In an effort to keep better track of what I watch, I'm reviewing the movies and shows as much as I can. No spoilers in this one.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a Netflix anime series based on the Cyberpunk video game, which is in turn based on the Cyberpunk roleplaying game. I own the Night City source book, and it's one of my favourite city books and it's the city I use in my Shadowrun games. I feel like a lot of tabletop science fiction, and maybe science fiction in general, has been dominated by science fantasy lately, and it's been refreshing lately to find the "hard" sci fi out there. I don't know how hard Cyberpunk sci fi really is, but there's no magic in the setting, and that's close enough.
This series is about a guy, David, whose mom dies. I guess that has some impact on his life, although the series doesn't really demonstrate that aside from conversations about how he shouldn't try to live his life to meet his dead mothers' expectations. He decides to become an Edgerunner.
An Edgerunner is essentially a cyberpunk mercenary. The series is the story of the David's journey from runt to pro, although he gets a lucky break when it's discovered that he's got an unusual tolerance for cyber enhancements. In the Cyberpunk world, the more meatware you replace with cyberware, the less human you become. Take it too far, and you risk a psychotic break. For whatever reason, David can handle more cyberware than most, and so he advances in the Edgerunner world quicker than expected.
David joins an Edgerunner crew, so much of the series is also about his team, particularly his mentor, Lucy. The early stages of David and Lucy's relationship is captivating. Lucy is enigmatic and has questionable motivations. We're not sure whether we can trust her, or for that matter whether we can trust anybody in the cutthroat world of Cyberpunk. There's a severe power imbalance, with Lucy being street smart and dangerous, and David wanting more than anything to be as experienced as she is.
David's attracted to Lucy, too, and she appears to be attracted to him. There are some super atmospheric scenes of them chatting late into the night as they look out at the sprawl of Night City. You can't quite tell whether they're flirting, or whether Lucy's just being kind to the lost puppy she's ended up with.
Those power dynamics are forcibly shifted later in the series, when David is a superhero-level Cyberpunk, and Lucy gets kidnapped by an evil corporation.
I have to admit, I don't think that power shift works for me. Not for any good or important reason, I just happen not to have enjoyed that story. I think I'd have rather seen Lucy lift David up to her level of experience as an Edgerunner, and then for them to go on jobs together, and to do those jobs well. I know that stories require...
]]>Not "The Arrival" with Charlie Sheen, just "Arrival (2016)".
Scifi has a funny history with cinema. It started out as cheap pulp fiction about grown men in funny suits. And then history started all over with 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie redefined what scifi could be, and I think broadly speaking I think of scifi movies as two categories. There's scifi, and then there's scifi. Hard to tell them apart, but one is like 2001 and the other is, well, energetic.
Arrival is slow and pensive. It's the story of a linguist trying to communicate with aliens. That's the literal plot. It's not a MacGuffen dangled in front of a string of action scenes. The actual point of the movie is to talk to some heptopods (seven legs).
It takes what must be an hour to finally get in front of the aliens. The journey there is procedural almost to the point of plodding, and it's beautifully done. By the time you see the silhouettes of the aliens approaching through their noxious atmosphere, you're genuinely anxious.
In the movie, Louise Banks is a linguist. She's drafted by the Army to enter a parked spaceship and talk to the pair of aliens inside. In real life, I'm endlessly fascinated by linguistics. I guess this movie probably skips a few steps in reverse engineering a language, but I think it does a pretty great job of faking it. If you squint a little, and tell yourself you see patterns in the coffee cup stain patterns that the aliens use as their written language, you start to believe you're really working out an impossible puzzle. Admittedly, there's no scene in which you really dig in to the language structure, but there are little flourishes onscreen when you need them. We see some of the rudimentary steps Louise takes to establish the basics. We hear her explain her logic for establishing baseline concepts, like pronouns and interrogatives and so on. The linguistics team develops an app so the scientists can quickly write sentences using the alien glyphs. As long as you're not a real linguist, I think this movie makes you feel like you get it. OK, it's probably as much as movie hackers explaining how the Internet works make people feel like they get advanced networking, but one's closer to my experience level than the other, so I'm happy to be fooled by scifi linguistics.
If Cthulhuoid aliens talking in Rorschach aren't enough, the really scifi part of this movie is what the language unlocks. I'm not a fan of the 10% trope, the one that says humans only use 10% of the brain and that by using more you can manipulate physics with your mind and so on. It's sometimes the foundation for psionics in scifi, but it always feels more like fantasy than science to me. Arrival is a little guilty of this.
It turns out that when you really learn the alien language,...
]]>Games Workshop re-released the first edition (titled Rogue Trader) of Warhammer 40,000 to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. (I'm not sure about their maths. The book was released in 1987, and the re-release was announced in 2023 and shipped to customers in 2024.) What little nostalgia I have for the game doesn't date back to the 1980s (I think I probably first learned of it in the early 2000s) but the real world history of an imaginary world is of interest to me, so I bought a copy. It's a big book of 272 pages, but it's an enormously fascinating read if you're interested in either Warhammer 40,000 or the intersection of roleplaying games and wargames. Because it's got so much of interest in it, I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. This post covers Book 1: Combat.
Rogue Trader labels its sections as "books". I'm not sure whether the original Rogue Trader was distributed as several small books in a boxed set, or whether they're just using "book" instead of "chapter" for thematic purposes. For clarity, I refer to Rogue Trader as the "book" and each section as a "chapter".
The first chapter in Rogue Trader is labeled Book 1: Combat and it's essentially the game. If you were to read no other chapter but this one, you'd be mostly prepared for a game of 1st edition 40k. As a wargame, it makes sense that the bulk of its rules appear in the combat chapter. However, as with modern 40k, most rules actually have a host of dependencies, so while you learn the main loop of the game (and lots of associated rules) in the first chapter, there's more you need to reference later in the book.
Early in the chapter, it says that if you already know the rules of the Warhammer Fantasy, then you can skip this chapter entirely. I basically know nothing about Warhammer Fantasy (now called Old World), but it's obvious that Games Workshop considered 40k mostly a thematic variant of their existing game system.
That explains a lot, because it strikes me that there are a lot more rules in this chapter than I personally would have attempted to support in the initial iteration of a game system. In addition to the rules you'd expect for infantry soldiers fighting over a battlefield, there are rules for destroying buildings, calculating a vehicle's turn radius, how to deal with dreadnought armour, robots, aerial movement and combat, and so on. As I read through the chapter, it just seemed like a lot of detail for a 1st edition game, and there was no differentiation between minimum viable rules and advanced play. I'd be nervous trying to cover that much so soon in a game's lifecycle, but probably Games Workshop didn't consider these rules to be new. They'd been proven already on the game tables of Warhammer Fantasy players, and moving into space must have seemed like a quick...
]]>In this horror movie, Sara Price travels to Japan to look for her identical twin sister Jess, who was last seen wandering around in the Aokigahara forest near Mount Fuji. Everybody fears the worse, because Aokigahara is said to be a popular destination for people considering suicide. There's a lot of local superstition about it. As Sara prepares for her trek into the forest, the townsfolk talk of ghosts and madness.
Sara finally enters the forest, along with an American named Aiden she meets at the pub, and a ranger named Michi. The forest must sell suicide permits and how-to guides, because Sara and her companions come across a lot of places where there are signs of people having died. They even find a fresh body hanging from a tree. And they come across a guy camped near the path, and Michi says people who bring a tent are only contemplating suicide, but are as yet undecided. I'm hoping this is all heavily fictional, because if not maybe Aokigahara should just be cleared for fire wood just to save lives.
Eventually, they find Jess's tent, and Sara decides to stay on site until Jess returns. Michi is adamantly opposed, saying that the forest is dangerous as night because of ghosts and stuff. He says the forest tricks you into seeing and believing things.
As horror goes, the plot leans pretty heavily into two things. One is the identical twin trope. I should hunt down a book or essay on this, but I do wonder what it says about us that we so often make identical twins seem almost supernatural in stories. I found myself wondering about the identical twin gimmick from the moment Sara said she had an identical twin. Knowing it's a horror movie, I immediately questioned whether she really even had an identical twin. And then, as the movie cut from Sara in the USA talking about her trip to Japan and then to Sara in Japan making her way toward the town at the foot of Mount Fuji, I wondered whether the movie was sneakily showing us Jess in a way that only made us think we were seeing Sara. They're identical, so how do we know we're seeing one or the other?
Secondly, the movie walks the old line of "is it supernatural or is it all in her mind?" pretty heavily. Throughout the film, Sara is the only one to see ghosts in the forest. She becomes more and more suspicious of Aiden, until finally she convinces herself, and probably you too, that he's not only met Jess before, but has also captured her and stashed her in a secret hideaway. There's never any evidence of this, but by the end of the movie you really do start to wonder, even as you also wonder whether there's even a twin at all, or whether there are twins but they've already somehow swapped places.
There are a few good jump scares, if you're into...
]]>Army of Thieves is a prequel to the zombie movie Army of the Dead. Surprisingly, it's not zombie movie and it's one of those rare second films in a series that's better than the first.
Dieter was probably the only character in the first movie whose name I remembered after the movie was over. He was funny, out of place, I was pretty sure he was going to die before he reached the safe (that was before I understood there was no plot until the end of the movie), and he turned to be good at what he did. I get the feeling that a lot of the character was probably defined by the actor, because what makes him so likable aren't his lines so much as the way he delivers them, and some of the goofy things he does an inappropriate moments.
This movie starts with the same actor. This time, he's named Sebastian and he, like Dieter, is an expert lockpick. He leads a boring life in an office, and in the evenings he makes YouTube videos about esoteric safe design. Specifically, he's obsessed with four safes designed around Wagner's The Ring cycle. And every once in a while, there's a TV in the frame with a news broadcast about a "zombie apocalypse" happening in the USA.
To sum it up: Same actor, vaults themed around Wagner, zombies on the rise. It's like it's set in the same universe, but it doesn't quite make sense. Or maybe it does. Maybe they just decided to use the same actor for a similar part. Or maybe it's one of those partial reboots, where there are some things that are similar and other things totally new. I half expected for something to go obviously off course, like maybe the zombie thing was just a daydream Sebastian was entertaining in response to a dissatisfying life. But no, it's the same. Everything's set in the same universe, and everything gets explained eventually.
This movie is a proper heist movie, and it knows it's a proper heist movie. Sebastian is the last to be recruited, but when the team is introduced they each have a specialty and so Sebastian just asks if this is like a heist in the movies. Gwendoline, the mastermind behind the planned heists, confirms that yes, it's a heist exactly like in the movies.
The movie goes a step further for the first robbery. Feeling anxious about what they're about to do, Sebastian asks to run through the plan again. So they walk us through it in a series of flash-forwards. You do this, I do that, this guard is distracted, that door is left open. We see it all exactly how it's supposed to go, and it seems like it should work. But of course, everybody knows heists don't ever work as planned. That's the gimmick to the heist movie.
We flash back to the present, and then it becomes clear. That wasn't a series of...
]]>At the time of this writing, Mantic Games is finishing up a Kickstarter campaign for a 10mm or 12mm mass warfare game called Epic Warpath. I'm a backer for several reasons. I can use the assets for the intended Warpath game, but also as auxiliary troops for some Mech games. I could, obviously, do the same with Games Workshop's Legions Imperialis but I like a bit of variety. The game is also co-designed by Alessio Cavatore, of Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, which is a very strong game system. I'm confident in the game, but I don't know near as much about Mantic's gaming universe as I do about Warhammer 30k or even 40k, but fortunately Mantic provides a $0 download of the Warpath Sourcebook, and I've read it from cover to cover.
