40K Friday - Not a lot of 40K - It's mainly about D&D Mini's this week

 Not playing much 40K here right now so while I'm doing a little work here and there on the Tyranids, Orks, and Fists I am mostly sitting out the Pariah Nexus stuff for now. It may change but it's not like I don't have a backlog and other things to focus on as well.

Among both of those things are several Age of Sigmar armies and I do have some interest in getting the new rulebook but for now I will likely just use the free download edition starter packs if we get a chance to play. No strong opinions on it yet other than realizing I have too damn many armies for a game I play rarely these days. Ah well ... I at least figured a fast painting scheme that I like and think will work for the pile of Stormcasts I've built up. More on that down the road.

The main focus this week though has been D&D miniatures - mainly miniatures for the upcoming campaign.  It's weird how a lifetime of picking up miniatures for the game leaves some surprising gaps when I stop to take inventory. Some things that are fairly common D&D monsters - like Bugbears - turn out to be completely absent from my collection while I have 5+ Kenku of all things which I might have used once in the last 20 years.

Yeah like these

Back in the early days the main focus for a lot of us was getting some decent miniatures for our own characters and ones our friends might use too. The monsters were a secondary concern. I had a few, as did most of my friends, but they were rarely enough to run a full encounter. The monster stuff really took off when the plastic D&D miniatures came out around 2000 with the launch of 3E because they were numerous and fairly cheap with the bonus of being pre-painted so they didn't add to whatever backlog some of us might have had. WOTC has kept these things going through several generations now and Pathfinder has their own line as well and it is truly a glorious time for building up a stable of monsters for your fantasy game. 

Regardless of the picture up top I am pretty well stocked with elementals - those things turn up all the time as either opponents or summoned allies - so I am doing pretty well there. But there are some blind spots like the bugbears - also hobgoblins and human guard/soldier types. I often use my Warhammer minis in my RPG's (so never needed official D&D Orks) so my Chaos Marauders and Chaos Warriors appear regularly on the battlemat, my Daemons show up as needed,  and my Beastmen are what I use for Gnolls but sometimes you want a different look.  So I've been doing a lot of specific searches for the things that appear in the ToEE to try and fill out the missing elements - heh.

I did this a few years ago when I started running Odyssey of the Dragonlords and I realized I was missing a lot of the creatures from Greek Mythology so I went on a sustained acquisition campaign to pick up enough of everything to run the adventure. It was very satisfying to pull out whatever I needed for the campaign

For our Deadlands campaign I already have a pile of Deadlands and general old west miniatures from previous runs so I didn't really need anything else and for the weird stuff I tend to draw on the D&D and Warhammer miniature files anyway. Pretty sure I used ogres, lizardmen, flesh hounds, a skeletal dragon and a bloodthirster during that game - but I didn't need anything new. 

With MechWarrior I did buy some new mech miniatures but some of that was just getting into the new style plastic stuff. I did lay some groundwork for future battles but I didn't actually need anything new to run the game.

Then we get to the new Temple campaign ... 

I'm going through the Moathouse and the ruins of  the Temple and the various wandering encounters and I'm just stunned at how much of this stuff I do not have. I've been doing this for over 40 years and I don't have bugbears?! I just ran Keep on the Borderlands 5 years ago and there's a whole lair full of them - what did I use? Probably beastmen, but still - I should really be able to run the Keep at least with no missing units. So I resolved to fix that this time - pick up enough of whatever to run all of the encounters without having to get too crazy with substitutions. 

He's waiting to get some time on the table ...

I've made a lot of progress but I am not there yet. The gaps are still weird, like Gargoyles - how do I not have gargoyles? I think every 80's module TSR published had at least one gargoyle in it but somehow I never grabbed one. Now, oh look - here's a room with twelve of them waiting to defend the area ... great.  I'm thinking my old Dark Elf harpies may have to assist there because I can't see needing that many gargoyles for anything else, ever. 

So anyway - tips for anyone else who's thinking about this kind of thing:

• eBay is the go-to here for specific individual miniatures, especially the ones coming out of the random box thing like D&D minis tend to be sold. There are separate stores online that do this too but eBay will let you compare prices across multiple sellers.
• If you need a lot of something look at fantasy army stuff like Warhammer, Age of Sigmar, Kings of War, etc. if you need 20 Orcs it's likely going to be cheaper to pick up a regiment that way than buying D&D ones though you may have to decide how important a paint job is to you.
• Individual big monsters are worth a look like this also - dragons, giants, demons, chimeras, hydras - these get a lot of use in miniature wargames too. There are whole units of minotaurs in the various Warhammer games for example - you might a better deal on 3 or 6 that way if you need a few.
• Buying multiples makes the shipping very reasonable so if you know you need, say, 3 harpies, 5 satyrs, 5 centaurs, a hydra, and some giant scorpions it's worth tracking down a single seller that can cover as much of that as possible. That's an important trick to making this more economically reasonable.
• So if you get 3-4-5 of something odds are they will be identical - how do you tell them apart? Well, on traditional miniatures I paint them differently. On the pre-painted stuff I do this:
  
  
  
  You can pick up these colored dot stickers at an office supply store or on Amazon. They are not expensive and you just use the color to distinguish them - "47 points of damage to green and a Dex save or he's prone" - that kind of thing. 

