Sun, 27 Jul 2008
I've found that, for an abstract game that can take place just in your head, there can be a lot of tacticle fun to RPGs. Rolling dice and moving miniatures are the obvious ones, but there are others. Gaming tokens (glass “stones” ) are used by many games and gamers, either as a component of the system or informally by the gamers for marking various things. Some games, like Savage Worlds, use cards. Miniatures terrain, whether three-dimensional, printed tiles, or simply drawn or a battlemat, adds a lot, and not just to the visual aspects of the game. Cards that represent character states, like buff and condition cards for D&D, or the effects of spells, or cards that have monster or spell stats, are also neat and passing them around adds to the fun of the game. Drawing maps for the games, drawing a scene out on a battle map, and making handouts can all be tactile fun, and then handing out the maps and other handouts to players so they have the fun at looking at them and passing them around and pulling them out when they suddenly realize what they're really showing them.
All of these things can add a great deal of fun to RPGs.
The Harlequin, copyright 2007 by Laurell K. Hamilton; Jove Books/The Berkely Publishing Group/The Pengiun Group, May 2008; ISBN 978-0-515-14461-1.
Another entry in Hamilton's “Anita Blake” series. Still worth reading.
Thu, 24 Jul 2008
James Maliszewski points out that D&D always had “mook” rules:
Under OD&D, a fighting man can attack a number of times equal to his level when facing foes of 1 Hit Die or lower. This rule carried over into AD&D in modified form, with multiple attacks being allowed only against foes of less than 1 Hit Die.
I'd completely forgotten that, if I ever knew. That's tremendously interesting.
Wed, 23 Jul 2008
I got to run the “Eternal Nazi” one sheet for Savage Worlds again, for adults this time.
It went ok, I guess. It ran much longer this time, probably for several reasons:
- I added a new encounter to it.
- It was the first time the players had played Savage Worlds, and to complicate things they were each playing two characters.
- I was not at my best. (Too little sleep, too much stress elsewhere in my life.)
I think I'm going to run this for yet another group, so I'll discuss the specifics of my changes to the adventure then.
The new maps did make things a little more interesting, although the design of one did provide a great deal of advantage to the PCs. I'll have to rethink that.
I should really sit down and come up with some better tactics for the BBEG.
I was not at my best, so I kept forgetting the simpliest things, and I know I actually made a couple of serious errors with the rules. You'd think that since I've been playing Savage Worlds for a while I would remember. In my defense, I was using a couple of sections of the rules that I'd only used once before. Still, I need to get more rest before I GM something!
Tue, 22 Jul 2008
I enjoyed the new Indy film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It had a few flaws, and it wasn't as good as either the first or the third, but it was fun. I happened to run across a blog post today that essentially thought it wasn't worth seeing because Indy was old. That's actually one thing I liked about it: it's nice to see an old action hero occasionally.
Sun, 20 Jul 2008
Actual Play
On Sunday we continuing the weekend of gaming, with L.B., D.B., T.A., E.A., and M.A. attending again.
Toon
First, by request I ran a session of Toon. I set it in the “Old West in Space” and the toons had to rescue the kidnapped daughter of the richest toon in town from the bandit chieftan Big Ape, the “Fastest Banana in Space”, and his bandit gang of monkeys, who were hiding out in an abandoned asteroid mine still inhabited by mining robots.
Savage Worlds
Second, I ran “The Eternal Nazi”, a Savage Worlds pulp one-sheet for them. Like many of the one-sheets, it didn't come with a map, so I made one a couple of nights before using printable PDF tiles. The kids had fun, but I can see why Kator the Ape Boy wasn't in the most recent pregenerated pulp characters download intended for use with “The Eternal Nazi”: as the sole melee-only character he was at serious a disadvantage.
I think this was actually the first time I've used modern weapons in Savage Worlds. It went ok, although I did forget each shot on auto-fire counts as three bullets expended. I think I'll add some grenades to the PCs gear the next time I run it, suggest the PCs other than Buck pick up some of the germain submachine guns, and up the number of extras with the big bad.
