Sat, 15 Nov 2008
Some of the kids and I played through about half of the Pirates of the Spanish Main Savage Worlds onesheet “Dead Men Tell No Tales” this afternoon and evening, before and after supper.
T.A. played Isaiah Kestrel, E.A. played Alice Pettigrew and Phillipe Gujon, and M.A. played Scarred Jack. They had a hard time with the enemy wildcard, who had the luck of the initiative most of the time, ending up with the Joker three times, and the high card of the draw most of the rest of the time. The enemy wildcard incapacitated Alice with one blow that ended up doing five wounds at a whack, and things were looking dire. However, the enemies luck with the iniative cards finally left him However, E.A., rolling for the crew extras who showed up after hearing Alice scream as she went down, aced an attack roll, then aced all three of the damage dice, and then aced at least one of the rerolls, putting the wildcard down decisively. After that M.A. had Scarred Jack try an untrained Healing roll and aced it big time, so Alice isn't quite as badly off as she was, and M.A. wants Jack wants to learn Healing for real now, which is neat.
Lots of fun.
I should have looked up all the details of the edges and hindrances and wrote them on the kids character sheets, and on my copies, before the kids came over for the game. I had to do it while they were there, and of course they wanted to get on to the gaming. However, I knew we'd be looking them up in the middle of game if I didn't.
We also need to play more often so I can keep the details in mind better. Maybe next weekend.
Sat, 01 Nov 2008
I ran the first part of the Savage Wolds fantasy onesheet “Tomb of Terror” for the kids after we got done with farm work.
Note
Spoilers!
Around the table, starting with me as the GM at 6 o'lock, going clock-wise: M.A. played Gar IronHelm; E.A. played Merula Lanus; B.B. played Marcus Two Hands (when he wasn't helping out with baby C.A.); D.B. played Ramel Ramelson; and T.A. played Fox.
We got through the first encounter with very little difficulty, largely because I forgot the very important surprise packages, and then nearly had a TPK when I set them all off at once. They got to where they could hear the next encounter when we had to quit.
Maybe we can finish this at Thanksgiving.
Sat, 11 Oct 2008
I ran a short game of Buggin' with L.B., T.A., E.A., and M.A. Their bugs were at an opera premier (in a suitably rustic setting: the opera house was made of thick grass stalks covered with leaves, with doors of bark fragments) when some thugs tried to abduct a young lady VIP bug. They, of course, prevented it.
There's more to the story, but we didn't have time to take it any further. We'll pick it up again later.
Wed, 01 Oct 2008
My current local gaming group met again today for the first full session of play of the Rushing Valley Campaign, a new low magic, real people D&D campaign, as a group of friends just becoming adults. Lots of fun.
Here's the actual play report.
Sat, 23 Aug 2008
This was the second, and concluding, session in T.A.'s Savage Worlds game. L.B. was in from Kentucky and B.B. and D.B. were down from Morgantown, so along with T.A., E.A., and M.A. we had a full table. Moreover, M.B., who is B.B. and D.B.'s much younger brother, also wanted to play. He's a bit too young to understand how the game works, though, so it was a bit frustrating for him and the others. We worked through it and it turned out ok.
T.A. GMed. E.A. played Eureka, the healer. L.B. played Alisia, an archer. D.B. played Surt, the combat mage. I played Loki, the sneaky guy, sharing him with M.B.. M.A. played Ragnar, the wizard. and B.B. played Fritz, an archer.
We decided we had gone back to town after the previous session and picked up a couple of friends. We easily finished off the rest of the goblin clan, picking up a couple more invented-on-the-spot magic items. We continued to have it in for the dire wolves, and Ragnar exploded a couple of them with his magic. The villagers were glad to be freed from the goblin raiding and gladly paid us as they had promised.
Sun, 17 Aug 2008
Background
T.A. has been coming up with maps and ideas for roleplaying games for a while now, and earlier this week while we were talking about RPGs he said he had a Savage Worlds game he wanted to run. I suggested we do it today, Saturday, in the afteroon, and that's what we did.
