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Seven Days to the Grave, by F. Wesley Schneider, continues the “Curse of the Crimson Throne” adventure path. The city of Korvosa is slowly adjusting to the change in rulers, when a new danger appears: a deadly disease which kills in about seven days (thus the title), with an extremely high fatality rate. Where did the disease come from, and why is nobody able to do much about it? Naturally enough, it falls on the PCs to figure things out.

A good continuation to the adventure path, this chapter features a wide variety of encounters and situations (like the first part). It retains the small problem of “how do I get the PCs involved in all this”, but it’s assumed the GM has figured out a way after running part one – the default scenario has the PCs involved via the town guard, perhaps being a part of it themselves. If your game has a different setup, be prepared to do a bit of extra work in setting things up. As before, it’s assumed the PCs have some reason to stay in town (patriotism, personal ties, etc) and not just get the hell out of a plague city – otherwise this chapter will prove to be very short indeed.

Not much to fault here, the adventure part of the book(let) is very good and the other chapters are also good reading. This chapter gets extra points for being the first semi-serious look (that I’ve seen) at how large-scale plagues would work in a fantasy environment which has things like Cure Disease – and for providing lots of reasons why magic alone won’t save the day. So far, this adventure path is shaping up to be quite excellent.

One of the things I like about most of Paizo’s adventures is that they don’t all automatically assume that things will be resolved via combat – a common failing of all so many D&D adventures.

At this point I have to say that the people who I’ve heard dissing this series are, well, wrong. It only seems to get better with each book; this fourth installment, Wizard and Glass, finds the story in full swing. It’s a prequel of sorts, telling the story of how young Roland came to be what he is. It’s a classic Western, with a town full of secrets, a band of gunslinger “good guys” riding in, and the obligatory gang of “bad guy” toughs. It’s also a love story between Roland and a girl named Susan Delgado (referenced in passing in earlier books). It’s also a lot of other things, building up structure for the “Mid-World” Roland comes from, with hostile magic, possible caches of high-tech weaponry, and otherdimensional horrors thrown into the mix.

I liked this installment a lot, it’s probably the best of the series so far – which is a bit odd, since often “prequel” books aren’t all that engaging since you know large parts of how things will turn out. Here that’s part of why it works, the feeling of doom over the happenings twists even some innocent “everyday” scenes into poignant moments. King remains a master storyteller when he hits his stride. And he’s hitting it here.

It’s not perfect. The “Wizard of Oz” bit near the end seems a bit superfluous, and ends the book on a perhaps too “open” note after the intense “campfile tale” that has just concluded… but that’s a fairly minor fault.

I’ve understood the final books of this series aren’t quite as good as these middle ones. That may be, but I’m still looking forward to reading them. I want to know how this ride ends, on what sort of clearing at the end of what sort of path.

Oh boy. This is all too accurate (and funny): Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd (from Wired).

Very nice weekend, Teemu & Tuukka organized a repetition of last year’s VTES miniqualifier tournament weekend – in other words, 2 days of VTES tournament and casual play, with beer, sauna and the option to swim in the sea. Huge amount of fun, and the sea wasn’t that cold anymore… at least not after enough alcohol in the bloodstream, to keep things lubricated.

Did poorly in the first day’s tournament, but that was no big surprise; I was playing my Daughters anarch voter, which isn’t really a tournament deck (I’ve been forced to conclude). When it works it works great, but it can and will fail in so many ways. In other words, it’s much too fragile. Had fun playing, though, and the casual games in the evening were entertaining also. Tuomas went on to win the first day tournament with his Mind Rape + Tupdog deck (which he in vain tried to claim wasn’t actually a Mind Rape + Tupdog deck).

Second day went much better, I tried out my newish Osebo combat toolbox and it did surprisingly well. After a table sweep and some extra VPs, I make it to the finals. Things actually looked pretty good there for a while, but then I ran out of intercept and Tuukka’s Malks swept over me. Was largely my own fault, I fouled up by transferring out the wrong vampire by mistake; if I had gotten the rush-capable Massassi out (as intended), things might have gone differently. Oh well. In any case, I was pleasantly suprised by the performance of that deck, even though it has lots of weak points. Need more Preternatural Strength (doesn’t everyone?)…

The last tournament round ended in a draw, with Tuomas and Tuukka both betting 2 VPs and Jukka getting one – but Tuukka got tournament win due to higher preliminary round totals. Score one more for the old-school Malks (though Tuukka’s deck didn’t use Dominate and was a pretty interesting take on the Malk S+B concept).

I think I’ll dismantle most of my current decks (barring the Osebo one and a Toreador one I’m working on) and build up some new ones with ideas I’ve been gathering.

Well, after having run a few (kinda sorta) Delta Green one shot scenarios, I’ve now finally gotten around to reading the core book. I was pretty familiar with the general game/world setup before, having read all the DG novels and short stories – but still, this was very much worth reading. I can easily understand why people went “whoah!” when this was first published, and why the original print run sold out: this is Cthulhu updated to the modern age, dripping with conspiracy, paranoia and a sense of doom. The whole tone here is “push back the darkness one more day”, and it picks up a lot of cues from cold war spy stories. Burned-out people trying to keep themselves alive and sane by whatever means necessary, fighting an invisible war that most other people around them are (happily) blind to.

