Games

Honey, the Anarchs are revolting!

The next VTES expansion, Twilight Rebellion, will see daylight (figuratively) near the end of May, and as has been the tradition we’re organizing a tournament around it. This time around it’s a “post-release” event, where players build decks from 5 Twilight Rebellion boosters and 5 Anarchs boosters. These events have been lots of fun, traditionally, and I don’t expect this one to be any different. Always cool to play around with brand-new cards when everyone else is in the dark about them, too.

More info on the VTES page. […]

Minireview: Scroll of Kings

Scroll of Kings is one of the batch of new Exalted books that arrived recently – due to various delays at White Wolf’s end lots of books got pushed forward in time until now, so now we get a pile of new books in one fell swoop. Fine by me.

This book is about warfare in Creation (Exalted’s game world), and goes to detail about how the various cultures think about warfare and extend that thinking into practice. I wasn’t expecting too much from this book, afraid that if would mostly just consist of army lists and dry “crunch” like that. I was happy to be proved wrong; this book is more of a “military gazeteer” of Creation, and goes into detail of how the various war gods think of war, how this affects mortal nations, and how the environment also affects thinking and practical matters.

The book is divided into sections by geographical direction. We get information about the varied forms of warfare in the East, the fast-moving skirmish mentality of the South, the naval paradigms of the West, the commando raid mentality of the North, and the traditional massive army paradigm of the Realm. While the organization mostly works nicely, it has the downside of spreading the rules crunch over the whole book in a semi-random fashion. Said crunch has to do with extensions to the mass combat rules in Exalted, which I have yet to use in practice. Didn’t bother me, but more crunch-oriented readers may find this type of organization very frustrating, especially combined with White Wolf’s traditional total lack of index and bare-bones table of contents. There is literally no way of searching for anything, other than by leafing through the thing.

Despite small organizatorial niggles, I liked the book quite a bit. While it could not focus on any area for very many pages (Creation is huge), it did add lots of useful information and nice local color all over the place. The writeup on the Linowan managed to not conflict with stuff I had created for that area, amazingly enough (though that’s mostly because the Linowan chapter was very short). Each described location/nation gets one or two sample statted mass combat units, which is probably very useful if you intend to use the mass combat rules – examples always help.

The end of the book lists some new large-scale weapons (steam cannons, yay!), stats for various vehicles, ships and flying thingies, and ends with a list of (mundane) traps that soldiers might create or encounter, with some required skills for creation and other details. Nice. […]

Minireview: Crown of the Kobold King (D1)

Crown of the Kobold King is the first “proper” module in Paizo’s “GameMastery” module line, with the very first one being an offering for “Free Rpg Day”, Hollow’s Last Hope (by the way, I’d love to get a print copy of that one, if anyone has pointers please let me know). This module is coded as “D1” (where Hollow was “D0”), with the “D” standing for “Dungeon”. So ok, we have a dungeon crawl on our hands.

Of course, since this is written by Nicolas Logue (an rpg author I’ve become to appreciate more and more), it’s anything but a boring, straightforward affair. The thing is set near Falcon’s Hollow, the setting of both D0 and the later scenario Carnival of Tears. It’s a lumber town with lots of built-in conflicts, darkness and social injustice (i.e. not quite your normal “we’re all happy farmers” D&D town) – and this time around a bunch of children have gone missing and it’s up to you, the players, to rescue them. Why? That’s largely left up to the GM, though hints on motivation and “how to get started” are given.

The adventure itself involves kobolds (surprise!), but they have been given quite decent motivation and some culture of their own, not just “we’re evil so we do evil stuff!”. There are even some quite distinct personalities among them, which is all too rare in this type of scenario. It reads like it should be a very fun affair to play or run, lots of room for total mayhem.

I’m reminded of the old TSD AD&D module N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God, which I still consider to be one of the best entry-level D&D scenarios. There, like here, we have a town with interesting social interaction material, and then a quest into a dungeon/lair to free up kidnapped people. I don’t know if this was intentionally written as some sort of “spiritual successor” to that module, but in any case: I liked this quite a bit, I think it should make for a very good beginning scenario for a D&D 3.5 game.

As an aside, I recently used the town of Falcon’s Hollow (to a very tiny extent) in my Exalted game, transformed into a snowed-in Linowan logging town near the Haltan border. The players didn’t stay other than to spend a night with the luxury of “sleepin indoors for a change”, but had they opted to do stuff I would have had some specs of the town itself to fall back on. Products like these don’t have to be limited to just the game system they’re written for, cooking up new stats and (sometimes) names for NPCs isn’t an impossible chore, given decent basic material to work with. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #5, Sins of the Saviors

Sins of the Saviors, by Stephen S. Greer, is the fifth and penultimate part of the “Rise of the Runelords” adventure path. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the last part in that it’s somewhat less straighforward. It’s also mostly “just” a dungeon crawl – granted that it’s a fairly interesting dungeon, but still… a bit too little social interaction there for my taste. Some parts are very cool, though; the beginning is nice, and the dungeon itself has some nifty parts and some internal politics which could be expanded in fun directions. I’m not completely sold on the “seven sins” motif that the adventure path uses a lot, but it’s used to fair effect here. Overall, quite solid.