His sister E.A. and brother M.A were the only ones of the kids around, and they both wanted to play. We decided to play outside, at a small picnic table in the shade, on top of a large blanket so dropped dice would be easy to find. (T.A.'s idea, and a very good one.) It took a while to get everything set up, and the kids were a little impatient; I can't blame them. But we finally got going. I brought up my Savage Worlds GM Screen and my Flip-Mats and dry-erase pens. E.A. and I got an extra benny each for shuffling cards, and M.A. got a benny for helping set up the table.
T.A. had made several pregenerated characters, so we had a good selection to choose from. E.A. went for a healer again, M.A. picked a wizard, and I picked out a theif and combat mage. E.A. came up with a name for her character, Eureka, but M.A. was stuck, so I asked if he wanted help, and he did. We ended up naming his wizard Ragnar, so I stuck with that for a theme and named my thief Loki and my fire-themed combat mage Surt.
T.A. had made a map of a cavern/dungeon and decided on the monster stats and locations, but beyond that hadn't written anything down. He had thought about what he wanted a lot, though, and had it all in his head.
Play
T.A. told us that our characters had seen notices posted that a small, nearby village was seeking adventurers to help with deal with goblin raiders. A short time later were were talking with the headman of the village, who after some talking promised us 50 gp each in advance and another 50 gp each after the job was done. A short time later we were headed out to the trail the goblins took after their raids.
The trail eventually lead up to the base of a hill and an cavern entrance.
E.A. aced Eureka's Notice roll as we snuck into the entrance and noticed something weird about the wall. It turned out to be a secret door, leading down a short passage and through another secret door into a room with a giant spider just settling down for a nap. Luckily, Loki had eased the 2nd secret door open quietly, so Ragnar tried to cast a Bolt at the spider. Unfortunately, M.A. rolled snake eyes (ones on both his Spellcasting and his Wild Die), and woke the spell up. Next round he spent a benny to get rid of the shaken and aced his Spellcasting roll, aced the damage roll, and so much for the spider.
After that we worked our way through a guardroom and a kitchen, each with goblins and dire wolves. As it turned out, the guards had screamed loud enough for the cook to hear something, but we sent in Ragnar in rat form and he saw the layout of the room and reported back to us. We burst in the door, catching the dire wolf with it and stunning it. The cook died fast, but the dire wolf took forever to kill due to some really lucky rolls. We had it stunned at least 3 times, but could never land another until Surt got the Joker, took a multi-action penalty to cast the spell smite and attack in the same round and aced his Spellcasting roll, killing the dire wolf with one massive blow. He immediately set about skinning the wolf, to take the hide back and have it tanned. And that's were we stopped.
Reflections
T.A. did several neat things. Whenever a PC made a really good search roll and found something magical, T.A. rolled to see which PC the magic item would best suit, then made up a nifty magic item on the spot for that character. The healer got a Staff of Healing that couldn't be used for attacking, but would give the healer a bonus on any healing related roll. The combat mage ended up with a longsword that added a bonus to the damage for his Smite power. Later, when Surt wanted the hide of the dire wolf that he finally killed after it had given the party a long fight, T.A. said that when it was tanned it would give him +1 Armor to attacks from the back. Neither the rolling for who the magic item would suit nor the making up the magic items on the spot was anything he'd seen me do, but it worked well, he came up with nifty magic items that weren't overpowering, and it was neat: no boring “you find a +1 sword” here. In some ways I think it was very “Old School”, in a good way. (I'll talk about “Old School” some other time.)
Wed, 23 Jul 2008
I got to run the “Eternal Nazi” one sheet for Savage Worlds again. 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. (To 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!
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. Today by request I ran a session of Toon first. 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.
After that I ran “The Eternal Nazi”, a Savage Worlds 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.
New Tech
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
I'll 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.
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. 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.
| [1] | I think the actual rules move a range increment only for a success and the first raise. |