One final note on storing these things once you have acquired them: the fancy hand-painted fragile stuff goes into the display case or a padded Chessex type case but the pre-painted ones go into a more utilitarian home:

The minis are pretty durable so utility drawers + a label-maker and you have decent enough storage that can be brought out of a closet whenever you need it. I have this kind of setup for the plastic Star Wars miniatures and one for my old west stuff as well and it has worked fine for me for years.  

So there's a bunch of mini talk that is -not- tied to 40K for a change!

Next week: let's talk about the rules.

Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Setting Details

 

Well the setting is obviously Greyhawk but it was not automatic. I considered running it in the Forgotten Realms - mainly because it's pretty familiar to my group (and to everyone else right?) - but ToEE is one of the definitive Greyhawk adventures where the locations and the gods and many other elements of the thing are just tied to that world and are not really generic. Sure, it's possible to relocate it - I've done it - but this just feels like the right move. 

The unfamiliarity with Greyhawk is now a plus as well. With my guys being somewhat burned out on 5th edition D&D changing up the system to some degree and also changing the setting to one they haven't seen in a long time (or ever for some) will freshen things up as well. My first 3rd Edition campaign was set in Greyhawk 23 or so years ago and part of that campaign was Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil which ended in a memorable TPK that still comes up in conversation today. After switching to a different setting for a while that group eventually came back to Greyhawk with a new party because they wanted to finish the adventure. They didn't, but we had some memorable moments there too. Three of my players from those campaigns are still with me for this game so I expect a lot of callbacks to those days and hey, even some of the NPCs from back then might show up.

The other issue here - strictly my own issue - is when to set this thing. When I was running Greyhawk back in 2nd Edition I decided to set all of my games in the same timeline and I retroactively decided the C.Y. 576 date in the original folio was effectively 1976 in the real world and just advanced things year for year with the real world calendar. So all of our games in the 80's were in the 580s and then my 2E games in the 90's were in the 590's and I kept that going with the 3E stuff as well so my own Return to the Temple was in 601 and later in my Greyhawk. This wrecks the official continuity of course with the Wars and From the Ashes etc. but I don't really care about maintaining a sacred canon timeline anyway - it's  MY setting and my players' setting, and we will do with it as we please in our own games. 

The only time this really causes consternation is when we replay a particular adventure or as in this case when we played a sequel 20 years before we played through the original. I'm partly inclined to reset the whole thing back to say 574 and keep it in time with the current year all over again. That said though, since I have some of the same players, I'm also inclined to keep it going and just say the history of the original temple's destruction still applies, then the Return decades later, and now a revival of the original still more decades later. I'm still thinking it over and it doesn't really impact our actual play but I will eventually make a call here.

Within Greyhawk the location of Hommlet and the temple are well documented but I'm looking to add some more details to the area - like side adventures. 

• I'm thinking B1 (which I also have the Goodman Games version of and have not run) would be a nice drop-in.
• I may convert the old Haunted Keep and drop it in somewhere as well using the Dragonsfoot expansion as a base. 
• If the need arises I could use Sunless Citadel. I should say re-use as that was part of that original 3E campaign back when.
• Forge of Fury would also be a decent option if I need something interesting beyond starting level.
• Some of the One-Page Dungeon entries should be handy as well for short expeditions. 
• Who knows, maybe the old DMG Monastery will even make an appearance! I ran it as "Dungeon of the Fire Opal" from an issue of Dungeon I believe - this was also back in 3E. A few tweaks and I don't think my veterans will recognize it.

I think lower level stuff will be more useful early in the campaign as I expect that the group will focus in on the temple proper as they dig in and as their characters become more durable.

Early on in this exercise I was also thinking I would love to find a way to work in the Saltmarsh series as well but I think it's too far away and best kept as a potential side campaign if the need arises. That way characters could cross over if wanted but it wouldn't be an assumed part of the game. If we need an extended side expedition because people are going to miss or if they get tired of dungeon delving the whole sailing the Azure Sea angle would make for a nice break and they could stay with it through similar levels or break off and head up to Hommlet and the temple if they wanted to later. I like to have some contingency plans in mind as it makes it easier to lay down some connections just in case. 

Long term the goal is to run through the entire ToEE - hopefully without a TPK this time - and then journey forth to go Against the Giants. Then of course the dream is to investigate the Drow and their spider-queen, possibly with an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks along the way. It's a lot to pack in to one campaign and it's a heavy diet of classic adventures but I know they will be a blast - so why not aim high?

More to come for sure. 

Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Session Zero

 

Feels like it's official now.

So we had a little get-together last weekend and talked through the new campaign and enough details that it effectively turned into a session zero for the game. Decisions that we made (taken from the summary email I sent out afterwards):

- Point Buy for stats

My group is not terribly concerned with balance between PC's but this was the one option everyone could agree on. It should be fine.

- No alignment (other than for your own thoughts on your character). It's not mechanically present in ToV anyway so it doesn't hurt anything game-wise.

