding the first player. Here are some of my favorites, with suggestions to improve them as well.

It makes sense that the starting player of Pandemic is connected to illness, that is after all what the game is about. In this cooperative game the rules state that the player who has been sick most recently goes first. I like this one a lot and in our games we always stick to it. The reason why? It’s always different every time that you play, essentially making it random. I don’t think that this one needs fixing.

One of the stranger methods of choosing a starting player is employed by Smallworld. The player with the pointiest ears gets to go first. Certainly an odd way of picking things, I do like that it rewards such a bizarre personal trait that really may have never come up before in the person’s life. However, like a lot of these methods it winds up being redundant in a group of players that frequently game together. Unless someone is so committed to victory in Smallworld that they alter their ears the same person will continue to go first. Here is my suggestion for an alternate method. Once the initial races are all out on the table the player who most resembles the race in the first spot goes first. Sure, it could cause some hard feelings when trying to figure out who among you most resembles an orc or a ghoul, but really it’s just setting the tone for a game that is all about slaughtering your friends. And if an elf pops up you can still fall back on the pointy ears.

Ticket to Ride rewards the most well traveled of a group of gamers. The initial player is determined by the player who has visited the most places. Like Smallworld this gets old fast, though it does at least have the possibility of changing if you have a long term gaming group. People travel, usually for the reason of improving their chances of going first in Ticket to Ride. Not really, but this game is not really about traveling. It’s about trains. How about the first player is the one who has most recently been on a train? Done.

It’s fun to pick on old people, and clearly the designers of Bohnanza agree with me. In everyone’s favorite game about bean farming, the first player is the player to the left of the dealer. Which is pretty standard fare, however the rules state that the dealer is the oldest player. Ouch. Not only does the elder gamer have to do all of the setup, but then they ultimately wind up going last as well. Not sure what any of that has to do with beans or farming and it also suffers from the redundancy problem, though in a different way (the first player is always changing, but the last player stays the same). My fix is rather simple. Prior to shuffling all the players flip over a single card, the player with the most common bean then has to do all of the shuffling and be the last player. Come on, growing old sucks as it is. Does Bohnanza really need to be against you too?

For a game that is all about being an evil overlord it seems like an odd choice that Dungeon Lords chose to reward the nicest player by having them go first. But I think it is a brilliant way of deciding. There is nothing quite like watching several people argue over who is the nicest among them. It is also the type of thing that is subject to rapid changes based on recent actions. I think that this method is pretty solid, and since in Dungeon Lords players are not really getting a chance to actually kill one another it’s nice to be able to get some animosity out with a healthy argument to start the game.

There is nothing wrong with the random roll of the dice to determine who has the minor advantage of going first, but sometimes a game deserves a little better. Plus, these games all have one thing in common. They don’t use any dice so something else needed to be implemented. (The exception is Smallworld which has the reinforcement die, but it is not a traditional die and could result in a bunch of ties. So we will forget about that one.) I applaud the game designers for coming up with a solution that has some personality to it, even if they are a bit redundant at times.

Heritage Feats

2010-04-26T15:28:00.000-04:00

It’s fun to come up with an intriguing backstory for a PC. Give them some previous glory, a bit of an agenda, perhaps some skeletons in their closet that they wish to keep hidden from the rest of the party. Personally I’ve always felt that a character’s motivations are more important that their past, but it all comes together to make a complete character. Often though a lot of this is forgotten as a character gets involved in new quests and gets acclimated to the life as a member of a party. One way to keep a background as a vital part of a character’s present is through Heritage feats, a hint to perhaps some ancient ancestry that still shapes family lineage in the present. Scattered over a couple of D&D books, Heritage feats are a bit of a mixed bag. But are they any good? Are they worth a heavy investment for some pretty specialized abilities and resistances?

All of the Heritage feats require an initial feat to establish the lineage in a character, usually this has to be taken at 1st level and none of them are that good. The series of feats build on one another, making the previous one’s more powerful as the total number grows and the ancestry of the character begins to unlock. Honestly, I really like the flavor of it.

The Infernal and Celestial lines are open only to sorcerers and generally allow them to expend a spell slot for some other ability for a brief time. I like the flavor of an inborn spell caster having some extraplanar blood coursing through their veins, and since metamagic isn’t always the best option for a sorcerer these seem like they could be good. They are not. Let’s take a look at Celestial Sorcerer Heritage, the initial feat required for the Celestial line. It provides a bonus to saves versus electricity and pertification equal to the number of Celestial feats you have, and adds Protection from Evil to the list of known spells. Wow. That seems like garbage unless you plan on battling a horde of electrified medusa. The feats are all dependent on one another so once you take one you are sort of committed to taking others, otherwise they are entirely weak. The Celestial line does have one strong option, Celestial Sorcerer Lore. The problem is that is requires three Celestial feats to qualify for it. It does add three spells to the sorcerer’s spells known list (including Teleport). Knowing more spells is always a bonus for the spell starved caster, but a four feat investment does seem like a lot. The other problem with these feats is that they are generally fueled by expending spell slots for abilities that are usually equivalent to the spell they are sacrificing. Infernal Sorcerer Howl allows the sorcerer to create a sonic cone that does 2d6 damage for each level of the spell sacrificed. Sacrifice a third level spell? That’s 6d6 sonic damage. Not so good, especially when a Fireball or Lightning Bolt would have done more damage if the caster was higher than 6th level. The adventurer saddled with either of these awful lines of feats has no reason to thank their adulteress aunt for her liaison with a devil.

The winners of the bunch are Fiendish and Fey Heritage. Continuing the trend common in most D&D material, the later a book was published the more powerful the contents seem to be. Found in Complete Mage, the Fiendish and Fey lines offer some powerful abilities which can greatly expand the repertoire of a character. The initial feat required to advance the line are mediocre; those of Fey heritage receive a +3 bonus to Will saves versus enchantments, while their fiendish brethren get a similar bonus against poison. Again, not great but not altogether useless. Especially the enchantment bonus since some of those effects can be devastating. However, by taking these feats a character becomes eligible at 9th level for the Legacy feats, Fey Legacy and Fiendish Legacy. This is where the fun is. Fey Legacy allows a character to cast Confusion, Dimension Door, and Summon Nature’s Ally V as a caster level equal to their character level, each once a day. Fiendish Legacy provides Teleport (self only), Summon Monster V, and Unholy Blight. Those are both pretty solid packages. In the case of Fey that’s two 4th level and a 5th level spell for the cost of two feats. That is hard to beat. The best part is that it is open to non casters, so a rogue or a fighter can suddenly have a couple of really useful spells thanks to an amorous meeting of their great uncle and a pixie. Way to go. Adding additional feats can provide some damage reduction, some other lesser level spells, resistances, and some increased DC’s for spells.

The class that can most benefit from these is the fighter. With a ton of extra combat feats the fighter can afford to load up on these with the normal feats that all characters receive. Having some spell like abilities can make a huge difference to a martial type, especially mobility related ones like Teleport and Dimension Door. And the Summons are great to provide a flanking partner and some additional muscle on the front line.

One Page Dungeon Codex 2009

2010-04-22T14:34:00.000-04:00

No matter how creative and hardworking a DM may be, we could all use a little help from time to time when it comes to putting together that week’s adventure. I know that, personally, sometimes I just don’t have the time over the week to put together exactly what I want. Actual, non fantasy life does get in the way. It usually works out well, but in an effort to alleviate some of the pre D&D stress that occasionally comes along I went looking for some DM resources that I could plug into an existing game. I was delighted to come across The One Page Dungeon Codex 2009. What an interesting and well executed concept. It is a free collection of system neutral dungeons that can pretty easily be plugged into most campaigns. The common theme is that they all follow a one page format that contains both a map and a description of everything in it.

One important thing to note is that these adventures still require work from the DM. Since they are system neutral the DM, if nothing else, still needs to have stats for the monsters, place some treasure, work it into their world, etc…The thing that I like most about it is that the map is already made. I am not a dungeon map making type of guy so it is nice to have the most cumbersome aspect of adventure making taken care of for me. But really none of this is the interesting aspect of the One Page Dungeon Codex. The whole project came about as a collaborative effort from a couple of RPG blogs who developed the format and then had an open contest asking for submissions from readers. Judging ensued and then the best entries were put together into the Codex. It has three overall winners, but all together 21 entries are included. Some of them are great, others I don’t have much use for but overall it is a pretty nifty resource. It’s also nice to see people coming together to workshop and promote one another’s stuff.

The Best Overall Dungeon is called Secrets of the Old City by Simon Bull and it is put together very nicely. It is not ultra imaginative, it details an abandoned city underneath a city that is inhabited by a small thieves den and an ogre. But it is nicely done and can easily be slid into just about any urban setting. I am also a fan of The Grey Goblin Warrens, winner in the Best Hack and Slash category. It is a huge sprawling cave complex filled with goblins and many other nasties. I must say that I am extremely impressed with the amount of content that has fit into a single page. It is almost overwhelming. My favorite though is Arendt’s Old Peculiar. Taking the prize in the category of Best Pub, it is the story of a band of goblins that have taken over and reopened a semi famous but now in ruin bar. To be honest I don’t entirely see the adventure in it, it does not have a clear structure for the PC’s to follow. But not every adventure needs to be so linear and so apparent. The point is that it is a fun establishment and any worthwhile PC’s can have themselves a night in this place.

The file comes in at 54 pages, so it is substantial. The entire opening section is a sometimes tedious description of how the project came together. I enjoyed it, it’s always interesting to see how these projects come together. The adventures themselves remind me of the short adventures contained in the Greyhawk boxed set. Which is a good thing. At some point some of these adventures will wind up on our table. I’ll let you know how it goes.

East Coast? West Coast? Which is the best coast?

2010-04-18T15:35:00.000-04:00

We have been playing a lot of Ticket to Ride lately, it’s really a great game. However, a clear strategy has begun to emerge to me as to how the game should be played. Unlike some games (Puerto Rico and Starfarers of Catan come to mind right away) in which there are multiple winning strategies, Ticket to Ride seems to greatly favor a certain approach. And by this I mean to dominate the Western part of the board and take advantage of the long routes out that way. In our games whoever controls the West Coast usually rides their trains to victory.

So what it is that makes that part of the board so much more valuable that it practically guarantees victory? Well, I think that there are a couple of things going on here. For one it is perfectly feasible to also branch off into the Midwest and pick up some routes out that way. You can branch off from the West. Denver and Duluth, in particular, are excellent cities to go into because they have so many outlets to the rest of the board. This is especially nice towards the end of the game when you may be tempted to try and pick up another Destination ticket, those cities give you a lot of options. However, the West Coast is just loaded with points waiting to be had for the patient train operator. As a proud Philadelphian it kills me to say this, but the East Coast is far inferior to the West. Ugh.

Like just about every board game ever made, the efficiency of actions is paramount to victory. Games come to an end so it is essential to make every move that you take count as much as it can. In Ticket to Ride each player has a total of 45 trains that they can lay down over the course of the game, the longer a single route is the more each train winds up being worth. Obviously, the thing to do here is to place as many long routes as possible to maximize the value of your trains. Looking at the board it is very apparent that the West Coast has the majority of the big (5 or 6 train) routes. Let’s break it down and see just how big of a discrepancy it is. Roughly dividing the board into three sections (west, central, and east) and making some approximations yields this: East has five such routes, the Central has five, and the West seven (Note: this could be interpreted as nine as well. Portland to San Fran and San Fran to Salt Lake City are both five train routes, but they are double routes. So there are actually nine such routes, but a player can’t double up so there are really seven available to them.) It doesn’t seem like such a huge discrepancy, but if you look a little deeper it’s obvious that not only is the West possessing of the majority of big routes, but the East is loaded with small routes. The kind that really devalue one’s trains in the long run. Plus the West boasts four routes of six trains, while the East has only two.

Not only are the long routes more point efficient, they are also much more turn efficient. As an example take two players. Both players have spent the last 4 turns taking in cards and are ready to place some routes. Player A lays down a route from Phoenix to Denver (5 trains), Player B then places two trains between New York and Boston. Player A resumes picking up trains for his collection the following turn, while Player B spends the next two turns extending his route to Washington and Montreal. It has taken him three turns to place six trains (for six points), while his opponent has spent the same amount of turns and received ten points and also spent the last two rounds putting four more cards into his hand. There really is not much of a comparison.

The problem with all of this is that due to the luck of draw a player may wind up with Destination tickets that run through the East, thereby forcing them into that section of the world. That’s a problem, though it can be dealt with. Since you have to keep two tickets in the beginning of the game the best thing to do is look for some horizontal moving ones and try to get the trains out West. If that it not possible keep the lowest valued ones and hope that they do not hurt you much in the end. After that spend a couple of turns picking up Destination tickets and try to get some better routes.

Black Flame Zealot prestige class

2010-04-08T19:37:00.000-04:00

There are a whole series of prestige classes that are really nothing other than the marriage of the abilities of two classes. At least in my opinion it seems like the creators went through all the classes and bred them with one another and tried to make some sort of prestige class about them. (How else can you explain something like the Daggerspell Shaper or the Shadowstriker?) A lot of them are very dumb and cumbersome, however one that does sort of interest me is the Blake Flame Zealot, a mixture of Rogue and Cleric that is part of some sort of evil society of assassins that really like kukris and fire. I could get into that. They sit around in abandoned temples, sharpening their curved blades over an open flame and plot the doom of PC’s.

So who does this society attract as devotees? Well, most likely Clerics and Rogues. The requirements are non good alignment, 8 ranks of Hide, Knowledge (Religion) and Move Silently, 2nd level divine spells, +1d6 sneak attack, Iron Will and proficiency with a Kukri. The easiest route seems to be Cleric 3/Rogue 2, though I think it might be worth taking another level of Rogue to get the extra sneak attack at 3rd level. This actually isn’t a bad character as is. Not going to be the star of any party, but enough resources to buff up for a fight and be useful outside of it. I suppose that Druid could also be an option, but since they will probably never get any Wildshape and the companion will stay weak, Cleric is the better choice. And flavor wise Cleric always gets the edge when the occult is involved. I do think that it should have a Profession (something related to fire) as a requirement, but I sort of think that everything should have ranks in Profession as a requirement, or Fire Domain if they are a cleric.

The vitals of the class are about average. D6 hit die, good Reflex and Will saves, medium Base Attack, 4+ skill points. It also advances spellcasting at every other level and sneak attack every third level. It has several class features seen in assassins, such as Poison Use and Death Attack. Both are okay, but nothing to go crazy over. Immunity to Fear (Zealous Heart!) is also nice, but it seems like every other class has that feature.

The signature ability of the Blake Flame Zealot is the supernatural power to make any weapon of their’s (presumably a kukri, you don’t want to anger the cult) burn with a…black flame! The weapon is treated as Flaming (+1d6 damage) and it lasts all day, which is pretty cool. Additionally, once a day for a minute it can be treated as a flaming burst weapon (which actually meshes very nicely with a kukri). The problem with this ability is that it is not available until 6th level. Which is actually more like 11th or 12th level. That is a long time to wait for an ability that is good, but not great.

The other primetime ability is Fateful Stride, which is just a once a day Dimension Door. I sort of have a thing for Dimension Door so I find this to be great. The Black Flame Zealot gets it at 5th level, so about the time that regular casters will be getting it as well. The final ability at 10th level is called Unholy Immolation and is not nearly as awesome as it sounds. All this does is that anyone slain by the zealotry of the black flame can only be brought back by a True Resurrection. If this class did not already scream out to be an NPC, it certainly does now. I mean, do any PC’s worry about foes coming back to life? I’m sure that it happens occasionally, but that is what ghosts are for.

I think that the reason that I like this compared to so many of those other awful hybrid classes is that it has a little bit of personality and makes sense. I can easily envision some rogues getting mixed up in a death cult and performing rituals, practicing unholy rites, etc…The opposite is true as well. Some evil death worshippers need to hone their skullduggery in order to kill the infidels on their list or procure body parts from graveyards. Whatever, it is usable in a campaign. Another aspect that I like in this class (and what I really see as the point of prestige classes) is that it creates a character that is otherwise hard to be. A sneaky cleric is hard to come by. This class is a reason to ditch the heavy armor and the mace and develop some other abilities. And seriously, if a group of these guys Dimension Door in somewhere an start flanking and stabbing they can do some damage in a hurry.

We Hardly Knew Ye: Siron Ellysanea

2010-03-26T22:01:00.002-04:00

(One in a series about adventurers who were better off staying at home.)