Reflections
I was trying out some new technology (for me): using printable PDF tiles from Skeleton Key Games (SKG) for the battle mats. I especially like the SKG tiles for a couple of reasons. First, the tile graphics in the PDF files can be easily extracted (just right-click and choose copy) and munged to produce custom tiles. Secondly, the tile sets include thumbnail catalogs of the tiles, which can easily be extracted and added to the tilesets of programs like DungeonForge. This makes it a lot easier to design the map layouts to begin with (virtual tile flipping replaces physical tile flipping) and makes it easy to produce small scale maps for reference for laying out the tiles on the table by exporting the maps from DungeonForge as .PNG files and adding labels with the tile numbers with the GIMP. (This is especially useful when using wilderness tiles!) On the printed tiles I wrote the tile number on the back, again to make things easier when laying them out on the table.
Overall the tiles worked pretty well. The worst problem was that the tiles tended to curve up at the edges, a common problem with cardstock printed on inkjet printers: as the large surface area of ink dries the edges curl up. This didn't prevent their use, and curling them in the opposite direction before laying them out helped, but I think I'll try laminating them and see if that helps. My first map designs using the tiles were not as interesting as I wanted, but the tiles themselves looked good and worked pretty well. The kids occasionally dislodged the tiles a little, but that was easily fixed, and once while dealing initiative cards I accidently slide one under the tiles, which got a laugh.
After we played I redesigned the maps to give a more dynamic environment, since I'm planning on running “The Eternal Nazi” for another other gaming group. I got a couple more of the SKG sets, and used GIMP to make three custom tiles. This let me make a much more interesting environment. Part of the problem I had with designing the map in the first place was inexperience with the tiles, but part was because the tile sets I had were heavily slanted towards fantasy, and I was constructing something more out of the “lost race” pulp adventure stories, set in the 1940s.
One thing that I'd like to see is a bunch of tiles with items that could be dropped on top of other tiles, like piles of metal barrels and so forth.
DungeonForge has a couple of annoying bugs, but it's free and works well enough, as long as I remember to save often and not put tiles against the edges of the map.
Note
Todo: I'll try to edit more actual play details into this post when I've got a moment and my notes are handy.
Sat, 19 Jul 2008
Well, I certainly got in a lot of gaming this weekend!
Today was D&D: my nephew D.B. D.M.ed the concluding session of our run through the Wizards of the Coast adventure “Scourge of the Howling Horde”. Great fun was had by all. I especially enjoyed being a player rather than D.M. Kids attending were L.B., D.B., T.A., E.A., and M.A.
Note
I'll edit more actual play details into this post when I've got a moment and my notes are handy.
Tue, 08 Jul 2008
I use the Unison File Synchronizer extensively to synchronize my working environment between 4 or so computers running a couple of different flavors of Unix and Windows XP and I would have a hard time getting along without it.
Note
This is unfinished.
I still like plain text. Almost none of the e-mail that I get that uses HTML formatting actually gains anything from the additional complexity.
Most of my writing doesn't require a 200 mebibyte word processor installation that still can't do reasonable intra-document linking, much less inter-document linking. Moreover, whenever I have to use such a beast, the conceptual overhead always gets in the way. I realize these may just be my own quirks, but they really make a difference to me.
So, I like to do my writing in plain (or very nearly plain) text. But I also like having nicely printed documents, plus some hope of being able to move from the plain text documents to something more sophisticated on those occasions where it is warranted. So, what do I do?
I use AsciiDoc and reStructuredText (aka ReST) for writing.
Why both? Well, they both have pluses and minuses.
reStructuredText
Pros: I found reStructuredText first. It looks pretty good as plain text, and produces clean HTML and PDF. It can handle deeper structures off the bat than AsciiDoc, which is occasionally important to me. (Some document formats require absurdly deep levels of nested sections.) It can be turned into PDF using LaTeX fairly easily.
Cons: some of the systems I use regularly don't have good packages for docutils, the underlying toolset. This may be in part because although docutils has a long history and is pretty solid, it's still not considered version 1.0 material. I get the surface impression that there are still some things that the developers are thinking about. And there isn't a supported DocBook output format. That's a real shame.