The basic tone and setup is reminiscent of The X-Files (though frequently much grimmer), but it’s not a copy; Delta Green preceeded X-Files by about a year, and was born from the writers wanting a modern Cthulhu game in which the PCs actually had a reason to stick together.

This new edition of the game is hardbound and is double-statted for BRP/d20, but it otherwise identical to the original as far as I know. It contains info on the basic game setup and details on the main groups, most of which are hostile to Delta Green. The second half of the book contains three scenarios: the startup scenario Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, the (in)famously deadly Convergence, and a longer mini-campaign titled The New Age. All are very good, though I’d hesistate to run Convergence other than as a one-shot, it’s ridiculouly dangerous even for a Cthuhu scenario and should result in an extremely likely total party kill (not “possible”, but “almost certain”). You have been warned.

The book ends up with a big infodump on U.S. government agencies (I had no idea there were so many, the alphabet soup here can make your head spin). Extremely nice detail if you want to add a degree of realistic detail to your game, and should be useful as a resource for other games, too.

There have been some claims that Delta Green doesn’t really work in the post-9/11 U.S., with the tighter scrutiny on federal agency ops and anti-terrorist paranoia which makes a cell operation like Delta Green look precisely like a terrorist operation. Which it is, in many regards. I’m not sure about all that – government agencies are massive things with typically low efficiencies and lots of obfuscation and layers, it doesn’t strain my sense of disbelief to have “shadow ops” still going on under official pretenses. Also, some have said that the X-Files/UFO elements of DG are “outdated”… and I’m not sure I agree on that, either. The Grey/MJ-12 thing is only one small part of the game, and the fact that terrorists have replaced UFOs in the public landscape doesn’t mean that you can’t still use UFO mythology. It might be even more effective in a game, now, since we’re well past the X-Files boom.

In short: I don’t really see any problems in running Delta Green set in a modern U.S. – and if you do happen to have a problem, you can always set your game in pre-9/11 times. Problem solved. I’ve gotten the impression that a “New Millennium” DG sourcebook is one idea the writers have been bouncing around, so we might even get an “official” version of the “DG in 2000s” thing some day.

This is a truly excellent book, and its reputation of being one of the best game expansion books ever published is well-deserved. The amount of new, weird and disturbing ideas here is off the scale, it’s a magic blend of Cthulhu, film noir, Cold War spy stories, X-Files and many other ingredients. I can’t really recommend this book and game highly enough.

Giving rest and relaxation a wide pass, we spent last weekend at a paintball wargame weekend, organized by a friend. Around 25 people, most pretty experienced… and then us and a couple of other semi-newbies as designated cannonfodder. I’ve tried paintball before now and then, but only with shortish sessions at rental game fields. This was a bit more intense, we spent about 8 hours crawling around the forest on Saturday and a few more on Sunday. Hot, sweaty, exhausting and quite fun. I died a lot (no surprise), but did manage to get some kills in. I think Janka did a bit better, but who knows – this was an informal “for fun” event, with no scorekeeping or anything like that. Just normal capture-the-flag and some extra scenarios thrown in for spice.

Since this was the anniversary of the Normandy D-Day invasion, we ended off Sunday with a simulated invasion scenario: six people with either full-auto markers or good semi-autos defending a small bridge, and everyone else trying to storm over it to capture the flag. Fun, even though I managed to run out of ammo in the end and only noticed this while hunkering down in a bed of nettles with paint whizzing over my head.

Good exercise in any case, I can still feel some complaints from my leg muscles… and it was nice to spend a few nights sleeping in a tent, the last time we used our tent was at Burning Man (and it showed, the amount of playa dust in the tent bag was ridiculous).

Anyway, it was good fun, good food and good weather. No complaints.

We had the “postrelease” tournament for the new Twilight Rebellion VTES set on Saturday. I’ve always found pre/postrelease tournaments a lot of fun, and this was no exception – about 20 players, and lots of new cards to try to figure out. We made decks from 5 drafted Anarchs boosters plus 5 drafted Twilight Rebellion boosters, so it was a low-resource game for everyone. No pool gain, very limited intercept, etc. Tuomas took the tournament win once again, with Tuukka coming in second place, proving that some people are just better players than others. No surprise there.

The set looks solid. Lots of powerful cards for the Anarchs, just what they’ve needed in order to be tournament-level viable. The balance looks good; while there are some very powerful cards in there, they also have suitable restrictions; I didn’t spot any immediate this-will-become-a-problem cases yet. We’ll see, once people start building decks from these. It becomes legal for tournament play on June 27th.

Sunday was a lazy day, which was nice and much-needed. We had one of our semi-regular movie weekends, with some people coming over to watch stuff with the theme “virtual realities” – which meant Matrix, The 13th Floor and ExistenZ. I’d seen all three before, but they stood up well to second (or third) viewings. Read a bit, ate lots of good cabbage soup, did some more Rails coding… nice and relaxing.