Keeping Up with the Torrent

One second after that particular picture is pretty much how it feels right now ...

But that's what happens when you take on too damn many projects at once. You might think I would learn but that's just kind of how it goes around here.

• There's all the usual stuff - wife, kids, job, pets, commute ... the baseline stuff of grown-up life today
• A high school band member in the fall in Texas = Marching Season Hell. There's a game every week, and a contest every week, and a late practice every weeknight there's not a game or a contest
• Older kids = them driving older cars which tend to break at the least convenient time. Some days I'm Adama, some days I'm Tirol, just trying to keep the planes flying ...

So game-wise ...

• Warhammer 40,000 is on pace to release ten (10!) new codexes from July through the end of the year. That's unprecedented, and the fact that we have 8 of those 10 armies covered in this house means I've been picking up codexes (and the associated datacards) every month. Reading them, much less getting to play with each of them, has been a challenge.
• As we've grown more interested in 5th Edition D&D I decided some time back to go ahead and pick up the rest of the books. That meant another 6-7-8 books to pick up and read. No, they're not all new this year but catching up was a big challenge when added on top of the 40K stuff. Thank goodness they aren't publishing on 4E's schedule this time.
• I started running a FFG Star Wars game - had to read the rules etc. for that again
• Got the PDF for Mutant Crawl Classics - have to take a run through that!
• My V&V 3.0 hardcopy arrived - have to check that out
• A BASH! bundle? I like that game I should grab that.
• Hey look a new ICONS book - need to read it!
• That new 5E game in the Forgotten Realms - need to pick up some of the relevant material and read through it too!
• Oh the other 5E game I started? Set it in the Scarred Lands? Well now I need to go refresh myself on that too!
• I finally got the finished PDF of the new Star Trek RPG - of course I have to read through it!

There's also trying to read some non-gaming books, that whole catching up on some comic book stuff goal for this year, not to mention trying to paint some mini's for all of these initiatives ... 

It's just been ridiculous here this fall. 

Some of it is trying to run multiple campaigns at roughly the same time - I haven't even started diving back into my Rifts stuff for the Thanksgiving Rifts Incident. I think a lot of it is starting and running multiple games while 40K is in overdrive. I mean I spent 2015 catching up on Pathfinder and 2016 catching up on FFG Star Wars so I've done this kind of thing before, just not with two major games at the same time. The good news is that I'm caught up on D&D books for 5E itself. The bad news is that the first 40K release of next year is another one that I will need to pick up.  

Grousing aside I am amazed at people who manage to run just the one game, and focus in on just the one game, without getting pulled into others. I don't totally understand it, I certainly have no capacity to emulate it, but it's definitely a positive thing at times. 

It's also getting towards that time of year where I declare a plan for what I am going to run next year. I expect some hard choices there, but we will see. 

In the meantime it's mostly D&D, Pathfinder, and Star Wars with some chance of M&M and Savage Rifts in the forecast for later this month,

Against the Giants, and the Other Giants, and Those Giants Over There ...

I've always liked giants as fantasy opposition, They're big enough to be a real threat to characters, they're themed in different ways to give some variety, but they are close enough to human to have understandable motivations and at least some potential for interaction and conversation. Thinking back I had giants as the main antagonists in my old Fantasy hero campaign. That was a homebrew thing but it was certainly inspired by some of the published material,

AD&D gave us three adventures with giants.

I remember seeing them on the shelves in the local mall toy store and they were part of what intrigued me enough to dive into this new "Dungeons and Dragons" thing.

In a see of boxed kids games these stood out. By the time I was buying adventures they had been repackaged as Against the Giants.

It's such a classic now that I think it gets forgotten but the material in here is a great example of old school adventures. There's not a ton of plot, not a ton of NPC's, it's just "here's a monster lair - go to it!" and the player motivations are largely left up to the group to decide. You can go with anything from a Seven Samurai scenario "please help us - we are but simple villagers" to a Dirty Dozen approach of "there's a royal pardon waiting if you'll go solve this problem".

Second Edition gave us the same material, updated with 2E stats, plus a more specific location and scenario. It's less generic, but still pretty adaptable and it includes encounters outside of the lairs. I recall a particularly nasty shadow dragon terrorizing the countryside. I don't see much about it online but it's a nice update for the new edition.


