Meme-ish Monday Returns - Super Bowl Edition

 

February Battletech

 

After laying dormant for at least a decade Battletech has been poking its head up regularly for the last few years and it did so again over the weekend. With schedule conflicts interrupting the RPG plans the night was open so we went with b-tech for me. Paladin Steve, and his son Apprentice P-Hawk ... because he always take a Phoenix Hawk. 

We agreed on 140 tons as a limit and ended up with Steve taking a Battlemaster and a Hatchetman while I took a Thunderbolt and a Crusader and Apprentice PH took a Phoenix Hawk (of course), a Warhammer, and a Wasp. This was a 3025 fight as it's just simpler than adding in all the Clan-era stuff to a small one-off fight. The battle took place on two mapboards. 

We played 7 turns and it was all fairly evenly matched though Some high points:

• Apprentice PH ran his PH out far enough that he took a lot of fire early. He did manage to back off so it survived until the end - unlike prior battles he has played.
• Having 3 mechs did give him an advantage as far as the initiative sequence goes because it's mech-by-mech and so we will avoid that next time. 
• For the first time in a long time we had two attempts at Death-From-Above. Neither of them connected but the miss damage didn't cripple anyone so it came out alright.
• We used some nifty markers I picked up online that indicate modifiers for movement for each mech and they did help a lot with running multiple mechs and I can see them helping even more as we escalate things. 
• The last turn saw some real craziness...
• My Crusader finally tagged the Warhammer with both LRM-15s and one cluster managed to punch through and score a crit on his SRM ammo and blew him off of the board!
• Paladin Steve's Battlemaster tagged the Phoenix Hawk in the head - the second head shot on him - and knocked the pilot out!
• Then Steve's Hatchetman chopped into the Wasp and blew up -his- SRM ammo, leaving Apprentice PH with two exploded mech and one still standing with an unconscious pilot! It was the most amazing single turn we've had in years. 

Handy - You can find these on Amazon and eBay and probably other places. 

The P-Hawk and the Warhammer were early favorites for many of us so it was a lot of fun to see the teenager picking those two right away. We could have played this battle in the mid to late 80's with these same mechs and that's a deliberate choice on my part to keep it simple and indulge in a little nostalgia as well. Putting some more hours on these miniatures I painted back in the 80's & 90's is a lot of fun too. 

There has been some talk about running a Mechwarrior campaign for a while now and playing again really woke that up for me. I spent some time last year looking at some different modern to SF RPG systems to find one I thought would work well with it but I have yet to find one I like and think is a great fit. It would probably be Savage Worlds at this point if I was picking today. But, I have come around to just running MW 3rd edition straight-up, allowing us to plug into all of those house supplements for character details. I'm really leaning towards using it for the opening stages of a campaign and determining if it works for us well enough to use it for the rest of the way. More to come on this for sure.

Green Ronin's Valiant Adventures RPG Kickstarter - Uses M&M

 

So this is similar to what GR did with DC Adventures years ago - a specific-universe game using M&M rules. That seems like a good idea for me and might bring some additional attention to M&M. Here's a link to the Kickstarter.

Looks like they are doing it as 2 books (rulebook + setting book) plus a GM kit at this point which I would say is perfectly legit as an approach. Steve Kenson is the designer so I am confident it will be decent and live up to the "fully compatible with M&M 3E"  statement. They have made their goal now so it's happening for sure. 

I will say I'm not a huge Valiant fan - I've tried to get into some of their books before and it never really took but as an M&M supplement in effect I am interested. It mentions they have access to Valiant's art files so it should like like it's supposed to look as well. 

There is a free quickstart PDF out on GR's Site and DTRPG too - I will review and post something here soon. 

Deadlands: The Flood - Things I Could Have Done Better as a GM

I had one last topic I wanted to cover here after running the latest Deadlands campaign to completion - what I could have done better. Anytime I have a campaign wind down I inevitably think of some things I could have done differently - and likely better. Some of this is perspective looking back but sometimes I realize things and try to course-correct while the campaign is still running. 