Who was he? Siron Ellysanea was a 6th level Elf Ranger/ 2nd level Catlord. A skittish fellow he grew up alone on a swampy chain of islands called The Elder’s Heart. Eventually he found companionship in one of the few creatures that he could relate to, a lion named Lionel Ritchie. Siron came into the game mid-campaign as a replacement for a Halfling paladin that had perished the week before. He was actually a pretty good character with scores of 20 in both Dexterity and Strength (thanks to some Gloves from the aforementioned departed Halfling) and could move silently like nobody’s business (+20). Plus, he was the only Catlord I had ever seen in action so I was excited to see how he was going to develop. I always felt that the Catlord was one of those bizarre prestige classes that no one would ever want to play, but I clearly was wrong. Between the high strength and two weapon fighting he was a pretty solid combatant and Lionel Ritchie brought a lot to the table thanks to Natural Bond. Siron was sort of catlike in appearance, though not to the extent that that weird catwoman is, and slinked around like a feline. He had whiskers.

I think that he had the potential to be a very fun character. Keeping in the spirit of being a cat, his favored enemies were vermin and birds. His only dream in life was to get off the island that he was born on and in the group of adventurers he had just met he saw that opportunity. Seeing him in civilization would have been very amusing.

What happened? Siron was a little too good at moving silently. He decided to sneak away from the party when entering into an abandoned manor rumored to be inhabited by some sort of necromancer. His moving silently got him in with no problem, unfortunately neither his spot nor his hide were all that great. Two skills that are pretty essential to both locating and staying hidden from the type of evil assassins that lurk in the shadows of abandoned manor houses. Siron fell victim to the much maligned Death Attack ability of the class. I thought that his chances of living were pretty good. The DC was 17 and he had a +8 Fort save, but the dice were not on his side and the assassin’s blade slid into his heart, killing him instantly. Lionel Ritchie followed suit moments later. Poor Siron lasted all of an adventure and a half.

Normally I don’t feel bad when characters die, however this one got me a little bit. Mainly because it was the second character that died for this player in three sessions. But as one of the other players said afterwards, “It keeps us on our toes.”

Hall of Fame: City of Greyhawk boxed set

2010-03-22T17:00:00.001-04:00

As a young Dungeon Master in the early 90’s I frequently ran parties through the wonderful campaign setting of Greyhawk. Sure, from time to time we found adventure in the macabre land of Ravenloft or ran through Dragonlance as it burned, but our heart really belonged to Greyhawk. Nowadays I am strictly a homebrew setting type of DM, but there is one aspect of Greyhawk that I refer to from time to time. The City of Greyhawk boxed set is probably the most useful, thorough, and cool campaign supplement that I can possibly imagine. It came out in 1989 and I still find it to be extremely relevant and, despite the fact that I have read it about a thousand times, I always find something in it that I can throw into an adventure.

For a single supplement it really contained a lot of information. Inside of the box the eager DM finds waiting for him two books, four very large maps, and an entire series of short modules. The two books are really the heart of the boxed set; Greyhawk: Gem of the Flanaess details the actual city, while Greyhawk: Folk, Feuds, and Factions is all about the inhabitants of Oerth’s primary city. As a teenager I was really just beginning to hone the craft of creating adventures for players, most of the time they were one shot style games that had little to do with the previous sessions. The characters would continue and sometimes NPC’s would resurface, but the idea of actually having the PC’s inhabit a world that lived and moved not only around the PC’s, but even in their absence, was not just a novel idea but one that may have been over the head of a thirteen year old. The Greyhawk boxed set changed all of that for me. For the first time I saw a game world that existed outside of a module, that is the citizens of Greyhawk had lives that they lived that had nothing to do with the invasion of evil giants or the secret slavers latest attempt to capture unsuspecting folks. It made them so much more real, and in turn really contributed to the world that the PC’s were looting their way through. Something clicked with me and I continue to design worlds like this to this day.

I have a confession. I thought that the maps were so cool that I had one hanging on my wall as a poster. I was 27. Kidding about the 27 part, but it was hanging in my bedroom for a long time. The four maps are phenomenal. Three of them show the city from the same point of view and scale, but each has a different spin on things. One of them (my poster) has a nice color detail of the city. The buildings are all visible and the city teems with life and action. Another map shows the city with very little details, but all of the buildings and areas are marked with a number and letter, which corresponds to an entry in the Gem of the Flanaess book. I’d gaze longingly at my poster and when a building seemed intriguing to me I would look it up and learn all about it. What’s that weird building that looks like a temple at the foot of the Grand Citadel? Oh, it’s the Lord’s Tomb. It even lists the guards that will typically be there, even some of the jokes that they make when killing time. The third map shows the same view, but reveals the underground of the city. Sewers, secret passages, crypts, and even cisterns! Wow, that is some level of detail. The fourth map places Greyhawk in context with the world around it, which is cool, but why would you ever want to leave Greyhawk?

It’s not just that the boxed set contained so much information, for what is quantity without quality? But the information contained within was top notch. The NPC’s in particular were all well thought out and they all made sense. They were not just one dimensional foils for the PC’s or overly generous benefactors anxious to part with magic items. They had agendas! They had lives! They did things. One of my favorites was the detailed descriptions of Mordenkainen and the Circle of Eight. A group of nine powerful wizards, I had been using their spells for years without knowing a thing about them (for the most part, I had picked up some info here and there). Now I knew everything about them, including their relationships with one another and why they created the types of spells that they did. It was a revelation to my inquisitive mind. I had no idea that Otto was obese. Shocking. I also appreciated how several of the NPC’s were presented at several stages of their career, making it easy to drop them into any campaign. One of my favorites was Varmai Zendeihei, a young lawful good warrior working to benefit the folks of Greyhawk. Over time she discovers a paired of cursed bracers created by Vecna and slowly transforms over time into an evil, trusted agent of Iuz. The book contains stats for her various incarnations and levels of power over different points in time.

The adventure cards that came with the book were also excellent and great for a night of adventuring, usually on the outskirts of the city. Inside the box are 23 of these adventures. They were short (all the info was on both sides of a single piece of paper) and usually quirky and compelling. They range from simple (watching over a shop while the keeper is out of town on business) to deadly (retrieving a broken staff from the crypt of a lich). My personal favorite was Vote for the Goat, in which the party is hired to provide protection for a goat that is running for political office. Great stuff all around.

Of all the TSR products of my youth, the City of Greyhawk boxed set may be my favorite. Certainly the one with the most impact. It just seemed so limitless to me in it’s scope and ambition, and what was capable with a game of D&D. Do they still make things like this today? I have no idea. I hope so. I was at the bookstore the other day and noticed the obscene amount of 4th edition material that is out there, perhaps there is another City of Greyhawk out there somewhere. I would think not though. Flipping through the Greyhawk boxed set one thing that jumps out is the lack of numbers. It is not entry after entry of feats, spells, magic items, and prestige classes. It is about enhancing a game through NPC’s and a rich world to explore, rather than by elevating the power level and providing the PC’s with endless opportunities to specialize their characters.

Bang: The Bullet!

2010-03-15T19:35:00.000-04:00

As if the sexual innuendo of Bang isn’t obvious enough, I present to you the extremely phallic packaging of The Bullet. Bang: The Bullet is a collection of the original game as well as of all the expansions; Dodge City, High Noon, and a Fistful of Cards. That’s pretty great in itself but the best part of it is that the game comes in a silver bullet. All of the cards fit neatly inside of it and it travels well, as a party type game like Bang should. It was also rather cheap (about $25 for everything), making it a great excuse to indulge in something so ridiculous.

Honestly, the packaging might be overkill if you are judging it on efficiency. Bang is really just a deck of cards, so it can be kept in a much smaller container, but the bullet really lends something to the game. I’m not sure that I’ve introduced anyone to the game that was not immediately impressed by the packaging. “Wow, this game comes in a bullet? It must be a blast!” Okay, so one actually says that, but close to it. The bullet is about a foot in length and is made of some sort of thin metal (Tin? Aluminum?), a seam splits it along the side to reveal the cards that are kept within. All of the cards, about three decks worth, easily fit into slanted little pockets that keep the cards in place. Even if you toss the bullet around the cards will stay in place. It’s fairly well made, and more importantly does what it is supposed to do.

Another nice aspect of the bullet is that it also comes with a small plastic Sheriff’s badge, to be worn by the player who is the Sheriff. Obviously. Bang is one of those games that really benefits when players embrace the role that they are playing, and having an actual badge for the Sheriff is pretty awesome. Besides, no one wants to be the Sheriff since they always get killed so the badge makes it a slightly less bitter pill to swallow.

I do have some complaints about it. For starters when I received it in the mail there was a slight dent in the bullet. Bummer. I don’t mind wear and tear on my games, I just like to be the cause of it. I also don’t know if I should blame the shipper or Da Vinci Games, so I won’t hold that against the game too much. My other complaint has to do with this strange little metal disk that was attached to the bottom of the game. I assume that it is supposed to help the game stand upright, for display purposes perhaps. Not sure. However, it was so poorly attached that Katie managed to break it off before we had played a single game of Bang! Once it was off it was impossible to get back on.

It’s nice to see a company put some thought into the packaging of the game. Not just the looks from the outside, but also the functionality of the inside. There are some very good games out there that have a mess inside of them every time the box is opened, Last Night on Earth and Pandemic come to mind. With Bang: The Bullet the near perfect marriage of form and function has been achieved. Well done.

Ticket to Ride review

2010-03-06T15:10:00.002-05:00

The premise of Ticket to Ride is certainly an excellent, exciting one. A group of friends make a wager about who can visit the most cities in the United States by train over the course of seven days. They were inspired by Around the World in 80 Days. In actuality the game has very little to do with this premise, it’s really just about laying down tracks of trains all over the board. But it’s a great game. Seriously. Three to five players can get mixed up in it. Like most of the games from Days of Wonder it is easy to grasp the basic rules, but continues to grow in strategy with multiple plays.

The board is a map of the United States with cities listed all over it. There are routes that connect cities to one another, in most cases these routes are colored but in some instances they are a devoid of color shade of grey. Each player keeps a hand of train cards, essentially colored trains that match the colors on the board. In order to connect a route the player must put down the appropriate number of the correctly colored cards. For example the route running from San Francisco to Los Angeles requires either three yellow or three purple cards. If a player puts down either of those they can then place their trains along that route. (Note: there is no correlation between the color of a player’s trains and the color of a route.) The grey routes can be claimed by any colored cards, as long as they match.

The board is very nice, if somewhat bland. It does what it is supposed to do. It’s high quality and seems durable and also doubles as the scorekeeper with the ring of numbers moving along the edge of the board. My only real complaint is that Philadelphia is once again left off of a game board. Just like with Pandemic it suffers from being squeezed in between New York and Washington DC. Duluth? Really? No Philadelphia, but Duluth? The train pieces are very generic little plastic things. They do the job and not a thing else. I can live with them.

The object of the game is to accumulate the most points by constructing railroad routes all around the country and also by fulfilling the routes listed on the destination tickets that each player receives. The longer the route the more they are worth, not just in total but also on a per train ratio. A route of two trains is worth two points, so each train is worth a single point. A six train route (the largest) is worth 15 points, meaning each train is worth two a half points. Players only have a finite number of trains to use over the course of the game, everyone starts with 45, so one of the keys to victory is maximizing the value of each train with longer routes. Over the length of the game it catches up to the player who has built a series of short routes, they are just not going to have enough points at the end. Sometimes it’s necessary to get the shorter routes for the sake of a destination ticket, but too many of them will drag down your score.

The destination tickets are a tricky bunch, but sort of the key to Ticket to Ride. At the beginning of the game each player is dealt three of the tickets, they have to keep two but may keep all three if they are feeling daring. On each card are listed two cities, for example New York and Miami. There is also a number on each card which is the point bonus at the end of the game if those two cities have been connected by a route. However, if those cities have not been connected then the same amount of points is deducted from the end of game total. Some of the routes are relatively simple and only worth a few points, such as New Orleans to Chicago. Other longer routes are worth much more, Miami to Seattle being a good example. Over the course of the game a player can also choose, as an action, to get more destination tickets. They take three cards but must keep one, though they can keep up to three if they want to. So why are they so tricky? Well, if you choose to keep a card you are sort of locked into pursuing that route for the game. If it is a high point route and you don’t get it, your future as a railroad baron is not looking so hot. In the beginning it is tough to decide what to keep and what to ditch, the temptation to keep all three is always there but it’s tough to complete depending on what they are. I would not recommend trying to complete more than one 20+ point destination. Once a card is chosen you can not get rid of it, and all cards are kept hidden until the end of the game.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward, it was one of those games that I felt I understood after having read the rules through once and not even played it. Also nice is that there is very little interpretation that goes into the game. I’m not sure that a single question has come up in the half dozen times that we have played it that was not answered immediately with a quick look to the rule book. Ticket to Ride also plays pretty quickly, a usual game clocks in at around an hour making it a great weeknight game. One problem is that on each player’s turn they are really only doing one thing, so most of the time a turn comes and goes very quickly and all that has happened is that you have picked up a couple of new cards to go into your hand. At first this was odd to me, but after some time I just realized that it is the nature of the game and have embraced the fast paced style of gallivanting across the country on trains.

At first the game seems to naturally lend itself to playing defense against the other players, blocking a route that they are taking makes perfect sense. Or does it? With only 45 trains to use for building routes the trains are actually a rather limited commodity, and oftentimes it is tough to get the right color to build the path that you want. To go out of your way to mess up another player may be as damaging to you as it is to them. It is sort of a pyrrhic victory that no one comes away happy from. It is also not in the best interest of a player to break up their trains from one another. There is a ten point bonus to the player who has the most connected trains at the end of the game, a ten point bonus that often means the difference between winning and losing.

One gripe I do have with the game is the size of the cards. The train cards wind up being shuffled several times over the course of the game and they are very small. The result is that they frequently get shuffled poorly since they are hard to hold. The second and third time around in the deck usually produces runs on colors that were discarded together. Since they were discarded together and poorly shuffled they usually pop back up in the same order. Oh look, five white trains in a row. What an odd thing to happen. It takes the randomness out of it and somewhat cheapens the experience. The cards should be larger.

I don’t have any kids, but if I did I think I would play Ticket to Ride with them. I suppose that there is something beneficial about learning geography and looking at a map, but really it’s just because it would be an excuse to play this game more. It’s fun, you can pour a ton of strategy into it if you would, and you can also play by the seat of your pants and see where it takes you.

Bang!- Review

2010-02-25T18:45:00.000-05:00

The camaraderie of a cooperative game is tough to replace, unless you can drown it out in a hail of bullets and violence set in a Western theme. Welcome to Bang!, the fast paced card game of the Wild West. In Bang players all adopt the role of a western archetype; Sheriff, Deputy, Outlaw or Renegade and attempt to kill one another. Really, it’s that simple. It is for 4-8 players and a game should last anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour. It also involves the pantomiming of shooting motions, hurt feelings, and mispronounced Italian words. Hence, fun for all ages.

One of the real neat aspects of Bang is that each player has a different goal for winning based on the role that they are randomly given. For example, an Outlaw wins if the Sheriff is killed, however the Renegade only wins if they are last one standing when the smoke clears. The Sheriff wins if only he and his deputies remain. At the onset of the game only the identity of the Sheriff is known, everyone else keeps it a secret, though by a couple of rounds into the game you can usually figure out who is who based on whether or not they are trying to kill the Sheriff. The game ends when one of two conditions are met; the Sheriff is killed, or the only people remaining are the Sheriff and his Deputies (note: Deputies only come into play with 6 or more players). When I first played it seemed like the Renegade was getting the short end of the stick since they only won if they were the last survivor and seemed to have no allies, however after playing it becomes obvious that this is not the case. The reason is that no one really wants to kill the Renegade, at least not until the end of the game. The Sheriff is really the man on the hot seat since the multiple Outlaws will be gunning for him from the get go. Despite all of this the game seems well balanced to not favor any role. In the games that we have played the winning role is pretty well spread out.

In addition to roles, each player also gets a character to portray from a host of cowboy types. This determines how many wounds you can take before dying and what special ability you have. Some abilities emulate the effect of an item (such as the built in Scope of Rose Doolan) and others are unique unto themselves, like Slab the Killer and his hard to resist Bangs! Players are also limited in who they can shoot at based on proximity around the table. To begin the game each player has a range of one, meaning that they can only shoot at players one place away from them at the table. Over the course of the game you can acquire items and new types of guns to increase the range. This is fun since you wind up making enemies with your neighbors, and it also does a good job of protecting the Sheriff from all of the Outlaws who would like nothing more than to open fire right away. It also another reason why the more the merrier with this game.

