Showing posts with label Savage Worlds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Savage Worlds. Show all posts

Friday, December 31, 2021

The New Year's Eve Post for 2021


2021 was not a bad year here. Personal and family stuff was good and that's about all you can ask for these days. Hobby-wise ...

  • I ran a fair amount of 5th edition D&D earlier in the year. One of these days maybe I will write those sessions up. That campaign was paused but I suspect we will come back to it down the road. It gave me a reason to spruce up the monster miniature collection and clean up the storage for it too. 
  • The campaign that closed out the year was a new Deadlands campaign I discussed here. One of the goals for the new year is to put up some session summaries here and then keep up with it going forward. it's been a long time since we've had a sustained western type campaign and I do like the Savage Worlds rules quite a bit so it's been nothing but good. It's been on hold for the holidays and my convention crew but we will pick it back up in Jan/Feb. 
Looking back I don't think I ran any other RPGs this year, even one-shots. That's pretty light for me. I suppose I should look at it as maintaining focus at a higher level than usual but it still feels a little weird. I certainly added enough new ones to the pile and of course there are ideas for way too many campaigns buzzing around my head but my players are happy with what we are doing so I feel like I'm doing something right. 


Miniatures-wise we played a reasonable level of 40K and I got a -lot- of painting done so that feels like a total win too. Close to wrapping up the Necrons and I am very happy with that. Simple paint scheme, as terminator-ish a look as I can give them. It's pretty much silver/chrome, red eyes and gun parts, and desert type basing. I won't quite finish them by the end of the year ... errr ... tonight ... but some of that is due to weather as you can't spray that final clearcoat if it's too cold, or too wet, or too windy and we will cover all 3 of those this week. 

  • The Blood Angels were also a big focus later in the year and I do now have a couple of Sanguinary Guard squads and enough Death Company to field a squad or two. This also pulled me into working on the BA dreadnoughts I've had laying around, the assault terminator squads half-built for a couple of years, some old unfinished tac squads and dev squads, and also finally figuring out the rhino & razorback situation I've had with them as not everything can have a jump pack or be dropped out of a Stormraven. It feels good to have these guys rounding into shape as my other major marine army
  • I added some stuff to my Crimson Fists - a landspeeder with two more almost done, a pair of stormtalons that have been "almost done" for a few years now - now they are "really done" - and I finished up some leader types - rebased, decaled where applicable, touched up, and clear-coated. There is more to do ... I suspect there will always be a backlog with these guys because they are my "normal" marine army and there is always new stuff coming out for marines, but they are in a good place for now. 
  • I played my Grey Knights early on but I haven't played them with the new book yet.  I have some units to build and tweaks to make and I need to focus on them for a while to do it - that will happen after the current wave is handled. 
  • I played the Imperial Guard early on as well and my force needs some tweaks (and a more experienced commander). All I really added was some more demolisher cannon turrets  - hopefully they stay good - and the lascannon gunship (Vulture? Vendeta? I don't know but it seems nasty) because I could and I'd like a flying tank destroyer to help protect my own tanks. I'm really kind of waiting for a new Guard codex to dive back into this army and tune it up.
  • I played my Orks in a Crusade campaign before the new codex came out and it is a really fun way to play the game. I got hammered pretty hard by Blaster's Ultramarines primaris gunline force but my warboss managed to wreck his redemptor dread regularly and to crunch his captain a few times too so it was not completely one-sided. With the new book I have added some bikes and since I mostly run Goffs I have the new Ghazghkull in the painting queue now too. I need to take a month next year and just play my orks only through a few games and I'll get them done. Also: The Great Re-Basing will happen as I have the base expanders sitting on my workbench to bump all the old boyz up to 32mm. not super exciting but it's a chance to change up how I base these guys and considering a lot of my army dates back to 2nd & 3rd edition I'm looking forward to it.


I did dive into Flames of War early in the year as this year's "miniatures game I will dive into hard and end up not playing" ... which is exactly what happened. At some point you might think I would learn but hope springs eternal. A few years ago it was Bolt Action, then it was Star Wars Armada (though we did play a few games of both) then Age of Sigmar ... I have played enough Kings of War that I don't count it as a non-starter but it was quiet this year too. Check in tomorrow for next year's candidates!

I did work on building an Undead army for Kings of War ... and also for Sigmar as that book came out while I was feeling it and so progress was made but not completed on both. I held off on 3rd edition AoS as we haven't played since 1st and I'm trying to be better about throwing resources at rulebooks I may not use. Armies - sure. We can play a few games with the old rules if we can get some armies together and make sure it's something we want to expand. 

Overall the miniatures situation is better then last year. I got a lot done and I also took the time to reorganize my work space  - cleaned out the workbench completely, picked up some new drawer/organizer things, and went through a bunch of paints and tools and supplies and got rid of a lot of clutter. I've enjoyed it more the last few months than I have in quite a while so I'm calling that a win. 


Then, last week of the year, the big surprise - we ended up playing Battletech of all things. We haven't played BT since the boys got interested years ago so I decided to go back to the original source and we played with the original BT boxed set, mechs, and map. This all came about because Paladin Steve's oldest son was asking about the 40K miniatures again when he was over for our boardgame night and rather than try to explain all that we started talking about how if he want to have giant robots moving around and punching and shooting each other Battletech was a better bet than 40k. It's also cheaper to get into if he really liked it. Paladin Steve hadn't played in 20 years but he was interested in dusting it off - so that's what we did. One mech apiece ... 3025 tech ... one original map board and we ran for several hours. It was a lot more fun than I expected - even when my Wolverine went down to a punch in the face that crushed my cockpit. 


Going through all of that old material hit me with a pretty heavy nostalgia wave. All those custom mech sheets, some sheets that still have damaged marked on them from battles 25 years ago, and even re-discovering old Mechwarrior character sheets ... we spent a LOT of time playing Battletech in the 80's and 90's. I have a ton of painted BT miniatures some of which I painted back in the 80's and it always feels good to put those on the table again. 

It was a ton of fun and Apprentice Boom Gun was already asking when we could play again before we finished the first game. That's a good sign. It was a nice way to wrap up the gaming year. 

