Winter War on the horizon

My local convention is next weekend. Here are my picks for the coolest stuff happening at the con this year:

Left Turn at Alba-Quirky - My Encounter Critical game on Friday night (7pm).
Kingmaker on the Big Board - Fight the War of the Roses on John Satterfield's custom set-up. Mr. Satterfield is an absolute hoot to play with. Saturday morning.
The Dwarven Rail - Saturday afternoon 2nd edition AD&D game. Don't know much about this one.
Arcane Vault of the Magic Goddess - AD&D/OSRIC adventure by Gameblog reader Alex Riedel, also Saturday afternoon.
30th Annual Blind Sniper Tournament - This is a long slog of an event, but because of its hidden movement nature a lot of other boardgames games get played while the ref processes the turns. In my humble opinion the best boardgaming at the con happens at this event. Also a Saturday afternoon, but clearly the best non-RPG event to shoot for if you can't get in on either D&D event.
A Mob Is A Terrible Thing - Old school fantasy adventure using Microlite20, a d20 variant that I would cheerily recommend to the grumbliest of d20-haters. Sunday morning.
Jeff's Big Stupid Dungeon Party - Maybe not the biggest event at the con and possibly not even the stupidest, but we'll try our best. Sunday afternoon.

a very special Shatnerday

You know, before I answer any more questions there's something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and I've spoken to many of you, and some of you have traveled... y'know... hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say... GET A LIFE, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! You've turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME!

it came from Holmes

Gauntlets of Ogre Power – the character wearing these gauntlets adds from 2-8 points to damage caused when striking with any weapon – doing 2-8 hit points merely with his fist – because of the additional power these gauntlets bestow. This power also allows him to grasp and crush things with great ease, just as if he were an ogre (18 strength). The wearer is able to carry weight equal to an additional 1,000 gold pieces in his hands without suffering from being overloaded or encumbered. The gauntlets do not add to hit probability.

–Dungeons & Dragons as edited by Eric Holmes, page 39.

One funny thing here is that ogres under Holmes Basic do d10 points of damage, not 2d4. That’s the sort of little inconsistency that drives rules lawyers mad if they can neither correct it nor exploit it. Speaking of rules lawyers, when I read this passage I can almost hear some whiny player demanding to know why their 18 Strength fighter doesn’t do d6+2d4 damage in melee combat. “Because you cheated on chargen” seems the most reasonable response to this vile miscreant, but what if we hypothetically indulged him? What if stat modifiers were variable, in the form of extra dice added to various operations, instead of flat adds? Something like this:

3	-d10
4	-d8
5	-d6
6	-d4
7-14	-
15	+d4
16	+d6
17	+d8
18	+d10

For Strength the modifier above obviously applies to melee damage, but I think we could squeeze some other uses out of some chart like this one. The Intelligence modifier could apply to starting languages or spells, for instance. The Wisdom modifier could be added to the roll for number of undead turned. The Dex mod I would apply to missile damage. For Constitution the modifier could replace the standard system for bonuses to hit dice, but since the value is so large the bonus would apply only at chargen. (I.e. an 18 Con character gets +d10 hit points at 1st level, but no further bonuses at higher levels.) Using Charisma with the chart above is a tough nut. Maybe the total henchmen you can bring on an expedition fluctuates? Or their morale randomly flitters up and down from session to session?

I’m not really arguing for the merits of the numbers I use above; that’s meant merely as a sample of this line of thinking. Really, I’m not even arguing that this is a good idea. Plenty of referees will balk at such large bonuses, as they only encourage an over-reliance on buff stats instead of player wits. Rereading the Gauntlets of Ogre Power entry just got me thinking along these lines and I thought I’d share.

