On Lampreys

I haven't actually said much about lampreys on this blog, despite claiming that it was partially a blog about them. So today I'm going to fix that.

Here is a drawing of the hideous things, by the extremely talented artist Don Kenn:

These things infest Lake Michigan.

And here is a newspaper story from 2012 that will strike fear and desperation into your heart.

A Shortcut Dank and Dark

Matt Jackson posted a cool little map on Google+ and suggested we have some fun stocking it. I enjoy fun, so I gave it a shot.

This is an adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics, but it's easily transferred to other systems. You can download the pdf here.

A Shortcut Dank and Dark

A short cave adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics

Written by Brian Wille
Map by Matt Jackson

Overview:  A Haunt of Hobgoblins and Orcs live here! They are at home when the party arrives, and they are not used to visitors. They react depending on their mood, how much blood they have shed recently and the attitude of the intruders. They are generally ready for battle, but are also unobservant and disorganized.


Creatures, Monsters, and Map:
Many thanks to Rafael Chandler for the Shadhavar in the Lusus Naturae preview, and to John Carr for the Night Children Hobgoblins and Orcs.
Map by Matt Jackson 2014

Miniatures Skirmish Rules Sci-fi & Fantasy

After years of reading miniatures rules and trying to play them, only to find that the rules were too fiddly or vague and the games too long, I finally discovered it didn't have to be that way. Miniatures games could be fun and fast, and played with any miniatures of the same scale that I had handy.

I was briefly part of a miniatures wargame club and greatly enjoyed the people and the games. But I never did learn how to paint figures very well, and eventually the games were held in homes instead of game stores. Distant homes, and often with cats (allergic) so attending was no longer an option.

Luckily, the club keeps a fantastic blog with great pictures of their work and battles, so my experiences are not lost like tears in the rain, and you can see what I'm talking about.

http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/

Here is a recent entry, a playtest of a new supplement for Song of Blades and Heroes called Song of Hammer and Forge. It introduces new rules for dwarves, flintlocks and cannons. Which frankly are three of my favorite things.

http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/2014/07/playtesting-song-of-hammer-forge.html

As a kid I played hellishly complicated miniatures wargames like Tractics or Engage and Destroy. I tried Chainmail a few times but there were holes and contradictions in the rules. The only Warhammer miniatures I ever played were demos at Games Workshop stores, and my dreams of playing Mordheim never materialized. Battlelore  is fun but set-up and take-down are lengthy.

When the guys at the club told me I could bring my old Grenadier miniatures or HeroQuest figures, my Ral Partha creatures or Warhammer troops, I was excited. They showed me how to stat them up, explained the easy and fun rules, and the games began. We could get two games finished in one night, easy. We used terrain from the stores at first, but the guys in the club are genius and soon had their own terrain created and painted.

The best of the sci-fi miniatures rule sets that I tried.

I was lucky enough to play a few other rulesets with them, a couple sci-fi battles on distant colony worlds (Tomorrow's War and 5150 Star Army) and a fantastic post-apocalyptic game (Wastelands). There was also an epic Halloween zombie battle with multi-story buildings and vehicles, using customized All Things Zombie rules.

A great pic from Chicago Skirmish blog. Killing zombies on Halloween.

Some day I hope to get some use out of all my old 40k figures (a game I played three times) using the rules to In the Emperor's Name: https://thegamesshed.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/in-the-emperors-name/

If you're at all interested in enjoying a fast miniatures game with a maximum of fun, I strongly suggest the Song of Blades and Heroes series and Wastelands. Put those old figures to use!

http://www.ganeshagames.net/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Song+blades+and+heroes&x=0&y=0

Rat Queens Dungeon World

Dungeon World was the game of choice at the most recent Monday Night Game Lab, and it was the first time playing it for everyone involved. We'd all played Monster of the Week though, and three of us had played Apocalypse World, so none of us were strangers to the basic mechanics.

The key differences were the types of Basic and Special Moves, the magic system, and the use of hit points. I think we solidly understood everything by the half-way point of the game, except for the concept of Bonds. Normally, you establish Bonds when you create your character: how are they connected, bonded, to the rest of the characters?  In this case we were using pre-generated characters and they had been filled in for us.

On a few occasions we felt the rules were implying an actual modification to the die roll based on Bonds, but we could not find what that would be. Bonds are actually quite important; in addition to helping you decide how you would act in a situation, and how your character would interact with another, there IS a die mechanic involved:  "When a move has you roll+bonds, you’ll count the number of bonds you have with the character in question and add that to the roll."