Other than the adventure, the book contains some notes on “rune magic”, mostly 3.5DD crunch which doesn’t interest me. The (to me) more interesting part was the rest: a writeup on Lamashtu, a “Mother of Monsters” god (good stuff), some more Pathfinder travelogue (also fun), and some more strange creatures to pit the players against.

I’ll reserve comments on the whole of the adventure path until I read the last part, but so far it’s looking like a nice package with lots of varied stuff thrown into the mix. I remain sold on the overall quality of Paizo’s “Pathfinder” stuff, even though I still don’t play D&D. […]

Minireview: Monsters and Other Childish Things (The Completely Monstrous Edition)

“Have you ever secretly wanted to be best friends with a magical unicorn? His name would be Dewdrop, and he would talk to you with his thoughts, and he would carry you on his back away from all the bullies and the parents and kids who don’t get you, and you’d have such wonderful adventures!”

“This game is pretty much like that. Except if you drew Dewdrop on your Trapper Keeper, they would send you to the principal’s office, then to the school counselor, and then probably to a place with a name like Morning Meadows Home for Disturbed and Psychotic Youth.”

“Dewdrop has too many dimensions and can gouge bleeding wounds in reality with his infinitely fractal horn. His dainty hooves burn the floor, and his breath makes Mrs. Wombatson’s prize petunias wilt and shrivel. But he really is your best friend.”

It started out as a short “proof-of-concept” game using a variant of the ORE rules (as seen in Godlike, Nemesis, Reign, etc), with the idea of players playing children with monster friends. Monsters of the more Cthulhu variety than Disney, and not even half as imaginary as parents would like. Calvin and Hobbes, except that Hobbes is an uneuclidean horror from beyond time and space, one which loves Calvin and is very proud of its tiger tail.

It got an extremely positive reception, so the author (Benjamin Baugh, Bailywolf on rpg.net) got together with the Arcdream guys to produce Monsters and Other Childish Things: the Completely Monstrous Edition. I placed a preorder as soon as I heard of it, and now the thing is finally out of the printing press and in my grubby hands. It’s hardcover, 180 pages, and it oozes Awesome. “Oozes” is the correct word to use here, as would be some alternate word involving tentacles… just can’t think of one right now.

“A distressingly fun roleplaying game about kids and the relationship-devouring horrors from beyond time and space who love them.”

…says the back cover, and really, that’s what the game is about. It’s also a very good read; the day that I got it, I sat down on the sofa intending to browse it a bit. Suddenly I notice that it’s about 1am and I’ve read the whole thing, giggling in a not-too-sane manner at times. Something like that happens very rarely to me with rpg books – fiction yes, but rpg sourcebooks very rarely. This thing is damn fun (and funny) to read. I mean… you have section titles like “Great, Now I’m On Fire” and “Special and Unique Snowflakes”. What’s not to love?

The mechanics seem excellent. It uses the ORE base engine, as noted, with some neat extensions. You have Relationships, which are very important – you can get bonus dice from them, but if things don’t work out you’ll hurt those relationships. Monsters practically eat relationships, if given the chance. Then there’s the fact that in this game, you get as much damage from words (social conflict) as you do from actual “sticks and stones”. As the author notes: “When Mom says it doesn’t matter what people think about you, she’s lying to save your feelings. It matters.” There’s also a One-Roll Conflict Generator, to kick-start things, if needed, not to mention lots of nice campaign seeds and one Buffy-esque intro scenario that is almost guaranteed to turn into high mayhem. And let’s not forget O’Malley, the Anti-Drug Dog, and other delicious antagonists.

The game posits three “grade levels” of play: elementary school, junior high and high school. The first has everyone playing very young kids (Calvin and Hobbes country), with matching challenges and interests. The next level expands horizons and bumps up age a bit, life starts to get complicated in new, strange ways. When you get to high school, we’re firmly in Buffy and Veronica Mars land (both cited as inspirational material). You pick and choose what you like to run and play with. You also need to decide if the monsters are secret (i.e. the kids only know about them) or if they are a known fact, with “media sensation” overtones. How does little Bobby cope with life, when he’s surrounded by cameras hoping to get a glimpse of Gnarly Sapsucker, his monster? And why does everyone seem afraid of him, when he just wants to make friends? Gnarly has promised not to eat any of his friends! Why can’t everyone just forget about that one time? Nobody liked Wilson anyway…

It’s simply a brilliant book, and Benjamin Baugh seems to have captured some essence of what it means to be a kid. The real stuff, not the saccharine stuff we’re presented with from Hollywood and Disney, or the edited version we’d prefer to remember, editing out all the embarrassing and terrifying parts.