Third edition didn't give us a new published module but there were some fan conversions and WOTC released updated 3E style maps for at least part of it. It was still a lot of fun in the new edition too.

4E gave us "Revenge of the Giants" which is an awesome update of the concept. In this version some of the giant holds are on other planes and are really well done. There's a much heavier emphasis on the elemental aspects of the giants and they are more magical, less mundane when it comes to their abilities,

A few years back Pathfinder took their shot with the Giantslayer Adventure Path which is six adventures that focus on giants as opposition. There's a pretty good mix of things here too and more giant types are included than in some of the earlier material but it is still mainly about fighting giants.

For 5th edition we have Storm King's Thunder which is the latest of the big giant adventures. It covers a variety of types and while it doesn't get quite as elemental as Revenge it does add some interesting elements to giants and to their lore, and the lore of the Forgotten Realms as well. There is of course much more plot than those old AD&D adventures but that's just how it goes today.

When digging into options for my 5E game I had originally planned to include the G-modules as a big part once they were high enough level. Once I had a chance to look SKT over though I changed my mind and I am making it the centerpiece of the new campaign. For whatever reason they just never get old for me. Sure, you can make them big boring bags of hit points but they can be so much more than that! Give them a culture, a society, some motivations, and even some names! Then mechanically change things up a bit  - "Hey, this one's a cleric!" - heck, try making one a bard - and suddenly they're a real part of your world.

Giants: A ton of hit points, a ton of options, and a ton of fun!

The Old Scarred Lands Campaign - Year 1

I ran a campaign in the Scarred Lands during 3rd Edition D&D and it was one of the best games I have run and had maybe the most memorable ending of all. Prior to this, in third edition, I had run:

• A Greyhawk campaign that ended up centered around Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (this one ended in a TPK)
• A Kalamar-based game that was tied to Kenzer's "Coin Trilogy" which frankly was not that great (this ended because the players wanted to go back and finish the Temple adventure in Greyhawk)
• A second Greyhawk campaign that returned to the Return to the TOEE (this too eventually ended in another TPK - that temple was dangerous, OK?)

After this it was time for something different, so we played a few other games then after about 6 months we came back to D&D 3E. 

We started in May 2005 with six players - a Ranger, a Half-Orc Fighter, a Rogue, a Paladin, a Cleric, and a Dark Elf Wizard disguised as a High Elf.

Sessions 1-3
The first adventure was "The Serpent Amphora" which was a free intro to the 3-module series set in the Scarred Lands. It took 3 sessions to work through and while it was pretty railroady (there were some fights you were definitely not supposed to win) it did start with a set of athletic contests during some holiday games that was a nice change from happenstance tavern meetings or other traditional D&D campaign kickoffs. I also worked in "The Wizard's Amulet" the first Necromancer Games adventure and that was well-received too.

Session 4-6
The group decided to head north towards Vesh and along the way kicked off "The Dragonfiend Pact", a fun little Goodman games DCC adventure.

Session 7-8
Continuing northwards the party played through the Crucible of Freya set around east Onetenazu. This is another cool adventure and instead of starting in a keep on some borderlands you end up attacking a keep full of orcs ... on some borderlands. They had made it to 4th level by the time they finished this up.

Session 9
The party then travelled through the Canyon of Souls to Amalthea and began exploring the Tomb of Abysthor. Actually this session was just the journey and exploring the shrines to Thyr and Muir between Amalthea and the burial halls that are the core of the adventure.

Session 10-11
These were spent exploring the first level of the Tomb and the interesting features like the Font of Bones!

This wrapped up 2005. We stayed pretty closely to an every-two-weeks schedule though we did miss one here and there. With six regular players one or two person's schedule issues did not derail a session - unless it was mine!

As the game went on I wrote up more and more details on Amalthea - it's condition after the Druid War, various organizations, facilities, and characters who lived in the ruined city. I had forgotten how much info I had on this city until I started looking back through my notes in preparation for the new 5E campaign but it's pretty extensive - probably the most I have done to detail an area since first edition. A lot of this is because there isn't much detail on Amalthea in the Ghelspad book and I wanted to give my players an interesting home base. It was a lot of fun and maybe the new campaign will make its way there at some point.