• System Mastery - I've been running and playing Savage Worlds to a lesser or greater degree since it was published over 20 years ago. Casually, I know it like the back of my hand. When it comes to certain details though I rely heavily on my players to share their knowledge as things come up in play. I could be better at this and next time I will be.
• There are some general rules that get tweaked when a new edition comes out like Shaken, the various conditions that can be imposed, or how backlash works, and those tend to catch me the first few times they come up. The chase rules change with every edition and those take a while to re-learn each time. 
• Edges and Flaws are where a lot of the chrome comes in with this system and they get revised in every edition - sometimes even within a single edition - and more than once I have run a monster or NPC as though one of these worked like it did the "old" way. 
• Powers are another area that gets tweaked quite a bit. The power itself may not be dramatically different but the extras and options often do and I should really pay more attention to these kinds of details before I start throwing dice with them.  

Lots of good pics from movies and TV out there for a western campaign

• NPCs - I made an effort to individualize NPCs in this campaign and made sure to have images to show my players for many of them and this campaign was good about having names for almost every NPC one could encounter, but I am not sure many of them really stuck with my players. This is strictly a thing in my head, not something they have mentioned, but I do wonder about it after the fact. Anywhere the party is going to spend a lot of time it would be beneficial to work on more of this in advance.
• For example, the Shan Fan run has a lot of distinctive NPCs built-in as it's a core part of the storyline here and I think it went pretty well but the Perdition election arc is presented in much less detail and I did not really fill out the townspeople beforehand like I could have done. It would have made for some more memorable characters at least.
• That said my own award for "unusual NPC of the campaign" goes to Born in a Bowl's severed finger which had a definite personality while it was with the party. Holding a grudge against the character who botched the knife work that created it gave us some humor opportunities that most campaigns don't see.

• The Setting - Deadlands has some very distinct qualities as a setting, both mechanically and just as a supernatural old west campaign. I think I hit a lot of these in play but I could have done more.
• I did not emphasize the classic tale-tellin'-to-offset-the-fear-level part of play that figured a lot in old (and in some new) Deadlands adventures. I don't think my players missed it but I could have paid more attention to he fear levels of various areas and made that a bigger part of things. 
• The Flood in particular is also heavily affected by Famine and I could have played this up more too as it's supposed to permeate the whole region. It was a factor in one of our adventures regarding the only decent ranch in the area, and it did come up in talking about the appeal of Lost Angels food program to the common man, but I don't feel like I made it ever-present as they were traveling through the state. I don't know that the campaign suffered from it really, but it's a part of the flavor of the campaign area that I could have used more frequently.

Those are my take-aways from this one - now on to the next game!

40K Friday - End of Year Tyranids

 

I spent some time leading up to the new year getting more big bugs built and feel pretty good about the progress here  - adding 4 Tyrannofexes and a Tervigon to the swam makes it playable now - granted with a pretty weird force composition - but that's just how it is when you're building the force. 

On these models specifically these are:

• A Tervigon with crushing claws because I figure it will be surrounded by gaunts most of the time but having some heavy-hitting punch in the middle of that could be useful against another monster or a tank that wades into things.
  Now with 5 of this kit you might ask why I didn't build a second one instead of a 4th 'fex and the answer is that I don't really see myself playing this army for swarms of little bugs, especially to the point that a second Tervigon becomes useful. I'm more Nidzilla-inclined so while I can see taking one to babysit some Termagants I'm not particularly interested in more.
• 3 Tyrannofexes with rupture cannons because it's the biggest gun in the 'nid army and while points may rise and fall over the course of the edition there will always be some use for a really big gun, probably several really big guns - so I built 3 of them to be sure. 
• The 4th T-fex has the acid spray because I think a giant flamethrower type weapon could be useful at times too. I did consider magnetizing some of these guys but I decided to just commit to this mix and get them built for now. 

The goal for now is to get the rest of the army built while it's cold out, then spray them once it warms up and start painting them after that. I do have a paint scheme in mind - still needs a test run but I think it will be solid. 

Savage Worlds - Deadlands as a Game Setting

 

I wanted to make one more point after wrapping up our campaign and that was to discuss Deadlands as a setting for an RPG because after running these 30+ sessions I am  somewhat unexpectedly - not tired of it. I've thought about why so let's talk about that.

I've been picking up Deadlands books since the game was released in the late 90's - 1st edition, 2nd edition, and multiple Savage Worlds editions. There are a lot of Deadlands books out there with campaign material in them but each edition has done a pretty good job of presenting the whole setting in just one of the core books. It was "The Quick and the Dead" first, then the Marshal's Guide, Then Deadlands Reloaded covered it and added some updates, and now the current "Weird West" book paints a nice broad picture with some more timeline updates and some changes to the past as well. 