AsciiDoc
Pros: AsciiDoc, just like reStructuredText, can go straight to HTML. And AsciiDoc's HTML looks nicer straight out of the box.
AsciiDoc is also explicitly a plain-text encoding of DocBook. This lets you be sure you can convert it to something widely used and well understood, which can then be converted by well-known tools into various other formats including PDF and HTML.
It has better package support amongst the environments I use.
Cons: not as pretty looking in source form as reStructuredText.
Conclusions
I wish it was easier to add special purpose structure to both AsciiDoc and reStructuredText that can easily added to all the output formats, for special purpose things like RPG stats or other complicated technical documentation.
So, what do I do when I need something more sophisticated? Use DocBook, of course.
The kids I game with get mentioned a lot. Right now they're my daughter and niece and nephews. I'm really lucky to have such a great bunch of kids around to play games.
- L.B.
- is my daughter.
My brother C.P.B. about an hour away, so his kids get to play regularly.
- B.B.
- is in his mid-teens and is the oldest of the bunch, which means
I've been experimenting on him the longest. (
I hope it
hasn't hurt too much. ) - D.B.
- is the middle brother.
- M.B.
- is the youngest child, well below reading age, and usually plays as part of a team with his dad or older brother.
My sister C.I.A.'s kids live on the family farm, next door to me, and along with my daughter get to play the most.
- T.A.
- is the oldest boy.
- E.A.
- is his younger sister.
- M.A.
- is their younger brother and is the youngest of my regular gamers. He can't read yet, but has fun playing anyway.
The new baby boy is C.A., and I'm already looking forward to when he joins the gaming group.
My brother N.A.B. lives far out of state, and so his kids only get to play on summer and winter vacations when they come and visit the family farm.
- T.B.
- is N.A.B.'s oldest son.
- O.B.
- is his younger brother, and has played Buggin' with us a couple times, and will play the other games more as he gets older.
I'm going to try online gaming with a map tool and either a chat inteface or a voice interface when the kids are a little bit older, so the ones that are farther away can get to play more often.
I've run a lot of games for the kids; Fudge Bunnies and Burrows, BESM Dungeon, Toon, Buggin', D&D, Savage Worlds, and perhaps others.
I find, when I've got little time or energy, that it is very easy to fall back to hack-n-slash and dungeon crawling as the default types of adventures to present for my players. Admittedly, these days I'm running mostly for kids who are happy to play in the intersection of those styles. Actual “roleplaying” happens mostly as the result of serendipitous inspiration from in-game events (witness the cuirbouilli armor).
Bad Dreams, by Kim Newman, copyright 1990, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc; 1995.
An interesting take on vampires, and an interesting relfection of London at a certain time.
Mon, 07 Jul 2008
I generally carry way too much stuff around to games. I'm trying to minimize it all, and here are some ways I've found or will be trying.
If you are running a system that doesn't focus on battlemat-oriented tactical play, or the evening's adventure doesn't require that style of play, you don't probably don't have much to carry to the nights game: maybe just a single rulebook, your notes, and your dice.
If you are using a battlemat and miniatures, you can cut down on what you have to carry around.
Just the core rulebook.
Just needing to carry one small rulebook makes things much easier. Savage Worlds: Explorer's Editon and Big Eyes, Small Mouth score high here, as does Rules Cyclopedia D&D and, given the pamphlet size and low page count of the three core books, Original D&D.
Use flat paper figures and separate bases.
I've never been one for painting miniatures, unfortunately, but I have found that part of the fun of many roleplaying games is moving miniatures around on a battlemat. (The kids like them too.)
Now that color printers that print on cardstock are cheap, paper miniatures are practical and good looking. But how do you transport them? It's great that they're way lighter than metal or plastic miniatures, but if you actually cut out and glue up the common triangle-from-the-top and triangle-from-the-side they still take up a good bit of space, too much to take on a business trip, for instance, and they're easily crushed. The “T”-from-the-side paper miniatures can sometimes be folded at the crossbar of the “T”, but they tend to get bent when carried together. If you don't glue the paper minatures you can carry them flat, but using paper clips to hold them in their triangular or “T” shapes it is just too fiddly and time consuming.