The rules for the game are perhaps the simplest I have ever seen in a game. You can easily understand the game within two turns of playing it. Each round a player draws two cards, then plays however many cards from their hand as they would like to (the only limit is that one Bang a turn is the max, unless you have a Volcanic gun or are Willie the Kid), and then discards to the number of cards equal to your current life total. Play moves to the next player. Between the number of players and the ease of the rules Bang is excellent for a night of casual gaming or when time is short.

The art on the cards is pretty plain, but also has a lot of personality to it. The characters in particular look cool, like shady western villains and heroes should. A personal favorite is the Mancato! (Missed!) card, which is played to negate a Bang on a player. The graphic is a bullet flying through a hat, narrowly missing the valuable contents contained within. Oh yeah, all of the cards are bilingual. They are written in both English and Italian, allowing you to make enemies with people that you would not normally even be able to communicate with. Though there is an element of teamwork in this game, especially among the Outlaws who all have a common goal of killing the local lawman.

Sometimes a little touch can go a long way in a game, and Bang has an excellent example of this. On the back of all the character cards are five bullets. These are used to track a player’s health during the game. Each player gets an unused card and flips it over, bullet side up. Using their character they simply show the number of bullets that they have life. Perfect! It eliminates the need for dice or any sort of counter and works perfectly. I am so into it.

I don’t have many criticisms of Bang. It is certainly not the most complicated or strategy heavy game out there, but it doesn’t claim to be. It’s elegance lies in it’s simplicity. It’s great for repeated plays, especially since a game can end very quickly. I like this game a lot.

Hospitaler Prestige Class- Like a Paladin...but worse!

2010-02-10T17:44:00.000-05:00

One of the aspects of D&D that makes it so appealing to so many people, myself certainly included, is how many options there are available, so many ways to create a character and outfit them with all sorts of gear and abilities. That being said, some are just totally unnecessary. Such as the Hospitaler. One of the problems with a lot of prestige classes is that they don’t do anything new, whatever they bring to the table can easily be recreated in core so I don’t really see the point of them. The Hospitaler is a good example because as far as I can tell it is a Paladin, however one that is a little bit worse. Sounds great, right?

In theory the Hospitaler is some sort of traveling knight who is obligated to provide protection to travelers. In reality it is a paladin who gives up some abilities for a reduction in their normal abilities. So awesome. In order to get into this prestige class a character needs a Base Attack of +5, 5 ranks of ride and handle animal, the Mounted Combat and Ride By Attack feats, an ability to cast 1st level divine spells, and a non chaotic alignment. A 5th level Paladin easily qualifies for all of this, a Ranger could as well but based on some of the abilities the Hospitaler receives it is clearly intended for the Paladin. So the question really is, what does a character gain by giving up future levels of Paladin for this nifty prestige class? Let’s break it down.

Both classes have full base attack, good Fort saves, and 2+ skill points a level. Both also receive the Lay on Hands ability, which stacks if the character already had it, so that too is a wash. Remove disease? Ditto, they both get it. The Paladin has a d10 Hit Die, whereas the Hospitaler inexplicably gets a d8. The Hospitaler also has reduced spellcasting, only getting an increased caster level for 7 of 10 levels. The paladin has slow casting to begin with and this only makes them a poorer user of magic. The other thing that really strikes me as odd is the lack of focus on mounted combat. The only feat requirements for this class are both related to mounted combat, so it seems obvious that this class would give them some advantages there. It sort of does in a very roundabout way (we will get to that in a moment), but what it does not do it make the mount any better. A Paladin’s special mount is actually pretty good but class levels do not stack for the two classes, essentially leaving the mount in a state of stasis as they get no new abilities. Likewise, the smite ability is left behind.

So what does the Hospitaler get? A couple of bonus feats. At 1st, 5th, and 9th level they get an extra feat from the fighter bonus feat list. That’s it. At least with this they can improve on their mounted combat skills with some feats, but there really aren’t that many available. They already have two of them, Spirited Charge and Trample are nice but a normal progression of levels will get them soon enough. A human could have them both by 6th level. The other aspect of the class that deserves mentioning is that a Paladin can take levels of Hospitaler and return to Paladin levels, which I guess counts for something. You can dip in for the free feat and then return to the holy warrior that is the Paladin. It’s nice that you can go back to the Paladin once you realize how poor of an option this prestige class is. The better option would be to have Fighter be the 1st level, and then take Paladin but whatever.

The other great thing about Hospitalers is the Code of Conduct that they have to adhere to. They must swear an oath of poverty, obedience, and defense of those in their care. As if being a Paladin wasn’t enough fun, you now have to be a poor Paladin.

And where are the abilities related to protecting people? I fail to see them. A straight Paladin, or even a Knight, would fill the intended role of this class much better than the Hospitaler does. Some classes are clearly meant to fill pages in a book, rather than a role in a campaign and this is certainly one of them. Thumbs down.

Class Struggle Review

2010-02-06T16:22:00.000-05:00

Straight out of 1978 comes Avalon Hill’s Class Struggle, the board game of capitalism and socialism. The game embodies the struggle of the workers of the world to succeed in a world dominated by the prosperous few, leaving the restless many to toil away in a society stacked against them. The game is for two to six players and greatly benefits from having the full six players, it definitely loses something when one or more of the minor classes are not represented. The game time varies depending on the number of players, but it should take about an hour.

Truth be told, Class Struggle is not a very fun game. It’s interesting, it’s opinionated, it’s good for a laugh, but it is not all that fun to play. I think that this stems from the fact that the creator of the game, Bertell Ollman, is an academic teaching a political lesson with a board game, rather than a board game designer making an academic game about politics. It also has the most unintelligible rules that I have ever read. Seriously. I’ve read quite a few game manuals in my time, I even sort of enjoy them. But this one is just a series of bulleted points, essentially non sequitor rules floating out in the ether. It is the job (chore?) of the players to try to make sense of it, and nothing is really easily found. Normally a rule book is indexed or at least divided into sections like setup, moving, etc…This one is sort of like that, but not actually. It really takes away from the game. Plus, there are three different levels to play it on; beginner, full, and tournament play. I’ve played Class Struggle a couple of times and I still really struggle with the basic game play. Or maybe I’m just giving the game the benefit of the doubt by assuming that there is more to it than there actually is. Or maybe I just don’t care to learn the more advanced rules since the beginner game is not all that fun.

In the beginning of the game all of the players roll a die to determine which of the six classes they will represent. The rules are structured so that the Capitalists will most likely be portrayed by the lightest skinned, white male present. Which is sort of funny. The entire tone of the game is extremely critical of the Capitalists in the world and I’ve found that it is more fun if each player sort of adopts the personality of their given role. If the Capitalist player isn’t acting like a bully they are missing out. There are six classes in the game; Capitalists, Workers, Farmers, Students, Small Business, and Professionals. The game can only be won by the Capitalists or the Workers, the other players win by being allied with the winning class. The winner is the Major Class that has the most assets at the end of the game. Game play is fairly simple in that it is just rolling the die and moving that number of spaces and reading what the space says (usually collecting an asset or debit). The game also uses a D3 for movement, which is sort of odd. That part is simple. The rest is where it gets tricky. The end game is particularly awkward. When a player reaches the end of the board they can then begin to move other player’s pieces, but the rules for this are a bit convoluted. There is also a nuclear war space that can only be triggered by the Capitalists, if they land on this the game ends and nobody wins. Yay for capitalism!

One of the very strange things about Class Struggle is the inequality among the players in their ability to actually play the game. The game is about the Workers and the Capitalists; everyone else is just along for the ride. I understand, from a thematic approach at least, why this is. It is mirroring the way that the real world works, or at least the world that the creator is trying to portray. However, the end result is that it is not all that much fun for someone from one of the minor classes. It is literally possible for them to have the entire decision making process removed from them. They do not even get to necessarily decide where the alliances lie. And with the game really just being played by rolling and moving it gets a monotonous feel to it pretty quickly.

The game pieces are nothing special, pretty generic offerings. The board is a simple series of alternating colored squares that wind their way inward towards the game’s conclusion. My only complaint is that sometimes it is hard to tell when the player jumps to the next level of the board, other than that it is fine. The game also includes two stacks of assets and debits. Each class is represented by a cardboard symbol that affixes to a wood block so that it can stand upright. There are also alliance cards with the symbol of each minor class that go to the major class when they form an alliance. There is something charming about the late 70’s artwork and aesthetic feel of the game.

Apparently this game was created as a learning tool about the dangers/horrors of capitalism so making a fun game was not really the priority. So is it actually a game? What it be more appropriate to call it a classroom tool? I don’t think I can recommend buying this game (especially since it is rather expensive. Thanks Cris!) but if someone you know has it, it’s probably worth a quick play one evening.

Pandemic Custom Card- Special Delivery!

2010-01-30T20:31:00.000-05:00

It was very nice of the creators of Pandemic to include some blank cards with the game, encouraging players to create their own Special Events and Roles. Considering how bad we seem to be at saving the world from disease and pestilence we could really use all the help we can get. So we decided to make our own Special Event.

I thought that it was very important for the card to be balanced, none of us wanted anything that would just turn everything in our favor. As nice as it would be the have a card that automatically cures one of the viruses, it’s not really keeping with the spirit of the game. That spirit being to crush the players and leave them feeling useless. I mean, who doesn’t want that to continue? Katie, Mike, and I put our heads together and came up with a new card, Special Delivery! One of the problems that we have, especially when playing with a smaller number of players, is trading cards to one another to cure a disease. Special Delivery allows the current player to give any City card in their possession to any other player. Basically I imagine the player packing up a vital piece of information, or a disease sample, and boxing it up into a parcel and shipping it off at high speed. It certainly isn’t overpowered. Trading cards is a part of the game and a regular activity among players, this just makes it a bit easier at a key moment in the game.

Katie was tasked with creating the card and I have to say, she did a rather awesome job. For one, it looks just like the other Special Event cards which is cool. And the picture is great; a package being sent off in a hurry. I especially like how it looks like a stamp. All around win. Rather than printing onto the blank card she made a sticker of the right size and just adhered it onto the template. Brilliant.

Considering that we lost again last night, even with the Special Delivery contributing to the curing of the black virus, we may need to come up with some more Special Events or a new Role or two.

Campaign Journal #15- Bad Times in Ocrist

2010-01-25T16:39:00.001-05:00

The party decided that they would rescue the soon to be executed prisoner for a variety of reasons. They thought that by doing so they would get in good with the insurgency, which would lead to the leadership of the rebel faction, who they would in turn give over to the DuChamps for the reward money. Then, using their connections with the DuChamps, kill everyone and loot all the rumored money that the crown was said to have. Got that? Kill some people, betray some people, kill some more, stack up piles of gold. Sounds like a plan. What could go wrong?

After leaving the meeting with Firebeard they checked into a room at Oh Starry Night, a local inn recommended by the red haired rebel spokesman. Since it was still early at this point they decided to have a night on the town; gather some intel, scout the route the prisoner would be taking the next day, and try to avoid getting into trouble. They knew the path that the prisoner would be taking from the prison to the town square from the documents that Firbebeard had given them. It was a simple path that passed through a residential neighborhood to a commercial district. After much deliberation they decided that they would most likely strike before the doomed man reached the town square. Originally they wanted to free him from the gallows to make the most public showing that they could, but common sense intervened and they thought that this may be a better approach.

Eventually they found themselves at the Tiger House, an upscale gambling house that catered to many of the Duke’s soldiers and the town’s wealthy class. They went in and lost some money at the tables, tried to blend in, and gather some information. Lela was immediately intrigued by a very handsome, dark haired man at the bar who was giving her the eye. After some conversation it turned out that he was a part owner of the place, his name was Carlos el Bastardo and he was clearly into Lela. She turned down his numerous attempts to sleep with him, though she was definitely feeling his vibe. She whistled a bit for him and he was impressed, though the stage was occupied for the evening by an enchanting dancing woman named the Spider Queen. As a souvenir to remember her Carlos asked Lela for a memento, she gladly gave him a pearl from her collection. The party left and asked some more questions back at Oh Starry Night. Carlos was well known in town and was the leader of a CIA type group called The Mist, he worked for the Duke and was apparently very good at his job. Lela was glad that she did not sleep with him, though she did wonder what it would have been like. They also learned that the Duke kept a collection of rare and exotic animals on the grounds of his castle and that he was also served by a dwarf named Hebnik Heartbane, but his actual role in things seemed a bit murky. A lot of this info came from a drunkard in the inn that they were having a nightcap with. After the conversation they all went to bed.

While settling in for the evening Lela failed two Will saves, both of which were made at a -10 (more on that later). The first was a Nightmare effect, so she couldn’t get back any spells, which actually wasn’t that big of a deal since she had barely used any for the day. The second failed save was a bigger deal since the party was being Scryed (which they did not know). Before they went to sleep they discussed the plans for the following day a little more, set guards, and passed the night.

The following morning they were ready to put their plan into motion and they set out into the town. Lela put on a disguise, but everyone else went out as normal and tried to blend into the crowd that was gathering around the “parade” route. The public execution was a big draw and a lot of businesses closed for the afternoon so that everyone could partake in the spectacle, or perhaps they were ordered to do so. In an ideal situation the plan would have happened like this; Mgabwe would turn invisible and fly to where the prisoner was, grab him and Dimension Door to Henri, Henri would then Teleport them to safety, return the prisoner to Firebeard, and they would all reunite with the rest of the party. Unfortunately for them that is not at all how it went down, though it was not at all a bad plan. In theory.

Glee and Romulus stayed together in the crowd watching all that was happening, a disguised Lela was also blending in with the crowd, Henri was hidden atop a rooftop within range of Dimension Door, and Mgabwe turned himself invisible and started to fly to the prisoner. The chained man was being led by a group of soldiers who were staying within a couple of feet of him. A dwarf led the procession, calling out to the crowd that this is what happens to traitors to the crown. As Mgabwe flew in the dwarf turned around and saw him, clearly he had something going on that enabled him to see invisible. The dwarf Dispelled his invisibility, and in response Mgabwe cast some Evard’s Black Tentacles (or as he calls it Papa Guedo’s Skeletal Fingers), which actually did a great job of neutralizing the dwarf and several of the guards. But then things started to get out of hand. Over a nearby rooftop a Chimera joined the fight, charging straight at the cluster of guards and Mgabwe. Henri began to hurl Fireballs at the Chimera, Glee and Romulus started to move to the fight, while Lela hung back and whistled to support the group. It took longer than expected to extract the prisoner (his name was Vincent Featherfall) since there were so many guards hanging onto him, but Mgawe and Glee fought well and the two of them (with Vincent) made it over to Henri. However, in the meantime things took a catastrophic turn for Lela. She failed to see a disguised Carlos el Bastardo sneaking up on her and she wound up with a dagger to the back. Romulus went over to help her out, but it was going to be an uphill battle for the two of them. The following round Lela cast Greater Invisibility on Romulus, which wound up being the last thing she ever did. A moment later Carlos feinted and unleashed a full round of sneak attacks on the half elf, skewering her for 140 point of damage. This put her at -101. She was really dead. The last words she heard were, “You should have slept with me.”

Romulus responded in kind with some Invisible sneak attacks of his own, but clearly this Carlos was no pushover. Carlos then tumbled away, throwing some Dust of Appearance as he did so. Watching this from afar the rest of the party had a decision to make. Do they get out of there with the prisoner, or do they Teleport to the aid of the party? Henri overcame his usual cowardice and brought in the reinforcements, just in time to see Romulus killed as well. However, he did bring Glee and Mgabwe with him. Mgabwe totally whiffed on some trip attempts against Carlos, Glee was able to get in some shots and Carlos was slowing down but had sent Glee into negatives with another attack. It really all came down to Henri. He would have been able to Teleport out of there with Mgabwe, as well as the bodies of Glee and Romulus. Lela would have to be left behind. What Henri did next I was not expecting. He cast a Fireball at Carlos. Now, they were currently engaged in melee with Carlos so the entire party was affected as well. Henri really needs to pay better attention. The entire party groaned as their fate was sealed by one of their own. Since he was unconscious Glee got no save and was killed, Mgabwe took 33 damage and since he had 31 he was now unconscious as well. On the bright side Henri made his save, as did Mgabwe’s familiar. Oh yeah, Carlos did too and he has evasion so he took no damage. From this point it was just a matter of mopping up the lone wizard and within moments Henri was killed as well. The entire party lay dead in the town square of Ocrist. And while this was happening the Chimera killed the “rescued” prisoner, who had probably just wished he died on the gallows.