The Warpath Sourcebook contains pretty much everything you need to know about the setting for Mantic's Deadzone skirmish game, Firefight wargame, and upcoming Epic Warpath mass warfare game. It's very much a universe that serves its game. It's not a launchpad for a publishing arm of fiction novels, like Dragonlance's Krynn or Warhammer or the Horus Heresy.
This is likely refreshing if you feel overwhelmed by vast amounts of lore. Where to start? How can you ever catch up? With Warpath, read 186 pages and you're pretty much all caught up.
Or, if you can't be bothered, read the first 20 pages or so. The story isn't actually that complex. Here's my summary:
That's it, or mostly. I mean, it's not the complete picture. For instance, in Deadzone, you get to know specific corporations, like Mazon Labs. And there's a nameless alien...
]]>I love lore. It's one of the reasons I play games. Having read through Mantic Games's Warpath Sourcebook, I've been thinking a lot about the quirky cyberpunk / hard sci fi / comedy-of-errors / war-ravaged universe that is the Warpath setting. On the surface, it's just kind of general wargame science fiction fantasy, with a lot of the obligatory elements to make your tabletop battles suitably bombastic. The sourcebook, however, does a lot to develop the warring factions and the galaxy they fight for. Here's 12 things I love about the Warpath setting. That's 1 thing for each millimeter of Epic Warpath!
You can argue that this is meeting minimal requirements for a tabletop game, but it does strike me that the factions in the Warpath setting are suitably distinct from one another. Pick any two factions, deploy them on opposite ends of the table, crash them into each other, and it looks good. (Not only that, it appears that they'll play good, too, at least judging from preliminary battle reports.)
There are notable exceptions, but I don't usually throw myself into a sci fi setting exclusively for the technology. More often than not, I want to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations. Warpath's choices provides that pretty well.
I don't know whether Mantic Games considers Warpath to be cyberpunk, and maybe it's not the hardest cyberpunk around, but its central authority is essentially an incorporation of mega-corporations. There's not enough lore civilian lore in the Warpath Sourcebook for us to know how the regular folk of the Warpath universe get on, but I get the sense that nearly everybody lives in service of the Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere. With a name like that, who wouldn't want to?
As much as I enjoy optimistic sci fi, I do gravitate toward dystopian fiction. Maybe my reading of the setting is influenced by what I want to see, but to me it looks like this particular grimdark future, there is only profit. At any cost.
There's a thread of misjudgement woven through the story of Warpath, and the act of catching on to it definitely kept me entertained as I read the sourcebook.
First, there's the entirely manufactured rebellion of the orcs. The Council of Seven engineered, through a series of business deals followed by a major betrayal, conditions that would compel orcs to take a stand against their employers. It was a surefire way to cause enough of a social disruption that the council would have an excuse to step up and lead everyone to safety. The problem is, it worked too well, and the orcs remain a menace to the GCPS. (Interestingly, they're famous for being a mercenary force, so it's not a matter of orcs hating all humans. In fact, you could see orc forces fighting alongside humans, for the right price.)
The Enforcers were developed in part to protect the GCPS from orcs....
]]>Las Vegas has been quarantined due to a zombie outbreak, and the USA plans on dropping a low-yield nuke to clear everything up. But there's 250 million dollars locked in a safe beneath a world-famous casino. Let's go in and retrieve the money!
It's a really good setup, 80% Escape from New York and 20% Ocean's 11. And there are some really clever gimmicks in the movie.
Ultimately, though, it's a pretty boring movie that's too long and awkwardly paced. That said, I'd watch it again, so it's one of those movies I don't love but also don't hate. It's less forgettable thanks to its excellent [actual] prequel, Army of Thieves, which I'll review in my next movie post.
The opening sequence, ironically set to the song "Viva Las Vegas", shows the events of, essentially, a prequel that doesn't exist. There's a whole movie during the opening credits. Zombies attack casinos, a few desperate survivors arm themselves and blast their way out of Vegas moments before the final cement-filled storage container is dropped into place to form a makeshift quarantine barrier around the city.
It's a disorienting but strong intro. By the time the movie starts, you feel a little like you've already sat through the movie, but it really works. When we see one of the heroes of the opening credits working as a short order cook in a diner, we understand. A big world-changing event happened, it didn't destroy all life as we know it, so life went back to normal, for better or for worse.
Mostly worse.
The proposal is simple. Sneak into Vegas, get past the zombies, open the safe, get to the abandoned rescue chopper on the roof of the casino, and fly to safety before the nuke is dropped.
The main dude, whose name I don't think I ever learned, assembles a team consisting partly of people from the credit sequence survivors, with a few others selected out of last-minute talent scouting. You don't really care about most of them, and neither does the movie. They don't each have a special skill or role and are pretty much all obvious cannon fodder.
At least, that's what you think. When the team finally gets into Vegas, there are no zombies to be found. No shambling masses pressing against the barriers, nobody wandering the streets. It's a ghost town.
Zombies eventually appear, and there are some surprising interactions, but it's not the first-person shooter slaughter we saw in the credits. It turns out that a social structure has emerged, a little like in Dawn of the Dead, among the zombies. As the no-nonsense mercenary who's been in and out of Vegas says, "Vegas isn't their prison, it's their kingdom."
OK, so we're focusing on tension. Things will slowly ramp up until things reach a breaking point, and then scary things will happen.
At least, that's what you start to hope. What actually happens is that...
]]>A battle mat is useful in both wargames and roleplaying games, and there are lots of different options for what to use. Like many players, I use a mix of them, including Paizo's dry-erase grid boards and flipmaps, BattleTech map packs, and boards that come packaged with games like Zombicide and Battle for Balin's Tomb. Recently, though, I found myself wanting a good general-purpose hex map that I could use for any game and any scenario. In the end, I designed my own battle mat and had it printed on neoprene by RedBubble, and I've been happily using it for a few months. I call it ZoneMat™ and because I've been enjoying it so much, I've made the RedBubble product page available to the public so anybody can purchase it. Here's what I (humbly) like about ZoneMat.
You can play a wargame on a bare tabletop. I've done it, it's fine. A battlemat, however, is like having a football field instead of just a, um, field. You don't have to remember the boundaries of the battlefield is when you have a battlemat. If a miniature steps off the battlemat, then it's fallen off the face of the planet. The battlefield is exactly the size of the battlemat. It's easy to see, easy to remember, and refreshingly clear.
ZoneMat™ uses 1-inch hexes, rendered black against a neutral grey background, making it easy to quickly measure movement. You and your opponent can agree to play without tape measures, or you can just use the hex grid for quick estimates as you strategize.
If you're playing an RPG, you might be used to squares instead of hexes. I find it easy to convert to hexes, though, especially if you just use the hexes as guides rather than actual spaces. Just count the number of hexes you want a miniature to move, and then place your miniature. Your miniature deosn't actually have to be within a hex for a move to be valid, as long as you've measured the distance by counting hex columns or rows. Don't overthink it. As long as everyone is counting on the same grid (and they are, because everyone's using the same battlemat), it works.
There are three bold hexes on the ZoneMat™. One is in the centre of the battlemat, so you'll never measure from edge to edge again. The other two are on either end of the battle mat, helping you choose places on the map that are a reasonable distance from the centre point, or within a deployment zone.
Each bold hex is surrounded by two circles to help you see when a miniature is in close proximity of the hex.
You can use these bold hexes for objectives or portals or goals, or you can just use them as visual aids to help you judge distance.
As its name implies, ZoneMat™ features several different zones marked on it. As with everything else on the battlemat, the zones are visually...
]]>From Games Workshop, Battle in Balin's Tomb is a skirmish wargame thinly disguised as a board game. One player controls the Followship of the Ring, and the other player controls goblins of Moria. Is this game meant for boardgamers as an easy introduction to wargames? Or is it meant for wargames who want to limit the scope of battle and focus in on just a few characters? The answer is a resounding "Yes!"
I like to get the unpleasant stuff out of the way early. I really enjoy this game, but there's one little detail that's impossible to ignore.
To a tabletop gamer unaccustomed to wargaming, this boxed game might be a little intimidating. You have to cut the miniatures off of plastic sprues, and a few of them require some assembly. However, the miniatures that do require assemble are push-fit, so it doesn't take long to build them. Still, if you're used to opening a box and playing, this game may come as a shock.
Then again, realistically, if you're buying Battle in Balin's Tomb there's a high chance you're already familiar with Games Workshop, and you know what to expect. That, in fact, is what puzzles me the most about this boxed game. It seems to me that the miniatures in the box are trying to solve a problem that may not exist. It tries to provide miniatures with minimal assembly required, just in case you buy the game because you're interested in Lord of the Rings and not because you want to collect miniatures. So the game makes it simple to assemble miniatures, but in the end up it delivers miniatures that are probably the worst Citadel miniatures I've purchased.
They're not wholly bad miniatures. The poses are good. The faces, even though they're maybe just 3mm big at the most, are shockingly recognizable. If you're not sure which Hobbit is which, just look at the miniature's face. They look like the actors from the film. You can actually recognize Sean Astin and Sean Bean. It's uncanny.
The problem is, by molding most of them as complete figures instead of parts of figures, there's an ugly lack of separation between different elements of the sculpt. A sword blade blends in with the body of its wielder. The push-fit connection between the shield the goblins carry and their bodies is blatantly unsculpted.
There's just a big hunk of blank plastic holding the shield instead of a goblin hand or arm.
Goblin hair blends into their armour. The staff on Aragorn's back gets eaten up by his bed roll, and then restores itself later (no, the staff isn't going behind or through the bed roll, there's just a spot where the plastic didn't get sculpted right). The Cave Troll, arguably the star of the game, doesn't fit together without gaps, and his hand doesn't stay on his arm without glue.
Easily the worst Citadel miniatures I've purchased, and in fact they're so bad that it's making...
]]>I've been thinking about the games I play, and what kinds of games I tend to enjoy playing the most. I've written about atmosphere and mechanics previously, and both of those apply equally to tabletop and video games. There's another component that strictly applies only to video games, although the way I often play tabletop it strangely applies to that as well. This component is, believe it or not, music.
It's all relative, of course, but I think I'm a fan of music in general. I'm one of those slightly annoying kinds of nerds who's just as interested about the audio engineer on an album as the musician or band. When I rip an album, I rip it as a single track because I rarely listen to just one piece out of "context". I have to confess that I don't really believe these things are as important as I did when I was a teenager trying to figure out how music production happens, but it's more or less habit now. These are some of the ways I connect with music, and whether it makes sense to anyone else or not I do tend to get excited about the music I connect with. And like many people, I can fall in love with music for irrational reasons. The music doesn't have to be "good" (whatever that means) so much as it has to be meaningful for some reason, whether that reason is its beat, its audio engineer, the fact that an Emu Emax II sampler (for example) was used, or because when I hear it, I think of the game I was playing when I this music was playing on an endless loop.
This applies most obviously to video games, because usually with a video game you get a near endless loop of music as part of the package. There's arguably an element of Stockholm Syndrome here. I grow to enjoy the soundtrack of a game in part because by the end of the game, I've listened to it for a combined total of 80 hours. But there's definitely more to it. The modern orchestral music scene is, at least in my opinion, happening not in universities or auditoriums, but in video games.
A long long time ago, chamber music was composed for rich patrons. It had to be done for rich people, because music involves somebody sitting around humming and jotting down some notes, followed by a bunch of skilled musicians playing expensive intruments. Other music was composed by common folk playing relatively inexpensive instruments for common folk (called "folk music" for obvious reasons).
A century ago, movies were invented. Once they became popular and lucrative, movie studios often kept composers on staff to churn out generic music that could be used as needed. Sometimes the pieces got adopted for a big picture, and other times they just got used (and re-used) in B movies. John Williams and Henry Mancini both came from this industry,...
]]>I've been painting exclusively with Citadel Contrast and Vallejo Xpress Color paints lately. The idea of a high contrast black is a little strange, though. There's no contrast to black, it's just all black. If there's something blacker than black, then the first black wasn't true black. And yet there are high contrast black paints.