The early material had a healthy dose of that popular 90's thing "The Metaplot". In this case the Reckoner's machinations to turn the world into a deadland by upping the fear level everywhere over time. This would enable them to enter the world and do even worse things to it directly. 

One of the fun parts of the Deadlands settings is that the Deadlnads: Hell on Earth campaign is a depiction of what happens if they succeed and it's rare to see a game company put that kind of thing out as a real product. 

The general direction in a Deadlands campaign is the idea that the PC's will become aware of this larger scheme at some point and take an interest in opposing these plans. That's the big picture, anyway. In the meantime your PC's can do pretty much whatever they want. 

• Want to do classic western things? There's a campaign built around a cattle drive (Blood Drive). There's a big adventure built around figuring out what's going on in one town and solving their problem (Trouble at Headstone Hill). Plus there are various shorter adventures that involve tracking down criminals and getting into gunfights.
• Want to focus on particular parts of the west? The four big plot point campaigns from Reloaded edition each focus on a different region of the U.S. with various complications tied to both the power groups in the area and the particular reckoner casing the most trouble. The Great Maze is awesome but classic Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City are all pretty amazing too. 
• Looking for a particular type of adventure? Gunfights are certainly easily available but there are creepy horror encounters, political intrigue, and chases/hunts out there too. A little bit of online research can guide you to an adventure that will likely cover a variety of opportunities for any determined posse out there.

Just as an example in our Flood campaign we opened with a gunfight, then got involved in a train derailment and robbery, tangled with some religious fanatics, did a prison break, defended a ranch from raiders & rustlers, spent a fair amount of time involved in Shan Fan triad politics, snuck into a pirate city and blew up an ironclad, came in 2nd place in a martial arts tournament, helped defend an area during a local warlord's invasion of a city, and helped set up and run fair elections for mayor in a new and growing town on the coast of the maze! Note that this is outside of the main plot of traveling Deadlands California to set up the conditions for the Flood that will wipe out a major evil - these were the things that were happening "along the way".

To me a good setting should get a GM excited about the opportunities they see and Deadlands does this every time I dig into it thinking about running a new campaign.  A lot of what I have listed above is tied to published adventure material but that's not a limiting factor. Just looking at the general setting notes followed by a flip through the critters section has me jotting down notes for future runs and it has been this way for years This last campaign let me finally pay off some of my notes like this from years ago.

The last point I will share is that I ran this game for about two years and there is still probably a third of the "Flood" book that I didn't even touch. It's full of cool stuff and I ended up not having a good place to use some of it as the campaign developed - but I still want to. That, to me, is a sign of a strong adventure. I think of all of these creatures, locations, and NPC's I didn't use and I can't help but think that we need to revisit this one at some point, even if we wait a while in between.

So there's my ringing endorsement of Savage Worlds as a system, Deadlands as a setting, and The Flood as an adventure. I normally am tired of a setting and a campaign by the time I wrap them up and ready to move on but this time I was not and it's a very welcome surprise and I am looking forward to my next walk through this world.

Wrapping up 2023 and Looking Forward to the New Year

 

It was a good year. I read more books and played more games than I did the year before. The family is good and the apprentices are operating on their own. The animals are thriving and the house and yard are in good shape so a lot is going right here. 

One new wrinkle is that since the wife tracks her books read over the course of the year I started doing that too and hit 50-something for the year. I figure over 1/week is a pretty good baseline but now I have to see if I can go higher. painting mini's, running games, and computer time all cut into this effort of course so balance is the key.

Kind of obligatory here

I only played a few games of 40K this year, one of my lower-effort years in a very long time, but I did get a lot of painting done. Maybe I can get more playing time in this year. Much of this year's painting effort will be going into the Tyranids and then probably my Imperial Guard as we delve into the mysteries of Speedpaint 2.0 and airbrushes.

Blaster and I did manage to finish up our eternal ongoing tour of Command and Colors Ancients finished. I have now played every scenario in that initial set at least twice - once from each side. Now on to the next of 5 expansions ... we probably need to pick up the pace here if we are going to finish while I am still alive.

RPG's I ran this year:

• Star Wars (FFG)
• The new Marvel RPG
• The Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG
• ICONS 
• Warhammer Fantasy RPG (2nd Edition)
• Savage Worlds Deadlands - lots of this one. 