Let’s peel back the curtain of the DM and take a look at how it all went down. Things really started to get dicey when they met Carlos at the Tiger House the night before. From the incident at the Wicked Annabella when the PC’s killed some soldiers Carlos had some intel about who they were and he recognized them immediately, they are not a hard group to pick out. During his conversation with Lela he also used some Sense Motive (Lela failed her Bluff), which further confirmed his suspicions about who they were. Just for good measure he was able to get a belonging of hers (the pearl) to aid in both Scrying and Nightmare. The Scrying allowed the army to pretty much know what the party was planning, so none of it was really a surprise. The following day none of the party noticed Carlos in the crowd, he was waiting for a chance to get one of them in a one on one spot and Lela was the perfect choice. I also knew that he was a very formidable opponent that they would have to work together to defeat, they chose not to go that route. In a previous post I had been real critical of the Invisible Blade prestige class, but Carlos put it to good use. For what it’s worth he was a Fighter 4/Rogue 3/Swashbuckler 3/Invisible Blade 5. A 15th level character essentially took out a party of 5 12th level characters by himself. Not bad.

I would also like to comment on the party killing Fireball from Henri. I know it seems a little harsh for them to go out that way, but I am sort of strict when it comes to stuff like that. If you say something at the table, then your character did it. Once he realized what he had done Henri tried to take it back, but I couldn’t allow it. The other players backed me up. I had mentioned way back in Journal #1 that Henri was a new player, this was really his first campaign. I don’t expect him to know all the rules, but this was also the 14th adventure he had played with Henri and the third time he had done pretty much the same thing. I let the first one slide because he was new, the second time almost killed Mgabwe during the fight at the medusa temple, and the third one…well, we see how that turned out.

Ranking the Weapons

2010-01-25T12:21:00.003-05:00

How to arm oneself is one of the most important decisions that a young adventurer will ever make. For a caster it may not mean much, but for a warrior? It literally could mean life or death. For a feat heavy melee specialist (i.e. fighter) it is even more important because they will probably have to commit to a weapon type in order to take advantage of all those Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization feats out there. So what’s it going to be? Greatsword? Longsword and shield? Whip? I’ve decided to look at the weapons out there and try to decide what, if any, is the best weapon available. I’ve also decided to stick with core (though I don’t think that limits things all that much).

In order to evaluate what’s out there I decided to break weapon traits down into a couple of categories; base damage, critical, and special features. Right off the bat I eliminated a whole bunch of weapons, I don’t think any reasonable person is going to argue that the greatclub is the best weapon around. It has inferior base damage and critical, and no special features to speak of. Is it without value? No. It only costs five gold and looks pretty cool, but for our purposes we are going to rule it out. A trident is okay since you can throw it, but an adventurer can do better. Leave it for Poseidon.

Perhaps the classic weapon of D&D, the longsword is very popular for a reason. It has good damage for a one handed weapon (1d8), a standard critical range (19-20x2), and allows the wielder to couple it with a shield or a second, smaller weapon if that’s your thing. However, that’s about all it does. And the truth is that base damage is not nearly as important as some other factors, so I think it is an inferior weapon compared to the scimitar and rapier, it’s brethren in the one handed department. Both of those have slightly worse damage (1d6), but an improved critical range (18-20x2). Plus, the rapier can be used with Weapon Finesse, which has to count for something.

It’s hard to separate the greatsword and the greataxe from each other, they are essentially the same weapon. The greatsword has a slightly higher critical range, whereas the greatsword is the home run hitter with the x3 critical multiplier. The base damage are essentially identical, so I think it’s really a matter of preference between the two. An interesting argument could be made for the scythe though in this category. It has an inferior base damage (2d4), but that matters less and less as the game progresses. What it does have going for it is the ability to make trip attempts, can be slashing or piercing, and a critical multiplier of x4! Choppin’ heads.

I have no idea why the Heavy Flail is not more popular, it seems as if gnolls are hoarding them all for themselves. For starters, they are sort of cool. You can spin them around and make a menacing whirling noise and they are pretty good at smashing heads. The base damage is slightly subpar for a two handed weapon (1d10), but that doesn’t matter a ton. The critical is standard (19-20x2), but is has some extra features that are real good. It gives a +2 bonus on disarm attempts and it allows the wielder to make trip attempts with it. We all know that tripping is among the most effective fighting techniques out there. However, it is really the weapon of a skilled warrior since it requires a handful of feats to really take advantage of it. Combat Expertise, Improved Trip and Improved Disarm allow it to shine, but is an investment of three feats worth it? Or could those be better spent elsewhere?

The bastard sword is sort of an interesting option, though not nearly the powerhouse it was back in 2nd Edition. The main drawback is that is that as an exotic weapon it takes a feat to use it one handed, which is the only way to use it. As a two hander it’s pretty crummy. As a one handed weapon it is a slightly more powerful (1d10) version of the longsword. Is it a good weapon? Sure. Is it worth a feat? Not really. I’ll pass on the bastard sword, despite it’s badass name.

And now we come to the spiked chain. Personally I think it’s a lame weapon. It looks sort of weird and is associated with all sorts of cheese, but it’s hard to deny how good of a weapon it is. The damage is not very good, only 2d4 but it is two handed so you do get the bump up from strength. So why is it so good? Well, it has 10’ reach, but can also be used on adjacent opponents. I’m not sure of any other weapon that has that, it basically is like giving the wielder Quick Draw for free since there is no need to switch weapons when opponents close in. It also gives a +2 bonus on Disarm attempts, can make trip attempts, and Weapon Finesse applies to it. Wow. That is quite a package. It does cost a feat to learn how to use it since it is Exotic, but that seems like a decent trade off for what it offers.

Of course, weapon selection all comes down to a personal preference. I would hate to see a slight numerical bonus determine what a fighter carries into battle. And the truth is that for all the grief that WOTC gets for lack of balance in D&D, the weapons are actually fairly balanced with each other. It really comes down to the type of character and what they would want to use. There are enough good weapon options to fit the need of any adventurer, so the choice is really what type of warrior do you want to be?

Campaign Journal #14- Poison! Death! A Den of Spies!

2010-01-18T18:42:00.001-05:00

While fleeing from the Wicked Annabella roadside inn Glee, Romulus, and Lela heard voices coming from the woods. The muffled voices were bickering about something and the party snuck up on them to get a closer look. Within moments they were exchanging pleasantries with their wayward adventurers Henri and Mgabwe. Henri had a black eye and Mgabwe seemed to have every bit of hair on his body burnt off, but for the time being they had resolved their argument about the nature of arcane magic. The party filled them in on their most recent adventures and then they set off for Ocrist. Mgabwe did not get on well with Corwyn, which was to be expected.

They decided to travel along the road since they are not openly warring with either faction. After several hours on the road they found themselves on a bluff overlooking a large open field, the Field of Sorrows that they had heard talked about from several sources. From their vantage point they could see a large force of the DuChamp army massing on the field, off in the distance they could vaguely make out another gathering force. They also saw the wagon of death driven by Ichabod on the opposite side of the field, he waved to them. They saw no reason to jump into a battlefield so they kept following the road to the East.

Several more hours passed and they came upon a macabre scene in the middle of the road. Two wagons flipped over and crushed, the bodies of half a dozen DuChamp soldiers lying on the ground, and tracks of something huge heading North into the foothills. As usual the party was split on what to do; Henri saw no reason to follow the tracks, arguing that nothing good could come from it. The rest of the party was spoiling for a fight and decided to head off into the foothills. While this was going on Mgabwe Animated several of the DuChamp soldiers as skeletons who would now serve as foot soldiers and heralds for the group. The skeletons led the way into the hills, the terrain changing from the grasslands surrounding the roads to scrubland and rocky paths in the shadows of the massive mountains looming to the North.

In less than an hour the terrain started to change and there were large holes in the ground, some as huge as 80 feet across. The tracks went right into these openings. While discussing how to proceed a pair of claws appeared over the rim of one of these craters, followed by a tail with an enormous stinger dripping with poison. Giant scorpions! The party leapt into action, everyone falling into their accustomed combat roles. The skeletons charged the scorpion coming out of the hole, but two more had emerged including one of gargantuan size. Lela was scooped up and held in the claw of the biggest scorpion and took some heavy damage, but the party was able to kill the creature when they surrounded it. Corwyn endeared himself to Lela when he charged the creatures flank, though his attack was impotent. Eventually they did kill all three giant vermin, however Glee suffered a severe poisoning and lost eight points of CON, greatly lowering his hit points for the time being. He was not happy about this. And one of the skeletons was killed.

Romulus was the only one brave enough to descend into the depths of the hole and he climbed down and began to search through the rubble. He heard some noises and saw a small scorpion scuttling around. Now joined by Glee the two of them quickly ended the foul creature’s life, and once again searched the area. They turned up a javelin of surprisingly high quality but decided to leave once they heard some more noises. Cowards.

Glee was very concerned about his lowered hit points. The party has no access to Restoration and it would take over a week to heal naturally, so they decided to head back to the Fields of Sorrow and see if they could get Ichabod to help out with some healing. So they backtracked and headed for the battlefield. Despite the presence of an army they decided to walk across the grounds. They were quickly approached by some DuChamp soldiers on horseback, who were equally curious about what they were doing and about the skeletal DuChamp soldiers that were traveling with them. The silver tongue of Lela helped avoid a conflict, though Mgabwe refused to comply with their wishes to allow the soldiers to have a proper burial. They did cross the battlefield and meet up with Ichabod. After listening to his normal rant of death and impending doom, whispering to his scarlet lady, and speaking excitedly about the carrion that will result from the next day’s battle Glee asked if he could restore his health. Ichabod said that was not within his power and perhaps death was calling out him. After that he said that Glee should sacrifice something that was important to him, and then suggested that he kill Corwyn. Glee did not hesitate and swung his greatsword at Corwyn, killing the young man with a single strike. Ichabod was delighted but still offered nothing to Glee. I have to say that I was a bit surprised at the sudden death of Corwyn. I did not expect him to last very long, but I thought that this opportunistic crew would at least have gotten something out of the young man. But I suppose that is the way that is goes. For what it’s worth Lela did seem a little bummed out by the whole thing.

The party awkwardly stood around for a moment and then departed, making their way across the battlefield and back to the road. Before long they came to a checkpoint on the outskirts of Ocrist. The guard was nice enough to the party, and actually rather impressed with Lela’s whistling, but insisted that the skeletons stay outside. Mgabwe consented and had the skeletons dig graves for themselves and then get into them.

From Gunther they were given a letter to deliver to the Leaves of the Fall, a tea shop in town. They never bothered to inspect the letter, which I found to be strange with this group, but having no other immediate agenda in Ocrist they set about finding the tea shop. Before long they located the quaint shop on a small cobblestone street and went inside. They were given a password to tell the shopkeeper, which they did. He responded with the proper words and then sent Lela, who was wisely doing the talking, into the back to deliver the letter. The back storage room had an opening at a counter than led to some sort of room where invoices are received and paid. A delicate looking female hand came through and took the letter, before Lela could do anything else the person was gone. Lela joined the party and exited the shop and onto the street. Outside the party walked and talked about what to do next, while doing this a stranger approached them and put a letter into their hands. He asked them to deliver it to 24 Steele Street, an address in town. He hurried off, ignoring their questions.

Assuming that this was their next step in establishing a correspondence with the anti-DuChamp factions in town they decided to head over to the address, which turned out to be an abandoned looking warehouse in the city. Going inside and walking down a narrow hallway which led into a large room, the party found themselves surrounded by cloaked figures. A voice boomed out of the darkness and demanded to know which side they were on, in this conflict who did they support? All at once the party blurted out a variety of answers. The highest bidder, says Mgabwe. Romulus said that he served no man. Lela chimed in with serving the Coleridges, which got their interest but the other answers clearly were not what the group was hoping to hear. What followed was an interesting discourse about who the party were, why they do things, and how they could help these mysterious figures. Considering that it was a Coleridge sympathizer who got them started on this quest they guessed that these people were also on board with that cause, which is why Lela played up that angle. She talked about the plight of the oppressed and with her considerable charisma it went over well with the group. The fact that the party were clearly a bunch of money hungry mercenaries was a little harder for them to swallow, but Romulus and Mgabwe did a good job of selling their position. Basically they said that if the DuChamp government were to collapse it would create ample opportunities for them to profit, which is a great motive for them to join the cause. If nothing else they enjoyed spreading chaos and disorder, two activities that these freedom fighters could get down with. The spokesman for the people, a red bearded man who has cleverly taken the moniker of Firebeard, seemed convinced.

Firebeard presented them with some ways to help the cause. One involved General Olden Delacroix, the commander of the DuChamp military who has recently come out of retirement to lead the fight. Sources close to Firebeard informed him that the daughter of Delacroix had been kidnapped by the DuChamps who have framed the Coleridges for the kidnapping. The girls name…Fiona. If they could convince Delacroix that it is actually his employer that arranged for the child’s disappearance they believe that he would leave the army, thus striking a major blow against the throne. The other option involved a prisoner held by the DuChamps. A Coleridge operative had recently been captured and was set to be executed in the town square the following day. If the PC’s could prevent this from happening it would be great for two reasons; it would weaken the power of the DuChamps if it seems that they can not even secure their home city, and this operative has a spy inside the inner circle of the Duke who provides him with information. If this man was to die his contact would most likely be lost. The party agreed to free this man, but they also had some plans to contact Delacroix.

I’m curious to see where this is going. They have the standing offer to turn in spies to the DuChamps, and it seems like they have found some. However, they do believe that to ultimately benefit the most financially they need to capture the vast treasures of the DuChamps. We’ll see what happens…

Retro Game Night- Careers

2010-01-17T13:41:00.001-05:00

Part two of retro game night (part one here) found us playing Careers, a 1955 Milton Bradley game about finding the right path in life. Now, I don’t know a ton about board games from the 1950’s but I think that this one had to be way ahead of all the others. It’s fun, engaging, interesting, and has a nice mix of luck and strategy. Really, there is a lot going on here.

The game begins with each player creating their own formula for success in life. By choosing a combination of money, fame, and happiness it is up to each player to dictate the terms of their success. I love it. Not only does it give the player the chance to do some strategizing from the get go, but the sentiment is awesome. Life is what you make of it. Of course, in this game there are also winners and losers so take from that what you will. The formula has to add up to 60 points and each player secretly writes it on their player sheet, keeping it hidden from the other players. The player sheet is also a nice part of the game. There are a couple of elements that need to be tracked during the game (salary, number of times you’ve completed a career, and fame and happiness) and it is really nice to have a sheet made to do this, rather than just a piece of paper.

Throughout the course of the game numerous career choices will arise and decisions will have to be made as to which to pursue. Some offer lucrative salaries and the chance to make a lot of money (like Big Business), others a chance for fame (Movie Star), and yet others provide a chance for happiness and personal satisfaction (like Farming). The two most outrageous careers are the Expedition to the Moon and Uranium Prospecting. Both of these offer a ton in the way of money, fame, and happiness but are much harder to get into. Yes, there are entry requirements for each career, which makes a lot of sense. Farming may be easy to get into, but not just anyone off the street is going to go to the moon. (Interestingly this game was created way before anyone ever went to the moon, really before the space race was all that heated up actually.) The requirements are usually money, though a specific college degree can sometimes help out as well. Once you’ve already been through a career you can always go back into it for free.

The game play is simple enough that even little kids should be okay with it but with enough options to keep it from being mundane and still appeal to all types of gamers. It is certainly more than just roll the dice, move your mice. Like most games, the board is a giant square and players move around the perimeter and encounter the spaces that they land on. However, spaced throughout the board are all the career tracks that a player can enter. Each one is a slight detour from the main board but it is on the career tracks that the game is really played; it’s where the money, fame, and happiness are most found. Normally two dice are rolled for movement around the perimeter but only one is rolled when you are moving through a career, which is good because the career tracks are only about ten spaces. Choosing what career tracks to enter is probably the most important decision that you will make (I sound like your mother, don’t I?) as you try to complete your secret success formula. A player can only go through a given career a maximum of three times, though that seems like enough to most likely win the game.

Over the course of the game players accumulate experience cards, which allow you to move a certain number of spaces in lieu of rolling the dice. This is really nice when on a career track because it allows you to land on a space that has a benefit that you really want or need. I assume the benefit of real world experience is that you have a better chance of making good things happen for you in the working world. There are also opportunity cards that let a player move to different career entry points on the board, some also waive the requirement to get into the career. This can give a player a huge advantage, especially if they can get into a strong career early on and then just keep going back to it. The rules also suggest that players are free to trade cards with each other, which is another nice feature of the game.