Cinder session 2

Last night was second run of my new Labyrinth Lord-powered World of Cinder campaign using the Wildlands of Points of Light. Again I had two players, but it was a totally different pair than the dudes who played two weeks ago. The totally new player roster caused no difficulty. I’m pitching this game as a “pick-up campaign”, where from my end of the operation I’m running a perfectly normal ongoing sandbox campaign but on the other side of the screen the players have a zero-commitment game they can jump into or drop out of as pleases them. As best as I can tell this arrangement has no practical differences from the way Arneson and Gygax operated their campaigns, but I find it important to sell the campaign to players as something that they don’t have to feel obligated to attend. I’ve seen a lot of campaigns mutter through largely via player inertia and frankly I’d rather have someone stop coming than show up and not care.

Anyhoo, my two players were Dave and Joe. Dave is one of the owners of Armored Gopher Games and a figure of note in the local RPG scene before he sold out and went all commercial on us. Seriously though, you couldn’t ask for a better guy to run your FLGS. He seems to know darn near every gamer in town, he believes in the local hobby scene as a community, and he understands that to run a successful store you can’t just put some crap on the shelves and wait for the money to roll in. I’ve played many games with Dave, most notably a big pile of Savage Worlds, of which he was an early adopter. He’s also been a player in some of my Encounter Critical con games and was in the local Run Club for the year we gave that a try. Good guy.

I met Joe through Dave, when Dave started his Pancake Hut game night, so-called because they were run at a local pancake eatery after it closed. Joe played in my brief Savage Worlds mini-campaign about a 1920’s mafia turf war. In the first couple of sessions of that game Joe and I were not on the same wavelength and I was clearly failing to communicate to him how the game was supposed to work. Then in the middle of one scene he all of the sudden perked up “Oh! We’re on a shadow run!” and from then on he gave that campaign a good sound ass-kicking.

One of the things that I really like about Joe is he’s a fun-loving guy who takes the game seriously. He’ll laugh and joke around and is generally great to hang out with, but he also shows up to frickin’ play, not to talk about the latest episode of whatever crap show all the nerds are supposed to be flipping out over this season. I like chit-chatting about comics books or Doctor Who or whatever as much as the next genre geekboy, but some people just can’t shut up and roll the damn dice. Joe is totally the opposite of those people. Also, when idiots talk like the internet (you know, actually saying “lols” or “pwnage” out loud) you can see the murder in Joe’s eyes. I totally respect that attitude, even though I have been known to occasionally use the word “roxxors” in casual conversation. I wish I could say I was being ironic when I did, but that would be a lie.

Session 1 of the campaign was pretty sparse with the setting material, but last night we were able to build up some neat stuff up during play. We established, for example, that Dave’s magic-user Snurd was one of many apprentices of the wizard Bolothous. The PCs’ base of operations is the small trading town of Delen, which is as per Points of Light is protected by six stone golems created by Bolothous. We decided that Bolothous is an alcoholic old wretch and a terrible teacher of the arcane arts. He’s great with golem-magic but a total arsehole personally. Most of his apprentices either quit in disgust or are thrown out when the master is in a fit of wine-soaked grumpiness. Reginald Featherweight, Carl’s M-U from session one and Hal Durg, the bandit mage in the dungeon module I was using, also happen to be ex-apprentices of Bolothous. Thanks to a blown carousing roll, we also learned one more fact: Snurd is totally in love with Bolothous’s hot young wife Zyra and the two are knocking boots behind his back! At one point Snurd spent 100gp on gifts for Zyra and another hundred gold on wine for his boss, to keep the old man stupefied while cuckolding him. Best use of the NPC reaction chart yet: determining if your mistress still loves her husband or not.

Joe’s character is just as awesome as Dave’s devious casanova/wizard. One of the first things Joe said to me when I arrived at the shop last night was “I’ve been catching up on your blog and I have just one question for you: What the hell is a grognard?” I explained the etymology briefly, starting with Napoleon’s grumbling soldiers. That stuck in Joe’s head. So when he diced up a fighter who happened to start play with a free tin of mustache wax he created this guy:


That's Grognard Whiplash, Frog God-worshipping ex-soldier of the Last Emperor of the West! I decided that the Last Emperor sits in his lonely tower in the wicked city of Hautville. Ostensibly Hautville is the last bastion of his crumbled dominion, but the truth is he's basically exiled there and a prisoner of local authorities. Grognard managed to survive the Emperor’s last war going very badly.