So, what I recently started doing was cutting out and gluing together just the front and backs. This gives me flat, stiff standups that can be easily stored in an envelope, but that together with separate plastic bases provide nice good looking 3d miniatures. The plastic bases themselves are sturdy and can be transported in a small bag; even a hundred of them can fit in my computer bag without taking much space. And the flat standups in an envelope travel easily without being crushed or bent.
- At some point I should try counters, like Fiery Dragon's Counter Collections, which have the complete D&D 3.5E SRD monsters covered.
Put all needed opponents/monsters on index cards.
I recently got a printer that can print directly on cardstock and 3×5" cards, and I love being able to carry around the opponents and deal out just the ones I need for the current encounter. It greatly reduces papershuffling in the middle of encounters, too, and cuts down on the amount of junk on the table between you and the players. And you can carry them on in a shirt pocket on a pinch.
Don't forget stock opponents.
Having a collection of stock opponents to fall back on really helps. Sometimes just shuffling the 3×5" cards gives me ideas.
Flip Mats and dry-erase markers for battlemats
I got two of Steel Sqwire's original Flip-Mat™ battlemats. They've got 1 inch squares on one side and 1 inch hexes on the other side, and they fold up flat to 8×10 inches and unfolded are 24×30 inches. Two of these fit in my computer bag without bulking it up noticably, and work wonderfully with dry-erase pens. (No more stains from wet-erase remains!) The only problems is that since they fold, they have creases, and don't lay pefectly flat. However, I've used these with paper miniatures and unless someone slaps something down in the middle of mat or really jars the table things are pretty stable and the miniatures don't fall down.
Printed Cardstock Tile Terrain instead of battlemats
I recently bought a bunch of PDF printable terrain tiles from Skeleton Key Games. They make nice looking terrain and they are all standardized shapes that I can print on cardstock on an inexpensive inkjet printer and cut out. Since they're all the same size and shape they stack flat and since they're cardstock you can easily carry them in a standard 6½x9½ manilla envelope, and two or three envelopes easily carry enough for an evening's play. The disadvantages are that tiles sometimes curve, which tends to lead to the tiles moving around more as they're laid and played on.
As a side node, the various tile sets published by Wizards of the Coast for use with D&D, Star Wars, and the associated miniatures battle games have a great graphical appears and are very heavy, sturdy solid cardboard (not corragated), so they make a great battlemat. Unfortunately, they're all different sizes which makes it difficult to pack them compactly, and the thick cardboard which makes them so stable in play also makes them surprisingly bulky. (And I can never figure out easily if I've actually collected up all the pieces after the game.)
2008-08-20 01:29:26: I'm still undecided as to whether these are slower and less convenient than the Flip-Mats. They do look neat, though.
Stones/bennies/chips/status chips, playing cards, etc.
I've been using the DocBook Website customization to build my website since the beginning.
First I used the DSSSL stylesheets to built it. They built the website as a single SGML (and later XML) document from multiple input files included into a main organizing file that produced multiple HTML output files, checking all the cross references and building a site map. Unfortunately, this method stopped working in my environment for some reason, and I never had time to figure out why.
I thought I'd see how the XSL stylesheets the DocBook Website customization worked. The architecture for the Website customization changed between the two: now the website was multiple documents, each built from an XML input file and producing an HTML output file, and using the DocBook XSL stylesheet olink cross-document linking for links between the different pages. This necessitated changing all the source files, but even more unfortunately the processing of cross document links consumed so much memory that rebuilding the site took forever, and eventually got to the point where it used more memory than was usually available on my server. (Admittedly, my setup was atypical for DocBook, and perhaps even pathological.)
In disgust, I let my site lie fallow, waiting for some better solution to present itself. Alas, nothing was immediately forthcoming. I really like DocBook for markup, and the “correct” solution would probably be to take Norm Walsh's route and custom-build some DocBook to website software, but frankly I haven't had the time or energy to do that, especially since, if I follow Norm's example, I'd have to take the time to figure out RDF and so forth.