Dungeon World is a very fun, fast and enjoyable system. If I was going to introduce someone to role-playing games for the first time, this is the system that I would use if we were playing in a fantasy setting.

For more information on Dungeon World:
http://www.dungeon-world.com/

We were Rat Queens in the game we played. Rat Queens is a fantastic comic about a company of adventuring women. They are rowdy, sarcastic, hard-partying and violent. They are sexy and they are hilarious. If you don't know the Rat Queens, you should check them out immediately!
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/rat-queens

[Major Spoilers if you are playing this at 2014 Nexus Game Fair]
The Rat Queens were in trouble for leading an angry murder of goblins into the city of Palisade while fleeing.  Sawyer Silver of the City Watch offered them a chance to get out of prison by finding and rescuing the missing children of a small farm community. Saying No meant staying in prison, so...

The girls had to leave immediately, or right after they took a bath, because they reeked of goblin and it was making people ill.

Upon arriving to the village one woman remarked, "This is who's going to save our children? They look more like prostitutes than heroes!" That set the tone for their helpfulness.

Dee was able to commune with the dead, getting details on the last time something like this happened from Edna Smith, the dead grandmother of the village headman. The dead are sometimes more useful than the living.

Striking out towards the low hills, Betty got them a little lost and soon they had to make camp. After getting a fire built and eating some rations, Betty broke out her bag of magic mushrooms and indulged. 

Violet and Dee decided that would be fun too and also dipped into Betty's little bag. Soon Hannah was the only one with her wits about her, and keeping watch. Halfway through the night she heard whispers and sensed she was being watched. Getting Betty's attention she told her they had company and to quietly tell the others. Betty thought she was being quiet but had no sense of her own volume, using a loud stage whisper to say "Grab your stuff girls we got company!"

Battle ensued. Hannah cast Light on a rock and threw it over to where she heard the noises, illuminating several humanoid shapes dressed like ninjas. Dee raised a Zombie Servant from the very ground!

Similar dress, but in tatters, filthy, and more flesh hanging on the bones.

Violet went to chase a fleeing assailant but went off-course and ended up throwing her shield, to no avail. Betty stabbed one of them in the back. Hannah clobbered one with her staff. Soon the Rat Queens had a prisoner, whom they began to question.

The assailants were Underelfs, who had been kidnapping children. Eventually they give details about where the kids were being held, and why--the Elf Queen was going to sacrifice them in a hideous magic ritual that would destroy the surface of the world.

The Rat Queens found the entrance and Dee used Dispel Magic to destroy the magic barrier. Walking in they ran into an annoying, smelly little albino goblin. They eventually decided to walk in the direction opposite of "where heroes go" (as the goblin said) and take his chamber pot, making it into a helm for Happy the Zombie Servant, as Dee had named him. Dee cast Light on the chamber pot and embedded Hannah's Light Rock into Happy's chest, a la' Iron Man. The girls sent him forward to light the way and scare the hell out of Underelfs.

They ran into several guards, some with very well-defined pectoral muscles and the open shirts to prove it. They killed or ran them all off.  Happy the Zombie Servant got the chance to eat Elf brains, and moaned for more. A fancy if dirty cape was found, and affixed to Happy the Zombie Servant. With the chamber pot on his head, he looked a lot like Mysterio.

They found a room with an altar, and Violet discovered it was hollow! Opening it revealed a trove of diamonds. Dee left a note on the altar for the Elf Queen: "Thanks for the diamonds." Dee also took the time to draw a happy face on Happy's brightly-illuminating chamber pot.

Hannah cast a spell that allowed her to see a tiny purple pony with wings when she closed her eyes, and that led the way to where the children were. Unfortunately it didn't care about walls, so Violet and Betty spent some quality time knocking through a stone wall to reach the children. Probably there was an easier way.

Kind of like this I guess. Never imagined such an image would be on my blog.

The kids were scared out of their minds by Happy the Zombie Servant but Dee calmed them down and Betty gave them candy. Just regular candy. Everyone trooped out the way they came, but there were a bunch of angry Underelfs waiting for them in the altar room, including the super-creepy necromantic Elf Queen. She demanded the children, Violet told her they peed on the altar, and battle was joined.

Like this, but against Underelves

The kids saw a chance to run out the front and took it. The Rat Queens covered their escape until the Elves were worried more about protecting their Queen, and the girls followed the kids--only to find that the annoying albino goblin was preventing their escape. Betty launched a dagger at him and hits him in the eye! He fell down dead and everyone escaped, with the kids and the diamonds.