Like Squirrel’s halfling in the previous session, Grognard could not stay away from the Slot Dice. Unlike Squirrel, Joe lost and lost and lost again. In fact, between starting play dirt poor (Snurd had to finance his studded leather), excessive carousing, losing money to a con man, and a gambling addiction, Grognard quickly became pegged as Snurd’s no good broke-ass friend, who was always bumming coin off of the more thrifty M-U. It was a great roleplaying dynamic and very funny. Snurd keeps the gold a-flowin’ on condition that the fighter would take the blame should word get out that Zyra was having an affair. Grognard agreed, but who can trust a dude that prays to amphibious demons?

The actual adventure involved a couple forays into the lair of the evil knight Krepache. Since Carl’s character Reginald had caroused during the previous session, I decided that he boozed it up with his ol’ buddy Snurd and totally spilled the beans about the source of his new-found gold. That was heavy handed, but I feel confident that Carl would go along with it. He’s a pretty easy-going guy. So Reginald Featherweight and his cleric buddy Deric Holyborn were off doing whatever PCs do when they aren’t on adventures while the two new guys took a crack at the same dungeon. Through a combination of judicious sleep spells, excellent dice-free dungeoneering and simple luck both characters made second level and scored some decent loot. A couple encounters were touch-and-go. Picking a fight with a troll is not a recommended activity for first level adventurers, but they did it anyway for fear that it might cut off their escape route. Even though they had no idea what the shaggy pumpkinheads were, they took on four of them and had a helluva fight.

Next session should be interesting. Joe indicated that he would be back and I expect Squirrel to play as well, as Wednesday is normally his night to mind the store. Joe’s Grognard Whiplash is a shady character and a follower of the Frog Gods of Chaos, while Squirrel’s Deric Holyborn is a zealous cleric of the lawful Great Gold Dragon. I don’t know if either player is willing to push the situation to the point of PC-on-PC violence or whether it will just be a source of good-natured jocularity. Personally, I’m willing to let it play out either way and I think both guys are grownup enough to not take a little in-game skullduggery too seriously. But only time will tell.

In the meantime, Dave has kindly offered to help me drum up some more players. I don’t mind running for one or two at a time, especially when the players I’m getting are so high quality, but I wouldn’t mind a few more as well. So if you live in my neck o’ the woods or are just passing through, shoot me an email (jrients to the gmail at the dot to the com) and we’ll set something up.

new NEW look up top

Hmmm, I like the Willingham that you've got up now, and I think the height is good too. But with the empty space on either side you could have all three.

Thanks for the new graphic, GreyBeardGamer!

deal o' the day

My sister Jenn sent me a link to tanga.com, a site that she's used before to buy boardgames. Their current extra special deal is 13 Dungeon Crawl Classics for fifty bucks plus shipping and handling. Dig it:

http://www.tanga.com/deals/current

The adventures are all for 3.5 but that is an exceedingly good price.

EDIT: sold out!

one of these things is not like the other

I honestly couldn't tell you who is cooler, Swashbuckler Dwarf with the suave wardrobe and gorgeous beard, Androgynous Hobbit with the lipstick and piercing stare, or Minga the Merciless. That sorceress may be the greatest fully clothed adventuress I've ever seen. When was the last time you saw this fabulous of an adventuring party?

That poor schmuck in the helmet is toast. He can't be anything other than a meatshield to the other three. Maybe they'll keep him around for a while like some sort of pet sword-monkey, but eventually they'll tire of his drab antics and make sure he falls in a pit or is eaten by a grue.