I didn't really play much as the GM-ing seems to be my normal role these days but maybe this year that will change up some.

Going into this year we have -no- commitments. with the main campaign completed we could go in any direction and that's a good feeling for the start of a new year. I have some ideas for some smaller games and for at least one big one but right now I'm sorting through them and figuring out what order top present them in and thinking through some details on how to make them work. More to come on those for sure. 

Other-games-wise we played some Battletech, King of Tokyo, and Scrabble - of all things! As it turns out the wife is a very good Scrabble player and I have lost more games of that this year than I can remember. A new goal for '24 is to beat her at least once now.

So - things are going well here, I feel good about 2023 and I am really looking forward to 2024. Happy new year!

Savage Worlds Combat

 

I'm pretty happy with Savage Worlds as a system and I am glad that it seems to be more popular than ever now. One area I do see people questioning online is combat - particularly initiative and the damage system. Typically these people are coming over from D&D and don't really grasp that there are other ways of doing things but let's talk about these two things:

Initiative is done in Savage Worlds with cards. The GM deals out a card to each player and the high cards go before the low cards. This is a holdover from original Deadlands and Rail Wars but it just works. It's a physical reminder of when you go - once you go you toss in your card. Want to delay? Just hold onto it until you want to go. The game supports this mechanically through related edges - want to be faster? There's an edge that lets you take 2 or even 3 cards when initiative is dealt and you keep the best. For a level-headed character you can take an edge that lets you trade in your card if it's below a certain value. 

And yes, initiative is dealt every round. No it's not a big delay and yes, we played D&D for at least 20 years this way until 3E changed it to static initiative so it's not some radical new idea.

Finally the cards are another physical object that can help enforce the genre for your game. I've posted about it before but there is almost always some kind of card deck out there that is thematically related to whatever your running - pirates, cowboys, soldiers, superheroes, well-known space setting IP's ...

As an example of the impact this approach has on play I typically had 5-6 players per session in the Deadlands campaign I just finished. One started off with the Level-Headed edge, then pretty soon another one had it, and by the end one had the basic edge while two had the improved version and one of them had Quick as well. This means on a combat round with only 5 of them I am dealing out 10 cards for the players, plus (typically) 1-3 for the opposition, with one player possibly re-drawing several more cards. Jokers are an important card in Savage Worlds and this approach let my players mill the action deck by 10-15 cards per round from a 54 card deck. This is double what a normal party would be doing and it meant those Jokers popped up very quickly. Every Joker drawn is a package of "go first", "+2 for all actions that round", and a bennie for everyone on top of that! Towards the end there were combats where both Jokers were drawn in the same round - and that was not a good round for the bad guys. The existence of these mechanics opens up an interesting set of options for a player to explore that you don't see in other games. 

Damage in Savage Worlds is the other "rough spot" I see - mainly because it's not like D&D and does not use hit points. There is not a direct "wearing down over time mechanic" like that really. A deliberate design goal was that combatants would be up, down, or off of the table with no tracking of hit points or health. Most opponents are taken out by a single wound. Only Wild Cards, a status reserved for the PC's and major opponents, can take up to 3 wounds and still be standing. There is a "Shaken" status to indicate some kind of degraded status and there are optional rules for an intermediate type of opponent that can take multiple wounds but is not a wild card but that's it. 

Attacks involve a hit roll which, if successful, will generate a damage roll - so far just like D&D right? The next step though is to compare that roll to the target's Toughness. Meeting it or exceeding it = Shaken, exceeding it by 4 or more = a Wound for each increment of 4. It's that second part that really throws people at first. There are some nuances to it but it's really not -that- complicated.  

However this sometimes freaks people out as they bang away on an opponent and seemingly do nothing for several rounds. You might Shake them, or inflict some kind of condition with a power, but it bothers some people that there's no counter ticking down with every hit. This despite the truth that in D&D those hit points flying off have no impact on most NPCs or Monsters either - until the last one. In Savage Worlds if you are fighting an opponent who can take multiple wounds then each one of those will inflict a penalty on actions that creature takes. There are edges to offset these penalties, and powers that can do the same thing  -"Numb" was a regular player in our campaign - but again that's another way to flavor a character or monster. 