Happy Halloween

Ah the classics ...

Happy Halloween!

40K Halloween: The Bloodthirster Challenge

What's scarier than one greater daemon of Khorne? How about THREE GREATER DAEMONS OF KHORNE!

This whole thing started when I happened to notice that Apprentice Who's new Tyranid army was roughly 1000 points and 3 Bloodthirsters come out around 1000 points. I offered to have my three monsters fight his whole army and he accepted the challenge. Mine is a Supreme Command detachment while his is a Battalion so he will have 6 command points to my 4.


The setup: We had a mission with some objectives but they won't matter. It's the Swarmlord and his super friends vs. Khorne's Avengers!

Turn 1 Chaos:

Come to papa!

Turn 1Tyranids:

Turn 2 Chaos:

CHARGE!

BLOODTHIRSTER HATE SMITE! 

Turn 2 Nids:

Two of the nastiest things in the game head to head!

That's a lot of wounds piling up quickly ...

Turn 3 Chaos:

ONE THIRSTER IS DOWN! DOWN I SAY!

Turn 3 Nids:

"Piling in" - literally!

Not going down without a fight!

Turn 4 Chaos:

HA!

ARGH!

Turn 4 Nids:

The End!

So the answer is that 3 Thirsters is probably not up to taking on another nasty HTH army all by themselves! I maybe should have ganged up on the Swarmload first and avoided the swarms of smaller creatures but I thought one BT could handle him! Clearly not! Also Smites are mean when you have no defense and no Smites of your own!

Anyway it was a fun game and didn't take all that long to play. We may do it again here with the new Imperial Guard using a tank army just to see how that goes.

The RPG Update at the End of October

Since posting has been spotty this month I wanted to put together a general update for my own sake as we head into the holiday season of the year and collect my thoughts on where our games stand.

• Superheroes: It's been months since we've played a Supers game of any kind but I am not unhappy about it. Our superhero games have been intermittent rather than a sustained campaign for years anyway so it's not a surprise and with some of my primary players moving out of the house and others getting their first jobs it's really cut into the extra time where we would work in a session of ICONS or Marvel Heroic. 
• If I can drag the college crew back to the house for the day after Thanksgiving it would be the one-year anniversary of our Time of Crisis marathon session and maybe - MAYBE! - we could finish it! 
• With Freedom City 3E coming out I'd really like to dig back into an ongoing superhero game, I just don't know when we will work it in.
• Speaking of settings I still really like Emerald City too and would be really happy if I could find a way to run a game there as well. 
• I've been looking at my ICONS material and notes and thinking we need to dust that game off too.
• My homebrew "Atomic City" setting - so many plans, so little attention over the last year. Need to get in some time there, whether it's M&M3 or ICONS or something else.

• Star Wars: Still a setting I really enjoy running.
• Red Sabers has been dormant since March but it has come up in conversation with the boys recently so we may get in another session or two during the holidays. This is the game that's turned Blaster into a d6 die-hard. He's not terribly interested in the FFG game because he thinks d6 is better. 
• Beyond the Rim has been stalled with schedule issues since August but we will get back to it now that high school band and football season are wrapping up here. Even beyond this one adventure (ha!) I have some things I want to do with this system and some adventures I want to try so i expect it will stay in the rotation thru 2018 as well. 
• I still have notes for the old Volturnus Space campaign and the Dawn of Defiance campaign and an Old Republic campaign. Regardless of system, I have a lot of Star Wars stuff I want to do and players who are interested. It's really just a Schedule Challenge to work it in on a regular basis.

• D&D: Digging deeper into 5th really has me in a pretty happy place with this.
• The new Forgotten Realms game has me re-reading a bunch of old material on the region and re-reading the newer stuff on the Realms as well.
• I realized I could easily run an entire campaign inside Waterdeep alone, and another one inside Neverwinter, and still keep them all in this same region of Faerun. One of these days...
• I did end up moving the "classics" game from Greyhawk to the Scarred Lands so I'm reading some of those books as well (in between everything else) and remembering how much I liked this world. It also had me going through my old campaign notes and recalling how much fun we had in that game too. More on that later.
• My preliminary looks at the Cormyr option for moving the campaign also generated enough interest for me that I'm going to continue working out an outline to see what I could do with that option. If someone wants a Realms game that isn't tied to the big campaign adventure, this would be a great region to go with a separate run.
• Honorable Mention: Pathfinder.  I'm not running it right now, and haven't this year, but I am still playing in Paladin Steve's Kingmaker campaign and I thoroughly enjoy it. I've brought up finishing Wrath of the Righteous with  my players but we haven't committed to anything yet. More on that later too!