Chaos space marines generally wear black armour with gold trim. Normally for chaos marines, it makes sense to just use a black undercoat, and then paint gold trim. I've got several marines painted that way, and it works well.
For this, though, that wouldn't work because painting high contrast over solid black renders solid black, and anyway for the contrast gold to show up it has to be painted onto something light. I do have a grey undercoat I could use, but in for a penny, in for a pound: I used an undercoat of White Scar.
The first coat of Vallejo Xpress Color's Black Lotus definitely, maybe predictably, came out looking pretty grey. The paint does what it's designed to do, though, and the edges were shaded with the darkest parts of the paint. It looked good, but it didn't look black. It also didn't look grey. I detect a blue tint to Black Lotus, so after one coat it's sort of a bluish gunmetal grey. If you happen to be looking for that, I guess this would be fine, but it's a peculiar kind of grey and I'm not quite sure when I'd want that exact shade myself. Maybe I'll try it on some BattleTech mech miniature, in the future.
The obvious solution is a second coat.
After a second coat, the paint comes out a little darker, and yet still maintains much of its contrast. Obviously there's less contrast, because the surfaces are darker and therefore closer to the shading around the edges. Interestingly, some regions manage to maintain highlights, and those read as a kind of grey or whatever you call a black "highlight".
I think I hadn't expected there to be any highlights after the second coat. I applied a third coat on select areas, and the results were basically the same. There were definite highlights.
In the end, I decided that Black Lotus, at least, can't get to true black, at least not in a reasonable number of coats. That's fair, because it's intended as a high contrast paint, and there's no contrast in a 100% shade. The question is whether I care, and the fact is that I don't. I prefer a little variation and texture on my models, and I love the look of high contrast paints.
And anyway, colour is largely cognitive, and at some point black is only black in comparison to some other colur.
Chaos marines have gold trim on their armour, and the miniatures I'm painting also have a sort of tabard cloth showing under some parts of their suit. I painted one Plasma Red and the...
]]>I'm the developer and publisher of Skuffle Wammer, the universe's smallest wargame. It's designed to be played in 5 minutes or less, with the intent of being the tabletop gaming equivalent of a good stand-up-and-stretch at work. The play area is an A4 sheet of paper, you throw out some miniatures and some dice, and play to the end. The dice are used as both ammunition and as hit points, and each mini possesses just 3d6, and its rules are just half a page, so it really is a fast and fun game, and easy to play. Lately I've been experimenting with expansion ideas, and my first idea is to bring some ghouls into play.
In my first and second dev diary entries, I designed special rules for zombies and ghouls as an expansion to the original half-page ruleset of Skuffle Wammer. I want the expansion to add extra fun options, but part of its purpose is to grant "permission" to play Skuffle Wammer as a true solo game. I developed the game as a solo exercise, but only in the sense that I was the one playing it and really I was doing the work of two players. It's inoffensive in a 5-minute game to serve as two different players, but technically I never feel like it's great design to force one person to play as two.
The expansion I'm working on now creates the façade of a basic automated opponent. It doesn't actually, but by making the "bad guys" of the game mindless zombies or packs of ghouls, I think it'll broadcast to the solo player not to overthink the other side. They enemies defined by the expansion are meant to be single-purpose. They aren't chaos cultists or traitor marines with lofty goals of galaxy domination. They're mindless creatures driven by instinct. They may not make the best tactical decision, but they do scary things like swarm you when you're down, or relentlessly pursue you even as you retreat to buy yourself time.
Robots are similar. They don't think, they follow an algorithm.
I have four drones from Games Workshop's Blackstone Fortress game, so I've been playing with them for my playtests. I guess they use lasers or elecroshock mechadendrites. It's hard to tell from the miniature, so WYSIWYG doesn't exactly apply, but I think it's safe to assume that they have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon attack. I see no reason to boost their attacks, so I started them out with the usual Skuffle Wammer 3+ for melee and 4+ for ranged.
Instead, I'll play into the borg and nanite trope, where a mechanical entity can auto-repair itself based on the power of a networked hive mind. Each robot starts with 3d6, but as a free action, at any time, it can send a any number of its dice to any other robot.
So if a robot is in a particularly beneficial position and has run out of d6, another one...
]]>The D&D 5e book Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft includes an adventure called House of Lament. Last year, I ran House of Lament as a side quest in an Expedition to Castle Ravenloft game. This is my review of the House of Lament module as a Game Master. It mirrors my review as a player.
I had every intention of having no host character. I've never thought a host character was a good idea, so I intended to skip it altogether. Because this was a side quest in a larger Ravenloft game, I had Strahd himself deliver the quest to the players.
Strahd wanted the player characters to travel to the House of Lament and free it from its haunting. He told them he wanted this because he was trying to reform his evil ways. He was lying.
Instead, Theodora Halvrest was another previous incarnation of Tatiana. He needed the players to free her spirit from the house because he thought it was preventing Irina in Barovia from assuming her true identity.
That all worked perfectly. Until the players reached the house and entered from the top level. It didn't occur to me to just move the spirit board and other key components of the plot to the third floor, so when they started to spend too much time upstairs, I conjured up a host character and had him come fetch them.
Then I was stuck with a host character for the adventure, which annoyed the players as much as it annoyed me. In the end, it did all work out, though. The host ended up being Khazan (from Curse of Strahd) in disguise, and all the players but the player with the sunsword figured it out, so he got away.
Never again. It seems like a fun mechanic, but the séances were slow, cryptic, unhelpful, and confusing. If I ever run the module again, I'll skip the spirit board.
My players kept stumbling on elements of unrelated plots, and that caused them to follow false leads, which confused them more than the spirit board already had. In the end, I dropped all notion of how the haunting was supposed to be solved, and just followed the players' leads. I let them do all the things they decided made sense to free Theodora's spirit, and wrapped up the module.
To keep things interesting, I had certain elements of the awakened house happen before the house was meant to awaken. That helped a lot.
House of Lament is a pretty awkward adventure. I love a good haunted house adventure, though, and I think this adventure is packed with strong material. Here's what I'm doing next time.
I've been thinking about why I enjoy games, and what kinds of games I tend to gravitate toward. The more I think about it, the more I find that it's probably an unsolvable riddle (but that in itself seems a little like a game). Either the gamer or the technical part of my brain has taken the bait, and this post is another one about an aspect of gaming I enjoy. Specifically, I play games for the mechanics.
A game "mechanic" is essentially a rule. On the one hand, it's jargon and probably we "serious" gamers could just say the word "rules" when we talk about game mechanics. On the other hand, though, I think when we use the term "mechanic" there's the implication that we're referring to not the entire ruleset, but a particular aspect of the rules, or the way a specific rule interacts with another rule. In other words, we mention a "game mechanic" when we're imagining the game rules as an engine, and we want to lift the hood and take a look inside to see all the gears.
Thinking of a set of rules as an engine is an apt analogy, of course, and video games distinguish the "engine" part of the code from atmospheric parts. It's all arbitrary, an artificial set of restrictions placed on a predefined activity, but it's what drives the game process. If you move this piece, then you make that thing happen.
It's proscribed cause and effect, and it's fun in stages. At first, it's fun to learn what the causes and effects are, and how they all work together to predictably end at an endgame scenario.
Once you understand them, it's fun to see the triggers happen. It's like the satisfaction of bubblewrap. You know what's going to happen when you press down on a bubble, but there's no satisfaction until you do.
And then, it's fun to see what the endgame scenario looks like from scenario to scenario. Sometimes you're in the lead. Sometimes it's your opponent. Other times, you're in the lead but by the barest margin, and then your opponont steals a victory by surprise. Or maybe you've set some things in place to snag the victory at the last moment.
That, I think, is the normal progression of a typical game's lifecycle. In the best case, it continues to satisfy for years and years, even after hundreds of game sessions. In other cases, it seems there's closure. You've discovered all possible states of the game, and while the discovery was entertaining, it's essentially a puzzle you now consider solved.
But playing a game because of the mechanics can sometimes transcend both the best and most common scenarios.
For a hobbyist game designer (which is what I think you are if you do this), tinkering around with the game engine can provide years of continue entertainment even in a game that otherwise would have fallen flat. The common path into this, I think,...
]]>I've been pondering lately why I enjoy games, and what kinds of games I tend to gravitate to. The more I thought about it, the more I found that it's probably ultimately an unsolvable riddle, but that in itself seems a little like a game. Either the gamer or the technical part of my brain has taken the bait, and this post is about one aspect of gaming I enjoy. This one's one of the more irrational aspects: atmosphere.
Whether I'm playing a tabletop game or a video game, the game's world and lore and visual appearance is a persuasive factor. I'm a gamer who gladly surrenders to the illusion that playing a game is spending time in a storybook or a fantasy. I don't seem to care whether the game world is a dystopian cyberpunk city, an idyllic dreamworld untouched by time, a steampunk factory, or a wartorn wasteland, just so long as it intrigues me. If I enjoy spending time in the world, then I'm apt to play the game often.
Annoyingly, I can't always quantify or qualify what intrigues me. Things I think I like sometimes fall flat, while things I never knew I liked somehow capture my imagination. The post-apocalyptic wasteland is a pretty reliable trope for me, as are zombies, and yet both Dying Light and Walking Dead have never managed to appeal to me the way Dead Island and Left 4 Dead 2 do. Confusingly, I don't long for a tropical island setting in real life, but the strangely tranquil (aside from the zzombie infestation, I mean) Banoi of Dead Island never gets old.
I think the way I engage with games is strongly influenced by roleplay. Whether or not I would like a setting in real life doesn't affect how my player character or avatar does. In other words, I can real-life enjoy a game world by imagining I enjoy it. And I do this for a variety of different reasons.
Sometimes, it's because the game mechanics are really good. If I enjoy a game for how it plays, then I'm likely to grow some fondness for the game world. That doesn't always compel me to come back to the game once I feel I've beaten it, but it keeps me invested while I'm working on it.
Other times, I like the game world despite the mechanics. Maybe the game mechanics are just average. Frankly, as much as I enjoy it, Fallout the Board Game probably qualifies here. The game design is impressive and accurately mimics the complexity of the video games, but it's no Blackstone Fortress. But Fallout is a setting I love, and the board game's atmosphere ensures that I continue to play it.
When atmosphere is missing altogether, I often find myself enjoying a game but not developing fond memories of the game after playing it. There are some very good classic card games, like Texas Hold 'em and Blackjack, that I enjoy...
]]>Blackstone Fortress is a Black Library novel by Darius Hinks. As its name implies, it's largely about a fortress. Made of noctilith, also known as blackstone. The reason it's significant that the fortress is made of blackstone is that noctilith famously both channels and repels the powers of the warp. This book is about a team of adventurers who dare to delve into it, and what they find.
The book doesn't go into great detail about the physical form of the Blackstone Fortress, but other 40k books do. A Blackstone Fortress (there are more than one of them) is a space station, of sorts. It's a gigantic structure floating in the farthest reaches of space, long forgotten until somebody happens upon it. After the one in this book was found, a space port called Precipice formed near it, as an assembly point for all the hundreds or thousands of people brave and foolish enough to attempt to delve into the fortress.
They've been used as weapons by the Imperium and the forces of Chaos alike, but nobody knows exactly what Blackstone Fortresses are actually for. Cult Mechanicus believes that Blackstone Fortresses are what reinforce the barrier between real space and the warp. Some believe the fortresses are the design of the Emperor. Others assume they're of a xenos race, or from the warp. Theories abound, and it seems people from all over the galaxy want to explore it for one reason or another. Janus Draik, a Rogue Trader from Terra itself, travels to the titular Blackstone Fortress because he believes it contains a powerful artefact that could bolster the Imperium in its fight against Chaos.