The Rat Queens deserved an epic fiesta after that, I'm sure...

A Single Small Cut: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mesdames et Messieurs, Damen und Herren, from what was once an inarticulate mass of lifeless tissues, may I present a cultured, sophisticated, Man About Town.  WAIT WHAT IN THE SEVEN WOUNDS IS THAT...ABOMINATION

Horrifying and disgusting, but much worse when combined with Sarah's detailed descriptions.

I finally had the chance to play Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  It's more like D&D than Dungeon Crawl Classics is really, like Basic D&D but with black-powder firearms and a horror element. The world is a fantasy-horror version of the 30 Years War. They burn pointed eared magic-using people at the stake in this world, so we had to convince them that our elf was just a weird albino guy with a strange accent.

A Single, Small Cut is designed to be a short adventure, played as a one-shot or right after your party has emerged from some hideous dungeon or grasping wilderness.

That didn't stop us from making it into an all-night affair, but we had a larger group than usual and we rolled up our own characters.

Our party consisted of a Sorcerer, two Specialists, a Fighter and an Elf. I got a huge kick out of blasting at things with my brace of flintlock pistols, and the Elf was crucial to our success: by reversing his Enlarge spell, he shrunk our huge and disgusting opponent and gave us the fighting chance to kill it. Here, I took pictures of that.

A huge hideous mass of flesh and sphincters and fluids

Still hideous but 60% smaller thanks to arcane Elf magic

I enjoyed the system and the scenario very much and hope to run something myself at some point soon.

You can pick up "A Single, Small Cut" here:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/129613/A-Single-Small-Cut

Free rules with no art for Lamentations of the Flame Princess here!
http://www.lotfp.com/RPG/products/lotfp-weird-fantasy-role-playing

But if you like grisly, sexy art then you'll want to buy it.

HOLLOWPOINT: Those Angels and Rebels and Aliens Aren't Going to Kill Themselves

Many thanks to Sarah for this awesome drawing.

I volunteered to run a roleplaying game called Hollowpoint for our Monday Night Game Lab. I'd never run anything for the group, but this game sounded like a low-prep, fun one-shot and that was exactly what I was looking for.

"No one in this game is innocent.
You're an Agent. No one ever messes with you, because you are that far above the common herd of men that sleepwalk through their lives. You get things done, and that usually means blood. Or pain. Or, when you are feeling generous, death."

Character creation is fast and easy, which is good because you are expected to die or "move on" in some way at least once during the session.  The game is set up as a series of Conflicts that become progressively harder for the characters to beat.  The conflicts themselves are resolved by rolling big handfuls of dice and using the sets that appear--pairs or more--to narrate the action.  I'm told by a reliable source that the mechanics have similarities to The Pool and InSpectres. At any rate, you'll need a lot of d6 dice for this game. I used every d6 I had in the house, and only had enough because another player brought a bunch of her own.

I got a test-run in with someone who is only an occasional player of roleplaying games and it was very successful. In that game my partner played three characters and I ran a modified version of an example scenario provided in the rule book.

In the test-run, the Agents were highly trained and skilled humans that worked for Heaven, doing a lot of dirty work for the angels who were few and far between on Earth. There were rogue angels and demons roaming our planet and they needed to be kept in check. The Mission this time was to find and destroy a Construct, a kind of Frankenstein's monster that had been created by rogues or demons for some hideous purpose.

The Objectives in this case were clear-cut, as they should always be in a game of Hollowpoint: find out where the creature was being kept, and destroy it. Don't talk to it, don't think about it, just kill it.

The action was fast as the player described their interactions and investigations in Las Vegas, which led to a raid on a warehouse in the desert guarded by a rogue angel and his human minions.  One Agent moved on. The game is not made to be played by one player and a Narrator, but I have to say, we both enjoyed our test game a great deal.

Two days later I ran a scenario of my own design for three veteran RPG players.  Walking around the south wing of my palatial mansion, I noticed one of my favorite books: Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. That was my inspiration. I quickly sketched out the nature of the player's Agency, the location of the story (Mars in this case), the Enemy, and the two Objectives. Each Objective has at least two conflicts. Then I decided on two Principals, important NPCs who would generate retaliations when messed with.

The players seemed to enjoy character generation, and we ended up with a hard-core group of Protectorate Agents who would be arriving at the end of a planetary rebellion to find and secure an alien artifact, a ship in this case.