The closest thing to hit points in a Savage Worlds game are bennies. When someone takes damage they can spend a bennie to try and soak the damage - it's not a sure thing - and the supply of bennies is limited. Over the course of this campaign  I was reminded again and again that the GM's bennies are effectively the big bad's supply of hit points as once those ran out the bad guys tended to drop fairly quickly. There is always the temptation to use them as "rage bennies" to reroll an attack or damage roll, but most of the time you want to keep your opposition around for another round of troubling the party. 

This just seems to be a hard thing for people coming in from D&D in particular to get over. Shadowrun and Mutants & Masterminds have some similarities to this approach where you are comparing damage to another number and then generating results based on the comparison. It's different from D&D for sure but it works just fine and is a lot of fun.

So in my opinion combat in Savage Worlds does live up to the Fast, Furious, and Fun tagline. 

• I don't think I had a fight last more than 7 rounds in my entire campaign and once players have a little bit of experience the pace of those rounds is pretty quick. D&D 3E and Pathfinder in particular tended to have long combats made up of long rounds where players might get bored waiting for their next chance to act. That was never a problem here. Also, in spite of this faster flow, combat is still rewarding as many different approaches and tactics can be tried - it's not a static regimen of "hitting for X damage" round after round as you whittle away at the dragon.
• Furious comes into it when characters are doing things every round - there's not a lot of need for multi-round actions. Also, the rules allow for multiple actions beyond the basic move + act as much as a player wants to push things by imposing a -2 cumulative penalty to additional actions with no actual cap on how much one can try.
• Fun is a factor with interesting abilities from Edges and Powers plus mechanical things like manipulating the cards and facing tough choices on how to spend those bennies when things hit the fan. Also, exploding dice - particularly damage dice -  add some excitement and occasionally some despair, depending on which side of the roll you are on. 

It's just a really strong system that runs smoothly and is fun to play. I've run it many times over the years and I expect I will be running it again fairly soon. 

Savage Worlds - Post-Campaign Thoughts on Characters

 

I wanted to write this post because I was expecting that after running Deadlands for two years - and having played in a 50 Fathoms campaign before that one - well, I was expecting to be feeling some system burnout. That feeling when the mechanics of a game system start to grate, characters and monsters start to feel samey, and the game's possibilities narrow down to what you've already done. It's a feeling that means it's time to change games for a while. This has happened to me with various versions of D&D, Pathfinder, and Traveller, among other games. Often it comes up near the end of a long campaign.

Unexpectedly though I do not feel this way about Savage Worlds. I've run or played a lot of Deadlands, a little Hell on Earth, quite a bit of Necessary Evil and 50 Fathoms, and a fair amount of Rifts - and that's just the published campaign stuff. There is a bunch more that I want to run from books on the shelf to homebrew ideas that demand attention. The system really does hit a sweet spot for me between playability and flexibility and having characters that are just detailed enough to feel unique. A lot of lighter systems are either OSR where one low level fighter looks a whole lot like another low level fighter or else they use such light mechanics that some kind of trait or tag system is the only differentiator between characters and mechanically they tend to all do the same thing. There's a place for all of these of course but a lot of times I end up wanting a little more crunch to build on for both my players and my NPC's and creatures. Savage Worlds apparently hits that just right for me. 

That said it's not a skinny rulebook anymore. The current Adventure Edition is 200 pages long BUT the biggest section is for building or advancing characters at about 60 pages. The gear section is about 15 pages and that covers from medieval weapons to guns to vehicles to armor. Combat is 10 pages. The powers section is about 30 pages and that's where a lot of the chrome is for certain character types and monsters too. There's a whole section called the Adventure Tool Kit which covers special cases - chases, mass combat, travel, wealth rules - stuff that won't come up every session but is useful to have.  So around half of the book is character-focused rules and the rest is running the game - I think that's a solid balance. Earlier thoughts on it here. 

The main thing for me is that it just runs well - the playability factor is high. Characters have a lot of options but you typically do not need to consult a long list or a long chapter just to do what your character does. Despite being simpler in a lot of ways characters still manage to feel unique. My Deadlands party has a Shaman, a Martial Artist, a Mad Scientist, a Hexslinger, and 3 non-magic using gunslinger types that have each specialized in an area: one is the "put a lot of bullets in the air" guy, one is a sniper (and a bounty hunter), and one is a pistol-focused gunfighter (and a Texas Ranger). That means three of my players could be stepping on each other's toes constantly yet they don't. There is some occasional friendly competition between them and comments when the dice are just not with someone but no one has complained about a lack of options or a lack of mechanical individuality.