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

The New Deadlands Campaign

 


So I started a new campaign a week or two back. RPG time has been pretty spotty around here since early 2020 for all the typical reasons but this is my effort to get things back on some kind of regular schedule. I rana lot of D&D 5E and some Pathfinder 2 prior to the pandemic so I wanted to do something different. After some debate I settled on Deadlands - with a shiny new batch of stuff released recently it feels like a good time. 

We managed to figure out a day and a time that worked for almost everyone and I ended up with 5 players! My goal for the first session was to get characters made and get into some initial trouble with them - and we achieved that! Names and details will show up in future posts but we ended up with a shootist, a huckster, a mad scientist, an Indian shaman, and a Chinese martial artist.  So yeah ... covering a whole lot of the Deadlands character spectrum. 

For various reasons this collection of unconnected souls finds themselves on a train station platform in Andover Kansas in 1879. It's a dusty, tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere with a small general store, a blacksmith, and a hotel that seems much larger than needed - probably due to a burst of hopeful optimism on the owners part.

As our heroes and some others mill about on the platform a kid rushes down the one real street in the town, raising a cloud of dust, waving his arms, and shouting. "The Clampett gang! The Clampett gang is coming!"

Yes, they are back again. A good opening is a good opening.

As the rest of the waiting passengers look for a place to hide the five strangers step forward to assess the danger. A gunshot rings out and a bullet slams into the unfortunate huckster obvious professional gambler which helps speed the assessment right along. The shootist, gambler, and mad scientist inventor stay on the platform, readying weapons and aided by a wall of flame that conceals their position. The martial artist moves up onto the roof while the medicine man moves around to one side of the station - both are thinking "ambush".


As the gang approaches shots continue to ring out along with curses and exclamations like "they done shot granny!" and "Uncle Jed - noooo!" and soon only Big Jethro and Dirty Jane Hathaway the well-known knife-fighter are left. No one among the station defenders is hit in the ongoing exchange and Jethro is the last to go down before any further harm is done. 

The defiant ones exchange nods and discuss the fight and the other waiting passengers come out of hiding and thank them. Checking the bodies it is clear the Clampetts have been dead for some time so it's clear evidence of the rumored "walking dead" right here in Andover Station. The station agent mentions no one has seen them for months and word was that they had met their maker in a dust-up with the Rogers gang. "Maybe they did - but it looks like it didn't take."

Soon enough the train pulls into the station and everyone boards, eager to get to their next stop.

This was only the first part of the first session but I think it's long enough for one post. The goal here was to get everyone together, try out abilities and to shake off any rules-rust and it did exactly that. 


Monday, September 6, 2021

The Deadlands Companion

 


The Deadlands Weird West Companion is a ... slim ... hardcover that's largely extra stuff for Deadlands Adventure Edition. Short take: This is a -very- optional book.

We open with a two-page spread that covers the publication history of the Deadlands game. I like this and I think more long-lived RPG's should include this kind of thing. 

Then we get to player stuff - more powers for harrowed, U.S. Marshals, metal mages (mad scientists who have become aware that their devices are working because of magic), voodooists (new arcane background),  and witches. It's all nice to have and brings some character types from earlier editions up to date but honestly I've never had anyone play any of those last 3 so this is probably the kind of book they belong in.

Next up is a chapter on Relics and this, surprisingly, is almost the longest chapter in the book! Deadlands doesn't do magic items the way D&D does but they do exist in the setting. They tend to be one-off, unique items tied to a person or event. So-and-so's pistols ... famous outlaw's boots ... somebody's coup stick - this is the kind of magic item in this section. There is typically a paragraph or two of background, a note on what power it holds, and a note on any taint it holds - yes, some of them have downsides. I've never thought of this as an item-focused game but if your players have some interest it could be fun and it does let a GM tie things in to some of the legends of the setting in a direct way. 


One thing I was surprised to see is an entire chapter that breaks down what happened in each of the four servitor campaigns. Now this was covered in a big-picture way in the main rulebook but here they have decided to give a summary of what happened and then they go into a rather lengthy breakdown of every core plot point in each of the four campaign books. I was really scratching my head at this as I don't know why anyone would need this level of detail if they are not running those campaigns! They are still available on DTRPG so one could certainly acquire and run them without much difficulty. It's sort of a timeline of the last 5 years of the setting but we already get a broader timeline and breakdown in the main book so this adds ... what? It's not wrong it's just a weird duplication of effort that has me wondering what the benefit is supposed to be.

There is a nice chapter on the hunting grounds which could be *extremely* useful depending on where your campaign takes you. It's similar to notes on planar travel in a D&D game: you may not need it early in your game and you may only need it once in a campaign but it's really handy to have if your game goes there. This section covers what it looks like, what lives there, how things work, and even includes some ideas on adventures that involve the hunting grounds. 

The next-to-last chapter has stats for NPCs both historical (Wyatt Earp, Seth Bullock) and Deadlands - specific (Ronan Lynch, Lacy O'Malley). This is handy stuff when you're running a game as if you want a more personalized statblock for your town marshal then maybe you clone Bat Masterson instead of using the generic law dog stats. This is all specific people - no generic stats or monsters here. 

Damn straight my Notice is a d12 ...

The last section is an old adventure from Shadis magazine (KODT! Joe Genero!) that hasn't been republished since then and it reads decently enough. It has some nice ties to other parts of the setting so I'd say it's worth working in.


Overall for me this book is director's cut material. There's nothing here you need to run a Deadlands campaign but if you're digging in and having a good time there are things in here that could be useful. I'd say the NPC's, the relics, and the hunting grounds chapters are all good examples of "expansion" type material. I would still say you want the main book first, some dice and cards and bennies, a GM screen if you like them, maybe an adventure ... then consider getting this book. 




Monday, August 30, 2021

Deadlands: Adventure Edition

 


Deadlands! It's hard to believe it's been around for 25+ years now. Those bright orange covers are just as electric sitting on my shelf today as they were back then and the concept is still just awesome. Just to review:

  • There was original Deadlands with the rulebook and "The Weird West" as the setting expansion that really dug into the world.
  • Then there was a revised edition that split things into a more traditional player's book  and GM's book.
  • There was a GURPS conversion and some supplements for that - back when damn near everything ended up with a GURPS conversion.
  • When the boom hit in the early 2000's there was a d20 version with pretty extensive support. 
  • Finally, after Savage Worlds had been out for a few years, there was Deadlands Reloaded which gave us a nice big one-volume full color hardback version of the game. There had been a conversion document to tide us over but this was a full-on update of the game and the presentation that brought it back to life. 
So right there we have 5 different versions of the game where the mechanics have changed every time but the setting has remained the same - other than timeline updates - and that's a good thing because the setting is a damn strong one for playing an RPG. 