I have to say that I was delighted with Careers. I sort of expected it to be nothing special, it’s sole appeal being in the cool looking retro board and some of the outdated language, which is funny in hindsight. But in actuality this is a really fun game. The rules are easy to learn, the game takes about a half hour, and it’s a nice break from some of the more intense games out there.

Campaign Journal #13- The Corruption of Corwyn, Lela's Imminent Death, and the Plot Thickens

2010-01-11T20:18:00.001-05:00

With the mountains and the medusas finally behind them the party set out East, towards Ocrist. The plan was to stop along the way at the Wicked Annabella, the roadside inn owned by a friend of Corwyn. Ultimately they hoped to pick up on the spy hunting mission given to them some time ago by Autumn, the mysterious agent of the DuChamp family. He had offered 10,000 gp for each undercover Coleridge spy that the party could present him with.

While traveling through the woods at night Glee spotted a pair of figures also moving through the woods, they were flanked by a pair of wolves and were armed. He pointed them out to the rest of the party and they slowed to observe the men, eventually coming face to face with the woodsmen. Both sides approached cautiously with weapons sheathed, and the party did something they had never attempted before. They talked to the strangers rather than killing them. Bizarre. The group of two was actually a group of four and they all made camp together like a big happy family. The leader of the group indentified himself as Martin, a traveling priest of Fharlaghn who had come to the island to aid the Coleridge’s in their fight against the oppression of the DuChamps. Martin described himself as a freedom fighter, going where he could do the most good. He sympathized with the Coleridges and was now working with the army to insure victory. He spent part of the night explaining the situation to the party and attempting to win them over and get them to join the cause. Eventually Martin went to sleep and Lela used her Fascinating whistling, followed by some Suggestion to plug one of the guards for some information. The guard said that Martin was a good man and genuinely cared for the plight of the oppressed on the island, though he expressed some concerns over the actual motivations of the Coleridges. There is a rumor, he said, that for years the DuChamps have been guarding a powerful treasure and that is the real reason that the Coleridge Clan wishes to unseat their power. So that they can get at whatever it is that is hidden in Ocrist. While all this was going on Corwyn was making multiple attempts to get into Lela’s pants. They did not work.

I was glad to see the party rely on wits rather than weapons for a change. They are evil and weapons are an easy way to be evil, however manipulation and deceit allow for a much greater evil that, perhaps, they may capitalize on. In the morning they broke camp and went their separate ways; the party (with Corwyn in tow) towards Ocrist and Martin and company to the Coleridge army.

Rather than skulking through the woods the party decided to actually take the road like members of a civilized society. After several hours they noticed a wagon behind them slowly gaining. As it came into view they were not prepared for what they saw. The wagon was pulled by two sickly looking ancient mares with fire in their eyes, the reins were held by a pair of skeletons, and seated between them was Ichabod. A cleric of Wee Jas, the party has met Ichabod once before and sort of took to the death-whispering creepy old man. He offered them a ride and they accepted, though it was Corwyn who was chosen to ride between Ichabod and a skeleton, the rest of them rode on the horses. Ichabod told them he was headed to the Fields of Sorrow on the outskirts of Ocrist, he was anticipating a large battle between the two armies sometime soon and he wanted to be there to harvest souls for his Scarlet Mistress. He was also pleased to sense that the scent of death was much heavier with the party then it was the previous time they had met. He also uttered some cryptic words to Lela that unnerved her, alluding to her imminent death. At one point she asked to look into the back of the covered wagon, he allowed her to do so but warned that she needed to be prepared for what was there. Ignoring his warning Lela pushed back the cloth covering and into the rear of the wagon, only to see herself on the floor, her throat slit and her body pierced with arrows. Ichabod smiled. Shortly after this Romulus offered Ichabod some gold if he would creep out Corwyn enough to cause him to defecate in his own pants. Ichabod did his job well and soon enough a rank stench hung in the air, thicker than even the smell of death that circled Lela like vultures. Corwyn tried to blame the skeletons.

Not wanting to be seen pulling up to the inn in the Ichabod death wagon they jumped out a little early and walked the rest of the way. They thanked him and he said that he would be seeing Glee and Romulus soon, he made no mention of Lela. While walking to the inn they had a serious life discussion with Corwyn. Corwyn has clearly been trying to feel like one of the party, but he does not seem to have the same attitude as them. He somewhat believes that people can be good and that there are things worth fighting for that are not greed and the love of death. The party set him straight, telling him what an evil place the world is. Just look at your uncle, they said. He sold you to medusas! All of this seemed to ring true with Corwyn and he began to look at the world in a new way.

As soon as they went into the Wicked Annabella Corwyn was greeted by his friend Gunther, it was the family of Gunther that owned the establishment. They exchanged pleasantries for a moment and then Corwyn requested a place where he could clean up his soiled pantaloons and get a change of clothes. Gunther accommodated his request and then brought the party into a private dining room and then treated them a meal. He inquired about what they were doing and how it was that they came to find Corwyn. Over the course of the conversation the topic turned to the current war and the PC’s began to pick up on the slightly anti-DuChamp sentiment in the voice of the young man. Seeing an opening Lela followed up on this, mentioning how they had spent the night with Martin the freedom fighter and hinting at the idea that they were not all that into the current leadership hierarchy on the island as well. Since the party mentioned that they were going to be heading to Ocrist Gunther asked them to deliver a letter to The Leaves of the Fall, a tea shop in the city. He alluded to it being more than just a letter. Gunther also mentioned how there was a group of DuChamp soldiers in the inn at the moment, and he believed that they were carrying something that is of great value. If the soldiers were to somehow lose it…With an unspoken agreement between them the party thanked him for the meal and went back out to the common room.

The evening’s entertainment was a musical comedy act called the Clown and the Bard; two men with a slapstick brand of humor. Apparently the soldiers stopped in the inn to see them before heading back to Ocrist. The other happenings in the inn included Lela talking her way into a whistling performance between sets of the musical comedy (the performance went very well, she was a big hit with her unique brand of epic storytelling through whistling) and Glee having sex with a buxom barmaid. Corwyn had also emerged with a change of clothing and attitude. With a pair of tight studded leather pants and a slicked backed haircut, he hung out at the bar all night flirting with some young vixens, ignoring Lela for most of the evening. He seems to have taken the nihilistic teachings of the party to heart. At the conclusion of the performance the soldiers packed up and headed out, setting off for Ocrist.

Lela, Romulus, and Glee sort of sat around and twiddled their thumbs while the soldiers left. They were not really sure how to approach it. In a way I thought it was good that they did not just draw their weapons and rush out after the prey, but the fact that they were clueless about how to proceed wasn’t all that good. It occurred to them that the soldiers may be on horseback, which sort of killed their plan of stalking them down the road and murdering them in the dark. Eventually they did go outside just as the soldiers were getting ready to leave atop their mounts. Lela cast Grease in front of their horses, slowing them down but clearly alerting the soldiers that something was amiss. While this was happening Glee and Romulus snuck up from the side and lunged at them, weapons drawn. A fierce skirmish followed, and the party was aided by Corwyn who charged from the inn and out to the stables. Romulus was dropped to one hit point but they were able to survive once again, though Corwyn struggled in his one on one battle with a horse. They looted and found a strange little box.

By the time the fight ended a small crowd had gathered outside of the inn to watch the murder of several of the local soldiers. Clearly, the PC’s had been seen. Gunther charged at them with a knife drawn, threatening the murderers and chasing them into the woods. He was also secretly signaling to them that they should get out of there. They all ran into the woods and Gunther asked if he could have the package that they had found on the soldiers. Inside the box was a single black arrow which Gunther said was an arrow of slaying. It was enchanted to kill Roosevelt Briggs, the commander of the Coleridge army. Romulus refused to turn it over, making Gunther very angry and having him question whether or not the party were the right people to deliver the letter. Their short career as double agents appeared to be on life support until Lela came in and used her silver tongue to smooth things over. Ultimately the party did turn the arrow over to Gunther and he thanked them.

I thought that it was a real good night of adventuring. Having a small party let each player have moments to shine and use some resources that they may not normally employ, such as Lela and her fascinating musical effects. Role playing was also strong throughout the group with everyone acting in character and pursuing their goals. I thought that it was interesting that no weapons were drawn until the very end of the evening. This is a party that is usually very quick to slay anything in their path, so it was a change of pace to say the least. Also, the lecture on morals that all three of them gave to Corwyn was a lot of fun.

Retro Game Night- What Shall I Be?

2010-01-08T19:19:00.001-05:00

The other night we had a retro game night with a couple of old games purchased at garage sales. Probably not the kind of stuff that we would play every day, but definitely good to break out on occasion.

First up was What Shall I Be?, a game from 1966 that helped young girls decide what career was for them. Apparently the only options at the time for a lady were Teacher, Model, Actress, Stewardess, Nurse, and Ballerina. What, no housewife? As you would expect the game plays rather simply, though it is not just a linear, roll the dice Candyland style walkthrough. The goal of the game is to get enough experience in the career that you want, and also have the right traits to be successful at it. A person who gets too easily excited is not going to cut it as a Nurse, though excelling when it comes to applying makeup will allow you to go far as a Model. Players take turns rolling the dice and moving around the board, hoping to land on the right spaces.

The dice rolling mechanic is a tiny bit interesting, just in the sense that you don’t roll the two dice and move that amount. The player rolls two dice and has the choice of moving the total of the two, or the amount shown on either of them. Who said that women didn’t have options in the sixties? Certainly not the makers of What Shall I Be? The board is a big circle with six sections that break off of it. Each of the sections is the career path of one of the six wonderful career choices available to the young lady. The winner is the first to collect four matching career cards (obtained by landing on spaces along that career path) and two personality and two subject cards that are beneficial to that career. Those are collected along the outer rim of the board by landing on certain spaces marked with a circle or heart. Some of these cards are really awesome. I think that my favorite is the Slow Thinker card, which is bad for a nurse, but apparently is not at all a hindrance for a teacher or any other profession.

Is this game anything other than luck? On the surface the answer to that question appears to be no, the game is really just a series of randoms. Looking a little bit deeper, and I still come up with the same answer. I suppose that there is some strategy involved in picking your career since there are only five of each career card, so you need to make sure that you are not doubling up the choice of another player. I mean, I know we all want to be an actress, but the world only has room for so many. The personality and subject cards are totally random though. By choosing which roll to keep you may be able to increase the total number that you draw, thus increasing the chance that you will not be a slow thinker. One thing I will say is that we have played this game three times (I think) and every single time Mike has won. Is that luck? Or is there some skill at this game that Mike has uncovered? Perhaps What Shall I Be? is more involved than I suspect.

It’s not a bad game at all and it only takes about 20 minutes to play a full game. Every once in a while it’s nice to have a change of pace and it’s kind of interesting to see how far games have come in the last 40 years.

Campaign Journal #12- Finishing Up at the Temple

2010-01-04T17:26:00.001-05:00

With the medusas in the Temple taken care of it was time for the party to loot and pillage the area that they had lusted after for so long. Exploring the top of the Temple they found piles of bedrolls and other mundane supplies, it seems as if many of the creatures lived and slept at the top of the steps. They also found a slightly raised section of the floor that contained the familiar indentation of the snake that they have seen several times before. Before trying to open it up they decided to check out the half dozen buildings that were built up around the Temple.

At about this time Henri and Mgabwe got into a fierce debate about the nature of he arcane arts. A debate that could only be decided by the two of them teleporting far away to the appropriate research facility. And with that they were gone! (Both of these players are on separate European vacations for the next couple of weeks and will not be playing)

The six buildings were all very similar to one another from the outside; stone, rectangular, with a single entrance in the front of the building. The buildings contained various foodstuffs, a blacksmith, a small brewery, a weaving shop, and other necessities for life in the middle of nowhere. One of the structures contained a small set of jail cells, one of which was occupied by a young man. Excited to see the PC’s he introduced himself as Corwyn, and after being freed from his confinement he willingly told the party his story. From a minor noble family in Ocrist, Corwyn was taken on a fox hunting expedition by his Uncle Istvan shortly after turning 18. This was several weeks ago. While on this expedition with us Uncle he began to feel drowsy and a short time later he drifted off into unconsciousness. Fading in and out of awareness he remembered very little of what followed after, though he did recall being handed over to a group of women by his uncle and heard some talk of honoring an ancient agreement. When he next woke up he was in the prison cell. He said that over the last several weeks he was forced to have sex with the medusa Queen while all of the serpent headed women looked on. Though he admits that he sort of enjoyed it and was somewhat upset to hear that the beautiful Queen was killed. He also took an immediate interest in the fair Lela, trying unsuccessfully to woo her with his mediocre charm. She was flattered by it. The party pumped him for information about the medusas (which he knew very little of) and Ocrist (which he was happy to share with them). Corwyn asked the party to help him get out of the mountains, though he did not want to return to Ocrist because he was afraid of his Uncle. Instead he wanted to be brought to the Wicked Annabella, a roadside inn between Ocrist and Bowerstone that was owned by a friend of his. The party said that they would consider it.

Heading back into the Temple they inserted a necklace in the raised tablet and the whole thing lowered into the floor, revealing the bedroom and master chamber of the medusa Queen. Decorated with lavish carpets and tapestries, rich paintings and works of art, beautiful statues, and jewelry draped around the room the chamber was truly fitting of a Queen. Searching they also found a chest loaded with gems and gold, which they eagerly stuffed into the bag of holding. On one wall of the room there was what appeared to be a door adorned with the symbol of entwined snakes, the door had no lock or handle. Glee searched it (poorly) and came up empty handed, though the common sense of the group felt that it must be trapped. What followed was one of those bizarre D&D problem solving situations that could never happen in a fantasy novel, but always seems to pop up in role playing games. From the previous day’s battle the party had about a dozen medusa bodies laying around, so Romulus took one (after Corwyn dropped it into the bedroom from above) and hurled it at the door. The force of it set off a Blade Barrier trap, causing a whirlwind of knives and blades to orbit the doorway. The force of the throw also caused the door to budge open a fraction of an inch. Now, when I designed this trap encounter the party had two arcane casters and a Knock and a Dispel Magic would be easy to come by and would have made this encounter nothing more than something that chewed up a couple of resources for the group. However the two arcanists are off doing other things and the one caster in the party (Lela) does not have either of those spells. What was I to do? The party wanted to go through the door, I wanted them to go through the door. So we went with it. They all took turns throwing the corpses of medusas at the door. They made strength checks to see how far they could move the door with a body, I rolled to see how much of the body was chopped up by the blades. After exhausting their supply of corpses they then tried to avoid the blades and roll through the opening. It wound up being quite an encounter and they got cut up pretty good trying to avoid the blades (they should have been better since they all have good Reflex saves, but they rolled like crap) but eventually made it through in one piece. I love the visual of a demented gnome, a grotesque half orc, and a beautiful half elf hurling corpses through spinning blades at a wall. Let’s hear it for D&D!

Beyond the door was a stone corridor that twisted and turned it’s way into the heart of the mountain, descending into the depths. As the crew progressed down the passage the heat grew and small bursts of steam broke through the walls, the occasional burnt remains of things that were once humanoid littered the passage. They felt they were nearing the core of the mountain chain. They party all passed Fortitude checks to resist the effects of the heat and the continued on. Eventually the corridor narrowed and emptied into a large room of molten rock and steaming water in a lake of fire. The party stood in the entrance to the large chamber. The passage fed into a wide stone bridge that spanned the radius of the lake and onto a stone island in the midst of the fire. There was a stone altar with an ancient leather bound tome on the island. Spotting around the area they noticed in the fire a longsword in one section, and a suit of full plate mail on the opposite side. Romulus found some loose rocks and tossed them into the room; some landed harmlessly on the island and near the altar, other landed in the fire and angered the eight headed pyro hydra living in the lake! It attacked!

Similar to the Blade Barrier encounter, this fight was designed for a party of five rather than a party of three. I did weaken it a bit for them by giving the hydra eight heads instead of the eleven it had originally had, but I still felt like this battle could be the end of them. I figured that they had a shot, mainly because of the potential for a lot of damage very quickly from Romulus. What needed to happen was some bravery on the part of the PC’s. They couldn’t dance around and avoid melee, firing their weak ranged attacks. Romulus needed to get in there, flank with Glee, and go after the body of the hydra. Forget about the heads and everything else and go for it. Fortunately for them that is just what they did and Romulus hit the jackpot, doing over 100 damage in one round. Glee followed up with 50+ damage and they were looking good. It still got a bit hairy for them. In one sequence Glee was knocked unconscious and Lela went over and healed him, the next moment Lela was knocked unconscious and then Glee had to pour a potion in her mouth to bring her back. It was that sort of battle. With the hydra finally defeated Romulus took the Ring of Fire Resistance from Lela and plunged into the fire after the treasures. While he was running around and grabbing the loot several of the hydra heads regenerated and went after the other two, wounding them and setting them running. With the armor and sword now in his possession Romulus grabbed the book from the altar and went after the remaining head. He decided to use the new longsword and was surprised when it shocked him, doing a couple points of damage to the evil half orc. They killed the head and fled down the passage and back to the surface. Several minutes later they heard an angry howl come from the room, seemingly the hydra piecing itself back together and being pissed off about it.