In general I am not in favor or pulling alignment out of D&D type games as I think it's one of the building blocks of the genre but this system does not include it so it's not really a mechanical issue. We opted to leave it as an optional shorthand for describing things - because 40+ years of habit will not go away quickly  - but we're OK not having mechanics for it. How very modern of us.

- Replacement characters if you die will be same level min XP. So if you're a 5th level character with 10,000 XP and you die then your replacement PC is 5th level with 6500. 

A lot of my more recent games - mainly Savage Worlds -  have taken the very modern (soft) approach of handing out XP every session and keeping all characters at the same number regardless of attendance and keeping your XP total if your character dies. This simplifies things for the party and for the DM  but I wanted to incorporate some old school approaches this time and to change up the XP awards I had to loosen up the "dead character" policy a little.

- We will use a "get out of the dungeon by the end of the session" rule. There is a %chance to get out if we don't actually RP it and if you fail t he roll there is a table for things that could happen to your character. I will modify the one we looked over last night to take out the off-screen death result.

This is something that's been around for a while on various blogs like The Alexandrian and Jeffs Gameblog but I've never actually tried it out myself. The idea is to provide a strong incentive to get your characters out of the dungeon by the end of a session. This is another piece of "restructuring" how we play. We run almost every week but not everyone is going to make it to every session. If you stop in the middle of a fight or 3 levels down in the dungeon and then the mix of players is different for the next session you have some re-working to do. In the past we just handwaved things but this is not always satisfying and in the Battletech game I was running it could really change up the situation. For this campaign I would like to start every session "back in town" so that the group can go in whatever direction they want each time. I did agree to change any lethal results - likely to a "captured" type entry - as no one wants their character to die offscreen to a random roll. My guys like to get their characters killed by their own decisions! This also enables some other changes discussed below.

- Using this approach lets us start every session fresh regardless of who was there last time or who is there this time. I think this will be easier to manage. This also means we won't be doing automatic XP every session. We may get some level differences in the party but I don't think that will be a big problem. Characters who aren't there can use the Downtime system to try and accomplish something even if they aren't fighting evil that week. There might be some timing issues there but we will work through them. We will also look at Downtime if I have to cancel a session.

Individual XP! If you don't play you don't level! Having an actual Downtime system gives those PC's something to do when they miss but it's not an automatic XP boost.

- The backup game will be side quests in this same game. If we only have 3 people, say, then instead of diving into the Temple you might want to investigate rumors of a bandit camp or a haunted cave nearby - something that might not need the full resources of the entire group but could still be fun. This might also lead to making a few side characters back at 1st level as the party levels up.

We've had fun with various backup games, often ICONS or Marvel Heroic, but by going with this "out of the dungeon" approach then even a small group could go out and accomplish something within the same game - so we likely won't need a backup game. I love being able to change things up but it is a huge pain as the DM to find out the day before - or the day of - the game that we are too short to continue the main campaign and I need to switch out to another game. I mean, I've done it, but it makes for more work and less fun going in. This approach may not solve everything but I want to try it out and see.

- Henchman & hirelings are also a thing in this campaign. In old school D&D you could pay for "hirelings" to join your crew and you could also acquire "henchmen" which were more like friends & allies and were limited by your charisma stat. This is an old school adventure so there are people in Hommlett and in other places that may be willing to join you for a share of the loot or sheer gratitude in some cases. It's something to think about, especially for those nights when we have lower turnout.

This was just a reminder that these are a thing and are very present in this adventure (Temple of Elemental Evil). We talked about it a little bit and this could also help with how those sessions go when we are short on players as well. Another old school piece that can help alter the feel of the game. I remember many sessions back when that involved hirelings, sidekicks, war dogs, horses, and mules and I'm going to try and push them in that direction a bit.

- In general if there's something we need that's not in a ToV book yet (like hirelings etc.) we will fall back on the 5E DMG etc.

Just establishing the precedent here. We are keeping strictly to Tales of the Valiant for character options but as the DM if there's a number or a system I need I will go to the 5E book until the ToV book arrives sometime in August.

Characters so far:

Grognard Mike: Bard

Battletech Terry: Ranger

Paladin Steve: ?

Boom-Gun Brandon: Fighter

Shootist Will: Mechanist 

Variable Dave: Cleric (War)

Former Apprentice Blaster and Next-Gen Patty were not at the session and have yet to chime in. Mike had multiple character concepts ready to go while Steve was all over the place - maybe a Paladin? Maybe a Rogue? Who knows? I suspect he will end up going Paladin though.

It's an interesting mix - no wizard so far, just a Bard on the Arcane side of things. Mechanist is ToV's crafter type class and it's not exactly an Artificer as it does not cast spells - it makes gadgets that have some magical power but does not have a spell list. It does look interesting and we will see where Will takes it. 

So that's where we stand right now. It will be a few weeks before we start playing as half my players run the annual convention they are involved in but there will still be some chatter and obviously there are some more character decisions to make. I expect those to be settled before session 1. I will also be setting up an Obsidian Portal page for this campaign and I will link it here too.