Eventually I decided that I'd try something minimal: adding a new blog using pyBloxsom, which seemed simple enough to be comprehendable. It supported reStructuredText, one of the nicer plaintext markup systems, which was a definite bonus [1]. After fiddling around about I got enough for a reasonably comfortable minimalist blog. So, give it a look-see.
| [1] | I hate most WYSIWYG software, and am hoping that using reST regularly for the blog will be lightweight enough that I won't notice the burden. |
I've been increasing dissatisfied with the complex of software I use to create my web pages. Until I replace the whole thing with something better I'm going to be doing things on this new blog.
This, by the way, is the actual first post. Anything that is earlier is backdated to the date it actually happened, and will be (eventually) marked with the “timewarp” tag, and have a link to this post.
Sat, 05 Jul 2008
Saturday after the 4th I ran another Savage Worlds game for the kids. This time it was The Secret of Smuggler's Cove, lightly adapted for the Savage Worlds: Explorer's Edition.
Attending were:
- L.B., playing Amy and Josiah
- T.A., playing Billy and David
- E.A., playing Catherine
- M.A., playing Devlin
Note
Spoilers!
The PCs in this adventure are all kids, and T.A. wasn't any too happy that none of the characters had any weapons more effective than a slingshot! Still, they all had fun with the first two sections of the adventure. In the first they raced small sailboats, and they managed to split the characters up so that all the characters run by the two boys were in one boat and all the characters run by the two girls were in the other boat, and each had fun taunting and distracting the others. I ran it as a chase and let good taunts and distractions affect the Boating rolls of the two captains, and I let every success and raise on the Boating roll move the boat one range increment forward [1], which may not be strictly by the book, but did allow for dramatic changes in position. The girls won on the last Boating roll, and then it was time to eat a picnic lunch. They observed the thug hide the map and papers, dug them up, figured out the notes were in German, reburied them, followed the man who picked them up back to Rydel Mount & figured out that he was the gardener, headed back home (very, very, late), saw the Gypsies cooking fire beyond the old Roman fort & traipsed over to see what was happening.
Note
This is a timewarp post.
| [1] | I think the actual rules move a range increment only for a success and the first raise. |
I recently decided that I need to read Heinlein's juvenile novels. I'd read some of them in my youth (thanks to the Weston and Clarksburg public libraries), but not all, and I wondered how they would stand up in the 21st century to my middle-aged eyes, and how interesting they might be to younger eyes as well. (I'll have to wait a bit to see the later, though.)
Luckily, inexpensive compilations published by the Science Fiction Bookclub are easily available from online sellers, and I got four volumes that include all the juveniles, as well as Starship Troopers. Four Frontiers is the first of them.
Four Frontiers, by Robert A. Heinlein; First Science Fiction Book Club printing: June 2005. Published by arrangement with “The Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust” and “The Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Library Foundation”, and Tor Books, and The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. ISBN 0-7394-5345-9.
Rocket Ship Galileo, copyright 1947 by Robert A. Heinlein, copyright renewed 1974 by Robert A. Heinlein, Copyright 1988 by the Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Library Foundation.
I had never read this one. As you might expect, the earliest is the roughest, and probably the least interesting to current crop of juveniles. It's still a fun adventure story, though current social mores would have made it impossible.
Space Cadet, copyright 1948 by Robert A. Heinlein, copyright renewed 1975 by Robert A. Heinlein, Copyright 1988 by the Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Library Foundation.
I can't remember reading this one, but may have. It's interesting how much of this is about learning to deal with others, which moves from dealing with other cadets to, eventually, dealing with aliens. Knowledge, brains, and morals win out over brains, money, and greed.
Red Planet, copyright 1949 by Robert A. Heinlein, copyright renewed 1976 by Robert A. Heinlein, Copyright 2003 by the Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Library Foundation.
I'm almost positive that I'd read this one, but if so I'd forgotten how subversive it was. And I love the skating, for some reason. (I don't skate myself.)