Since the Blade Barrier was never dispelled they had to circumvent that again, through a series of tumbling and Reflex saves the party once again made it through alive, much to the delight of Corwyn who was eagerly awaiting the return of Lela. They spent the night in the master bedroom and the next morning set out to leave the mountains, using the tunnels that they had taken in initially. The three of them have no Survival between them, and Corwyn had nothing to add, and had a rough time finding there way out of the region but eventually they made it. The battled some more winter wolves but otherwise it was an uneventful journey out of the mountains and into the woods on the outskirts of Bowerstone.

Considering that they were undermanned I though that the party fought well as a team. The hydra could have ended it all but they fought with guts and rolled well when they needed to. Glee and Romulus flashed some of the skill they developed working together for all those years and Lela is proving herself to be practically irreplaceable.

Hey Travelers, Don't Bother Calling

2009-12-27T18:58:00.000-05:00

In a previous post I expressed my love for the Travelers, the mysterious race of intergalactic merchants from Starfarers of Catan. I mentioned how I wanted to hang out with them, that they seem cool. I wanted to be friends. Well, I take it all back. If I was to spend any time with them it would merely be to kill them, Tro-Taphon specifically. I blame him for my Starfarers loss the other night, no one else. Just him.

The 5-6 player expansion for Starfarers adds the Travelers to the game as a trade outpost, previously they were just a very generous black ball encounter. It is indisputably the best trade post in the game and the one that all players try to reach first. All of the cards are very good, but the Small Donation card has got to be the most valuable in the game for several reasons. Here is what it does: It allows the player to ask the lead player for a specific resource. If the lead player does not have the card then Tro-Taphon and his scumbag friends take an Upgrade from the lead player’s mother ship. An upgrade! That is absurd. I’m taking this very personally, it’s true. But it is a killer.

So, here’s what happened to me last night. We were playing a five player game of Starfarers (Mike, Katie, Tozer, Danielle, and myself) and I jumped out to an early lead on the strength of some colonies and fame rings. Mike eventually wound up getting a trade ship to the Travelers and got Tro-Taphon on his side. It was a great move for Mike, especially since he was in last place and wasn’t looking to be the lead player anytime soon. Since my lead was pretty substantial I wound up being the victim of his Small Donation for the majority of the game. I lost several resources to him, but the worst part was the lost freight ring and the four lost cannons. I had an abundance of carbon so I was working on a cannon strategy in the hopes of fighting a bunch of pirates and freeing some pirate planets. That went down the drain real fast since I was losing a cannon just about every turn. At one point I had seven cannons (I had picked up the plus two cannons from the Scientists) and was one move away from freeing the (7)Pirate planet. That was the closest I ever got to it. The game unfolded in a wretched manner and Mike wound up winning. I finished with 14 points.

I guess my question is if the Small Donation card is too good? Is it unbalanced to the point that it is foolish not to get it? Let’s see, the only reason to not get it would be if you are in the lead since it won’t help you at all as long as you are winning. You could even make the argument that it would be worth taking it just to prevent someone else from getting it. Compared to other cards it yields much more over the course of the game than a typical card from another trading post. I’m going to make some vast generalizations in an attempt to quantify exactly what this card is worth. Here goes. In an average game of Starfarers there are going to be about 18 turns. Small Donation is going to be one of, if not the, first trade cards picked up. We will say that someone gets it on turn 5 of the game (it is at the far end of the board, so it takes a little while to get there) and begins to use it on turn 6. That is twelve turns that they will have it, and let’s predict that they will take the lead on turn sixteen. That means it will be yielding resources for ten turns and it is guaranteed to produce something every turn. A smart player is going to ask for a resource that they know the lead player does not have, so for seven turns it will yield an upgrade (all of which are worth two resources). Following my fuzzy math that card has yielded 17 resources over the course of the game, plus has the additional effect of taking those resources from the lead player. Wow, that’s a lot. Does anything else even come close? Let’s compare it to some others.

A card from the Scientists is worth four resources (some combination of a booster and a cannon, or two of one type) plus a little bump up since it allows you to get your cannons over six and kill that one real tough pirate. I’ll be generous and say that they are worth five resources each. How about the Green Folk? At most they will yield an extra resource every other turn over the course of the game. Say you get to it early and it starts to pay off right away, it might be worth nine resources over the course of the game. The Merchants are hard to quantify since they allow you to convert your resources into others at a more favorable exchange rate, but it’s really an improvement on something that any player can do regardless. The trade goods one is the most useful, but since it is only usable once a turn I doubt that it is worth more than a couple of resources a game. Let’s be generous and say it’s worth eight resources over the course of the game. What about the Blue Folk? They seem to be sort of a mixed bag of usefulness. Let’s go with the one that is similar to Small Donation. The card (I can’t remember the name) allows the player to take a random card from up to two players, as long as the players have more victory points than the player taking the card. That one is pretty good. It has the potential to generate two resources a round, but they are random so not worth as much as picking a resource. This one puzzles me. I am going to say that it will be useful for half the game in all, but for half of that will only yield one resource. That’s a total of 15 resources, but since they are random I’d say that it is worth about 12 resources altogether. Plus the same bump that Small Donation gets for taking resources from someone. What does this all mean? It means that Small Donation is probably the best card in the game. I can’t even think of the last time we played Starfarers and it was not one of the first cards taken, which shows how highly valued it is.

Am I bitter? Sure. But it’s not so much because I lost but rather that this one card seems to be grossly out of line with other cards in the game. It doesn’t seem fair, not particularly to me but just in the general sense. The point is that if I ever run into Tro-Taphon on the street I’m going to tear him a new mouth.

Campaign Journal #11-The Long Awaited Temple. At Last.

2009-12-21T20:41:00.001-05:00

Having dispatched with the winter wolves the party decided to make camp in their mountain lair. Shielded from the elements and easily defensible it made a good temporary base. During the night while on guard duty Glee heard the sound of some falling rocks not far from their location, he awakened Romulus and the two of them stared out into the night, scanning the area for the source of the noise. They spotted a lean, muscular figure climbing across the face of the mountain opposite where they were, several hundred feet on the other side of the valley. Before they could react the figure disappeared into a small cave opening on the side of the rock.

The next morning Glee and Romulus filled the others in on what happened during the night. Packing up they traveled along the mountain tops with the goal of ultimately winding up above the cave opening that they had seen. After being on the move for about an hour they came across a herd of mountain goats, they were doing goat like things. One of the goats seemed larger than the others and had a long black beard. Immediately suspicious of anything even slightly abnormal the party attacked the strange goat, sending arrows and fireballs it’s way. The goats did not last long; some were pierced by arrows, others done in by a fiery ball of destruction, and others leapt to their death in the confusion. Expecting to find the corpse of a wild shaped druid the party was somewhat surprised by what appeared to be body of an ordinary goat. Suspicious indeed.

Continuing to skirt along the top of the mountain the party noticed two figures scaling the sides of the rock, based on the description from Glee this certainly could have been one of the people from the previous night. They also noticed two cave openings in the mountain that the pair seemed to be headed towards. Wasting no time they laid into the two figures. Henri launched fireballs at them, while the rest of the party fired arrows. Neither figure made it to their destination and soon enough two corpses lay at the bottom of the ravine. During the course of the one sided fight the two figures were revealed to be medusas.

Atop the mountains they also saw the far off Temple more clearly than ever before. And for the first time they noticed a series of smaller buildings at the base of it. An entire mountain community perhaps? Eventually, with Romulus leading the way, the party descended the mountain side and entered into one of the caves that the medusas seemed destined for. It appeared to be a natural cave that ran through the mountain. It was thin, low in height, and extremely dark inside. Nervously the group moved through the small tunnel which seemed to go on for hours. At one point another similar tunnel fed into the one that they were in, the group theorized this may be the second cave opening they saw from the outside (they were correct in their assumption). Finally they came to a circular chamber that had about half dozen tunnels all feeding into it. At the far end of the room was a stone pedestal against a blank stone wall. Romulus and Mgabwe cautiously crept up to the pedestal, aware of how vulnerable they were with all the passages facing them. And they were right. A volley of arrows came out at them, doing little damage but drawing their attention. It was on! The combat did not last long and in two rounds a pair of dead medusa archers had been added to the death roll. Examining the pedestal they saw on the top of it a shallow outline of a snake. Using the snake shaped necklace they had recovered previously from the medusa sorcerer, they inserted it into the pedestal and the ground began to rumble. Suddenly the blank wall began to rise up, revealing a large passageway behind it that seemed to twist further into the mountains.

At the end of the tunnel light began to creep in and a cold wind gusted down the corridor. They faintly heard the sound of a ringing bell coming from outside the stone tunnel. Exiting the tunnel they found themselves atop a mountainous plateau and the long sought after temple was just several hundred feet from them. Looking at it carefully they saw that at the top of the temple steps was a large golden harp, but there seemed to be no one around. There were several stone buildings around them, and a large tower with a bell in it. A cloaked figure stood near the bell. Prepping for battle they started to cast some spells and formulate a plan, unfortunately the over eager Henri couldn’t control his bloodlust and fired a bolt of lightning at the figure in the bell tower. Everyone groaned and rolled for initiative.

Usually a very quick bunch they wound up getting pretty low rolls all around, the opposition was going almost entirely before they had a chance to act. From the buildings several medusa archers and guards emerged and began to fire on them, including the still living bell tower guards. A medusa wearing one of the snake necklaces appeared behind them and struck out with dual wielded short swords, fighting in a dance like fashion. From the stone of the mountain a black shadow appeared and grabbed at Henri, draining several points of strength from him and setting him running. It was clear that they had a fight on their hands, and that was before the strikingly beautiful medusa appeared on the temple steps and began to strum the harp, causing sonic booms of energy to strike the PC’s!

They dealt with those around them first, dropping the short sword wielder first due to the combined efforts of Mgabwe and Glee. Lela fell into her buffing role and got the party going with some inspiring whistling. Romulus was eventually able to take down the shadow, drawing it’s attention away from Henri (who had been struck again and was hovering near a coma with a 2 STR). The medusa hit the group with a Song of Discord, which had the result of having several of them attack each other. They fired on her with arrows, only to have them batted away by a Wind Wall. Mgabwe used his new Evard’s Black Tentacles (or Papa Gueda’s Skeletal Fingers) to keep the charging medusas in check while they picked them off, unfortunately Glee was Dominated by the head medusa and reduced to a non factor for the rest of combat. With only one opponent left they began to close in on her. Mgabwe was leading the charge and was repeatedly being hit by sonic booms from the harp. By the time he got to her he was barely alive, in single digit hit points and greatly depleted of resources. He finally struck her with a Vampiric Touch and gained some valuable hit points and pushed her to the brink of death. This whole time Henri had been bombing on her with Fireballs and he continued to do so, even after Mgabwe reached her, resulting in some friendly fire and damage. If Mgabwe had not gained some hit points from his necromantic mastery he would have been toast, instead he was just close to it. The next round the medusa went down for good and the battle seemed to be over.

I was hoping to be able to make a pretty formidable combatant out of a high level bard (which is what the main medusa was) and I think I sort of succeeded. Once her crew was dead, however, she did not have much going for her. She needed a magic item that did sonic damage to really stand a chance. Her medusa Hit Die gave her staying power but she did not have a real reliable way of dealing damage or incapacitating her foes. In the end it did her in. Glee was taken out of the fight and once again two of them were almost killed, but I think this should have been a tougher fight. Oh well, there’s always next time.

Exploring the area they learned that the surface of the temple was very warm and shielded from the elements, they also saw a bunch of bedrolls set up around the center of the temple. It seemed as if the medusas may call it home. There was a slightly raised stone section of the floor that had the same indented snake form that they have seen previously in the tunnels. Eager to explore, we nonetheless called it a night there…

Pandemic: On The Brink- Virulent Strain

2009-12-18T19:38:00.000-05:00

Just when we were starting to get the hang of Pandemic and reel off some consecutive wins we decided to start to use the On The Brink expansion, thus once again endangering the world and setting back our success considerably. On The Brink comes with a bunch of goodies including new Roles, Special Events, and extra scenarios. Of the three additional games in the expansion the Virulent Strain challenge is currently my favorite.

In the Virulent Strain challenge one of the four viruses takes on deadly new properties. It¹s virtually the same game as the original Pandemic, except that the Epidemic cards are replaced with new Virulent Strain Epidemic cards. Otherwise it plays the same way. All of the new Epidemic cards function just like the Epidemic cards from the original set (i.e. Increase, Infect, Intensify), except they all have one added nasty effect that impacts the virulent strain for that game. When the first Epidemic card comes up during the game the color that currently has out the most cubes becomes the virulent strain for the rest of the game; making it tougher, harder to cure, and usually more abundant as it seeks to infect the known world. Or at least one localized quarter of it. The added effects vary from card to card and depending on when you get them in the game can be completely lethal. Some of them are one time effects, others are continual and will torment you until the game comes to it¹s (bitter) conclusion.

One that I’ve found to be particularly difficult is the Complex Molecular Structure, which increases the number of cards needed to cure the virulent strain by one. This can be an absolute devestator of an effect if there is no role suited to curing with fewer cards. Needing six cards of a color to cure a virus (out of a total of twelve) is crippling in several regards. First off, when playing with three or more players each player is most likely not going to see six cards of the same color over the course of the game (they are probably not going to see five either) which means that the difficult practice of trading cards will have to come into play. Second, it also means that only six cards of a particular color can be discarded over the course of the game, either from chartering flights, building stations, or discarding for being over the hand limit. Getting the right cards into the right hands is really the key to the game. A lot of it also has to do with the number of players. Have too few players and you will wind up discarding cards that will come back to haunt you. Have too many players and the Player Cards will run out after each player has only had a couple of turns, thus really limiting the chance of getting the needed number to cure.

Slippery Slope is another one that will push the world to the brink of extermination. A continuing effect, it causes each outbreak of the virulent strain to move the Outbreak Marker two spaces instead of one. That can end the world in a hurry. Of course, not all are deadly as these two, but none of them are pleasant.

One of the aspects of the On The Brink expansion that I find interesting is that, unlike most game expansions, it just makes the game harder. A lot of expansions do nothing other than introduce new characters or make the map bigger, ultimately making the game easier in some cases by giving the players a larger arsenal of options to work with. Not so with this one. Additionally, the Virulent Strain contains eight Epidemic cards, allowing the players to really test their skill by having one more potential epidemic than in the original game. I have to say that I think that Pandemic is absolutely one of the best games around, probably the best game that we’ve added to our group since the classic Starfarers of Catan. Having an expansion that really enhances the game only makes it that much better.

Campaign Journal #10- The Battle of Bowerstone

2009-12-07T16:44:00.001-05:00

…as the party stepped out of the Church and into the street it was obvious that combat was imminent. A group of a dozen half orcs armed with longswords and shields were quickly approaching, looks of anger and revenge flashed on their piggish faces. The party surveyed the area and also saw two more figures, an archer on an adjacent rooftop and the elven female spellcaster who was part of the ambush on the party several nights prior. Everyone leapt into action, thirsty for blood and fighting for survival!

Henri lobbed a fireball at half the approaching group, burning the lot of them but they remained on their feet. Romulus and Glee paired up and tried to take out the other mob, working together with their team flanking tactics and cutting through flesh as if it was paper. Mgabwe started to buff up before heading into melee and was struck by a cluster of arrows from an unseen assailant, he spied a ninja on the roof of the Church for a moment before the figure vanished. Finally becoming comfortable in her support role, Lela went about buffing up the party with haste, bardic music, and healing when they needed it. I was surprised to see the initial onslaught of the party focus on the rank and file goons that were approaching them, rather than on the clearly more dangerous trio that was beginning to do some serious damage. A ray of enfeeblement from Mgabwe left the archer too weak to pull his composite bow, but the mysterious ninja moved around the battlefield invisibly and caused some grievous wounds with sudden striking nunchakus.