Or does he just want to impress his dad?
Nevermind. Whatever his reasoning, he's got his ship, his reputation, and his loyal assistant Isola, and he's determined to do whatever it takes to succeed.
Before venturing into Blackstone Fortress, Janus and Isola decide to gather an adventuring party.
The first adventurer he recruits is Grekh, a kroot mercenary. It's at this point that you realise this isn't like most Warhammer 40,000 novels. This is a Rogue Trader novel. Xenos and humans work together in Blackstone Fortress. It's a tenuous alliance, but it takes you by surprise if you're used to the endless war of either Horus Heresy or 40k books.
Next, Janus recruits Taddeus the Purifier, a bonkers priest convinced that he's been granted visions of the path to the Ascuris Vault within the fortress. Like Janus Draik, Taddeus believes the vault contains a valuable relic, known as the Eye of Herminus, that could help the Imperium of Man.
Pious Vorne is Taddeus's loyal acolyte. A former ganger turned religious fanatic, Pious Vorne is one of the most fascinating characters in the book. She's by no means a central character, so what little of her character development there is you have to glean from the couple of scenes she gets. In very little time, though, she makes an impact on both the reader...
]]>I play an Adeptus Mechanicus army in Warhammer 40,000 and the new Adepus Mechanicus Codex recently came out. I've purchased it and read it from cover to cover, and this my review of it. In short, it's good. I'll talk about why in this blog post.
Before talking specifics though, it's worth explaining what a Codex is in Warhammer 40,000.
In Warhammer, a codex is primarily a rulebook, but it contains only the rules specific to the army you play in the game. Most importantly, a codex contains specifications ("datasheets" in Warhammer terminology) for your individual miniatures so you know how far each soldier or tank or robot in your army can move, how powerful its weapons are, how strong its armor is, and so on. This is information you must have in order to play a game of Warhammer, and it's not information that doesn't typically come in the box of miniatures you buy (unless the box you've purchased is a self-contained game or a starter set with special rules all its own)..
In addition to rules, a codex also has a primer on the lore for your army. That's not really something you need to know in order to play, but if you're a fan of the Warhammer books and setting, then it's fun to read.
If you're buying the Adeptus Mechanicus Codex for the rules, then this book is absolutely worth the cover price, although it's not the only way to get the datasheets for your army. Games Workshop also sells datasheets on individual note cards, and I'd have purchased those in addition to the book, but my local game store had just sold out.
If you're buying it for the lore, then this book is probably not worth the cover price. The lore is good, but only 40 pages out of 120 pages are lore. Then again, I don't know offhand where to find more Adeptus Mechanicus lore all in one place, so maybe this book is worth it. Even if you don't use the datasheets for a game, they do at least give numbers to the relative strengths of different soldier types and machinery. But lore doesn't change that much, so I'd probably just look out for a previous edition's codex and buy that.
The Adeptus Mechanicus Codex contains lore, photos of painted miniatures, and rules for both Combat Patrol and full-scale armies.
The first 40 pages of the book is all lore. You get a history of the cult, with some details you might not have known, or thought about even if you know it deep down. I never really thought about how old the Adeptus Mechanicus actually is, for instance. I knew that the Emperor struck a deal with them before he had unified Terra, and yet it never occurred to me that this meant that they predate the Imperium. It's super...
]]>I don't like sports. I tend to think of geek culture in general as being against sport, but that's a sentiment influenced strongly by my own social experience. If you think about it, sport and tabletop gaming share a lot in common. They're competitive, they're games, people play them for fun, there are usually points involved, and goals, and so on. And probably for this very reason, sport and tabletop gaming actually do cross over sometimes. In tabletop gaming, this is usually represented by the tournament (also known as "competitive play" or "competitive circuit" or "the championships" and so on). These days, tournaments are usually sanctioned and organized by the publisher of the game, and personally I think there's a right and wrong way for it to happen.
Personally, I know the golden age of a game is over once a tournament scene shows up. That's how I feel about tournaments. There are exceptions (which I'll get to, later) but generally I find tournaments restrictive, imposing, and esoteric. I think they codify the fun out of games. They prompt game designers to make bad decisions, game publishers to print mistakes, generate a lot of noise about the game's "meta", and altogether frighten away new players.
Tournaments are meant to be tests of player skill. The illusion is, essentially, that every board game is exactly like chess. It's perfectly balanced, and each player has exactly the same resources as the other.
Anybody who plays tabletop games knows that this isn't accurate. Modern tabletop games offer players arbitrary choices over how they build a deck or assemble an army, they implement all kinds of strange rules and systems meant to break those rules. Tabletop games are unbalanced, and that's by design because modern gamers understand that not everyone feels the need to earn a trophy for every game. Like many tabletop gamers, I play my favourite games to find out what's going to happen this time. Does the Fellowship get slaughtered by a bunch of orcs? Does a goblin end up with The Ring, with Frodo's head on a spike? Or do Aragorn and Legolas manage to kill the entire horde on turn 1? Nobody knows, and that's what makes the game fun.
You can try to make that "balanced" so that both players have a totally equal chance of winning, but then you have to add a bunch of exceptions and details to ensure that Gandalf is powerful but not too powerful, and that Frodo's ring does a cool thing, but not something too cool, and so on.
Admittedly, a lack of balance affects "casual" players (that's the term we all have to use now, to differentiate between normal people playing a game and the "serious" tournament players), but it's not widely regarded as important because in a home game you can change rules on a moment's notice to ensure everyone is having fun. You can't do that in a tournament...
]]>The D&D 5e book Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft includes an adventure called House of Lament. Last year, I ran House of Lament for a group of players, and later that year I played in House of Lament with a different group of players. This is my review of the module as a player.
Before I begin my review, though, I want to clarify that yes, I was the Game Master for the module before I was a player in it. This isn't the conflict of interest it might at first seem to be. For more information on how this works, read my post about how to replay modules honestly.
The idea of having a host character in the house for the duration of the adventure turns out to be awkward. I don't care what character you choose to be in the parlour, it's just weird to have an ally in the house that you're exploring, who just won't ever leave the parlour. The Game Master can obviously play the character to do anything, but then you've got an NPC driving the narrative and that's no fun for anyone.
I'm still not convinced there's any elegant way to make the host character work well. I think player characters are bound to get annoyed with the host no matter what, either because they're not helping enough or they seem so helpful that the player characters aren't required.
My solution: Don't bother with a host character, or have them turn up dead early in the adventure.
The séances weren't great experiences for anyone. The messages from the ghosts are cryptic, with some being more useful than others. Then characters get to ask follow-up questions, which often can't be answered without spoiling the plot. It's frustrating for both players and Game Master.
My solution: Don't hold séances. Have mysterious cryptic messages traced in a dusty surface, or on the suddenly condensation-covered surface of a mirror.
Padraig, the Game Master running the adventure, did an amazing job of shielding us players from the tangle of plots happening in the house. We ended up following the Halvrest storyline, which I recall being the most confusing, but as a player it was relatively simple to follow. It was still difficult to solve, mostly because the séances were so useless, but the storyline worked well.
There were definitely elements that seemed superfluous, though. We found Dalk Dranzorg's axe early on, and we ended up encountering the chimney witch, and in the end it really felt like not a whole lot of what happened made sense in review.
My solution: I like that the adventure has the option of three separate plots, but I think I'd set each plot in an alternate reality. The Game Master ought to roll a d3 at the start of the adventure for a plot, and then only the hauntings that relate to that plot are brought into play. For example, if you're...
]]>I like re-playing RPG adventures and I don't let my knowledge of the module interfere with the way my character follows clues. Should you re-play an adventure, though, there are some important things to keep in mind.
My primary rule is pretty simple. If I can't trace a decision my character is going to make back to something the Game Master revealed during the game, then my character doesn't do it. It might like a lot of mental gymnastics, but it comes naturally as long as you pay attention to what your character knows.
If you feel the largely unreasonable urge to skip ahead of the plot, then stop and ask yourself how your character would have gotten to that point in the plot flowchart. Suppose you're playing an adventure in which it's been established that there's an evil goblin somewhere in the manor. As a repeat player, you already know the goblin is hiding in the attic. Well, you can only go to the attic once you can produce the piece of evidence that would make your character believe the goblin is in the attic. Simple as that.
And you should also refrain from suggesting that the party search every room, knowing that that tactic will eventually necessarily lead the party to the goblin's hiding place. There's a good argument that searching the manor room by room is actually the logical way of locating an intruder, but you're a repeat player. Play the game for the table. Let somebody else come up with a strategy.
It's a roleplaying game. We all deal with metagame knowledge on some level, and re-playing an adventure isn't any different. Play your character, setting aside your knowledge of how the plot unfolds.
Here's a basic example. You know, from having run the adventure a few months ago, that over night a bunch of goblins are going to raid the town. Your character is a lowly farmhand with no military or adventuring experience. Does your character suddenly decide to stay awake, armed with a crossbow, staring out at the empty plains all night until a goblin shows up? Or does your character go to bed as usual because the big harvest is tomorrow and getting rest is important?
That's a pretty obvious one, I think (the correct choice was the latter option). Seldom is an RPG adventure so simple.
Here's a slightly more complex example.
You know the MacGuffin is in a hidden compartment under the owlbear rug. But your character hasn't even gotten the quest to find the MacGuffin yet, let alone know that it exists. Why would your character storm into the room and search for secret compartments? Well, come to think of it, your character is a level 5 rogue. It's arguably second nature to go into a room and give it a quick once-over. Now what?
Restricting your character from doing something that is arguably natural, or even from doing something impulsively, seems like...
]]>Several years ago, a video game called Mechanicus was released by Bulwark Studios. I found the game before I'd started playing tabletop wargames, but after I'd discovered Black Library, so my main question was whether the video game would accurately reflect the cult as it was presented in the books. And also, was the game fun to play?
I work in IT, I grew up playing with Man-at-Arms and pondering the ineffable nature of RoboCop, poring over as much sci fi as I could find. I was destined to love the Adeptus Mechanicus, and predictably they're one of my favourite factions of Warhammer. But it's not all prophesy and fate. From a storytelling perspective, I don't see how anyone can help but join cult Mechanicus. They're cyborgs from Mars, which is relatively (astronomically) near holy Terra, they worship technology, and they habitually delve into ancient tombs and dungeons.
Dungeon delving is comfortable for me. It's a game structure I'm used to, it reassuringly limits the scope of gameplay, provides clear goals, encourages exploration and discovery, and it's often got an irresistibly mysterious atmosphere.
Apart from that, I also enjoy strategic turn-based combat. It's not that I don't like real-time combat, but I do enjoy the ability to sit back and consider the most strategic ways to overcome the obstacles in my path. I love getting to choose what equipment to use and which special abilities to activate, and I enjoy having multiple characters to control so I can utilize several different strategies all within the same game.
Mechanicus combines dungeon delving and strategic combat along with RPG-like character leveling. The game has three distinctly different modes:
The way I see it, it's a combination of all the best parts of tactical D&D or Pathfinder, in the Warhammer setting featuring the best faction.
I feel like paying special attention to just a few "good" points might suggest...
]]>I get bored during action scenes. Books, comics, movies, it doesn't matter what it is. But sometimes an action scene actually works for me. The scene somehow manages to be engaging, maybe even tense, and something makes me want to read or watch it. What's the difference between a good action scene and a bad action scene?
In this context, I'm using the term "action" and "fight" interchangeably. They're not necessarily the same. An action scene could be a chase with no physical violence, while a fight scene is violent by nature.
I have 3 problems with action sequences.
Usually, an action sequence is basically a binary choice. By some measure, the hero either gains an advantage, or experiences a setback. You don't have to hate action sequences, but think of your least favourite action sequence. Now imagine that just before the action sequence, the filmmaker cut away, or the author inserted a page break and started a new chapter. The next scene is the hero, bloodied and battered, exhausted and ready to fall over.