Farmer in the Sky, copyright 1950 by Robert A. Heinlein, copyright renewed 1977 by Robert A. Heinlein, Copyright 2003 by the Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Library Foundation.
This situation on earth in this one, sadly, looks more and more likely.
There's a fair amount of discussion of the actual technology of space travel and related planetary science in these first four books, and that's probably what has aged the worst. The adventures are still fun, and I think an open-minded juvenile could still enjoy them.
Note
This is a timewarp post.
Fri, 04 Jul 2008
Introduction
One of the games I ran over the holiday continued a Savage Worlds adventure that I started at Christmas 2007. The adventure is set in the Frontiers of Alusia sometime during the later stages of my original Frontiers of Alusia DragonQuest campaign, but set away from the scenes and characters of that earlier series.
Prehistory
In December 2007 I was looking for an adventure to run for the kids at the family get-together at Christmas. I'd been looking at my notes from my old Frontiers of Alusia campaign and decided it would be neat to revisit Alusia since my brother, one of the players in my original Alusia campaign [1], would be in for Christmas and would probably be playing with the kids. Of course, instead of using DragonQuest or GURPS, the systems I'd used in the original campaign, I wanted to use Savage Worlds, especially since I was giving all the kids who were old enough copies of Savage Worlds: Explorer's Edition that Christmas. I decided to reuse an The Tomb of Aghyar, an adventure I'd written for another group that had adventured for a short time in my version of The Frontiers of Alusia, and have my original group's characters feature prominently in the city's gossip but not actually appear in the adventure.
I took the map I drew for the original adventure, added some more rooms, worked up Savage Worlds stats for the opposition (borrowing from Noble Deceit for some thieves guild types), and printed out copies of the pregenerated characters from Against the Orcs and Noble Deceit for the players to choose from, and off we went. It went well, my brother was pleasantly surprised when he figured out what was happening, and everybody had fun being chased by the Thieves Guild, figuring out where the tomb was located, and finally venturing into the tomb it self. As is not uncommon when playing with the kids we didn't finish the adventure that evening, and so had to wait for the next time my brother and his family were in town to continue it. My nephew from out-of-state repeated mentioned how he was looking forward to playing “those games with dice” when he came back for the summer.
Revamp
Fast forward to the summer 2008 visit. The night before we played I decided to remap the dungeon and redo the encounters to add a bit more zing. I was interested by D&D 4E's increased emphasis on encounters with more dynamic aspects, having followed some of the Internet discussions and read H1 – Keep on the Shadowfell, and wanted to see what I could do with Savage Worlds to make encounters be more dynamic.
Wizards of the Coast sells Dungeon Tiles, heavy cardboard [2] tiles with pretty dungeon and outdoor scenes marked off in 1 inch squares. They've also released similar tiles in the D&D Basic Game sets in the past.
There is a browser-based Javascript program called Dungeon Tiles Mapper that lets you design dungeons by dragging and dropping the pictures of the tiles from all those sets onto a grid. It lets you print off pictues of the dungeons you've created along with a list of the tiles needed to build it.
Anyway, I download the program and spend some time fiddling with it. It has some quirks and some outright bugs, but overall it is very useful. I was able to make a more interesting dungeon layout pretty easily. I then spent some time rethinking the encounters, looking for ways to make them more dynamic.
Actual Play, Part 1
The first room I changed the least. I already had an WC ooze and a fire trap, but I added a vicious bug swarm in a pile of skulls in one corner near the entrance. When they looted the pile of skulls they disturbed the swarm and after a couple of rounds where the two looters failed to stop the swarm and the swarm failed to damage the looters, everybody moved away to the other side of the room while one of them used fear to send the swarm scurrying. Of course, in the process they moved into the area of the ooze, which was actually dispersed under the dirt floor of the room. It oozed up through and around their legs, and they had to make Strength rolls to break free while the ooze got to try to completely envelope one of them and all had a chance of being damgaged by the acid ooze around their legs. They managed to break free, and one got off a lucky shot with their crossbow, acing their Shooting roll and then acing the damage roll so high I ruled that the shot hit the plum-sized brain of the creature and killed it outright. After that they searched the room, avoiding the depression left by the ooze erupting from the floor and the acidic liquid left by the dying ooze, and finally found a secret door out. Unfortunately, the rogue set off the trap on the door, a fire blast, and caught fire and fell back into the remains ooze, setting it on fire in turn. Now they had to hurry to rescue him and leave the room before the burning ooze rendered it unihabitable. They left through the new tunnel, which lead a few feet to a a shaft down to another short corridor that opened up into a larger room.