Now Pinnacle has released a new version of Deadlands with both a rules update to match all of the changes over the last 15 years, especially the new Adventure Edition of Savage Worlds. I figured I ought to look it over and share some thoughts. 


First up let me say this: If you're interested in the game but either haven't ever played it before or sold off your stuff years ago this is really all you need to worry about - the new core book for Deadlands pictured up top. It's a great entry point - or re-entry point. It does a thorough job of talking about rules tweaks for Savage Worlds, it does a strong job of covering the setting and the history and why things are the way they are, and it also does a really good job of explaining what the game is about. That last one is something not every game does well or even tries to do at all and I think this book covers it well.

I'm not going to do page counts and go chapter by chapter - let's take a larger view:
  • Right up front we get a general setting overview and then we dive into character details. In the original book there was a selection of character archetypes (like in Shadowrun 1st-2nd-3rd edition) and we get something similar here though we do not get full-page color illustrations of them with all game stats listed out. It's more conceptual here but it works and there are more of them. There are new Edges and Hindrances here as well as you would expect in a Savage Setting book. After that it goes into gear which covers all kinds of old west and mad science options. It's pretty familiar if you've played the game before and it is necessary so this is good. 
  • There is a really nice section on Life in the Weird West which is sort of a grab-bag of details that really flesh out the world. Travel options and times. Money - because it's not just dollar bills you know? How ghost rock works. The law and marshals vs. sheriffs vs. judges. It's just a very handy section that helps glue the setting together.
  • The big rule section covers western type things like high noon gunfight duels, hangings, and cattle stampedes as well as all of the archetype special rules for the arcane backgrounds and the not-so-arcane backgrounds like Texas Rangers. 
  • The latter third or so of the book is all GM stuff - Monsters, NPC's, GM details on all of the arcane backgrounds and ghost rock etc. and a bunch more information on locations within  the setting. 
It's a solid, solid presentation of a really fun setting and it's the best looking version of Deadlands as well. Pinnacle has gotten really good at presentation and I would say this is their best effort to date.  



Now there is a nice fancy boxed set with a lot of cool stuff in it - that's it up there - but you don't need anything in it to run the game. It's a lot of themed nice to have stuff and I ended up getting it but it's all bonus - nothing essential.  

One thing is that the timeline has advanced and there are several reasons for this. The original game started in 1876 and the new version sets the time to 1884. The big change is that the Civil War, which was ongoing in all prior editions of the game, is now said to have ended in 1871. There is an in-setting explanation for this retcon and yes, some people in-setting do know that it changed so it's not just hand-waved away. The larger reason for the change is that having the Confederacy as an active part of your RPG setting nowadays is going to bring some negative attention, especially when you've already messed with the historical timeline. I'm not sure I would have handled it the same way they did but I can understand why they did it.

The other impact of the timeline jump is that it is now assumed that all four of the big servitor plot point campaigns were completed - The Flood, Good Intentions, Stone and a Hard Place, and Last Sons. I suppose it makes sense but if you were running or intending to run any of those you're going to have to reconcile the "when" of things a bit here. I am still going to use them and I'll just be setting things back a bit and starting my games in 1879 or so. 


So I love this setting, I love how Pinnacle has handle it over the years, and I am a big fan of Savage Worlds and have been since it came out. That said I have two issues ...

One, I saw an online discussion wondering if this update took too much of the conflict out of the setting. The Civil War is over. The four big Servitors have been thwarted. Pinnacle is taking a different approach with this version and focusing on smaller scale local problems with their campaigns making for less metaplot and making it more about your group of PC's cleaning up a town or a region. Is that what people want? Most D&D type games seem to focus on publishing big time epic save the world adventures for full campaigns. I don't hate the idea of scaling it back and I think a western game is the right setting for saving the town - or the ranch - whether it's from the greedy land baron or a pack of werewolves. That said there is a bit of feeling like maybe the big story already happened on some level.

My biggest annoyance, and it is a small one in the larger scheme of things, is the "Twilight Legion". Yet another in the growing line of "retconned organizations that hand out missions to player characters in a setting that doesn't need them". It's been creeping in since at least The Flood and now it's a full-blown default assumption that your players will inevitably join the secret organization that's been fighting a secret war in secret since medieval/ancient/the dawn of time(s). We played in this world for a decade or two before this became a thing - why do we need this now?

The argument is usually that it's an easy hook for new GMs and new players. Sure. Let's just have someone tell them what to do. Since when is that how RPG's work? For a Trek game sure, it's fine. For a western? With zombies? Does the GM not have any ideas here? Do the players not have any?

I would say it's just an optional thing discussed in the book but I've seen two of the new adventures published for this edition and they both assume that the party is working for the Twilight Legion. With one of them you might as well be part of MI6 - "Hello 007. 003 went to Malta last month and has not reported in since arriving. We need you to go and see what has happened to him" - it's pretty much a cowboy version of that!

It's heavy handed and it's lazy. Star Trek gets away with that because it's built in. In Star Wars the Jedi Council might ask some Jedi to investigate something like a trade dispute. You are creating characters or a whole party that is tied to an organization. In Deadlands we usually end up with a gunfighter, a huckster, a mad scientist, and some other random character type. If you create a Ranger or a member of The Agency then you have some baggage and strings but you knew that going in. Assuming at the start of every published adventure that the party is a member of the legion and is obligated in some way to do as they are told is just ... lazy. No need for interesting hooks. No need to write up different reasons for different characters to want to get involved. No need to invoke family connections or contacts or rumors or Hero-style hunteds. No need to get creative here at all. 

Sure, a good GM can (and likely will) come up with an alternate approach. My point is that you shouldn't have to by default. There should be a little more effort in the kickoff than "mission received". 