The obligatory confidant character takes a look at the hero and says "What happened!?"
And the hero says...
Well, the hero either says, "We've got a problem. They beat us to the MacGuffin."
Or the hero lifts a briefcase and says, "I got it. I got the MacGuffin."
From the hero's appearance, we understand that there was a fight. It was probably very exciting, but it probably lasted for 5 minutes of screen time, and there are more important things to spend screen time on.
About 70% of the time, it's the setup and resolution of a conflict we care about.
The villain punches the hero. Then the hero punches the villain.
Then the villain punches the hero again. Then the hero punches the villain again.
And just repeat that 20 times.
That's 95% of fight scenes.
Authors and filmmakers and illustrators try to fool us by replacing punch #4 with a kick, and punch #14 with a chair broken over the hero's back. But I'm usually not fooled by it. Most action scenes are the same action repeated over and over, in a slightly different location for visual appeal.
In real life, a skirmish is very often over in seconds. Humans are frail. It doesn't take long for them to get damaged enough to realise they're better off getting away from the situation.
Weapons make the decision happen even faster, by hook or by crook.
Those were 3 reasons I tend to dislike action sequences, but there are really good action sequences out there.
A good action sequence isn't about the action in the sequence. Sure, action is happening, but the scene is actually about something else. Here's how that often gets expressed successfully.
A walk-and-talk action sequence happens when there's dialogue inserted between bursts of action. We've all seen this, it's a common...
]]>I played the Shadow of Mordor video game to completion, and I enjoyed it, so this is my review of the game. The game is a Warner Bros. game and I've heard that its combat system is a lot like the Arkham games, but as of this writing I've not played those games (I like Batman, and I've meant to play them, I just haven't gotten around to it). For me, the game feels a little more like Far Cry in Middle Earth (or Middle-earth™ or Middle-Earth™ or whatever license this version of Tolkien's work this game ties into), meaning that it lets the player set the pace of the main storyline while providing a world of little exercises so you can practice the skills you need to become good at the game. I only have one minor complaint about the game, so here's all the stuff I love about it, and the one minor frustration.
What I love about a good setting is that no matter how limited the scope, there are arguably always opportunities to tell the story of what was happening over there. You know over there, it's the place the narrator of the actual story wasn't writing about. It's all the directions the camera wasn't pointed.
That's what Shadow of Mordor does. It doesn't dare try to be a sequel to Lord of the Rings, and instead takes place in that decades-long gap between Bilbo's return from Erebor and his farewell birthday party. There's plenty of references to the "Tolkien legendarium" (that's what people call it, I guess), and much of it seems "safe" but there's a lot of nuance to Tolkien's world and this game takes a pretty casual stance on it. I mean, it's all made up anyway, but a lot of the lore in this video game is really made up. As long as you're either a Tolkien scholar who can detect inventions for the video game or a casual fan like me who just doesn't care, this video game is a great way to immerse yourself in Tolkien's setting. You get insight into how orc armies are structured (which feels mostly true to the book), you get lots of cool-sounding Elven words, you get really familiar with how being a Wraith works, and you feel like you're hanging out in Middle Earth.
Is this the game Tolkien would have made, had he been a video game writer? Probably not. But it is a world with strong Tolkien flavoured lore, and it's a fun place to spend 80 hours.
You don't get a feel for human (or Hobbit or Elf or Dwarf, for that matter) society. This isn't Dragon Age or The Witcher. You're a human whose soul got unjustly intermingled with a Wraith, and now you and the Wraith are determined to use your dark powers to weaken Sauron's growing army.
I don't play nearly as many video games as I mean to,...
]]>As a newcomer to miniature painting, I'm, er, fortunate to have made lots of stupid mistakes early in my hobby journey. In my own defence, I did a lot of research before starting to paint. That saved me from some really egregious errors. But I managed to make a mess of a few things. Here's what they are, and how to avoid them, should you start painting miniatures:
Before you paint a plastic miniature, you have to "prime" it with an undercoat. I don't understand the chemistry of it, but an undercoat paint adheres to plastic better than other paints. This means the decorative paints you apply later are able to adhere to the undercoat instead of rubbing off of the bare plastic.
Beyond the mysteries of chemistry, the undercoat step is a little confusing because some plastic models come pre-primed while others require priming. And in both cases, it seems like it's just a footnote in the instructions. It seems to me that the first step for any model ought to tell you whether you do or do not need to prime before painting.
When you're unsure, give your miniature an undercoat. In my experience, a spray can undercoat paint is the best option. When I first started painting, I brushed on an undercoat because I couldn't find spray can undercoat paints anywhere. I ended up purchasing a primer paint in a drop bottle. It worked alright, but it was tricky to get right and it often either left gaps or it gathered in recesses and covered up the little details of the underlying sculpt.
Buy a primer or undercoat paint in a spray can. It'll provide you with a light and smooth undercoating with uniform coverage.
One point of confusion for me was that everyone seemed to use the term "primer" like it was a special kind of paint. I asked around at the local hardware stores, and while some people seemed to acknowledge the concept of paint that was a "primer", nobody could ever find a spray paint labelled "primer". Then I remembered something that had been true so far, and remains to be true to this day: When in doubt, just buy Citadel.
Sure enough, I went to the Warhammer shop an hour away and asked Jamie for primer. He explained to me that it's called an "undercoat" by Citadel, and of course they sell spray paint ("rattle cans") in any variety of colour. I use White Scar largely because I paint almost exclusively with Contrast paint, but I could see myself choosing a different colour for, say, a Space Marine that's 95% Blue or Red or Black.
I've since discovered that "primer" is a generic term for the act of laying down a coat of paint that you then intend to paint on top of. As long as the spray paint you buy specifically says that it works on plastic and is as matte as...
]]>In an effort to keep better track of what I watch, I'm reviewing the movies and shows as much as I can. No spoilers in this one.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop-motion movie about a fox whose love of stealing chickens from local farms endangers his family and community. It's based on a Roald Dahl book, which I've never read, and it stars George Clooney and is directed by Wes Anderson.
The story is surprisingly cataclysmic. What starts out as a Wind in the Willows (admittedly, I've never read that either) style "look at the little animals in clothes!" story pretty quickly becomes an armegeddon flick. Their homes are uprooted, they're pursued day and night by angry farmers, they're flushed out of their foxholes and burrows, captured, and threatened.
Despite the traumatic events happening in the story, the movie keeps it pretty light. Arguments can be severe but they're short. Everyone is pretty tolerant of Mr. Fox, especially considering the damage done (indirectly, I guess) by his actions.
Pretty much all of the characters act like Wes Anderson characters. They deliver their lines almost in monotone. One of the main character conflicts is between two cubs, because one is a natural athlete and the other one wants to be a natural athlete.
I think there are some moments when the story is supposed to be insightful or touching. When a rat dies, Mr. Fox asks what he'd wanted out of life, and the rat says "apple cider". That's an odd response, because the rat was guarding a stash of apple cider when we met him, and in fact was visibly sipping apple cider out of a hose connected to a jug of cider. So I guess he died completely fulfilled. When Mr. Fox gives him a sip of apple cider, it doesn't seem as poignant as I think the movie meant for it to be, because he's had so much cider in his life already.
Mr. Fox also makes two toasts near the end of the movie, neither of which are any good at all. He admits he didn't like the first one, but the second is the one the film ends on and it's rubbish. As last lines of movies go, this doesn't rank among the most profound or memorable: "The point is, we'll eat tonight, and we'll eat together. And even in this not particularly flattering light, you are the most wonderful animals I've ever met in my life."
There's an almost-poignant scene between Mr. and Mrs. Fox, when Mr. Fox is coming to terms with his own desire to be "fantastic", and Mrs. Fox says the line "I love you. But I shouldn't have married you." Confusingly, there's no follow-up on that very serious sentiment. I guess she changes her mind, because by the end of the movie they're still married and she reveals that she's pregnant. So that scene falls flat, ultimately.
The one scene that I think was meant to be poignant...
]]>Last year, I developed and published Skuffle Wammer, the universe's smallest wargame. It's designed to be played in 5 minutes or less, with the intent of being the tabletop gaming equivalent of a good stand-up-and-stretch at work. The play area is an A4 sheet of paper, you throw out some miniatures and some dice, and play to the end. The dice are used as both ammunition and as hit points, and each mini possesses just 3d6, and its rules are just half a page, so it really is a fast and fun game, and easy to play. Lately I've been experimenting with expansion ideas, and my first idea is to bring some zombies into play.
To my surprise, I only own one zombie miniature. It seems like an unlikely oversight for a horror movie fan and avid gamer, and yet it's the current state of things. Keeping with the WYSIWYG principle of wargaming, I decided to save zombie rules for later and work on ghoul rules instead. (At least, I thought that's what I'd decided.) So I started running Skuffle Wammer games with the four ghoul miniatures included in Games Workshop's Blackstone Fortress.
Normally in Skuffle Wammer, a melee attack of 3+ is a hit. But these are ghouls. These are undead creatures that specialise in shredding the flesh off of a living body and feasting upon its internal organs. I think a ghoul auto-hits. No roll required. When it's in melee range, it hits on its turn.
That's an exciting and terrifying concept, but surely overpowered?
To balance that out, I decided that each ghoul would have 1 less die than its opponent. Skuffle Wammer defaults to 3d6 for each mini, so a ghoul gets 2d6. They're undead, so arguably they should be harder to kill than average, but then again they're undead. They're the remnants of a living crature. I think it's fair to say that they come apart pretty easily. They're ghouls, not zombies (don't quote me on that).
I was still worried that auto-hitting would be too powerful, plus an auto-hit is tough to define. If it's an automatic hit, do you still spend a die? Or do they just keep attacking until you shoot their die away from them?
At the last minute, I decided they'd hit on 2+ instead.
The first battle went well for the Citadel™ Space Marines. They slaughtered the ghouls with only one loss to their own force. It didn't help that I made the horrible choice if testing an unrelated weapon rule (one of the miniatures had a flamer, and I couldn't resist making that an area attack). (It's really bad to test two unrelated changes together, but I'm just a hobbyist game designer and sometimes what's cool to me as a gamer interferes with what's correct. I fix the issue in my next playtest.)
I was surprised to find that rolling 2+ wasn't as powerful as I'd expected....
]]>Player characters in an RPG can be tricky. A player character is an imaginary person who you're meant to speak for and control. The character is meant to be distinct from you (in reality), and you're also supposed to be mindful of fellow gamers at your table (in reality) which obviously your fictional character doesn't "know" about. Problems can arise pretty quickly, whether you realise suddenly that you yourself would never rush in to face a dragon, or that your character has every motive to fight the character being played by your real life friend sitting next to you at the table. How do balance conflicts of motives and interests between who you are, who you think your character is, and what makes sense for a fun game? Here are five things I try to keep in mind when trying to play a character in an RPG.
As much as you try to make it your own, a character in an RPG tends to have pre-defined goals. In a D&D-style fantasy game, the goal is often to vanquish an evil monster and earn money. In an investigative game, the goal is to solve a mystery. In a sci fi game, the goal might be to thwart an invasion and earn some credit. And so on.
You can provide context for these goals ("I want to vanquish the evil orc horde because they slaughtered my village, and also I need money to start over") but in the end, the game is still a race to a pretty specific end.
Instead of thinking about my character's goals, I try to focus on my character's tendencies. What does my character do, by default, when a challenge arises? Does my character back away from a threat to study it before attacking, or does my character charge in without hesitation? Does my character view their friends as family, business colleagues, or just partners of circumstance? Does my character value wealth, knowledge, or community? Does my character prefer words or numbers? Does my character prefer savoury or sweet or both? Does my character expect kindness or cruelty?