Baugh is working on a follow-up of sorts, which goes into Tim Burton territory. The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor is due out pretty soon, and will go on my pre-order list the second I see it announced.

While it’s hard to predict what 2008 will bring, I’ll say this: right here, right now, if you only buy one rpg book this year, make it this one. Yes, it’s really that good.

“It’s a confusing time, childhood. Even though it doesn’t feel like it, your clay is still wet and everyone leaves fingerprints on you. The Art Teacher of Life hasn’t got the kiln working, so you have to sit on the Windowsill of Time and bake in the Sun of Experience. Then you get the Cracks of Hard Knocks as the bits closest to the sun bake quicker than the bits facing away.”

“Anyway, that’s childhood. It’s pretty much the same for you as for everyone else.”

“Except your best friend is a monster.” […]

PX Poker Saturday

One of my players had to cancel from our Exalted game last Saturday at (almost) the last minute, so I had to figure out something alternative I could run, with only Friday night to prep. After mulling some alternatives, I decided on the “PX Poker Night” Delta Green intro scenario which I had recently read. Said scenario exists in many variants, but a nice version with maps etc is found in an old 2003 back issue of Dungeon/Polyhedron – and since I recently found out that Paizo still has those available, I ordered myself a copy about a month ago and read it some weeks back. It’s a nice scenario; lots of room for mayhem and very open-ended, and with a fairly low lethality factor (for a Cthulhu/DG scenario, at least). It mostly involves the Grey/MJ-12 connection, which is only a small part of the DG mythos, but it’s nicely structured and fairly logical. Probably doesn’t seem logical to the players, though, since events get chaotic fast and the players have no idea of the background machinations going on.

We played using the stock NPCs (each player chose one of the 11 available base personnel and statted him/her up), and it went well – everyone seemed to have fun and I really enjoyed running the thing. I added some extra stuff into the mix from other sources, but mostly I ran the core of the scenario as-is. Had some fun “didn’t see that one coming” moments, such as the spot where a friendly-seeming alien approaches asking for help… and gets hit on the head with a shovel in response. Assistance is futile! Most of the characters were left alive at the end, leaving room to continue some time later with another scenario using (partly) the same characters, if there’s occasion. Funny, I’ve now run two sort-of DG scenarios, and I still haven’t read the core Delta Green book (it’s on the shelf though, waiting its turn).

Fun (if long) day of gaming, with some food made via a random Internet recipe to stop people from going hungry. Food was good too; the next time I make that thing I’ll want to increase the amount of crepe batter, though, we ran out before running out of filling.

I was pretty exhausted afterwards, even more than normal after a full-day GM job. Fell asleep a bit after 11pm and slept almost 12 hours. Zzzzzzz. Maybe it’s an alien plot. […]

Minireview: Entombed with the Pharaohs (J1)

Entombed with the Pharaohs (written by Michael Kortes) is the first of the “J”-series modules (Journey?) from Paizo. Though the letter+number numbering scheme of these “GameMastery” modules is reminiscent of the classic TSR modules, unlike some other game lines like Goodman Games’ “Dungeon Crawl Classics” this series doesn’t much try to emulate the feel of the old stuff – these adventures are fairly modern in design.

I’ve read some others of the GameMastery line before, and overall the quality has been high. Some have been excellent (Hangman’s Noose) and some just ok (Guardians of Dragonfall), but on the whole this seems to be a very solid series of pregen adventures for D&D 3.5.

So, on to the module. It’s very consciously an Indiana Jones -styled pulpy “Tomb Raider” adventure that takes place in “Osirion”, a mythical Egypt clone with the serial numbers (very lightly) filed off. To be honest, it’s such a direct copy of mythical cliche Egypt that it bothered me a bit – but only a very small bit, since the old TSR “Desert of Desolation” modules also had a direct-from-Egypt copy thing going on and they rocked, and in any case cliche Egypt resounds pretty well with the whole “pulp adventure” feel. So I won’t complain too much on that score. It is a bit corny, though, with stuff like “The River Sphinx” etc.

The adventure itself is very good, and has a nice nontraditional element in that there’s another party of tomb raiders racing to plunder the same tomb as you are. So in addition to all the deathtraps (of course there are deathtraps, silly!), you’re dodging or fighting another “adventurer party”. Good stuff. The high lethality of the module makes me reluctant to recommend it as part of an ongoing campaign; I see many places here where a total party kill is easy to achieve. For a one-shot, this thing should work great, though it would probably take a few sessions to play through.