So there are the three main streams here. The rest:

• Deadlands is on hold because I've had trouble getting my three players together at the same time and when we did they wanted to play D&D instead  - mainly to finish Keep on the Borderlands. 
• DCC was fun with 0-level characters but it's not going to replace 5th edition now that "real" D&D has taken hold. I do still have some hope for MCC when I get the physical book here, but it will likely be an occasional one-shot game rather than an ongoing campaign.
• Shadowrun - one of these days
• Runequest - we will get in a session 2 one of these days!
• Star Trek - regardless of system it's just not a setting most of my guys get excited about enough to bump something else aside and that's what it would take to really get it going,

The Wild Card: Savage Rifts. We all want to play it, the question is do we want to skip something else to do it? Yes, I pretty much live in a world of Opportunity Cost when it comes to gaming time these days. I think the holiday breaks will give us a chance to try it so I am looking at putting together a one-shot or more likely (since we have to make characters too) a "two-shot" setup type session and short run to give us a taste of how it will work, and then maybe we work it into the rotation for next year. 

Overall I am really happy with the way the games are going. Running it down like this I end up enumerating more  of what we aren't playing than what we are but that's because we've gotten to play a lot of different games over the last couple of years. I'd like to be more consistent or focused but this is how it has worked out and playing a wider variety of games is quite a bit of fun too.

Thinking Out Loud - Running Multiple 5E D&D Campaigns

So I finally started a 5th edition campaign a while back and I went for an old school approach: we rolled up characters with 4d6 drop the lowest, we used old school styled character sheets, I set it in Greyhawk, and we started with The Keep on the Borderlands placed on the frontiers of the Kingdom of Keoland. I've run several sessions and it's all good but ...

When some of the players from that group were not available and really wanted to play through the rest of the adventure, my solution was to start a completely different 5E game set in the Forgotten Realms and using a completely new school approach - point buy, new style sheets, 5E published adventure book, bringing in a new and very young player, and set in the 5E Realms - as opposed to the 4E Spellplague Realms, the 3E Realms, the 2E Time of Troubles Relams, or the original recipe 1E Realms. I've run a couple of good sessions here and we are having a blast.

This coming weekend we're looking at another session of the Old School campaign due to player availability and a few things occurred to me.

First, I wasn't really looking to run two D&D games, yet once again I've somehow found myself in that position. It's a nice problem to have but it's somewhat ironic that with all the games I'd like to run I end up running two of the same game at roughly the same time.

Second, having them in two separate settings means more overhead for me and the players as far as NPC's, nations, gods, assumptions, etc.

Third, if I put them in the same setting it opens up the possibility of crossovers of both players and characters which could be a lot of fun and very helpful as both campaigns proceed.

Given that, it makes some sense to retcon the old school game into the Realms. I really like the region where Storm King's Thunder is set and I am diving in full-on in researching it and gathering material, but I would prefer to set the other game somewhere else so they're not stepping on each other and so we can explore a different part of the Realms. I need a somewhat organized kingdom .. how about Cormyr? Far enough away that it would feel like it's own thing but still on the same continent and connected to the main region I want to use anyway.

So I was all set to do this when I started to have some second thoughts. The whole point of the original campaign was to do some "old school" adventuring using the 5E system. There are a lot of old adventures that I really like and that  my players have never experienced. I want to work those in along with some homebrew stuff. I'm worried that moving the game to the Realms will lose some of that feel. Most of the old 1E adventures have a location in Greyhawk and while it wouldn't be hard to place them in Faerun I myself first encountered them in Greyhawk and that's what feels the most "old school" to me. The thing is I'm not that excited about Greyhawk on it's own at the moment - I mainly chose it because it's the first place I think of when I think of these adventures, not so much because I think the world itself is something I want to explore right now.  My players don't really know enough about the old modules or either world to have a strong opinion so this is a problem mainly in my own head.