And so on. I sometimes pick three tendencies and write them down on my character sheet. When that character is faced with an unexpected situation, and I'm not sure how to play it, I consider these tendencies. They may not always be directly related. After all, anything can happen in an RPG. But I can extrapolate, interpret, and play the character according to their typical disposition.
You can justify anything to serve your character's actions. When faced with a choice, justify the thing that's fun for the group.
Sometimes, despite tendencies and motivations, a character doesn't do what they're "supposed" to do. I never let the way my character usually acts define every single action during a game. Sometimes, a character who prefers stealth is compelled, either by the inspiration of another party member, or just the...
]]>Last year, Catalyst Games ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund BattleTech: Mercenaries, an expansion set of miniatures for BattleTech: A game of armoured combat. I don't play BattleTech (yet?) but I like mechs, I'd like to paint some miniature mechs, and I do play some mech battle wargames, so I bought into the Kickstarter. It was with this in mind that I bought the BattleTech Map Pack: Alien Worlds when I saw it at my local game store. In this blog post, I'm reviewing the map pack as a product, trying to be as objective as possible.
The question is, do I start with the good stuff or the bad stuff?
There's a lot more good than bad, so I'll start with the good stuff.
I'm an avid fan of speculative fiction (SF), and have been for my entire life. I like a lot of different kinds of SF, but I do seem to have a preference for dystopic science fiction, specifically. In my exploration of that genre, I've noticed a sub-genre within it, which I'll just call superhuman dystopia. In superhuman dystopia fiction, the dystopic sci fi setting is held together by figures who are something more than an average human. The unavoidable questions in the genre are how these superhumans are "more" than human, and are they preserving or reforming the broken world around them? I've identified a few exemplary realisations of the genre, which I'll describe in this blog post. In all examples, I'm considering only the precise media I'm describing and not any sequels or alternate versions.
In the original RoboCop, lawlessness is tearing Detroit apart. In response, OmniCorp develops the ED-209, a mechanised police robot that malfunctions the moment it's demonstrated to the company board members. In a rush to get a product on the market, they take a cop who's recently been shot down in the line of duty and turn him into a cyborg cop. They wipe his memory, load him up with police data, and send him out onto the streets. It's an instant success, until RoboCop starts remembering parts of his previous life as a human, and starts to uncover corruption within OmniCorp.
The setting is a dystopia, with brilliantly exaggerated scenarios designed to emphasise a bro ken society. When ED-209 malfunctions, it's not just a sub-optimal reaction time or a loose screw. It shoots and kills a board member. The crime gang that plagues Murphy both as a human, and who are then hunted down by Murphy in the superhuman form of RoboCop, have a hand in practically every crime you can think of. When one of them gets shot, they throw him out the back of their van to slow the police pursuing them.
RoboCop is a human, made "super" through cybernetic augmentation. He's visually striking, with chrome that gleams in the city lights, but don't let the visuals fool you. Sure, he can draw his weapon before the bad guys. And he's got thermal vision so he can shoot bad guys hiding behind walls. And he's got instant access to police databases. But RoboCop isn't superhuman just because he's half robot.
RoboCop is superhuman because he's inscrutable.
There are plenty of moments in the RoboCop movie that show the disconnect between RoboCop and the humans around him. Obviously criminals are in awe of him, but that's founded in simple terror. Watch, instead, the faces of RoboCop's own creators, station superiours, fellow officers, and his own former partner.
He saves lives, and affords no succor. He doesn't accept reverence or thanks. He protects. As the audience, we see what RoboCop doesn't perceive. We see the mix of emotions flashing across the faces of RoboCop's allies. There's apprehension, confusion, probably... ]]>A defining aspect of geek culture, at least for me, is correlation. As a kid, I spent hours every day correlating different elements of a fictional universe to other elements within that universe, or else I'd correlate one fictional universe to a different one. That's why, for instance, the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, or those Time Life books about faeries and cryptozoology, were so captivating to me as a kid. They allowed geeks like me to obsess over, parse, and map data structures until, arguably, we geeks knew a fictional universe better than the people writing it.
The trope of the nerd fan explaining to a show producer why a plot was impossible according to the show's own rules isn't a joke. It happened, often. It still does, and it's a product of how geeks are entertained. We don't consume our entertainment. We process it.
There are a few properties that I think demonstrate this in practice. There are a few other properties that got it right, but faltered.
The Warhammer universe is huge, both in its fictional setting and in this reality. The fictional universe of Warhammer has millions of inhabited planets and billions (trillions?) of humans and superhumans and aliens, many with a unique story.
Games Workshop, the company that creates Warhammer, designs and sells plastic miniatures for gaming. Here's their mission statement: "We make the best fantasy miniatures in the world, to engage and inspire our customers, and to sell our products globally at a profit."
It's refreshingly straight-forward, but according to their own mission statement, the lore of Warhammer is secondary to producing the "best fantasy miniatures". In addition to producing the best fantasy miniatures, they also sell paints, wargames, board games, rulebooks, fiction books, a magazine, and they license their fictional world to other companies who produce card games, video games, comic books, and more.
And yet their mission statement focuses on miniatures. It's rare for a company to have a comprehensive understanding of what it produces, much less the ability to focus so exclusively on it.
As far as I can tell, purely as an outsider, it seems this focus has an effect on how Warhammer is developed. A miniature is designed and produced, and while some people might buy miniatures just out of appreciation for tiny sculpture, more people will buy it when it can be used in a game. So a game is developed. A game in this context are rulebooks and codexes and datasheets, or boardgames and expansions. The game takes place in a fantastical world, and a lot of geeks are interested in fantasy and science fiction, so the story of the game deserves a book. So a book is written, containing lore and background stories and general explanations of the game setting. Animated shows are produced to further develop the lore. Video games are developed because they can take advantage of existing lore.
The universe within a game being played out by millions...
]]>I love pre-built characters. That might seem strange, because I also love building characters. On a week when I don't have an RPG to play, I'll often sit down with a rulebook and build a character that will probably never get used. And yet, I love a system that provides a good array of pre-built characters, and I admire players who post pre-built characters online for others to use. Here are five reasons I love pregenerated characters.
Everybody comes to play an RPG for their own reasons, but in my experience most people curious about an RPG don't really know what they're in for until they play it. Even people who have watched actual-plays or listened to podcasts don't tend to know what to expect.
Now think about this. Over the course of your hobby, you might build a lot of characters, but you probably spend a lot more time playing those characters. I'd guess it's probably a 10% and 90% split, but even a drastic estimate like 30-70 significantly favours playing to building.
When a friend tells you they want to try playing an RPG, their first and potentially only experience can either be 90% playing and 10% building, or it can be 90% building and 10% playing. One of those scenarios does not accurately reflect what playing an RPG is actually like.
I understand that building characters is fun. I build characters I never intend to play. I love building characters. But for somebody who has 0 hours of playing, the RPG "experience" shouldn't consist of 2 hours of paperwork to 4 hours of playtime. Their first experience should be all playtime, and only enough for them to decide whether they enjoy it.
A pregenerated character ensures that new players don't eat up valuable evaluation time with mystifying administrative forms.
I like trying new RPG systems, because nearly every system I've ever tried either has a great idea embedded in it someplace, or just a fun mechanic that's good for a laugh. Part of experiencing a new system, for me, is the process of building a character for that system.
And yet.
Sometimes, I just want to try to the game's mechanics. Maybe I'm at a gaming convention and I literally only have a 4 hour block to spend with the game. Or maybe I'm just not sure I like the game enough to explore its every facet. Give me a pregenerated character and there's nothing standing between me and the new game I want to evaluate.
Examples in RPG books are hard. I don't tend to like them, because they're usually so specific to exactly one situation, rendering them useless for 99% of the questions I have as I read. However, a few example character builds are refreshing not because they answer questions but because they prompt them.
I can't count the times I've looked over a sample character build only to realise that...
]]>My partner and I love a good "couch co-op" game, a video game where you and a friend can play together on the same computer rather than over a network. We recently played through Quest Hunter and its Strangewood DLC, and this my review of it. This review contains minor spoilers.
Cutting to the chase, the game was fun. We played through every quest we found and got 65 out of the 74 possible achievements (the ones we didn't achieve basically require grinding or a different style of play altogether, and we play for fun). It's not a perfect game, but it's a fun one, and I guess superficially it's a Zelda-like (during the Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker era). You explore local maps, bursting into houses and smashing barrels, delve into dungeons and solve little puzzles, you collect weapons and shields of greater and greater power, and in the end you save the princess. You can use gemstones and raw materials you collect to craft upgrades for your backpack, or to improve your three magic spells, and to brew potions for temporary attribute boosts. I could imagine playing through it again with maybe a different strategy, but I don't think you could play through it more than twice because there just aren't that many character options. We played on Easy mode ("Noob with a shovel") mode, which allowed us to keep all our loot through death, and completed the game in 23 hours of play.
Listed as an RPG, Quest Hunter has a main campaign and a world map featuring randomly-generated dungeons. Calling it an RPG is a little bit of a stretch even by video game standards, but it definitely has RPG-like elements. There aren't any character attributes, as such, but each time you level up you gain a few points to boost your Health, Armour, and Shield. It's difficult to say what effect on the game the Armour and Shield actually have, and I'm not entirely convinced they have any.
You also have "skillS" (actually magical powers) you gain as the game progresses. New skills unlock at certain levels, but you only have three spell slots, so you're likely to choose a strategy early and stick with it as you increase the power of your spells.
In the end, we basically both played tanks. We each had one slot to boost our armour, one slot for a big damage dealer, and one slot for an area-of-effect spell (I chose the Freeze spell, which paralyzed the enemies for some number of seconds, and my partner used a roundhouse kick that damaged lots of enemies at once). We tried a Banner spell, which created a sort of non-portable Circle of Protection for some number of seconds, but the game is pretty frantic so staying in one place just for a modest reduction to damage didn't make sense.
Had we understood the scope of each power, I can imagine a playthrough where one of us...
]]>The Contrast line of paints by Citadel are designed to provide instant highlighting and shading with just one coat of paint from just one pot. When it works, it's the stuff of science fiction. To this day, I sit and marvel at my painted Ur-Ghul miniatures, and all I did was slap some Pylar Glacier on them, along with a modest amount of detail work. Black paint, however, is a quirky problem for contrast. Adding a highlight or shade to black means it's no longer black, at least by strict definition. And yet not just one black Contrast paint exists, but two! Citadel sells Black Templar and Black Legion, and I own them both, I use them, and here's why.
First, a word about Black Lotus by Vallejo Xpress Color, which I also use. It's one of my favourite blacks for its flexibility, but there's a slight blue tint to it. With one coat, it's sort of a bluish gunmetal grey, and after a second coat it's a dark grey with black shading.
I've used it and was happy to keep using it forever, except for one problem. Last time I went to buy Black Lotus (luckily, I did this before starting on my Adeptus Mechanicus army) it was sold out.
So I've switched over to Contrast blacks and greys instead, exclusively because it's what's reliably available. Contrast is more expensive, and while I do use a lot of black paint on my armies, I don't use so much that the price is likely to break the bank. And besides, there are some benefits to the Contrast blacks.
First of all, Contrast paints come in pots not bottles. I've heard some people swear by dropper-bottles, but I am not a fan. I never know how much paint to squirt out of the bottle onto my palette and inevitably end up wasting paint, and the bottle nozzles get clogged with drying paint even though I religiously keep the caps on.
Contrast paint comes in a little pot that you shake, open, grab some paint from the cap, and then close. It's a familiar and reliable ritual that keeps my paints clean and secure.
The truth of the matter is that both Black Templar and Black Legion are almost equally black. The difference between them isn't the shading, it's the texture. There's probably a technical paint term for it, but I don't know technical paint terms, so I think of it in terms of Black Templar being paint and Black Legion being (not literally, though) liquid latex.