Now I don't want my rant to drive anyone away from this game. For one you can work around it and also, if you don't run the published adventures then it really doesn't matter. I usually try to work them in when I can but I'm not sure about these right now. 

To reiterate: this is a great setting with excellent support and a tight very playable set of rules. I've found that it's very difficult not to have a good time with this game. If I can get one going again soon I will be posting it up here on the blog. 


 

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Rifts Savage Worlds Kickstarter - Atlantis!

 


Well it's time for another Savage Worlds Kickstarter, in fact another Rifts Savage Worlds Kickstarter. The first run was in 2016, then another one in 2019 to expand the books with Magic, Coalition, and regional stuff books, plus an upgrade of the original to the new Adventure edition of Savage Worlds. 

This time it's for Atlantis for this version of Rifts. I always thought Atlantis was one of the cooler areas of Rifts and one of the cooler books for it as well - magic items, races, tattoo magic, plus all of the worldbuilding and backstory that came along with it ... it was a very strong early entry in making Rifts Rifts. 


Now I never did much with it in my games as far as the region. It seemed horrifically dangerous for most characters to approach, much less enter, sort of like going to the Nine Hells in a D&D game. It was more an "aspirational" destination than a likely one at low to medium levels. With the Savage Worlds version of the game levelling the playing field a bit I can see where it might actually get used at some point. 

The short version is that the original Atlanteans look very much like humans but they were driven out or enslaved when the Splugorth invaded a long time ago.  The city magically TARDIS-d out when magic diminshed on Earth but it returned when the rifts opened up and magic flooded the world again. This is one of the major evil powers of the setting so it's a dangerous place but there is a sort of underground rebellion of True Atlanteans active there as well. Oh and it's also full of dragons. 

It's awesome but deadly. I've used Atlantean slavers several times as a campaign opener so maybe next time they won't go somewhere else - maybe they will go back to the big island.

The good news is that Pinnacle knows how to run a Kickstarter and I am absolutely sure this one will run smoothly and deliver what it promises pretty much on time. 

The part that bothers me a bit is that Pinnacle has a ridiculous amount of KS experience because pretty much everything they publish these days is done via Kickstarter. I know I know, it's rough for small publishers out there these days and doing it this way makes sense. Doesn't it seem like today, though, with 5E doing this record business for several years now, that the RPG market should be better? There were a ton of smaller publishers in the 80's and 90's and early 2000's who supported game lines for years before crowdfunding ... shouldn't it be easier now? Shouldn't an experienced, respected, well-liked company be able to sustain their main game line without having to crowdfund?

Who knows, maybe they could but they know this is just better - more predictable at least. 


The downside of doing it this way is that you can't just buy a $30 book like you can with many other games. No, you are going to get the book, some character cards, and a poster map. Now the basic digital-only version is pretty reasonable but if you just want a printed Savage Rifts Atlantis Book you're in for the $45 package. If that's all you want your best bet is to wait until after the campaign, whenever it's printed and shipped and you can buy it at the FLGS or online for the cover price or less. 

The other stuff in this campaign include a set of cardboard stand-up pawns, like Pathfinder pawns apparently, and a couple of map packs along with the book and the cards and the poster map. It's all cool stuff, it's just the forced bundling that itches just a bit and granted that is a temporary state that will only last until it's all released separately, likely early next year given what they are saying on the KS page.  

So yes, I will probably back it at some level - Rifts is a great setting and Savage Worlds is a great set of rules that works well for it. I like a ton of what Pinnacle does so I try to support them directly like this when they make something I like. If you have some similar inclinations then go check this one out. 


 

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Savage Worlds - Adventure Edition




I've been interested in the Savage Worlds game since the earliest days of its existence - maybe before if we're going back to Deadlands and the Great Rail Wars days. I played and ran some Deadlands in its original form, picking up pretty much all of the books and the Deadlands: Hell on Earth setting and books as well. I dove into GRW a little later and picked up a bunch of the miniatures and books for that too. I was on the Deadlands email list in the late 90's/early 2000's and followed the development of the system as bits came out there - you can see a more extensive version of that info here.



In my experience it's a great system with great support and I've had a ton of fun with it over the years. A lot of this is in the actual play of course. It's also in the way the game is supported - for the most part they do not publish 20 books on one setting - they publish 1 book for 20 different settings. Deadlands is the exception here as it's been a thing since before SW existed but most of their settings are a plot-point campaign book that has all you need to run games in a world for probably a year or more if you desire to. It doesn't feel like you're signing on for a long term subscription just to keep up with a particular setting. Recently a lot of their efforts have been published via Kickstarter and while I have some mixed feelings about that it does mean you can get a more complete set of  "stuff" for whatever setting is being presented - custom bennies, cards, extra books, maps, etc.

The last big Kickstarter was for a new edition of the rules - the Adventure Edition. Pinnacle has said before that they don't usually do new editions to dramatically change the rules. It's more about when they need to do a new print run and decide it's time for a revamp of the presentation and of some of the rules tweaks they've been trying out since the last one. I can vouch for this - I have at least one of each version and the rules changes from one to the next are fairly minor.



After reading it I can say that the Adventure Edition is still Savage Worlds. That said, let me talk about the changes:

  • Default Skills or "Core" skills - Everyone gets a d4 for free in Athletics, Common Knowledge, Notice, Persuasion, and Stealth. I get this and it's fine by me. 
    • Athletics is a consolidation of Climbing, Swimming, and Jumping into a single skill and that's fine too. 
    • Common Knowledge is new too. This sort of thing used to be a Smarts roll but they are trying to make things you typically make active rolls with an actual skill and not a stat.
    • Notice, Persuasion, and Stealth are all very commonly used skills in any given session and now new characters will start with a d4 instead of a d4-2. I'm fine with starting characters being a little more competent in these areas.
  • The Shaken change - technically this came out in 2015 but it hasn't been in the main rulebook until now. Previously when rolling to "unshake" success meant you were unshaken but could not act, while a raise let you act normally. Now a success = unshake and act normally. It's good for players when a character does it but less good for them when a monster/bad guy does it so ... I'm fine with it I suppose. 
  •  Experience: The old rule was the GM awards 1-3 XP per session and every 5XP is an Advance which lets the character upgrade in some way. The new approach is to drop XP and just talk over with your players at the beginning of the campaign how quickly you want to advance - every session? every other? every third? This one is the one that grates on me the most despite being the least important in many ways. I think it affects the tone of the game. 1-3 XP shows some evaluation of how much the group accomplished in a session. The set rate of advancement approach devalues that in my opinion. Its not a game breaker for me, it's just a change in approach I dislike. 
  • There are changes to various Edges and Hindrances - to be expected in a new edition. I don't worry about these too much until I'm running a character that has them so I won't go into any detail here. 
  • Lots of new conditions, or Statuses: Distracted, Vulnerable, Bound, Entangled, and Stunned.These consolidate a lot of separate very similar rules, weapons, and powers into a few set conditions. It's a smart change and one many other games have benefited from.
There are a lot of other changes as well. The chase rules changed again, as they do in pretty much every edition. There are short sections that present other ways to handle a scene or a task: Mass Combat, Quick Encounters, Social Conflicts, and abstracted travel and wealth rules. Some of them I like better than others and that's partly because I know what my players like and also because I know how I like to run things. At the very least though they give you something to push against if you want to explore some alternate approaches. 


One other positive thing that stood out is that there does seem to be more explanation on why things are the way they are. Pinnacle has been good about this in most editions of the game but this one feels even more so to me.

Visually the PDF looks great and I am looking forward to getting my hands on the hardcover in the near future. Then of course the question is "what will I run next and will it use these rules?" and the answer is "I don't know but probably so".

Anyway, more to come.






Thursday, March 7, 2019

RPG Stuff: Our 50 Fathoms Campaign Log



So I'm actually playing in two ... that's TWO (!) ongoing campaigns now - and have been for a few months! I could not tell you the last time that happened. I've been playing in one for about 5 years now - more on that in another post - and I've had a few one or two-shot games in that time but it's been longer than that since I played in two sustained games at the same time. I'm also still running a campaign or two myself so it's a really cool situation I find myself in game-wise right now.

I'm playing a kraken water-mage who is also an expert swordsman and it's been a lot of fun. The setting is roughly 1700's tech plus magic and some non-traditional fantasy races (like mine!). There is some one-way crossover with Earth of the same time period so we have the East India Company running around among other familiar landmarks. In the group we have the gun-nut, the trade specialist, the recon/sniper character, and out fearless monkey-cursed captain. So far it's been a little reminiscent of some old Traveller campaigns - lots of trading between different ports while following up on local problems/quests/missions and connecting some larger threads, all while trying to make some money so we can tackle larger issues.

Anyway here's a link to the session logs so far if anyone wants to see how a campaign like this can go: The Caribdus Cruise



Monday, January 28, 2019

The RPG Catch-Up post




Despite the silence this month I have managed to get in some games - here's what's been going on at the beginning of the new year:


  • I'm actually playing in two games! At the same time! Not literally!
    • Paladin Steve's Pathfinder campaign is about to make it's 5th anniversary. We're 10th level now and even playing once a month, roughly, it does feel like a nice long continuous campaign. It's clearly going to outlive the system that spawned it ... and I don't care at all.  
    • Variable Dave has been running his 50 Fathoms campaign weekly for around 10 sessions now and it's going really well. I have not played in an extended Savage Worlds game in a very long time - actually never this long - and it's cool to see the intended progression at work. Playing a squid-faced water mage and ace swordsman has been a ton of fun. People always know when I'm speaking in character because I put my hand in front of my face and wiggle my fingers like tentacles and it cracks us up every time.
    • In general it's really nice to be playing in some games regularly for a change. I've been a constant DM for so long it's good to have that perspective from the other side of the table and it helps remind me of the way the fun works on that side of things too.
  • The main campaign which has run mostly consistently every two weeks is the "Classic Cormyr" 5th Edition D&D game. 
    • I really liked running Storm King's Thunder but I felt like I needed to focus on just running one D&D game for a while -not the 3 I was attempting- to keep on some kind of regular schedule. The players liked playing through Keep on the Borderlands and when I explained my thinking on what other old classic modules we could play through as this campaign the immediately voted to make it "the game". Most of them have not played through these old adventures because they are too young or if they did it was back in 1st or 2nd edition and it's pretty fuzzy. 
    • It's fun for me because it gives me a framework to build around but the process of updating to 5th gives me some space to flex my creative muscles in tweaking the encounters and working up some hopefully memorable characters to encounter, both good and bad.
    • They are now finished with the Keep and next on the agenda is The Isle of Dread which starts later this week! Down the road we will probably encounter some Giants and then likely Descend into the Depths of the Earth.
  • As a holiday one-off I ran Day of the Swarm for ICONS - yes, a Supers game again! It went pretty well so I expect ICONS will show up again as an ad-hoc game.
  • I also managed to run another session of our extremely intermittent Marvel Heroic game! I will write it up in the future but the start of a new Event saw the return of Hercules, new writers for Colossus and Iron Man, and the first appearance of Wolverine. It took some time to shake off the rust but we had fun and this may turn into a once-a-month game to try and keep the rust off.
For the rest of the year I would like to keep these things stable and work in more as much as I can. Hopefully SKT will drop back into the rotation at some point, Savage Rifts is still being asked for regularly, and I'd love to run another fixed-run Star Wars game. We will see but it all looks pretty promising at this point. 

Monday, December 24, 2018

Greatest Hits #24 - Starting Concepts for a Rifts Campaign

Early thinking for my own campaign ...



With Savage Worlds Rifts a real thing now I thought I would share the three ways I have started and run a Rifts campaign. It's a post-apocalyptic game, but one where there is some organized technological /magical society and industry (unlike Twilight 2000 and most Gamma World campaigns) and most of the world has been covered at some point so I know it can be tricky trying to decide how to start a game in a way that makes sense.