That's where we broke for lunch.
Actual Play, Part 2
After lunch we switched play to a different house (mine, just next door), and one of the younger players, M.A., wanted to play. I had a character sheet he could use [3], so on the spur of the moment I added a mystical column of light in the next room as a prison where the adventurers would find the his new character.
That room was much larger, but I'd set it up with with a pool in the middle that took up much of the room, and around several of the walls were a number of alcoves. When I added the mystical column of light, I put it on a short circular pedestal on a square base in the middle of the pool. The PCs could easily jump (not even requiring a roll) from the six-inch tall lip around the pool to the base, but could only balance and move around the base with difficulty. An early experiment with poking the column of light with an unlit torch destroyed the torch and revealed that the rather-more-viscous-than-water liquid in the pool was very caustic. Cautious investigation by T.B.'s combat mage revealed the proper method of manually disabling the mystic column, and after some careful manipulations by T.A.'s rogue, M.A.'s new PC, a paladin of the Holy Light, was with the group.
While improvising a description of his cuirbouilli armor during the initial get-to-know-you conversation the serendipitous juxtaposition of my description of a design on his armor and a aced Smarts roll by L.B., who was playing a priestess of the Holy Light, inspired me to add to the new paladin's backstory that he was the last living paladin of the Holy Light, imprisoned here in agony for, his captors thought, all eternity as punishment by the pirates who destroyed the last stronghold of the order of the Paladins of the Holy Light, and who it was thought had killed last Paladin of the Holy Light. L.B.'s priestess informed the rest of the group of the paladin's identity and his importance, and several of the players immediately assumed the paladin would set about reforming the Order of the Paladins of the Holy Light. M.A. thought all this was neat. (He's 6, BTW.)
During all of this the PCs had dispersed around the room, and it was at this point that they finally noticed that the liquid in the pool had become very agitated, with waves as tall as a man, and suddenly it was flinging globs of acidic gloop at them. Several were hit, some were injured, and one had his precious chainmail damaged by the gloop. Luckily, they had the example of the earlier ooze remainds catching on fire and had plenty of oil, and proceeded to set the gloop pool ablaze, which quickly killed it, to my dismay. [4]
Just before the beginning of the glooping, B.B.'s fighter made a Notice roll and figured out that the dusty cobwebs in the alcoves at both ends of the room concealed leathery corpses. He wanted to start stabbing the corpse in each alcove before moving on to the next. Knowing that this would simply bring the corpses out to fight him as he moved toward the alcove I decided it would be better to charge a “Divine Inspiration” tax and take one of his Bennies and tell him it was a bad idea, so they didn't end up fighting the eighteen zombies at the same time as the Wild Card gloop.
However, as soon as they opened the door out of the room, the eighteen zombies came out to attack. Since B.B.'s fighter had noticed the corpses earlier and warned the others of the alcoves' contents I gave them a Notice role with a bonus, so they had a round to decide where they would be when the zombies actually attacked. Most lined up at the end of the room with the door out, but D.B.'s dwarven fighter moved back halfway through the room, planing to get a first shot at the ones coming from the other side with his crossbow, then switch to his axe.
It was M.A.'s paladin's turn to shine: he got the Joker for initiative early in the fight and proceeded to ace his Fighting roll and really ace his damage roll. I decided that the return of the Last Paladin of the Holy Light to the world and his almost immediate return to the fight against Darkness was such a momentous occasion that he had been inspired by the Holy Light and began to glow and his sword, swung for the first time in over 200 years, cut through the heads of the three nearest zombies even before they had completely left the alcoves. The paladin retained the glow and a small bonus through-out the rest of the fight. B.B. remarked that his fighter was inspired by this, and slightly later in the fight when he aced one of his rolls I ruled that he picked up a slight glow for the moment. At the end of the fight B.B. decided he wanted to become a Paladin of the Holy Light as well.