Black Templar is a Contrast paint in all but contrast. By that, I mean it's doesn't "feel" like traditional acrylic paint, and instead is fairly watery, which you're used to if you use Contrast paints. It goes on smoothly, sort of pouring out of your brush and onto the surface you're trying to cover.
Is it contrasty? Well, not especially. I guess...
]]>A Castle for Christmas is a Netflix original movie starring Brooke Shields (from Muppets Take Manhattan) and Cary Elwes (from Princess Bride obviously).
The story goes something like this. The main character, played by Brooke Shields, is an author of romance novels and in the 12th book in the series she kills the main character. She runs away to Scotland to avoid a scenario like in the Stephen King movie Misery.
She ends up at a castle that her father worked in as a kid. The owner of the castle, played by Cary Elwes, is an anti-social grumpy non-communicative Duke. At some point, she decides to buy the castle, and he gets even grumpier.
Because she intends to buy the castle, he insists that she move in so she can learn how to care for the castle. He does his best to scare her off, and she does her best to charm him and the community around the castle.
It turns out that secretly he's a really nice bloke, and is only selling the castle to pay off the mortgages on all the farms around the castle.
They fall in love, they throw a Christmas party, everybody's happy.
Then she suggests that after she owns the castle, he could stay. He gets angry because of pride.
She decides to leave, but not before promising to pay off all the mortgages of the farms in the area, thereby saving both the community and the castle. But before she can leave, he comes to his senses and professes his undying love.
It's a Hallmark-style Christmas movie designed to be as bland as possible, with only the most predictable romantic comedy plot. No surprises, just an evenly-paced predictable but satisfying romantic movie set during Christmas. If that's the kind of comfort cinema you're looking for, this movie fits the bill.
Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash
I've been a pretty active blogger for a while, although initially most of my content was concentrated on the very technical side of open source computing. My gaming life tended to creep in on my tech blogs, though, and so this past year I made a concerted effort to expand my active blogging to gaming. Using the magic of RSS, I've been aggregating my blog to my favourite source of RPG news and musings, the Campaign Wiki RPG Planet feed. On August 15 of last year (2022), I also started posting content to Youtube. Here's how things have gone after a year.
I encountered Alex Schroeder on Mastodon probably in 2020 or 2021, and learned about his RPG Planet feed. I subscribed and I've been an avid reader ever since. It's everything I ever wanted in a gaming feed.
I don't remember exactly when I started aggregating on RPG Planet myself, so I don't have great numbers for comparing its effect on my site, but I think there are signs of increased readership. I have also increased the frequency of blog posts, which influences page hits. Whatever the reason, there's been definite growth over time. In 2019, my gaming blog (such as it was) averaged 350 unique visitors each month. In 2023, I posted at least weekly and was aggregated on RPG Planet, and now my site averages 3,450 unique visitors each month. These are numbers straight from the server logs, so I don't have metadata about who visits and where they visit from and how much time they spend on each page and so on. (I have no use for that level of data, and I don't care to invade the privacy of my readers anyway. No Google analytics here.)
I have had a few "high-performing" articles, too.
My 5e-style character sheet for Pathfinder 2 remains one of my most successful posts. It's so popular that somebody on Reddit managed to find it and remixed it, and posted an iteration of it, which itself got mentioned in a popular Youtube video (not by me) and likely drove traffic to Reddit. It's just one small example of how free culture helps the corporate Internet thrive!
Another lesson to learn here is that the Reddit user posted a remix without giving me credit. It's all an unsanctioned remix of WotC's original work anyway, so I probably don't really "deserve" credit, but had the user contacted me about remixing my work, I would have been able to provide the original scalable vector graphic (SVG) I created, which would have prevented the "blurry image" complaints the user got on his Reddit post. Due diligence can pay off!
I started posting solo play-throughs of board games to Youtube on August 22 last year (2022). I average about 20 views for each play-through post, which for the production value (I put a webcam on a tripod and point it at my gaming table) feels about right....
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
In this episode, Jurgen and Baldur make their way to the factory producing a bunch of drugs. I feel like this is actually a pretty strange plot point, given that the protagonist has been taking drugs from the start of the series. It's a little difficult to drum up outrage, as a viewer, over the drug production after we've already seen that our protagonist relies on them, and that they're made from humans.
The difference, I guess, is that these drugs are worse than the other ones. Jurgen says so.
I'm along for the ride, though. I feel like the drugs are a good-enough plot vehicle to uncover the truth about Bellona. We don't know anything about Bellona, but we see that the main characters had trusted her, valued her, and are now questioning everything they'd believed about her. This is all working for me.
Almost more than the exploration of Bellona, though, is the setting. Gheisthaven is big, industrial, dark, rainy. There's a lot of classic cyberpunk happening in this series, and it's so good that I really am taking the story as a secondary component.
I think the atmosphere, far from being a crime of style over substance, is a major feature of the series. There's a reveal of what the factory is doing to the captive psykers (astropaths, specifically) about halfway through the episode. It doesn't come as much of a shock, but the morbid beauty of the tanks draining the people of their psychic and life energy is what makes the impact. The plot function of the factory is one thing, but what stands out are the visuals. It's a cheap thrill, and it's practically every other shot in the series, but I guess when one of the main appeals of the Warhammer universe are physical models, it makes sense.
I'm not being pejorative, either. I'm enjoying being in the world so much that the specifics of what Jurgen and Baldur are doing don't matter all that much. They're a pretty grumpy duo, but no more than you'd expect from a down-and-out noir team. It's a good story, I'm following along, I keep wondering where everything's headed. I've been known to play video games more for the world and soundtrack than the story, and I'm comfortable with that. In this series, I happen to get distracted by set dressing a lot. And that's not a bad thing, for me.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
I'm running Tomb of Annihilation as a Pathfinder 2e adventure, and as usual there have been some surprises when comparing what a book says and what happens in a game. I regretted starting my players in Port Nyanzaru because, as hex crawls go, Tomb of Annihilation is not exactly the best. It's about as useful as a map generated by dice, except I had to pay $100 for Tomb. The sites the book does provide are often either severely under-developed compared to, for instance, the wilderness section of Rappan Athuk, and the illustrated maps in the book are baffling. A full map of a Merchant Prince's home is provided, but it's too small to photocopy and besides that there's no reason for a map of that to be provided. But by far the worst thing about the map of Chult are its rivers, which are apparently just 20 ft wide.
According to the map of Ataaz Muhahah, the Olung river is 20 feet at its widest point. At least, that's what's shown in the section of the river in the official map, but for a river to bottleneck down to just 20 feet, it couldn't be too much larger upstream. I guess the river could be peculiarly deep, after all this is a fantasy world so maybe this is how rivers work. However, it's also a game with specific mechanics and my players wanted to know how wide the river was for fear of zombies wading out from the shore toward their boat. A river that's 20 feet wide offers almost no protection from anything on the shore that might want to grab at them, so the question wasn't academic but strategic.
It's puzzling, because it seems like the inset picture, of the bridge dwarfing a dinosaur grazing in the valley below, is meant to emphasize the absence of water. The book says nothing about the Olung having mostly dried up. In fact, it somewhat suggests the opposite by including boat travel as a viable option for traveling through Chult. I'm guessing that the Olung was meant to have dried up when the art order was created, but later that detail got cut from the book.
On the map, you can clearly see the borders of the two cliffs that the bridge is meant to connect. It's roughly 120 feet across. The map shows just 20 feet, at its widest point, of that 120 feet being occupied by water, and the rest is filled in with tree tops and grass.
In the end, we agreed that the map is wrong. Instead of a major rain forest river that's 20 feet wide, we decided that there was water in the entire 120 foot span of the canyon. That's still arguably a pretty small river, but then again the book doesn't make any claims about the size or grandeur of Chult or its rivers. And anyway, it's a nice managable size for game mechanics that...
]]>I love a good tabletop game, but with few exceptions most tabletop games take at least 30 minutes to play. Wargames often take substantially longer, and even quick skirmish games can require a lot of setup. Earlier this year, I found myself wanting a really quick and simple wargame to play literally in the 7 minutes it took for my water kettle to boil. I figured it would be a great way to optimize my work to fun ratio if I could fit a wargame into the time it took me to get a fresh cup of coffee. This led to Skuffle Wammer, the universe's smallest wargame.
I regularly set up a few Warhammer or RPG miniatures on my desk at work. They usually sit just under my monitor, and I like to admire them over the course of the day. And I'll freely admit that when my computer's taking a particularly long time to compile code or run a test, I'll pick up a toy soldier and make the whooshing sounds of its jumpjets, or the blasts of its lasgun, or the hissing of its hydraulic gears. Sound effects aren't mandatory for Skuffle Wammer, but here's what is required:
Arrange 2 or more soldiers within the play area. As you do this, decide whether the soldiers form two teams or whether they're independent agents. For instance, if you have 2 xenos and 2 Space Marines, then you probably have a xenos team and a Space Marine team. If you have a xenos, a rogue trader, a space marine, and a chaos knight, then you probably have a every-miniature-for-itself situation. This doesn't change the rules, but it will influence which miniature attacks another miniature.
The soldier closest to you goes first. The turn order proceeds by team, or clockwise when there are no teams. Turn order doesn't actually matter that much, as long as every soldier gets a turn in regular intervals.
On its turn, a soldier may move or attack.
To attack, remove 1d6 from a soldier's dice pool, permanently, and roll it.
When a soldier takes damage, remove 1 die from its dice pool.
When a soldier's dice pool is reduced by damage to 0 or less, tip it on its side to signify that it is dead.
(Note that a soldier can run out of dice by making attacks and never taking damage. A death from lack of dice only occurs when a soldier's dice is reduced to...
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
"I'll owe you a favour." Seems like an easy statement to make, and in certain company it's casually said as an afterthought, never to be revisited. In the world of The Interrogator, though, it's currency. And in this episode, Jurgen gets into debt for three.
To be honest, knowing that Jurgen owes three favours to two people causes me a suitable amount of dramatic anxiety. Because Jurgen is the protagonist, I suddenly feel a strange urgency for Jurgen to pay off these debts, and I think I'll be devastated should the show end without him resolving this. That's a little strange, because I didn't care 15 minutes ago, and then I watched the episode, and now I'm plagued by an outstanding debt as if it were my own.
That's the most effective thing in this episode, I think.
The real hard-hitter was meant to be the source of Jurgen's magical Psyker-suppressant drugs. I don't think anyone watching would assume that the drugs were responsibly sourced. They're clearly narcotics, they're obviously illegal, so you have to assume that people are suffering for it. That's basically how drugs work.
In this episode, it's revealed that the drugs Jurgen's been relying on is made of...you guessed it. People. Psykers, specifically.
Maybe I'm jaded but it's been several decades since Soylent Green, and I feel like "the Psyker drug is made of Psykers!" plot point just doesn't hit as hard as it should. It's unquestionably horrible, but Warhammer is a universe in which Psykers have been shipped off in Black Ships to feed the Emperor. To find out that they're being vaporized and used as psychic suppressants just doesn't shake me, and I don't think it would really shake characters in that world.
But wait.
It doesn't shake Jurgen, at least not enough for him not to take the pills. Deep down, he admits, he knew the drugs cost lives. And he was OK with it. Getting confirmation changes nothing.
Baldur, however, is angered and disgusted by it. Interestingly, that works on an emotional level. Prior to his disgust, I was musing that surely the only creature in Warhammer 40K that would find this reprehensible is an Astartes, who basically have it in their genes to protect mankind. So when Baldur is actually horrified by the cost of Jurgen's drugs, it elevated him to almost an Astartes-level. It was a fascinating shift in ethical reference points. And that's what I love about speculative fiction, and it's something that Warhammer does so effectively.
