Gaming Minutia - Playing Surfaces

One of the practical considerations when running a tabletop RPG is "do we need a map?"

I've run superhero games where we really didn't use anything to keep track of where people and things were because it was easier to keep them in our heads. We might have miniatures to represent our heroes and some for the badguys, but that's mainly to keep up with who is where in a general sense - character A is at the bank robbery, character B is at the big fire, and character C is at the city jail.

For most D&D type games though, the answer is yes. People moving and fighting in confined spaces means it's often good for everyone to know just where everyone is.

For those, for a very long time, the solution has been the good old Chessex mat - erasable, flexible, portable.I have 3 of them and they are the standard by which I judge other solutions. I've played every edition of D&D on them at some point, along with Pathfinder, Champions, GURPS, Star Wars, Deadlands, and a bunch of other stuff that was popular in the 80's & 90's.

When I was looking at starting a new D&D game with a new edition of the rules I decided to try something newer so I got this:

It's a Hexers RPG board (you can find them on Amazon) and along with a set of multicolor dry erase markers it makes for a nice change from the more limited palette of my wet erase markers. It's a fold-up hard board and has hexes on the other side so it's useful for a variety of games.

Now I thought that having a white background would be more like drawing things out on paper but in practice I find that's too bright for D&D type games. I'm so used to the parchment colored background of the chessex mat that the bright clean white with bold black lines looks too high tech in some weird way. For modern, sci-fi, or superheroes I think it will be fine but for D&D it really throws me off.

It's also smaller than my chessex mat so I feel a little constrained when the party goes exploring.The heavy borders make it hard to join up with another map too.

A possible middle ground is the new item from WOTC:

 This is the "D&D Adventure Grid" and it's also reversible, though in a different way:

With a green grassy-looking background on one side and a grey stone look on the other it's pretty versatile as long as all you need is a square grid. Also note: no border so we could add on additional boards though the edge squares are not full squares. I'm thinking about getting one or two more and maybe cutting one of them into sections to add even more flexibility. I really like this one and I'll be trying it out this weekend for the first time.

Now I am not generally a fan of dungeon tiles but there is one set where I make an exception:

These are from the Star Wars Galaxy Tiles that WOTC published when they were doing Star Wars d20, I have 2 or 3 sets of them.

My problem with Dungeon Tiles in general is that while they are handy for those dungeon passageways we all know and love they tend to cripple creativity when it comes to rooms and details in general. I find people start defining towns and dungeons by what pieces they have which is as bad a case of the tail wagging the dog as I can think of. If I am running a published adventure I can guarantee that there will be at least a few things I cannot recreate with tiles and I hate having to intermix printed tiles with hand-drawn paper or mats.

The reason I like the Star Wars tiles is that the universe has a fairly specific look to it, particularly Imperial facillities, and the tiles enhance that by presenting that same look. No, I would not use them for a battle in a desert canyon on Tattooine (I'd use the Chessex mat!), or the forests of Endor (I'd use the green map above) or Hoth (I'd use the white one above!) but for ship interiors, and Imperial base interiors - something that tends to come up quite a bit in a Star Wars campaign - they are really handy and so avoid those issue I have with tiles in general.

What about Dwarven Forge? - just a more expensive version of tiles to me. I already have a fair amount of miniature terrain for actual miniatures games and when it fits I use it - see above. I am not looking to spend much more on what are in the end miniatures-optional games.

There are also poster maps and flip-mats and they do have their uses. I have a ton of poster maps from my 4E adventures and some of them I have used a dozen times while others I have never used at all. They're sort of like bigger dungeon tiles - useful when they fit but not something to tie yourself to. The Paizo flip-mats tend to be more broadly useful but since they are a standalone purchase I have far fewer of them.

What about the monitor-as-tabletop option? One of these days. I feel that you have to build your table around the whole thing and I am not really looking to undertake that challenge just yet. There are so many maps available in electronic format that it makes a lot of sense.

For now though, I have yet to find anything that is as flexible as the tried and true pens-and-a-drawing-surface approach that we've been using for decades. That said, it's good to have options.

Thor: Ragnarok

There are some spoilers here so skip this one if you haven't seen it yet

I saw this over the weekend and it was awesome. The Thor movies have been more fantastic than the other Marvel films in that they typically do not deal with car chases, skyscrapers, bank robbers, hacking into some computer system, or corporate intrigue. They are much more about what's right and what's not set against a backdrop of fantastic vistas, monstrous creatures, and tremendous fights. This third Thor movie amps up all of that and outdoes the rest in sheer spectacle.

Bonus: We also get a side view and what is presumably the cinematic universe's take on Planet Hulk. I'd love to see a full Planet Hulk movie but I assume this is about all that we're going to get on that.

There's not a ton to discuss - if you like the Marvel movies you've either already seen it or plan to see it and you should!

Cate Blanshett does a great job as Hella - an interesting, competent villain who's plans largely succeed despite what the heroes attempt. She's billed as a tremendously formidable opponent and she lives up to that, opening with shattering Thor's hammer and punting him and Loki out of the world. even when they do find their way back she pretty much handles them again! The only way you stop her is to unleash something at least as bad if not worse - Surtur! "A titan to fight a titan" to quote a completely different movie.

This gets to one of the more interesting aspects of the movie - there's no reset button! Thor loses Mjolnir early in the movie and he doesn't get it back! Thor is injured significantly later in the film and it does not magically heal up before the movie is over. The Warriors Three are dispatched early on and they stay dead!  Perhaps most significantly Asgard is threatened, taken over, and in the final battle, destroyed! It truly is Ragnarok! The remaining Asgardians are a group of refugees, looking for a shining planet ... well, you know the rest.

I have to say that on the list of "things I never expected to see in a live action movie" Surtur destroying Asgard would be a significant one. I used to own some Thor comics where he made it into Asgard and seeing that up on the screen was wild.

So yes, I liked it and I am looking forward to the next Marvel thing!

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.