The only time there was some mention of a lack of options was at Legendary as there were not a ton of Legendary-specific edges. To be fair though this is where most games will spend the least amount of time - in my experience, anyway - so it's not nearly the problem it could be. Still, there's an area that could be improved. I would especially like to see setting-specific Legendary edges as that would give players something to aim for within a specific  campaign and show what the heavy hitters in a campaign world are supposed to look like. It would also help with flavoring them at the higher tiers.

The way characters are structured and advancement is handled is also a part of this. There is a rough level type structure in that there are 5 character tiers from "Novice" to "Legendary" which are based on the number of advancements the characters have received and stat advancement and certain edges are gated by tier. So while it is pretty open and loose it is possible to gauge a group's power level this way. Also, while there are definite Archetypes in most of the published settings there is nothing as formal as the way classes are handled in most class and level games. There are benefits to specializing in certain skills and combining certain edges to enhance whatever area you want to excel in, but there is nothing mechanically making you do this. The closest thing you see to 3E-style Feat trees are that some edges may have a prerequisite and there may be an "improved" version of a particular edge so you're looking at a string of 3 edges at the most to really dig into something. This means that your character can be good at more than one thing or in one area! Not all games accommodate this. 

The one area the game does restrict to a notable degree is Arcane Backgrounds. This is the magic/psychic/super option where you can have special powers and you can only take one. So your Mad Scientist cannot also be Blessed or a Huckster. I have no problem with this as it serves as both a balancing control (no getting around the particular trappings or restrictions of on AB by taking another), a playability control (no having to figure out any weird interactions between spells or magic items when you're both a wizard and a cleric), and it also enforces some niche protection in a game that is pretty open otherwise. It's one of the absolutes in the system and I've never had a player complain about it. Considering that there are typically few or no restrictions on the kinds of powers you can take with each one, it's not terribly restrictive mechanics-wise. Flavor counts for a lot so under these rules a Blessed doesn't have to be the party healer- he can throw holy fire or turn invisible or whatever else he wants to do.

So throughout this campaign my players never felt constrained in their options and neither did I when it came to NPCs and critters both. Edges, Hindrances, and Powers all provided enough variety, when skinned the right way, that there was plenty of flavor to go around. 

More on some other aspects of the game tomorrow. 

Deadlands: The Flood - Our Finale

 

The City of Lost Angels ... up until Saturday night anyway ...

This weekend we managed to wrap up our Deadlands campaign with an epic finish that I believe left everyone satisfied. The only thing left for the party to do was to shed some blood on the doorstep of Reverend Grimme's grand cathedral in Lost Angels and that's exactly what they did ... eventually. 

If you've read or played the adventure the final piece is presented as a bit of a set run - once the party drops the blood in the right spot Grimme and his 13 ghouls and some fallen angels all rush out of the cathedral and start a fight that has a 13-round timer ticking away before the flood finally hits the place. 

This is not how it went at all ...

My crew was very concerned with trying to survive the earthquake and flood they were about to start and spent quite a bit of time running through various plans to achieve this. Boats were purchased, ironclad acquisitions were contemplated, a ridiculous amount of math was done to calculate how much weight the shapeshifting Indian shaman could carry in his most extreme form - and for how long, and at what speed. I joked that he had turned into a Vulcan at one point because he was "communing with the spirits" quite a bit in this effort. 

There was a whole lot of recon in and around the city too looking for "safe ways in and routes to help them keep a low profile along the way. I emphasized that this was a city open to land and sea trade and not a tightly guarded fortress and eventually they calmed down about it.

In the end they decided they had done all of the planning they could do and said "well we have to go in" and did so.

The Approach ...

To summarize, they used the quiet, stealthy approach to get to the cathedral and then obliterated the exterior guards in two rounds of gunfire, magic and dragon flame - more on that in a minute. Smashing open the front gates they moved through the main space of the church and broke open the rear doors to the inner sanctum where Grimme and his allies were having their annual feast. This is where the fight broke out and where it stayed for about 9 rounds as they blew away the ghouls, the summoned demons, and eventually beat down the Reverend himself ... 

"Sir, there is a dragon in the cathedral ..."

Then they went outside, spilled the blood, flew off towards Perdition, and watched the mighty power of the ocean wash away the center of Grimme's power. 

Yeah it was seriously flipped from the projected finale but it still felt epic and it still worked out. They had no idea what the expected approach was so they did it their way and I loved it.