Option 1: The North America opening - This is how my last campaign started. The idea is to limit the character types and the setting to the core rulebook and let things expand from there. The starting line from my email to the group that last time: Welcome to Horseshoe Bend, Arkansas, 2400 A.D. No flying cars, and not much indoor plumbing either.  It was a backwater town with some local problems where the PC's were drawn in and things gradually expanded from there. It's a classic "bullseye" type campaign where you have a fairly high level of detail for the town, some detail on the surrounding area (say a day or two of travel for normal folks), and a general idea of what's outside of that. The main premise here is that it's easier to add things to the game than it is to take things away from the game. It's easier on the GM and it's easier on the players too. Plus it makes no assumptions about where the campaign is going - it's just a starting point and once the party finds their feet it could go anywhere. Maybe they end up headed for Tolkeen. Maybe they become heavily invested in the town and the local NPCs and become local champions and defenders. Maybe they take it over and rule. It's wide open once things get rolling and it's largely player-driven at that point.


Specifics: I liked Arkansas as it was near parts of the Coalition, Texas (and so vampires), the Federation of Magic, and it's not all that far from Florida and Dinosaur Swamp. I prefer an area that's not in the middle of some heavily detailed region or plotline but is close enough that the party could dive into those if they wanted to. Parts of Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania would work well here too.



Option 2: The Epic Quest - I used this for my longest-running campaign. The concept goes back to everything from  Jason and the Argonauts to Sinbad to Lord of the Rings. Heroes from all over gather when a call goes out to join an expedition into mysterious territory.  In my case a wealthy patron wanted to travel across half of North America from Arkansas to the ruins of Detroit to retrieve some legendary artifacts. You can read more about it here.  The thing to keep in mind is that just because the Rifts allow instant travel to other places you don't always know where they go or how long they will last. People are still going to travel the hard way and the epic quest is based on doing just that.

This opens things up for the players to bring in almost any character type as a "wandering adventurer" with any motivation from a worthy goal to revenge to a simple payday. It keeps the GM sane though as you're not required to explain why all of these disparate characters are working together - it's built into the concept and it's up to the players to explain why they are joining up! So if you end up with a juicer from Texas, a Triax full conversion borg, a Japanese cyber-samurai, and a Venezuelan anti-monster, that's perfectly fine. Maybe they traveled by ship, maybe they came through a Rift, maybe they want to get home, or maybe they don't remember how they got here - it all works! It gives all of you time to discover the backstory of each character if you want to without having to know everything up front.


For the GM it puts the "why" on the players and let's you focus on developing the "where". You have a major quest goal that is the long term focus of the campaign but while everyone is traveling there you can have impromptu side adventures. It also puts a definite end point to the campaign when the quest is achieved. After that you can reset the campaign with a new situation and some or all new characters as desired. If you think of your game as having "seasons" like a TV show then this would be a great way to start and finish a coherent storyline or season. It's also a good way to explore another area of the world if you have veteran Rifts players. Maybe North America is something you've all played before and you want to go somewhere different - the quest for the heart of Africa (meet the Egyptian gods? Take on the Four Horsemen?) is a definite change up. The team could outfit in NA in relative peace, then board a ship (or a fleet) which would utilize Rifts Undersea/Coalition Navy for some adventures along the way/ once they land in Africa there's a whole support book plus material online and something besides Coalition Troopers to bash.

Specifics:

  • "Expedition to Africa" as described above
  • "To the End of the World" - NA expedition to Antarctica via South America. Could take a ship down the coast, could take a giant robot over land - either one could be interesting.
  • "Transcontinental Transport" - it doesn't always have to be a one-way  traveling quest. What if someone gets an idea to rebuild a transport network across the continent? Part of the campaign would be talking to locals and working out deals along the way to extend the line, and part of it would be defending what you've already built. This could be a crazy back and forth campaign and could easily accommodate multiple groups of players and characters if you're fortunate enough to have multiple groups. It gives them a chance to change the landscape of the world in a notable way and gives them plenty of diplomacy and combat as well. Keep in mind it doesn't have to go east-west either - maybe Northern Gun wants to ship products to Mexico - or Chile!
  • "Moonshot!" - Mutants in Orbit gave us details about what's going on up on Luna. It's kind of a wasted book if no one goes there, right? Maybe someone on Rifts Earth is convinced that pre-Rifts civilization survives on the moon and thinks humanity's last hope is to establish contact with them and get some help.  This could be a 3-stage quest: First, getting to Florida to what was North America's major spaceport. Second, taking control of the facility and figuring out how to get to space. Third, launching for the moon, landing, and finding out what's there. If all goes well then you might have set up your next campaign: "Red Planet". 




Option 3: Slave Ship - All of the characters begin the game on an Atlantean slaver. First session it comes under attack, the players break out, get to land, and begin exploring the area. There are some similarities to both of the previous options.

  1. Player character choices are wide open. The Splugorth trade and raid across the multiverse, so if it's in a Rifts book (or any Palladium book really) you can justify it showing up here. Bring on your Robotech characters and Ninja Turtles! Characters from prior campaigns could even appear in this one with nothing more than "I passed out in a bar and then I woke up here".
  2. The GM gets to pick the setting - I used this kickoff to explore those shiny new South America books back when they were shiny and new. Want to run around Russia or Australia or Japan for a while? Here's a great way to do it. You can assume your players will be spending a fair amount of time at the beginning just figuring out where they are and what they want to do so you can dive into that area of Rifts earth that interests you but has never made sense to include in your previous games. 
  3.  ...but the players drive the campaign forward - once they have their bearings what do they want to do? Take over? Help the locals against those oppressive jerks from the kingdom next door? Find their way home? Pay back Atlantis for what they have done?  It's totally wide open at this point and it's mainly up to them. Sure, the GM can plant interesting rumors about a pre-Rifts city that's intact up in the mountains, or a powerful magic item hidden in a tomb in the desert, or a really nasty monster that dominates a local region, but the direction of the campaign is all about what the players want to do.  

Specifics: Pick a book! Any non-North America book, or any book that doesn't cover a region you've already played through. Talk to your players in advance about what areas of Rifts Earth they are interested in - veteran players will probably have some ideas. I don't know that I would open this way with a group of players totally new to Rifts but for vets it should be a blast.



So there are 3 ideas to help get a Rifts campaign organized and off the ground. They all worked for me when I tried them out so I believe they can work for other people too. It's hard to predict where a campaign will go most of the time so these are mainly focused on "how do I get started?" After that, hopefully, you won't need much help. If you do try some version of them out, let me know how it goes!