Blood may be thicker than water, but magic trumps them all as Romulus tossed aside his friendship with Glee and fell prey to a confusion spell from the caster. A series of unfortunate rolls on the confusion chart left Romulus repeatedly attacking Glee, bringing him to death’s door. Mgabwe was also in bad shape from the ninja attacks. Things were not looking too good for the PC’s. Lela was invisible and able to avoid damage and several times she bailed out one of them with some healing, at one point bringing Glee back from the land of negative hit points.

With the goons finally defeated by the combined work of the entire party they turned their attention to the remaining powerhouses; the archer was firing again thanks to a dispel magic, the caster was trying some tricks on Mgabwe but nothing seemed to work, and the ninja continued to annoy with stick and move tactics. Lightning bolts from Henri were able to take down the caster, thus freeing Romulus from the confusing haze in his brain; the two of them now working on ranged tactics to remove the archer from the combat. The ninja was proving to be a pain. Thanks to see invisibility Mgabwe was able to locate the ninja, though it did not seem to help too much at first. With a heroic flying charge the near naked necromancer dove at the ninja, only to roll the dreaded one on his attack. Poor guy, this seems to happen to him quite a bit. The ninja was running out of invisibility and chose to stand and fight for a round, which was not in his best interest. After some melee attacks from Mgabwe and Glee he was ultimately dropped by a magic missile from Henri. Defeated by a 1st level spell, the ultimate in humiliation.

This was the toughest battle that they have had to date and I was a bit surprised that they all made it out alive, but they fought well. It takes a while for team tactics to develop and I think that they are finally starting to figure it all out. Lela in particular was excellent in the fight in her role as a support character, if not for her I think they would have been lucky to make it out alive at all. Both Lela and Henri turn invisible for most combats, so that really makes the other three big targets. Mgabwe has a great AC (thanks to the lunacy that is the abjurant champion), Glee has the Ring of Blink, but poor Romulus is usally the target of most enemy attacks. They need to work on some of that stuff, but I think they are doing pretty well. They just need a name.

With the corpses of the defeated littering the streets of Bowerstone, the party made a point of looting quickly and grabbing anything of value. True adventurers, they be. As they were doing so a patrol of guards led by Captain Miles approached, demanding to know how the party was once again mixed up in bloody street warfare. He scolded them for fighting outdoors and implored them to keep the melee inside from now on. Miles seemed very unconcerned with the argument that the party was once again attacked by the mysterious Association and instead issued the party a ticket for 7500gp for fighting in a public space.

Now really done with Bowerstone the party once again headed to the mountains in search of fortune and glory! They rested up in the woods and identified the considerable haul of loot from the Association, as well as healed some wounds and made some plans. Ultimately they would like to wind up in Ocrist, but it will take one more level before Henri can teleport the entire party to the city that none of them have every been to. The party equipped with new gear they set off the following morning and found the mountain terrain to be strangely empty, not a single medusa ambush waiting for them. Looking for a high point in the mountains to see the area better they climbed upward. They had purchased some fancy mountaineering gear from Up In Arms and were eager to use it. Romulus was appointed as the lead climber and did an excellent job of traversing the rough terrain, eventually arriving at a plateau from which the temple was visible. It was closer than ever before! They could practically see the gold overflowing from it! Some more exploration brought them into the lair of some winter wolves, which were quickly dispatched with a fireball from Henri. Making camp for the evening, the party prepared for another day of mountain climbing.

I thought that it was a very good night of adventuring, it seemed like everyone had a good time. Everyone likes plot and roleplaying and adventure, but nothing really beats treasure and fighting. Who doesn’t like that? I’m curious to see how the next couple of adventures play out, I have some things planned. I also have to deal with a development that messes with many a DM, teleportation. Once Henri hits 12th level he will be able to move the entire party virtually anywhere in a moment. That is going to keep me on my toes.

Campaign Journal #9- The Day the Music Died

2009-12-01T19:34:00.001-05:00

The party decided that they were done with Bowerstone and were ready to move onto other adventures. I agree, four whole nights of gaming is a long time to spend in one town, even if it is as seedy and filled with adventure as Bowerstone is. However, before leaving there was the small matter of the Association and a certain do-wop group that needed to be taken care of. The group spent about half a day getting some more supplies around town to prepare for their journey back into the mountains and towards the medusas, the goal being to make it to the far off temple that they had seen perched away atop the mountain range. Also, Lela penned a letter to Mrs. Goldborn informing her that she would not be making it to her scheduled performance for the birthday party.

No one likes a bully and the party decided that before leaving they would kill the lead singer of the Dockside Boys, the charming Swooner Simon Schooner. After seeing Simon interact with Abraham at the Squires Club they had pegged the crooner as a rat, since he had seen the party leaving the docks after stealing a package, which then led to the initial encounter with Abraham. Simon had to die, it was that simple. Plus, Glee has had a long standing hatred of the man since first encountering him on the street. Smart enough to realize that murdering the well liked and well connected Schooner will probably spell the end of their time in Bowerstone they planned their assault very carefully.
Some advance scouting by Lela revealed that the Dockside Boys would be performing at the Squires Club that evening, two performances at nine and eleven. Aside from that they did not know where to find him. The hit would have to go down in public. Everyone seemed fine with that.

They waited until the very start of the performance and then put their plan in motion. Henri waited outside the bar, about 200 feet from the door in a little hiding spot. Once he was in place Lela donned the Cape of the Montebank and dimenion doored the group inside, right onto the stage. Before teleporting in everyone was also made invisible by either Lela, Henri, or Mgabwe (some of them had Greater Invisibility so they wound not appear when attacking). They appeared inside, adjacent to the stage and invisible to the entire audience, who were about to be treated to quite a performance. Now, everyone wanted to be the one that killed Simon, he has not made any friends in the party, and I don’t think I ever saw an initiative roll that the party was so eager to make. Glee really wanted to play executioner and was psyched when he got a 24 for initiative, only to wind up second to the 25 rolled by Romulus. It may sound like a backhanded compliment, but no one kills an unaware opponent while invisible quite like Romulus and poor Simon was no exception. Right as he was hitting a high note the longsword and axe combo went to work, blood spraying the crowd from the slice opened in the throat of the singer, his final melody hanging in the air like gallows. He slumped to the ground dead. No more sweet music for the do-wop fans of Bowerstone. With the party crashed, why stop with one death? Looking around Glee saw Abraham, leaned against the bar, a look of horror beginning to creep across his face as he watched the death of Simon unveil. Glee lunged at him, carving him up pretty good but he remained on his feet. The party delivered inside and her job done, the invisible Lela fled for the door and into the night. Mgabwe followed the actions of Glee and went after Abraham, again the dwarf held his ground. Despite both Lela and Romulus fleeing the scene, Glee could not help himself and got one more shot at Abraham. This time it was enough and he sunk to the ground like a dead dwarf in a bar. Mgabwe spent a whole round stuffing his corpse into the Bag of Holding, the bar watched on in amazement as the body seemed to be swallowed up by the air around it. Weird stuff. Now the only one left in the Squires Club, Mgabwe ran for the door only to have it closed before he got there by panicking patrons. He dove for the window and burst through the glass and into the night.

Henri was watching the door to make sure the party all got away safely, however he had no way of knowing this since they were all invisible. Once the window broke he figured they were all out and threw a Wall of Fire around the bar to prevent anyone from following them. The party met up at the designated rendez vous and casually walked out of town, leaving Bowerstone behind them forever. Smiles all around, for nothing tastes as sweet as revenge.

The mysterious temple far off in the mountains has been a siren’s call to the party since they first laid eyes on in at the start of the campaign. Upon leaving Bowerstone it now become their destination. The group headed off into the mountains, unsure of what was ahead of them. They had purchased some mountaineering gear from Up In Arms before exiting town and were eager to use it. After moving for a couple of hours they found themselves deep in the rocky region, not far from the collapsed lair of the giant snake. As they were moving through the area excellent Spot checks from Mgabwe and Lela (I’m pretty sure her only good spot check ever) revealed a pair of cloaked figures waiting to ambush, a third figure was far off perched atop a small rocky ledge. The crew leapt into action and charged as the figures did the same. The far off one hurled fireballs repeatedly at the party and did considerable damage, including the fiery death of the likeable rat familiar of Henri, Gertrude Charlemagne. The shock was devastating to Henri (especially the 1000xp he lost). Mgabwe cast fly on himself and eventually took down the spellcaster, but suffered serious wounds himself. The sword wielding medusas (which was obvious once the cloaks came off) fell to the might of the party, but not before another loss was suffered. As the battle wound down a desperate medusa was able to petrify Romulus as he was carving her up. His massive half orc frame now turned to stone, the party was in a bit of a bind. On the plus side, the spellcaster was wearing a diamond snake necklace, an identical one to the necklace that the party forgot to loot the last time they were in the mountains.

Knowing that they planned to return to an area inhabited by medusas I was curious if they were going to buy an extra Break Enchantment scroll for some insurance. They did not and it came back to haunt them right away. There was only one way to return Romulus back to his normal state, they had to return to Bowerstone. Stuffing Romulus into the bag of holding they began to creep back to town. They had several concerns in returning to Bowerstone. One, they were afraid that they officials in town may want to talk to them concerning the fire that appeared outside the Squires Club the night before. Two, the larger concern was repercussions from the Association. They were invisible when they assassinated Simon and Abraham, but it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out that they were behind it. The goal was to be in and out. Head to the Church of Boccob/Institute of Learning, purchase a scroll of Break Enchantment, and get out of there as quick as possible. Seemed like a good plan, they even decided to use the Cloak of the Montebank to get there faster once they were in town.

They arrived in Bowerstone in the middle of the night and quickly found their way to the Church. Mgabwe purchased a scroll and traded in the magical axe and armor taken from Abraham for another. While there they decided to do a little research on the medusas using the vast library of the Church. Mgabwe rolled a one on his knowledge check, turning up zero bits of useful information. Henri tried next, even though he was not a member of the Church and not permitted to use the research facilities. He turned up some useful information and just as he was reading about the Queen of the medusas, the enigmatic Bride of Nine Snakes, he was caught by the librarian and forced to leave the premises. Mgabwe had his membership revoked and was shown the door. Henri did notice that most of the information on the medusas was contributed by someone named Master Fong.

The party exited the Church and out onto the street. As they looked around they saw gangs walking towards them from each direction, clearly coming right for the party…

Touch of Evil - The Delion Dryad

2009-12-01T19:20:00.000-05:00

Poor Shadowbrook. As if it’s not bad enough that this quaint hamlet is constantly under assault by evil Scarecrows, savage Werewolves, and Vampires that turn into mist, but now it has fallen under the enchanting spell of the Delion Dryad! The Delion Dryad scenario for Touch of Evil is available free from the Flying Frog website (get it here), which is pretty awesome. Touch Of Evil is not a particularly cheap game, usually going for around $50 so it’s very nice to see the designer encourage players to create their own scenarios and also to give away some free content. Well done.

Cris and I played a cooperative game the other night against the Dryad and we found her to be a pretty challenging opponent. The Dryad starts the game with a six combat and four wounds, unlike all the other villains who have five and five. But there are numerous ways for her to increase her wounds throughout the game, so don’t expect to fight a lightweight. The earlier a showdown can get started with the Dryad the better off the hero(es) is, but there are a couple of obstacles in the way. For starters the Dryad has the Sorceress ability which protects her from heroes who rely only on brute strength. If a hero has a Cunning and Spirit combined score of less than eight only sixes will hit the Dryad in a fight, so only a foolish hero will jump into an early showdown (the otherwise feeble Victor Danforth is the only one who meets this requirement at the onset of the game). Shadow of the Season grants the Dryad an extra wound marker every time the Shadow Track passes into a new stage, either back or forth so the players needs to be careful if they move it around or the Dryad will continue to grow in power. Additionally, the Dryad has the potential to lure town elders to her side for the showdown to protect her with the Enchantment ability. Whenever a “Murder” card is played or a one or two rolled on the minion chat there is a chance that multiple elders will have enchantment markers places on them, the more they have at the start of the showdown the better chance that they will join the evil nature spirit and crush Shadowbrook.

The minions following the Dryad are a mixed bunch. She has wolves, which are nothing special and usually pretty easy to deal with. However the Living Trees are another matter. They are automatically placed in a random location each mystery phase, which means that it does not take very long for evil plants to overrun the board. Pretty early in our game the other night all four corner locations had Living Trees, which made it very tough to get anything. I was Thomas the Courier and was knocked unconscious at least three times by them in the first several turns of the game, the fact that Thomas is sort of a wimp wasn’t helping. The Trees have four wounds and three fight dice, but they only hit on a six when attacking. But their blows are fierce and do two hits each. On the bright side any hero with a torch gets a +2 to their fight dice, making the torch a cost effective way to do battle. Plus, they are worth five investigation points.

Also on the minion chart is the Creeping Brambles event, which is sort of feast or famine for the players. When it comes up every hero has to make an Honor 6+ test or lose D6 investigation, however each success garners the hero a +1 Cunning, Spirit, or Honor marker. That certainly helps to get past the Sorceress power, but can completely sap a players investigation reserve and thus delay when the player can fight the Dryad.

I consider the Dryad to be a rather capable opponent. Cris and I were victorious against her, but by the time we won Thomas had been knocked unconscious in the showdown and the shadowtrack was down to one, so it’s not like we had an easy time of things. Honestly, if it was not for Isabella’s Manipulation ability we would have been done for. Strategy wise it’s hard to say who works best in this scenario. Because of the Dryad’s abilities and some of her minions all of the stats are needed, so a well rounded character probably works best. Especially if they can avoid fights early on and get an item or two to help out against the Living Trees which are going to be all over the place. The torch can be discarded against the Dryad for an extra four Fight Dice, which makes it almost a must have for this scenario.

I think that anyone who plays Touch of Evil should immediately go and download the Delion Dryad. It’s free and it will show Frying Frog that they should make more free scenarios. Sounds like a win win situation.

Campaign Journal #8- Burning Bridges in a Town with No Bridges

2009-11-23T17:56:00.000-05:00

Again the party found themselves beginning the adventure in town. They still had some time to kill while waiting for payment from Lord Monty and for Lela’s performance at the Goldborn residence in several days, though they suspected things may be a little dicey around Bowerstone considering the heist at the docks from the prior night. That morning Mgabwe purchased a scroll of Break Enchantment and used it to free Al’londia from her stony constraints. A bit bitter, but more anxious to stretch her legs the elf departed from the party, vowing to regroup at a later date.

Deciding it was in their best interest to figure out what was happening in town Lela, Henri, and Romulus went out on a fact finding mission to gauge the town views on what happened at the docks the night before. The extremely charming Lela set to work and learned that some were talking about the incident, but it by no means dominated the news cycle. However it was clear that Arlen Starcrush was the target of the heist since it was his package that was stolen and not much else. The party was predictably concerned about making enemies with a retired conjurer.

Glee went out to spend some party gold at Up in Arms, the weapon shop run by Percy the survivalist nut orc. After trying on many items he settled on a +1 Greatsword and a suit of +1 glamered studded leather. Like I had mentioned in a previous post
, the party is very generous when it comes to helping one another. Glee spent virtually all of the party gold on these two items (Mgabwe had also spent a chunk on some scrolls) and no one seemed to mind. The armor was somewhat necessary, aside from his Ring of Blink Glee has very poor defenses and has been close to death a couple of times. The sword was not as necessary as his damage output is real good, though having a magic weapon is always nice, especially at this level when some creatures are resistant to mundane weaponry. Henri has mentioned several times to the rest of the part that he would like to trade the Cloak of the Montebank to someone else, since he never seems to be one using it. No one was particularly interested in doing so, so I expect him to lobby for some party funds to purchase a Cloak of Charisma or something else that he needs (as a Cha based caster with a 16 Charisma he really could use a boost to that stat).

During the course of their information gathering Lela, Romulus, and Henri found themselves at the Squires Club, a local establishment that seems to cater to henchman and hirelings. While enjoying a beverage they were approached by a rough looking dwarf. Without an invitation he seated himself and spoke to them, the glint of his gold tooth shining in their eyes as he introduced himself as Abraham. He explained that he represented an Association in town that controls certain activities in Bowerstone, activities that the party has infringed upon. He was going to be generous with them and instead of making them pay for it the hard way he would be willing to take 5000gp and call if even for the time being. Not wanting to give up their hard earned gold so easily they play it coy and said that they had no idea what he was referring to. Not one for innuendo, Abraham said that he knew the PC’s were at the docks the night before and were involved in the heist. Again they refused his offer and he left, but not before telling them that they had until midnight to get him his gold.