Now I could go in a completely different direction and retcon it into my homebrew old-school setting that I put together a few years back for our Basic campaign. I had a lot of the old D&D/AD&D modules in mind for that game anyway. A homebrew setting would be the oldest of old school approaches and it trades "research" for "creation" which may be more satisfying in the long run anyway.

As a plan C or D, well, the Scarred Lands have come up a few times as one some of my players (and I) remember fondly from our 3E campaigns and I've been thinking about how we could work it in to the rotation at some point. It's an interesting mix of old school and some newer concepts and I would really like to take my players into that world again. I mostly ran some Goodman Games and Necromancer Games adventures there and I have some that I never ran that would be fun in 5E as well. There would be a lot of adaptation so it still scratches the creative itch.

After thinking through it here I may reserve Greyhawk for another run down the road, maybe original flavor Temple of Elemental Evil. I think I like the Realms/Homebrew/Scarred Lands options more than GH right now. I have to decide whether the advantages of using one setting for both games is worth giving up separation to protect that old-school feel and that may take a little more thinking. Nailing down which adventures I want to run in the "Classics" campaign would probably help. Even there though I am not driving a metaplot here- a lot of it will be up to the players.

So anyway there's one DM thinking out loud and trying to find a good answer to this. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share.

Villains & Vigilantes 3.0

I first played Villains and Vigilantes about 1983 after the second edition came out the year before. My group had discovered Champions the prior year and jumped into it pretty heavily, so V&V was a big change of pace. It was cool, and we played a short campaign with it, but Champions remained our standard for supers. Next year the TSR Marvel Super Heroes RPG was released and that pretty quickly became our "other" superhero game and V&V didn't get much attention after that. I've tried to dust it off and play it a few times over the intervening years but there always seemed to be another option that was more popular when it came time to hit the table.

The game had effectively been dormant for years with nothing more than uploads of the old system to DTRPG and nothing new really coming out. Then last year Jeff Dee, one of the two original authors and the main illustrator,  started talking about a new edition of the game thru an upcoming Kickstarter. Sounds good! So I backed it and followed along and received my PDF and eventually my hard copy of the book as well.

 First up: Jeff Dee - the guy has been active in RPG's since the late 70's early 80's with V&V and some memorable D&D illustrations. I've never met him but from some podcast interviews I've heard he sounds pretty enthusiastic about this new edition of the game and gaming in general. It's always a concern (for me at least) with guys who have been in and out of the industry over the last 30+ years as far as how involved or aware they are of current trends and tastes and events - see the current Frank Mentzer kickstarter for an example of why. After hearing Jeff Dee a couple of times I have no worries about him. He still reads comics, he is aware of other games, and comes across as in-touch and heavily involved in addition to the requisite enthusiasm. So I like the guy, I have good memories of his game, and I'd like to support him

As far as the actual game ... it pains me to say this but my tastes have shifted dramatically and nothing has made that more clear to me than reading through this game. It seems to have been infected by a terrible chart virus, to where I am pretty sure that if you distributed them evenly there is at least one chart for every page in this book. There are a lot of charts.

Also, terminology is very specific to this game. Your "stats" are your Basic Characteristics which are abbreviated BC's throughout the book. You build with Character Points which are "CP's" throughout the book. You're going to see those two terms a lot.

The rules are numbered like a wargame ruleset: 2.0 is Characters, 2.1 is Character Generation, 2.1.2 covers the Character Record Sheet, and 2.1.2.3 covers Birthplace - which has a chart for Place of Birth. This is the same approach that Star Fleet Battles and Advanced Squad Leader use for organizing their rules and those are maximum detail very competitive games - as soon as I noticed this I started to wonder if maybe V&V and I were headed in different directions.

These two things mean you get sentences like "Each BC is worth (1) CP (see 2.1.16.2)". You don't see that a ton in RPG's anymore. Not a deal breaker but not particularly reassuring to find on page 10 of the book.