Grimme's Last Stand (upper left part of the map)

A few points of explanation:

• Unfortunately for the reverend my posse was a couple of advances into Legendary by the end and were both ridiculously powerful and damn versatile. "Only hurt by magic" on the demons didn't mean much when my shootists were using magic bullets (Smite from the Mad Scientist) from a .50 cal rifle and the Hexslinger was throwing her usual ammo-whammy'd shots. 
  
  
• The party had discovered Grimme's original walking stick in the course of their travels and this started off in the hands of the martial artist with his ridiculous skills and super-boosted 30" of movement. This was not super-effective given Grimme's toughness so it was handed over to the dragon during the fight.
  
  
• The dragon ... sigh ... yes my Indian Shaman had the shape change power and at Legendary you can turn into any living creature up to size 10 ... and dragons are size 8. This seems like at least a bit of a limitation but he realized this during on of the last rune-marking efforts where they encountered an undead dragon - which I had placed as it seemed like a wild opponent for one of their last challenges. However, once I had established that dragons could be a thing in Deadlands he immediately jumped on that and I had a PC dragon for at least a little while in each of their last 3 fights. I could have blocked it but it felt a little heavy-handed and they were "legendary" and this was the thing that had wiped out the rest of his tribe so I allowed it. The player loved it and that's rarely the wrong call.
  
  Effectively this meant that the party had a second decent melee combatant as thus far only Wu the martial artist had been filling that role and as the finale approached I thought it wouldn't hurt to have another HTH fighter available. 
  
  Something I did not foresee at the time was that the Reverend's Strength + 1d4 walking stick - the only thing that can actually hurt Grimme as he is immune to physical and magical damage - would end up being wielded by a Strength d12+8  dragon in this final encounter! That said, it was still very much a challenge for even the dragonized shaman to land real wounds on him for a while. Managing to score a single wound meant I would just bennie it away. I eventually ran out of bennies and then the concentrated attention of six legendary characters was more than even the Servitor of Famine could withstand.
  
  
• I had a total of seven players during the run of the game and six of them were present at the end. That was very satisfying. Everyone was on time, in a good mood, and invested in the challenge as they knew this was, one way or another, the end of the campaign - that's how you finish a campaign! We may revisit these characters a little way down the road for a coda but this was the big finish.
  
  
• We managed 33 sessions from September of 2021 through December of 2023. There was a six month gap in there while I packed up, moved, and then unpacked, plus the annual convention crew pause this year, but it works out to about two sessions a month during that time otherwise. That's a nice, sustainable pace I find. Knowing we run 5-6 hours per night that's 150-200 hours of Deadlands and I am not tired of it yet!
  
  This also gave me time to run some other games in between when I had free off-weekends and interested players and that keeps the GM's wandering game-eye satisfied - in this case with d6 Star Wars, FFG Star Wars, WFRP 2E, the Sentinel Comics RPG, the new Marvel game, and ICONS.
  
  
• No PC deaths! I do not think I've ever run a campaign approaching this length without at least one character buying the farm. And I don't mean they were raised from the dead - no one got to the point of needing it in this campaign. The downside is that this denied us the chance to explore the Harrowed rules - ah well, maybe next time.
  
  I chalk this extraordinary resilience up to a group of very experienced Savage Worlds players in this case - there was a Deadlands Japan game one of them was running on a different night that started before and was wrapped up during the run of this game. Plus there was a 50 Fathoms campaign that ran from 2018-2021 that many of us played in as well. I have also run multiple games going back 10+ years from other Deadlands runs to Necessary Evil. System mastery is still a thing and knowing how to make a mechanically effective character in a limited number of advances can be a game-changer.

The Aftermath ...

Over the course of the campaign they fought bandits, undead, corrupted religious fanatics, maze dragons, and some transformed mages ... helped a ghost, ran into Big Trouble in Little Shan Fan, came in second in a martial arts tournament, survived a train crash, blew up an ironclad, and even ran an election for mayor in a small town - that was a first for any campaign I have run!

So there it is - this is the first campaign I have run in quite a while that had a definite end point and it feels good. This is not always my style but I do like having the option and I still think Pinnacle's Plot Point approach is the best way I have found to set these up. 

I have some more things to say in other posts about the system and the setting and some things I could do better if I was running it again but those are for later in the week - for now it was a blast and I am very happy with the whole thing.