In the mean time, everybody else had been whacking at the zombies. D.B.'s dwarf was doing wonders with Sweep, keeping a significant number of the zombies from attacking the others from behind. T.A.'s rogue was stabbing away Two-fisted with his knives and both of the girls (who had independently and without me knowing at the beginning had picked two female clerics with Pacifist; I might have suggested one or the other take one of the other female pregens without Pacifist had I known) were quite happy to be taking out these unatural creatures.
T.B.'s combat mage had been plagued with really bad rolls all night, and he was getting perturbed. I had actually missed pointing out a couple of bonuses he should have got that would have made one or two of his earlier attacks hit, so I gave him a small bonus on his last attack roll, which got him a hit with raise and with the extra d6 of damage he aced a couple of his damage dice and got to totally disintegrate the last zombie, which made up for the bad time he had earlier.
With the zombies truly dead and the gloop still blazing, it was time again for some quick looting and then out the door to the next encounter. Unfortunately, we had to end things there, to be resumed at Christmas 2008.
Remarks
In hindsight, switching houses in the middle of the game was a bad thing for the game [5]: we lost a lot of time moving things and setting up again. On the other had, it did help get rid of distractions. I think in the future at this big family gatherings at the farm I'll just plan to have gaming set up at my house, and we can just migrate people there when it's time to play.
The Dungeon Tiles make nice looking dungeons, but are tedious to organize; finding the right tiles takes too much time unless you can do it before the game, and they are surprisingly bulky. I still haven't figured out if I've lost any of the tiles. I need to try some PDF tile sets to see if it's more convenient when I can just print out as many tiles as I want on cardstock, instead of having a limited number of much thicker tiles.
When playing with the kids, I tend to let really high aces do things that are just plain cool, like letting a damage roll that aced with enough raises to do a half-a-dozen wounds if the PC had been attacking a Wild Card to instead take out several side-by-side Extras, and/or add some cool special effects, like the glow and bonus for M.A.'s paladin, the much shorter glow for B.B's fighter, and T.B.'s combat mage's disintegration of the last zombie.
I also tend to be fairly lenient with bonuses if I realize I'd made a mistake in an earlier round that could have made an earlier attack a success, retconning those earlier misses into “you spent a couple rounds getting this attack set up right, and boy did you hit it this time!” It's not going to do me any good to not recognize my mistakes and hide behind the letter of rules and send a kid away from the table unhappy. All but one of the kids I play with regularly is 11 or younger, and we often don't get to play more than once month, if that. If I was playing with adults or older kids, or we played often enough that even the younger kids had the rules down perfectly I'd be stricter.
Savage Worlds doesn't have all of D&D 4e's mechanics for dynamics, such as special rules for shifting and pushing and pulling, and I didn't really do anything particular in these sessions to do that with Savage Worlds other than trying to have more terrain obstacles and have more than one opponent per room. Things seemed to be pretty dynamic in play. I think the things that Savage Worlds does have still let you do dynamic things easily, though with more recourse to GM judgement.
Note
This is a timewarp post.
| [1] | The original campaign was based only on the original The Frontiers of Alusia supplement, which was just the original map and some the terse descriptions that accompanied it. |
| [2] | These are real cardboard, heavy and stiff and about one sixtenth inch thick. |
| [3] | Several of the Savage Worlds Savage Tales adventures come with pregenerated characters and figure flats for the characters (as well as the monsters for the adventure) so back at Christmas when I'd quickly put this adventure together I just printed out the sheets from a couple of the adventures and let the players pick which ones they liked the best. That left me with several from new players could pick. |
| [4] | Perhaps using an ooze and a gloop that both could burn as Wild Cards in nearby rooms was not a good idea... |
| [5] | It was still a good thing overall, since it got most of the kids and their commotion out of the house with most of the adults, so the stess levels for those adults went down. |