Overall, I liked it quite a bit. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s a very nice take on the “pulp tomb raider” genre.

Entombed with the Pharaohs has been pretty popular with players, and it recently won a “what module do you want to see a continuation for?” poll on Paizo’s forums – so we’re getting J4: The Pact Stone Pyramid in November. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #4, Fortress of the Stone Giants

Fortress of the Stone Giants, written by Wolfgang Baur, is the fourth installment in Paizo’s “Rise of the Runelords” D&D adventure path. As a concept, an “adventure path” is a set of linked adventures which can either be played stand-alone, or linked together to form a longer campaign. Sort of like the old TSR “Against the Giants” modules, or the “Slavelords” ones, or many others. I like the concept myself, it provides quite a bit of versatility in how you use the things. Of course, since there is a long-term plot involved there is a fair bit of inevitable railroading, or at the very least some behind-the-scenes GM headscratching to the tune of “how on earth do I get the PCs to do this next?”. You can’t really avoid that, unless you create a totally “sandbox” adventure setting – which has problems of its own.

Anyway, this is part four of a six-part series. After the crazed macabre goblin mayhem of part one, the horror trappings of part two, and the inbred mutant hillbilly splatter-horror of part three, this one is much more straightforward and does what it says on the tin: an assult on a stone giant fortress. It’s intentionally written as a sort of “spiritual successor” to the old “Against the Giants” adventures. Maybe because of the straightforwardness I didn’t find it quite as good as the first three parts; it’s mostly a combatfest and doesn’t offer many clever twists unlike the previous parts. To its credit, most of it is quite logical (though some parts of it feel a small bit like a zoo dungeon and are a bit incoherent), and the main bad guy has a nice backstory (though it’s likely that the PCs will never uncover it).

Other than the adventure, the book contains essays on the stone giants and dragons of Golarion, one more Pathfinder travelogue piece, and a bestiary with some nice, otherplanar antagonists. The add-ons overshadow the adventure itself this time around; I especially liked the stone giant writeup, it made them quite interesting instead of just “big hostile piles of hit points”.

As an interesting aside, this book incorporates some beasts from Cthulhu into D&D; some of the Paizo guys have a love of CoC, and this isn’t the first time Lovecraft has made side treks into their D&D creations. While some purists may yell in horror, I find it rather cool – especially since they go to great lengths to credit CoC and Lovecraft, and to say how good a game CoC is.

As a whole, a solid if not exceptional addition to the “Runelords” series. […]

Minireview: Cold City & Cold City Companion

Cold City is Malcolm Craig’s second game, and it clearly shows the effect “indie” (and Forge) games have had on him. This time around, the ruleset is anything but traditional, and is very focused on enforcing a certain play and character interaction style. It’s also a fairly “lean” game, with the whole book clocking in at only 128 pages. The add-on book, Cold City Companion, is a 48-page booklet. Both are trade paperback size.

So, what’s it about? Nothing very traditional there, either. To sum things up, it’s about monster-hunting in post-WW2 1950’s Berlin. The players are agents of the “Reserve Police Agency”, a multinational clandestine agency formed right after the war to trace and control the results of Hitler’s dabblings into the paranormal… various “esoteric” creatures which have gotten loose and need to be captured, killed, or controlled – and kept out of the public eye. To make this hairy mission even hairier, the player characters all belong to different nationalities, and (at least initially) don’t necessarily trust each other. This is enforced by the ruleset, which has a “trust mechanic” (copied largely from the game Mountain Witch) which is critical to things. In short, the more you trust someone the better they are able to help you… but the easier it also is for them to betray you. And would they betray you? Hell yes. Each character has separate personal and external motivations, neither of which are public, which may well be in conflict with other characters. For example, a Russian character may have (secret) orders to grab and hide all esoteric material (and deliver it to Moscow), and may have a simultaneous personal agenda of trying to defect to the West. Hilarity ensues.

I’m not quite sure how well the dice mechanic will work in practice, it seems very simplistic… but it may well work just fine. Hard to say without playtest. The game itself is full of flavor and contains lots of cool and creepy ideas, and some of the “creatures” shown as examples are very alien – no boring “direct from D&D!” monsters here. A short example adventure is provided, and it reads like it would play very well in practice.

The Cold City Companion booklet contains some extra suggestions for different ways of running the game, some notes on other intelligence agencies, and various bits and pieces. It’s nice enough, but in no way required.

Like in A|State, the art here is excellent and really evokes a certain bleak, industrial feel.

I could well see myself running a short game of this at some point. I’m not sure it’s ideal for a strict “one shot” game, since the evolution of the trust thing would not have time to work there, but something like a mini-campaign of 2-4 game sessions would probably work great. […]