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Bringing it Back Online



Well, it's been a few months but it's time to get things back online, spin up the FTL, climb out of the hole, re-ignite the forge,  and get the blog going again.



Catching Up:

  • Westworld! It's back and so far is looking good. I was concerned that they might not be able to match the first season and the total lack of knowledge we had - I mean, surprises are tougher once we know what's going on - but so far they seem intent on revealing even more about the park's place in the world and I am liking it all so far.
  • Ready Player One! Saw it, liked it, still haven't read the book. As pretty much the exact target demo for this movie I appreciate it quite a bit but it's not a Star Wars/Raiders/Iron Man level event. That said, there's a fight near the end that if you're a fan of various Japanese pop culture things - like say, Godzilla - that you will never see anywhere else and that alone pretty much made the movie for me. 
  • Pacific Rim 2 - Again I liked it, and again it just didn't quite hit the highest notes for me. The first one felt revolutionary. this one feels like we're just doing some business. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it felt like they could have done more.
  • Infinity War - YEAH! Started off strong, didn't waste time with a bunch of exposition, kept Iron Man awesome, put Thor back up to awesome - maybe even moreso than before - and stayed true to what they've been doing for the last ten years. 


Game-wise it was pretty rare thing for a few months but we're firing that up again too. It's pretty much cut down to two games for now:
  • Savage Rifts is going again with our first session since January in the books and another one on the way. No pre-planned campaign here, this one is all stuff from my head.
  • D&D is rolling again with the Storm King's Thunder game restarted for the first run since December. I had another sessions scheduled but we ran late and ended up playing Smash-Up instead and everyone still had a good time. 
  • I'm still playing in Steve's Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign. All is well there.
So I'm running Savage Worlds and D&D 5E which makes me a happy DM as I really like both systems. I expect we will get at least one more option in play for the summer. Reading Freedom City has me itching for a Supers game again, but a second 5E campaign has some attraction as does a second Savage Worlds game - resurrecting our Deadlands campaign probably tops that list. 

Anyway there's the restart update - more to come!

Monday, January 8, 2018

Savage Rifts - Session One!




So ... finally ran my first Savage Worlds Rifts game over the weekend. We had some character building to finish up at the start but after that we covered the ground I wanted to cover so I'm calling it a win.

Part 1 - Character Creation
It's more complex than a normal Savage Worlds game and there's a lot of jumping back and forth within the Rifts player book and over to the SW rulebook. Additionally the various Iconic Frameworks have different effects on the normal character creation process - some replace race, some alter the number of attribute points you get, some alter the skills, so each one would sort of have its own procedure chart if there was such a thing. We managed though and ended up with ...

  • A Cyber Knight (Paladin Steve)
  • A Glitter Boy (Paladin Steve's 10-yr old son)
  • A Juicer (Variable Dave)
  • A Dragon Hatchling (Apprentice Blaster)
That's pretty iconic Rifts right there for a 4-man party 

Part 2 - The Opening Scenario
I used (well, re-used) one of my starting concepts mentioned in this post. Specifically, the "Slave Ship" option. They wake up in the dark, stripped of gear, and in unfamiliar and confined surroundings. The ground shudders, the lights flicker, and a previously locked door half-opens, and you're off to the races!

For the GM this is a nicely controlled situation that you can use to introduce players to using various skills, then hand to hand combat, then to ranged combat almost like a tutorial if you wish. Less-disarmable characters (like the juicer) are held in higher security single occupant cells outside the general human "slave pen" and provide another way to try out skills and thinking while getting them free. the whole thing can be mapped out as a flow chart  - you don't even need a map!

For the players this means they have to try out some things without auto-starting with "shoot big gun". I had the human-form dragon, the GB pilot, and the cyber-knight start out in the "gen-pop" pen as they all look like normal humans without some kind of special scan. Admittedly, ridiculously high physical stats make things like forcing open a door much easier but I do want them to get somewhere so this is not really a problem. Our heroes forced the door open, ventured down a hall, found some doors labelled "Special Prisoner Containment" and with the help of some NPC's (I have no serious magic PC's and his restraints were mainly magical)  freed the juicer.  

Part 3 - Combat!
Moving through the next set of doors led to a group of humanoids in armor with pistols and vibro-knives - combat commenced! The basics of combat came back pretty quickly but we were all making wrong assumptions about who or what is or has mega-damage pretty much every round. The knight's Psi-Sword was probably their best weapon (remember that they're all basically naked) until the juicer slapped the pistol out of one crewman's hand, caught it, and then shot him in the face with it - all in the same round! The dragon was the victim of horrendous dice-rolling and did almost nothing during the fight - the wild die doesn't always save you! I'm sure we got some rules wrong here but it helped to shake the rust off. 


Part 5 - Gearing Up!
After this fight they reached some kind of control room that was connected to the armory where all of the prisoner gear was locked up. Several failed hacking attempts and several successful strength checks later they were picking up their gear and some "backups" as well. The Glitter Boy pilot was particularly thrilled at this point. 

Part 6 - The Big Fight
They had several options after getting their stuff back but the ongoing explosions, sounds of firing, and "whoosh" noises from outside led them to make "getting out" a priority. They took an elevator down to the lowest level of whatever they were in, The doors open and ...


... they appear to be in a large flooded room shaped like a U with ships docked on both sides. The elevator opens at the base of the "U" and there is daylight shining in an opening at the top of the "U". It's basically a hangar for waterborne attack craft and most of the attack boats are already gone. There is one still docked near the party and they immediately start after it. 

The boat has two deck gunners warming up their stations and a single full conversion borg watching aft. The juicer takes a shot at him which does very little and the fight is on! The borg gets off one shot with his railgun then the dragon sheds his human form, flies up, and flames the entire deck, setting it on fire, killing the two gunners and shaking the borg. The juicer and the cyber-knight charge in on him and out comes the chain greatsword to test their skill and protection. 


After this brief flurry of actions an armored figure emerges from a different elevator on the other side of the docking bay - a figure wielding a red psi-sword. "Duel of the Fates" fires up out of nowhere as he and the Cyber-Knight take stock of each other. Then the Glitter Boy declares "Everybody Get Down" and unloads the boom gun into the red-saber knight.