On the way home Lela ran into Lady Goldborn, the woman who had hired her to play the birthday party of the husband. Lela informed her that she would not be able to make the performance and then spun a thoroughly transparent lie about her sick sister. Goldborn seemed very upset and insisted that she would ruin Lela’s reputation in town if she did not make the performance. Even the mayor was going to be there! Eventually Lela conceded and agreed to perform, even if it meant the death of her sister. Goldborn seemed pleased and gave Lela some instructions, including entering through the back door of the house.

The party regrouped at their home and figured out what to do next. Glee was all for paying off Abraham to get him off their back. His argument being that Bowerstone is a nice town and he doesn’t want to have to be looking over their backs forever while here. Romulus was very against being extorted and would much rather hunt down Abraham and settle the affair that way. You know, with axes and swords. No real conclusion was reached and the party eventually headed back to the Squire’s Club to check out the night time scene. When they arrived there no one was surprised to see a performance by the Dockside Boys going on, which included between set banter between the group and Abraham. Were the Dockside Boys working with the Association? Is that how Abraham knew the party was at the docks, since Henri was seen by the do-woppers? Glee’s blood was just about boiling over this development. They talked to Abraham some more and offered to join his gang instead of paying, hoping they could take over the group and profit from doing so. He laughed at the idea and mocked them, saying they knew so little of what was happening.

While all of this was going on Mgabwe was playing the role of entrepaneur and hoping to get some takers for his fledgling mining operation. He wanted to round up a crew of workers and excavate the collapsed cave in which they had battled the giant snake. Telling tales of the treasure within he was hoping to get some volunteers to do the actual digging, offering a share of the treasure. He even approached Abraham with the idea. Abraham had no interest in such a scheme. A young swashbuckling type named Leonardo seemed to have the most interest and promised Mgabwe that he would see if he could get some others on board for the job. This could certainly go somewhere, though the rest of the party does not seem as interested as Mgabwe.

Eventually the party left and decided to stake out the bar, waiting for either Abraham or The Swooner Simon Schooner (lead singer of the Dockside Boys) to leave. After several hours neither of them had been seen leaving, and some investigation by Henri revealed that they were most likely not inside the place either. They went back to their rented home to work on a new plan. Suspecting that a trap may be in wait for them, they rested cautiously. Doors were barred, watches were set, and they all rested in the common room of the home. Shortly after midnight the window to the home was broken and the residence started to fill with a poisonous cloud. Most of the party failed their Fort saves and took Con damage from the noxious fumes. Under attack, the party switched to battle mode. Since they had barricaded the door it was not easy to get out. Mgabwe, Lela, and Glee were able to dive out the window, though the large Romulus was caught half in and half out of the house, leaving him as quite the target. The three who escaped through the window were attacked by a pair of rooftop archers and two invisible swordsman as they came out of the house. Henri grabbed Romulus and used the cloak to Dimension Door away from the scene, putting the pair about 400 feet from the battle, much to the chagrin of Romulus.

With his Mage Armor and quickened Shield Mgabwe is practically invulnerable to melee attacks, so he had little difficulty dispatching his opponent. However he was forced to make several Will saves while fighting, the source of which was not readily visible to him. Lela was not as lucky and was reduced to -9 hit points before Glee could ram a healing potion down her throat. Several hundred feet from the action Romulus was limited in his attack options and fired arrows and moved to the scene as quick as he could. While doing so he made an excellent Spot check and noticed a cloaked female elf on a rooftop. He focused on her. Following suit Henri fired lightning bolts at the female, one of which caught her full on and she began to flee the scene. Henri pursued through the air, but she disappeared before he could close on her. The rest of the combatants were defeated and searched. The two swordsmen were wearing matching rings that each had a large A emblazoned on them.

Not wanting to show weakness the party went back in their home and went to sleep. Early in the morning they were awoken by a knock at the door. Captain Miles, the guard who had given them a hard time when they first arrived in town, wanted to talk about the bodies in the street, as well as the “welcome” that Glee had scrawled in blood in place of a doormat. They explained the situation to him and he took notes, as well as the rings that he deemed to be evidence. He thanked them for their cooperation and asked that if such an incident happened again he would appreciate if they would keep the fighting out of the streets and clean up afterwards. Glee commented that this was their type of town. After Henri prepared breakfast they were greeted by another knock, this time a messenger from Lord Monty.

Arriving at Monty’s house they were welcomed by the nobleman and the infant Fiona, who seems to be taking quite well to her new father figure. Monty assured them that he was able to move the “package” and paid the PC’s 7000 gp for their role in the whole situation. He also said that things were getting a little strange in Bowerstone and he was going to be leaving for a little while, though he encouraged the party to check in with him at a later date. Monty also added that he suspected that Starcrush was not as angry as it may seem, Monty believed that he was going wind up with the missing item anyway. When asked about Abraham he said that he had heard of him but suspected that he was the face of the operation rather than the brains of it. Monty had certainly heard of the Assocation and believed that they had legitimate influence in the town. He also shared some information that he learned recently. As was told to the party in the past, a retired General named Olden Delacroix had recently strapped his sword back on and was once again leading the DuChamp army, despite his desire to lead a life without war. Monty had discovered that recently his baby daughter had gone missing, a fact which Monty thought may have been motivating him coming out of retirement and which Monty wanted to explore further. Lela asked him about the Goldborn family and he mentioned some information about them, including how they have been closely associated with the Shadowstaff family. At the mention of this name the ears of both Glee and Romulus perked up, for this Shadowstaff family was the same one that they double crossed some time ago before meeting up with the rest of the party (this was all in their shared backstory during character creation). Ready to depart Lord Monty offered them some cookies and then took his leave.

Well, the party has certainly made some enemies in town but they seem intent on at least sticking around until Lela has her performance, though this may change with the new information that they garnered about the Goldborns. Bowerstone has proven to have a wealth of opportunity for the enterprising adventurers, and they have taken advantage of many of them. I’m happy to see them spending some time in town after having spent virtually no time there for the first part of the campaign. But I think that they are itching for some heavy combat and looting. They are also quite varied in their motives at this point. I’ve left numerous adventure threads out there for them and I’m curious to see which of them they take up.

Bohnanza Revisited

2009-11-19T12:48:00.002-05:00

Recently our gaming group has played a couple of games of Bohnanza, everyone’s favorite bean farming game. However, I’ve had to reconsider some of my thoughts on the game because two aspects of it. One, we actually have not been playing the game the correct way. Two, Bohnanza is an excellent two player game.

So, apparently we’ve been playing Bohnanza all wrong the entire time. I feel foolish about it, especially since I’m usually the one who reads the rules and figures out how games work. While playing the other night Cris pointed out that she thought we were doing a couple of things wrong. Turns out she was right. Apparently she learned something about farming this summer. Somehow I manage to totally misinterpret two pretty important rules and created a new version of the game, one that breaks from the actual game in a couple of key aspects. In a strange twist the rules that we’ve been playing with are like a Bizarro version, here’s what we’ve been doing. The first mistake was allowing a player to dig up any bean field when they had to plant and had no open spaces, rather than the actual rule of harvesting the bean field that is the largest. Pretty big difference? It is, though the other one is even more significant, I think. During the donation and auction phase of the turn a player can turn down a donation from another player, we had been playing that you must take any cards that the other player gives to you. Which was often a very destructive way to play the game, essentially because your opponent was giving you cards that you had to play. If we had only done one of these wrong I don’t think the game would have worked and we would have been left scratching our heads (and probably figured out how it actually works), but with both mistakes they sort of cancelled each other out. Here is the difference; in the correct version a player has a great deal of control over what they plant in their fields, however when forced to plant they can’t control what gets dug up. In our renegade version a player was often forced into planting cards that they did not want, however they had total control over what was harvested. In the end our game worked fine, but I do think that the actual rules are the better ones.

I’m not sure why I read the rules this way, they are pretty clear. Not having to accept donations is even printed in bold! So how did this happen? I have a theory. When we first got Bohnanza earlier this year and started playing it a bunch, we had just come out of a phase of playing a lot of Munchkin. Because of the cut-throat nature of Munchkin I think that we were in the mindset that the goal of games is to screw the other players and make their life miserable, therefore it made perfect sense that you would be sticking it to the other bean farmers by forcing wax beans into their plentiful fields of cocoa and black eyed. And considering how much we embraced this idea one thing is quite clear. We are rotten people who delight in making games harder for one another.

The more pleasant discovery involving Bohnanza is that it is a really great two player game. There are several key changes to the game from the normal version, but simple changes that are easy to adapt to. The biggest difference is that any cards left over during the auction phase do not have to be taken by the player or traded, any beans left stay on the board and the opposing player has the option of taking or discarding these beans at the beginning of their turn. The other interesting wrinkle is that the top card in the discard pile is added to the face up auction cards if they match. For example: a green bean is put face up during step three of the turn, the top card in the discard pile is also a green bean, so the discarded bean is placed on top of the other one creating a stack of two cards that can be taken by the player or traded. This creates a whole new strategy that involves selling off at key times and creating large piles on the board. I highly recommend the two player variant of Bohnanza. Twice Mike and I played last night (he won once, and we tied the other) and I suspect we will play again soon.

Campaign Journal #7- Heist at the Docks

2009-11-16T18:31:00.000-05:00

After a couple of days of relaxing around town and gathering information, the party was clearly lusting for combat and treasure, fortune and (mis)adventure. Gathered at the house they have rented from Lord Montgomery the party weighed the options before them; a return to the Medusa mountains, investigating spies on behalf of the DuChamp family, trying to learn more about the mysterious child in their care, and slaughtering everything that crosses their path. While pondering these lofty issues there was a knock at the door. A messenger from Lord Monty said that the shady nobleman wanted to see them immediately.

After traveling up the hill to his house, Lord Monty presented them with a job. Due to the illegal nature of it he withheld the details until they accepted, though he assured them it was suited to their strengths and that it would pay very generously.
They accepted and learned that there was a cargo boat named The Champion that had come into the docks in the last several hours. Since it was late it would not be unloaded until the following morning, but Monty’s man on the docks informed him that it was carrying some very valuable cargo. Most notably something bound for Arlen Starcrush, a retired conjurer in Bowerstone of some reknown. Unsure of it’s exact nature, Monty was certain that it was worth a small fortune. The PC’s were to acquire this item and bring it to Monty, he would handle the sale and split the money with the party. It had to be done that night.

Monty also continued to be interested in young Fiona, he upped his offer to 1000gp and the party agreed. While handing over the child it occurred to them that they were now dealers in the slave trade in a sense, buying and selling people with little remorse. They had no problem with this. When I put Fiona into the story line I had no real idea how it would play out, more than anything I liked the idea of a party of evil adventurers saddled with the burden of an innocent young child. I think that it went well and this may not be last that we’ve seen of the kid, especially now that she in the charge of Lord Monty.

Heading to the docks it was not hard to find the boat, it was right where Monty said it would be. They relied on their skills to scout it out, learning that there were two guards on the boat in addition to some normal patrols of guards in the area. In what has become their calling card they used the Cape of the Montebank to get half the party to the boat in a quick manner, while Mgabwe and Romulus relied on invisibility to get within striking distance. These two surrounded one of the guards and unleashed a furious invisible assault, inflicting over 200 points of damage and cleaving the man into several pieces in the blink of an eye. Henri took care of the other with a Dominate Person spell. Now on the boat and with a dominated pseudo henchman they went below deck and continued to explore. The boat was three levels; one of quarters for the captain and crew, and the two lowest housing cargo. Using the dominated guard, Julio, to explore as much as they could they worked their way through the boat. No one gave a second though to the exploitation of the poor Julio. On the lowest level they came across a formidable foe who got the drop on them. A large man with scraggly black hair and wielding a greatsword, he dropped Romulus with one attack and nearly sent him to whatever hell it is that backstabbing half orcs wind up in. Glee was the star of the fight, inflicting a critical and scoring several other shots that eventually took the man down. Clearly outnumbered I thought the adversary did pretty well on his own. He was a fighter/warlock with mainly combat invocations, I liked the build and how he turned out. As a D&D junkie who rarely gets to play actual PC’s I like to try numerous builds as NPC’s and see how they do. Some succeed, some do not. I think that this guy would have been a fun character to play, though his lack of skill points would definitely put a damper on his out of combat usefulness.

The lowest level of the boat held plenty of mundane items bound for shops in town. They took a couple of bottles of wine and some silk rope, but left most things intact. The middle floor seemed to hold the interesting stuff. In four separate rooms the more valuable cargo was stored before unloading. They found raw materials for fancy clothing, the crates of which identified it as belonging to the Silver Needle. Lela stocked up on supplies for future performance costumes. There was also a coffin shaped crate with no markings on it. Forcing Julio to open the crate they found a glass sarcophagus, the inside of which was filled with a swirling mist and what appeared to be a mummy. There was some debate among the party about what to do with this. Romulus wanted to smash it open and see what happened, Henri was insistent and leaving it be. They decided, smartly it turned out, to let it go. The next room contained an angry caged tiger, which they also wound up leaving alone. The final room had a wooden crate bearing the symbol of Arlen Starcrush, an exploding nova surrounded by mystical symbols. Having emptied out their Bag of Holding before going to the boat they were able to stuff the entire thing inside, the magic sack expanding to swallow it whole.

While searching the quarters on the first floor the keen eared Mgabwe heard foot steps from above. Knowing that they had left the corpse of the dead guard on the deck they assumed that anyone up there would have been hostile so they started to plan their getaway. For perhaps the first time the PC’s thought about the potential long term consequences when planning their actions. They decided that avoiding a fight was in their best interest, not because they may lose the battle but because being wanted men in Bowerstone was clearly a bad thing for them. The plan was for Julio to go above deck and attack the men who were on the deck, while he did this the party would escape using invisibility, flight, and magical fog created by the party’s new toy, a Horn of Fog that was found amongst the lizardmen living below The Cage. They hoped that the entire heist would fall onto the shoulders of Julio and he would be blamed for it. Seems like a reasonable course of action, except that when told to attack the guards Julio was given a chance to make a Will save and break the enchantment. Of course the PC’s didn’t know much about Julio, but I knew that he was Lawful Neutral and I felt that attacking the guard would have been out of character, so he got another save. Which he succeeded on. The enchantment broken, the PC’s were suddenly in an awkward spot. Lela, Mgabwe, and Romulus were already invisible and escaping. With the hatch open Henri flew out, also while invisible. Knowing that they could not leave Julio alive Glee was left to cleanup. She killed the man, but also found herself alone. Using the fog as cover she tumbled her way out of the ship, avoiding the swords of several town guards. Eventually she found her way back to the docks and to the rented cottage.

Henri’s invisibility was short term and he resorted to flying from roof to roof on his way back to the cottage. An awful roll on his Hide check and he found himself on a rooftop, the moonlight shining directly on him. Looking down he saw the Dockside Boys singing their sweet melodies on a corner while looking straight at him, clearly he had been spotted. Ignoring them he flew back and reunited with the party, letting them know he had been seen. Glee really wanted to hunt down the Dockside Boys and kill them, now that she a reason to go after them she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass. Wanting to lay low for the night they decided that any revenge should wait until the next day.

Ignoring the late hour they decided to go see Lord Monty and get the package out of their hands. Monty greeted them in a robe and slippers, swaddling the form of the sleeping Fiona. Monty was thrilled by the PC’s success and asked for details of the evening, which they supplied. He took the crate and let the PC’s know that it would probably take about two days to move it on the black market. Bringing them to another room in the mansion, he placed the crate in the center of a circle drawn on the floor in chalk. Prying it open he revealed the contents, a large stone devil that looked a bit too lifelike. What exactly is Arlen up to? Monty would be in touch. Before leaving Lela purchased a pair of slippers from him.

The following morning Mgabwe went over to the Temple of Boccob/Institute of Learning to purchase some magical accoutrements. He paid the 1000gp to become a member of the institute and found out a bit about the services they provided. Access to a vast library of information, magical services, and some others were among the available benefits. He was also told to come soon and see the exhibit that they were hosting, on display was going to be the famed mummy of Ra-Ton Fa. Housed in a glass sarcophagus, the mummy was trapped years ago by a group of powerful adventurers and is said to be one of the most powerful mummies held in captivity. The Institute is very proud to have it as part of their collection.

Despite the evil and selfish actions of the party in regards to just about everyone they come across, they are actually very selfless and cooperative when it comes to the rest of the party. I think that they are really coming along in this respect. They make up for one another’s shortcomings, play up to each other’s strengths, and are becoming aware of the capabilities of everyone. They have the makings of a real solid party dynamic. Except for poor Al’londia who is still a statue.