Random Generation: One of the things V&V was known for when compared to Champions was random character generation and stats based on the player. That's still an option but the main approach is random - but it's not 3d6 like the old system. There's one chart with a list of 5 scores for each of the 4 recommended power levels in the game (basically street level up thru Avengers). There's a second chart that you roll on to determine which stat gets the 1st score listed, then you roll again for the 2nd score and so on. The five BC's are Strength, Endurance, Agility, Intelligence, and Cool. and the chart scores range from 6 - 14 for "normals" to 12 - 20 for the high end.  It's pretty much the 3-18 scale we know from D&D and older V&V with the top end expanded to about 100 to accommodate super-types. The prior edition had Charisma instead of Cool so we're already seeing some changes to the basics of the game.  Straight-up point buy using your CP's to buy BC's is also an option.

Then there is a giant chart that tells you what all of those scores mean in game terms:  carrying capacity, punching damage, your "saves" (a big part of the game system), your initiative, your hit points, and your healing rate.

Saves are a major concept. If you have a 10 in Agility you look at the chart and discover will need a 10 or less to make an Agility save or accomplish an Agility-related task. If you have a 50 you need a 17 or less, and if you have a 90  you need a 24 or less. This is the heart of how you do things in the game. I'm not as big a fan of roll-under systems these days but it's simple and it works and once it's on your character sheet it minimizes the need to look at a chart elsewhere.

"Power" is the endurance mechanic in the game. Add up your 4 non-Cool stats and that's your "Power". As you fire off various superpowers they each have a cost that comes out of this pool

Superpowers are called "Abilities" in this version and are still randomly generated: There are charts of course and you roll 2 Offensive, 2 Defensive, and 2 Miscellaneous abilities. Once you do that you get to choose 4 of the 6 you want to keep - this is to help have a more cohesive concept for a character and mitigate some of the wildness of random rolls. I like it. There is a second axis here in that once you roll up your options and decide which ones to keep you then spend points (CP's) on them as well so you can emphasize one power over another as best fits your concept. This is a nice change from the earlier edition and gives a player some control over an otherwise random character.

You also roll 2 Weaknesses (another chart) and can keep one, both, or none of them depending on how well they mesh with  your concept. You then gain points from the ones you retain depending on their severity.

This is all fairly understandable after a couple of read-throughs and seems decent enough.

The combat system looks like Pathfinder - lots of rules, lots of modifiers. The range modifier table has 14 entries. Size modfiers, mobility modifiers, target defenses, cover, visibility - all of them come into play in their own way. The combat rules are 15 pages long and cover a lot of details. Initiative is roll high. Saves are roll low. Damage is roll high. Task checks are roll low. It's not particularly consistent but it looks a lot like old school D&D which is where the game started way back when. This is where it shows the most.

The last fifth of the book is GM stuff - the law, running adventures, and the setting. It's good - V&V has always had pretty decent info here and this is significantly upgraded from the 80's version.

V&V's "Keep on the Borderlands"

So ... I really want to like this game. It's tricky though, as there is a lot more detail here than I want to deal with most of the time these days. It reads more like "Advanced V&V for V&V fans" than a game that's aimed at new players. One example is the vehicle chart:

I've fuzzed it up but there are 57 entries there, basically size/space/modifiers for potential vehicles. The corresponding table in M&M 3E has six entries. There's a sort of false precision that gets introduced to the game when you have lengthy detailed tables like this - it's a comic book game, not an engineering simulator. You shouldn't be agonizing over precisely which one of 57 levels of vehicle size class is bets for your Catmobile - it's so much simpler to just say "It's a car" and go with the "car" entry, especially considering it's probably not the focus of the game anyway - it's effectively a movement power! Keep it playable and relatively simple and move on! There's a lot of this kind of thing in various powers but I think most of them are manageable - this is probably the worst one.

So I'm torn. It covers more ground than the original and has some tuned-up mechanics but is very much an old-school game in others, probably more than I like.

• Compared to ICONS, Bash! and Supers it's a lot more complex to create a character and to run a fight for a group of those characters, and is it more fun with all of that extra detail?
• Compared to M&M the lack of a unified mechanic has me wondering if I want to keep up with all of the sub-systems during a game. 
• Compared to its old foe Champions ... well if I was going to run a more old-school style game for an extended run I would choose Champions mainly because a lot of its rules are still burned into my brain.

All that said I feel like I need to give it a fair shake so I'm going to try and set up a one-shot with some of my players and see how they like it. If I cans string that together I will post a follow up and share some actual-play-based thoughts.