The boom gun does a lot of damage and ignores a lot of armor. After the first shot the red knight has taken 4 wounds but managed to soak one (DM bennie) so is still on his feet. We imagined he's just punched full of hole except for a line that perfectly matches where his psi-sword was when the blast hit him. He sneers at the party.

Then the GB fires a second shot and erases Mr. Red Sabre from the planet. Completely.


The juicer, knight, and dragon are all fighting the borg but are having a hard time getting past his armor. They've hurt him but it could be a long fight. Then they all back off and the big gun speaks for the third time and blows the borg into fragments while largely removing the upper deck of the attack boat, The controls are intact as they are inside what was the control cabin or bridge, but the boat is definitely a convertible now. 

They figure out the controls and jet out of the larger ship into the daylight. They spot a shoreline not too far away and speed for it as they watch Coalition SAMAS and skycycles making attack runs on the larger ship where they had been prisoners. They safely make it to land ... but what land?



The Aftermath
I know we mangled the combat rules in that last part as there was a lot going on. Autofire - that could have been a lot nastier if I had thought about it and there were several missed opportunities on both sides to do other cool things. The knight's psi-sword seemed overpowered against the normal crewmen but under powered against the borg. 

The good thing about the "slave ship escape" opening is that it lets me drop them anywhere in the world near a shoreline. The even better thing about ending it just as they land is that I can change my mind now about where they are and they will never even know the difference.

Our youngest gamer was hating life when his character was running around naked but he was cackling with glee once he finally got to fire the big gun. It is every bit as nasty as advertised and it's a medium burst template which means things like the red knight's -1 to be hit power doesn't help as you don't aim at a target, you aim at a spot on the ground, and everything near that spot gets blasted with fragments. It's going to be fun.

Everyone had a good time, including me, so it is going into the rotation. I'm going to re-read the rules and work up some cheat sheets for combat, psi, and magic to make things easier next time. I have the general SW cheatsheets but I want some Rifts-specific ones for this. 

Next time: Strangers in a Strange Land!





Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Looking Back and Looking Ahead



2017 was an interesting year - the year I ran more different games and less of any one game. It was also a year I filled in a lot of boardgame "gaps" that I had been feeling for a long time. It was also the year 40K was reborn and became even more our Number One miniatures game.

  • I ran a few sessions of Mutants and Masterminds and then it just fizzled as my players were unable to gather at the same time and other games moved into the space this created.
  • I ran a few sessions of our very leisurely d6 Star Wars campaign earlier in the year.
  • I ran one session of Runequest. Hey, "one" is better than "zero"!
  • I was determined to get in more experience with the FFG Star Wars game and for a while I did - I ran 4-5 sessions of it this year and feel cautiously optimistic about it.  
  • I have been trying to get back to having a regular Savage Worlds game on the schedule and I briefly achieved this while running a few sessions of our Deadlands campaign but then it too sputtered to a stop as Player Schedule Incompatibility Syndrome reared it's head again.
  • I ran 4-5 sessions of 5th edition D&D using "Keep on the Borderlands" to kick off our experiment with the current big thing in RPGs.
  • I ended up running 4-5 more in a  second, separate 5E campaign using "Storm King's Thunder" for more of the typical schedule issues. 
The single biggest issue (and I know I'm not alone here) is schedules: I have college kids with their work and school schedules, I have adults with work and family schedules, and it's a real challenge to get those to sync up regularly. It gets an order of magnitude more difficult when trying to keep the same group of players together for a particular campaign! Now about a year ago I outlined my approach to managing this and that's pretty much what we have done and it works - with some considerations I will describe in a future post. 

In spite of the challenges I am still getting to run a lot so some things are going well. 


Looking back to last year's kick-off post, well ...
  • I was noting that 5E had not replaced Pathfinder and seemed unlikely to do so - weeeell...
  • One goal was to rejuvenate or kill the Pathfinder campaign I was running. I did accomplish this at least. 
  • I was trying to make a Supers game a regular ongoing thing. That briefly appeared to be working, then it fizzled. My players all seem interested but it never really seems to be the top priority. I may have to resign myself to it just being that way here and keeping some things ready as a fill-in option.
  • I also resolved to do more Star Wars - I did!
  • I didn't run any more DCC, Shadowrun, or Gamma World but I did manage to squeeze in more Savage Worlds and a session of Runequest so partial success there. 

Enough rear-view mirror - what does 2018 look like?

Well 5th is here to stay for us for now. I expect to finish SKT and probably move on to Tomb of Annihilation in that campaign. I expect to finish the Keep and move on to the next thing in that campaign. I halfway expect us to end up with a third campaign in it as well - why not? 

We're regrouping on the FFG Star Wars and I expect we will at least finish Beyond the Rim early this year. After that I am not sure. I'd like to do some more with it but it will depend on the players. I expect the d6 game to continue.

The third main game will be Savage Worlds but right now it looks like it will be in the form of Rifts. Rifts! I'm set to run a kick-off session this Saturday so we will see how that goes. Assuming we have fun with it I could see it becoming the "other" game we play on a somewhat regular schedule. If it fades out then Deadlands will likely make a comeback. 

Anyway it's shaping up to be a good year - I have a clear course, a decent plan, some backup plans, and interested players!

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Day 29: What has been the best-run RPG Kickstarter you have backed?




As of today I have been a part of about 30 Kickstarters and about 20 of those have been related to tabletop RPG's. I have received the promised rewards on every single one of them other than the most recent ones and even on those I may have a PDF already while we wait for books to print.

Most of them have been fun and interesting. the M&M 10th anniversary run was cool and the RQ2 KS turned up a lot of old material and released it as PDFs.

There are two that stand out however:


Spirit of '77 had a tone that stood out right from the beginning. The concept, the video updates, and the follow-up and delivery were all top notch. That was a really great job.





The other one is a company, not one particular KS. Pinnacle, the Savage Worlds guys, has done a consistently excellent job with Kickstarters. I've been a part of Weird Wars Rome, Deadlands: Stone and a Hard Place, Deadlands: Good Intentions, and Rifts Savage Worlds and every one of them has come thru with everything promised, no surprises, and pretty much on time. I like their game, I like their settings, and I like the way they handle their business. For a smaller company they have a damned impressive track record and I'm interested in anything and everything they do in the future.