I feel like I was less-clear than I should have been when I explained the first Objective to the players: were the Agents primarily concerned with finding the location of the rebel base that housed the alien artifact, or were they to focus on killing the Generalisimo who led the colonial rebellion and was still alive?  It's important to be clear about the difference between Objectives and Conflicts, and I muddily combined the two. 

Example character from the book

We also ran into a problem at one point that wasn't covered in the rules, or that I perhaps missed: is this a Story Game, where the players are creating their own reality and dictating the environment, or is it a More Regular Game, where the Narrator prepares the world and the players react to it? The particular situation came up in the last act, as the players approached a large white tent with an airlock, with researchers and rebel guards around it. I had envisioned this scene as leading to a deep shaft, which would in turn lead to the alien ship once the players were underground.  One of the players, however, declared that the ship was in the tent. So which one is true? We decided in this case to play it out the way I had planned it, but I'm still wondering if that was correct. On the plus side, the Epic Final Battle was epic.

Hollowpoint is written by Brad Murray and C.W. Marshall, published by VCSA Publishing:  http://www.vsca.ca/Hollowpoint/

DROP

So we played DROP as a kind of warm-up game the other night. I think it took us an hour max.

"DROP is a high-level story-telling, roleplaying game of survival horror that plays in about 2 hours. While you will control your character's individual actions, DROP plays more like a group of writers weaving a movie plot around a table.

This is a game about building a story, one that will go very badly, all in a couple of hours. It's Fiasco crossed with...a heavy dose of Alien.

In DROP, the players are all crewmembers on a starship that arrives at a planet in trouble, and must drop to the surface, explore some large structure, then run like hell. The rules provide a simple framework for defining the characters and coming up with challenges for them to face."

I probably should have read these Session Logs before playing the game, but it was fun all the same:

http://brentnewhall.com/games/doku.php?id=games:drop

DROP

SESSION LOG

The Preparation: Crew

1. Tycho.  Navigator and experienced veteran, but oddly afraid of the dark.

2. Tynd.  Brave xeno-biologist, beautiful to behold, but extremely clumsy.

3. Liam.  Self-confident engineer who thinks he can fix anything but is mad at the world.

4. Mia.  Happy-go-lucky Imperial assassin but also a skilled geologist.

Risk Factor: Our destination, the planet Crucis Q-8. The planet has a breathable atmosphere but is subject to destructive acid rain storms.

The Arrival: Here We Go

1. Tycho arms himself from the ship’s locker but forgets to check the oxygen valve on his environmental suit.

2. Tynd picks up sampling gear but forgets to bring his morphine.

3. Liam equips his ablative armor like the professional he is.

4. Mia always has her knives and fixes her hair before a drop, but her hair product is highly flammable when combined with acid rain.

The drop will be accomplished using personal flight suits in order to arrive on planet quickly. Ship will descend slowly through the atmosphere on auto-pilot, arriving in time for crew departure.

Risk Factors: Environmental hazards and the presence of other humans—our enemies, the Carcossans.

The Drop: SNAFU

1. Tycho lands perfectly and rolls up with his sidearm drawn, like the professional he is.

2. Tynd lands face-first in a mushroom, breaking his fall but damaging the fungus and sending spores into the air!

3. Liam lands in a large, soft mud pit but still manages to break his arm!

4. Mia lands with knives in hand but accidentally slices into her environmental suit!

Risk Factors: Intelligent, indigenous enemies and continuing environmental hazards.

Exploration: What’s In Here

1. Tycho will explore the well-lit Central Archives.

2. Tynd will explore the Chapel of Mushroom Worship but when she sits down on a stone bench to contemplate the grandeur, realizes it’s not a chair at all—but a sacrificial altar…

3. Liam begins examining the glyphs that cover the walls.

4. Mia encounters a tribe of Mushroom Worshipers in the temple annex and slaughters them all but is pierced by a poison dart through the hole in her suit.

Risk Factors: Who will cause problems for the crew during their escape? The Carcossans!

ESCAPE:

1. Tycho runs very fast and shoots at pursuing Carcossans!

2. Tynd jumps up and flees very gracefully!

3. Liam realizes the glyphs point to dripping blood on the altar and discovers that a secret door will open once blood covers the plate. He cuts his own hand to produce blood but in his anger he cuts off his entire hand!

4. Mia is already on the run after assassinating the tribe and flees using an athletic system of sprinting and jumping.