This episode is great scifi. Things you and I care about aren't the same as things people in the 41st millennium care about, and sometimes even when something falls flat for the audience, it's the way it affects the characters that...
]]>A few months ago, I tried Vallejo Xpress Color paints. Aside from the bottles they come in, I like them a lot. They're a great way to get started painting with auto-shading paints for a relatively small investment. It's got a limited colour range, but when you're just starting out, less can be more. If you're just starting to paint miniatures, or you're looking to buy some paint for a friend, but you don't know where to begin, this blog post is my attempt to provide some simple guidance on what to consider buying.
One problem with colour is that there's just too much of it. Take a look around you and you're likely to see hundreds of different shades. Fortunately, in the make-believe world of toy soldiers, realism is reduced. Things are simpler at 28mm scale. When a cape is blue, it can just be blue. You don't have to worry about all the different shades of blue that might appear in actual fabric. You can just paint the cape blue, and your imagination fills in the detail.
But the reason you buy Citadel brand Contrast paint or Vallejo brand Xpress Color paint is that with one colour, you get all the subtle shades included. These paints are specially designed to auto-shade themselves, so a cape isn't just solid monochromatic blue, but blue with depth. It's a marvel of modern chemistry, honestly, and it'll change the way you feel about your miniature painting.
The reality of miniature painting is that you usually know what materials you're trying to mimic.
In a fantasy setting:
In a scifi or horror setting:
There are likely to be a few surprises along the way. Some day you'll suddenly acquire of a bunch of undead miniatures. Now you need a colour for undead skin. Later, you'll acquire a miniature specifically called Knight of the Purple Robe and suddenly you'll realise that you need all the shades of purple you can find. But 90% of the time, you're painting the same stuff over and over again. And loving it.
What that means is that you can buy a dozen colours of paint and get a hundred miniatures painted without ever feeling like you're lacking. You just need black, brown, a skintone, and the colours of the rainbow. It's as easy as that, and Vallejo Xpress Color is ideal for this strategy because that's literally all they released in their initial line.
Now, even with Vallejo's limited range of colour options, there is room for variation and choice. It's hard to know which blue to get without seeing it for yourself. I tried to make choices for myself by looking at swatches and photos online, and invariably I felt like what I saw in real life was different than what I saw online. It was never bad, it was just always different. Still, follow...
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
I'm enjoying this series on several levels, but what comes through the most in this episode is the war. In actual film noir, a past war is prerequisite. The quintessential noir protagonist is one scarred by the trauma of the Second World War. Post-war isn't part of the atmosphere, it's the entire setting. Similarly, war is the all-encompassing setting of Warhammer. Sometimes it fades into the background, but it has to be there somewhere, and eventually it's probably going to encroach on whatever story is otherwise being told.
In this episode, it feels like war is starting to creep into the story.
Having peered into the mind of the guy in the bar (Broath, or something. I don't know how to spell fictional names), Jurgen's got a lead. It's not much to go on, but it includes Haroth (not Karoth, excuse my poor spelling of fictional names) meeting with a priest in a temple. Unfortunately, there are riots in the city as a civil war starts to brew.
The rioting triggers a flashback. It's good. Jurgen, in his youth, attempts an ambush of an Inquisitor. He desperately wants her Inquisitor badge.
Things did not go well.
Back in the present, the riots start to pick up as some gangers converge in the streets. Jurgen decides it's time for him and Baldur to contribute back to society. Instead of going around the riot, they go through it, clearing out gangers as they go. Until, that is, they're apprehended by an old enemy.
This episode is great scifi. It's tough and ugly, post-apocalyptic in feel. This is classic British calamity, straight off the pages of 2000 AD or off the screen of Max Headroom. It's gritty and gruesome, and I love it.
This episode is great Warhammer 40K. We're starting to delve into Inquisitor lore in this episode, and staring hard at the underbelly of a hive city. This is the pain you forget about when you're staring wistfully at the superhuman Space Marines marching bravely into battle. Warhammer admittedly isn't often beautiful, but this is Warhammer at some of its most miserable.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
The problem with colour is that there's a lot of it, and it's never the same to two different people. It's not even the same to one person under different lighting conditions. I love the topic of colour theory, but when you're just starting out as a miniatures painter, it can be overwhelming to see a rack of 66 colours across the spectrum. Whether you're just starting to paint miniatures, or just looking to buy some paint for a friend, this blog post is my attempt to provide some simple guidance on what to consider buying.
I generally prefer Citadel paint. It's a pretty ubiquitous brand in miniature painting, it's got a great range of colours, and most importantly it pioneered the concept of auto-shading miniature paint. By "auto-shading", I mean that a single paint bottle contains more than one shade of its colour. That sounds like science fiction, but we live in the future and it's a real thing. When you buy, say, Ultramarines Blue in the Contrast paint line, you get a bunch of subtle shades of blue included. When you paint with it, you don't just get a solid monochromatic blue, but blue that's brighter at the peaks of the surface, as if it's being highlighted by the light, and darker in the valleys, as if it's in shadow. Traditionally, a painter could mimic this either manually by painstakingly adding on shades of colour, or quickly by using an ink-like "wash". With Citadel's Contrast paint, though, you get all the best nuance with one coat of paint.
First of all, Citadel has an online and mobile app that guides you through the painting process, including which paint to use for a specific model. This is one of the many reasons I'm a fan of Citadel paint. If you've purchased a set of miniatures from a Warhammer store, then you can buy the paints that go along with those exact miniatures, and you can get a step-by-step tutorial on how to apply them. If you're painting something not from the Games Workshop line of miniatures, you can probably find something similar to it and use those paints and tutorials. For example, I have an elf ranger I'm painting for an upcoming Pathfinder game. I have no idea how to paint this miniature. Green hair? Green clothes? Green skin? I have no idea.
Citadel knows.
Find an elf miniature, like Legolas or Tauriel from the Lord of the Rings miniatures line, and you get a paint list and a great example of how an elf miniature ought to look.
Job done.
Maybe you don't paint just elves, and admittedly the Citadel app's suggestions kind of assume you're willing to buy 8 or 9 paints for a single model, or at least a single army. Sometimes, for purely practical reasons (like when your nearest Games Workshop store is an hour away), you have to be the reductionist.
Using my not-quite-Tauriel elf ranger example, the Citadel app...
]]>Sometimes, after you've painted a miniature you need to go back and fix a mistake you hadn't caught the first time around. When you revise your paint job, though, you're usually filling in something that's missing or concealing something that isn't meant to be there. That means you have to match the exact colour of the paint you applied months ago. Do you even remember what paint you used last week, much less months ago? I don't. Luckily, there's an easy solution.
I had a really bad habit, early on, of using any random paint I could find. When I first started painting, I was using one of the Paint and Tool Starter Kits from Citadel. It's a great kit, but it's pretty specific to a certain range of Warhammer miniatures. For instance, mine had no green paint in it. While painting some monsters, I wanted some green paint. The Warhammer store is an hour away, so I just raided my partner's teaching supplies and grabbed a $3 acrylic paint tube meant for children's crafts, watered it down a little, and used it.
It actually worked really well, so I started grabbing cheap acrylics from my partner's stash whenever I needed a colour I didn't happen to have. As a result, I can't begin to guess how to match the paint of any of my earliest 6 miniatures.
Later, when I discovered that you could mix paints, I started mixing some of my Citadel paints to invent new shades of colour. I'm sure that's fine to do, but I didn't write anything down about how I achieved any given shade I created. As a result, I have no idea how to match the colours for the second set of miniatures I painted.
Since those days of exploration, I've learnt to help my future self. Now, when I need a specific colour, I buy that colour. I know there's power in being able to mix paints well, but for me there's safety and convenience in letting the experts define a colour for me.
Buying Guilliman Flesh solved all my skintone problems. Sticking to Macragge Blue for deep blues and Pylar Glacier for light blue means I only have two paints to choose from when I need to touch up a blue region on a miniature. Having defined choices makes it possible for me to understand what's on a miniature.
When I was just painting miniatures from board games (I had something like 52 miniatures between Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, Wrath of Ashardalon, and Warriors of Krynn), it never occured to me to jot down notes about the colours I was using on each model. Once I got some miniatures from Games Workshop, however, it seemed pretty obvious that I ought to record the paints I use. After all, the booklet showing you how to put the models together provides a manifest of which paints you can use to...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
Professor Lillian Stemmler (Eve Arden) has developed an experimental drug that temporarily boosts (or reduces) all attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma). The professor is sponsored by THRUSH, but I guess she doesn't have full THRUSH membership because to ensure her continued loyalty they kidnap her estranged daughter, Leslie (Sharon Farrel).
Theo Marcuse, who I guess is a pretty good Donald Pleasence impersonator, is the dapper THRUSH villain who intends to use Stemmler's Plus-X formula to boost the attributes of his own thugs.
At the same time, he's decided to use her Minus-X formula on the guards of a high security government building to render them useless. The end goal? An important MacGuffin, which I've completely forgotten.
This episode is pretty lackluster. It's sort of an avenue for a mother-daughter reconciliation arc, but I didn't find myself caring about their relationship all that much, and I didn't feel terribly sympathetic to Professor Stemmler. The THRUSH plot lacked inspiration, and there's little I enjoy less than seeing adults awkwardly acting like they're five years old. Or at least, that's what we're told Minus-X does. I find myself wondering what direction the actors got, because everybody seemed to interpret Minus-X differently. Some of them sort of act childish, others act like they've gotten a dose of laughing gas, others just seem sleepy. It's all over the place, and not that much fun to watch in any case.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There may be very minor spoilers in this post, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
Jurgen and Baldur are now officially on the trail of Bellona's killer. Baldur leads Jurgen to a dive bar owned by an old "friend" called Sortha. Long ago, Sortha had joined Bellona's team. It's not clear what kind of team that was, but Sortha had betrayed her own crew to take down a rogue trader, so maybe bounty hunting?
A customer in the bar has been telling tales about somebody who sounds familiar to Baldur and Jurgen. Apparently, Jurgen and Baldur are looking for a guy named Karoth (or something like that), who has the unique trait of making you physically nauseous when you get too close to him. Getting the customer to share this information is the real trick, though. And the way Jurgen ends up getting the info is strongly suggestive of a Psyker.
Psykers in the Warhammer 40K universe are the people who use "magic" (actually it's the powers of the Warp). They're basically illegal, or at least they're closely monitored and managed. Most of them get taken away by Black Ships, delivered to Terra, and sacrificed to the Golden Throne. The lucky ones are indentured to serve the Emperor in whatever way the Imperium requires.
It's obviously kind of a big deal that Jurgen is a Psyker, and definitely raises a lot of questions when he uses his powers out in public, apparently not at all afraid of being discovered. Then again, his title is apparently "Interrogator", so maybe he's registered.
I have no idea where the story's headed, but it just got a lot more interesting.
This episode is good scifi. More cyberpunk, but with magic mixed in.
The dive bar is perfect, full of grissled free agents, attitude, and unreasonable threats. A fight's always about to break out, you can just tell. Nobody's friendly, and everybody's in it for themselves.
The brief glimpses of the city are great, too. I love the consistent look of Imperial cities, with that mix of brutalist and gothic architecture, Imperial heraldry, and impossible tech. Warhammer has nothing if not character, and this series exudes it.
This episode is great Warhammer 40K. It gives you a great feel for the other side of life in the Imperium. In this episode, we get to mingle with the unsavoury free agents and scum of an Imperial city. We meet a bouty hunter. We get some hints of Psykers and maybe an Inquisitor.
It's hard to say what exactly is going on at this early stage, but the intrigue is bending back on itself: Who killed Bellona? Who was Bellona and who is Jurgen? And why do we care? What's this show about anyway? This is a great pace of discovery, and I love that each episode takes its...
]]>I've written before that you can never have too many spells for roleplaying games like Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant, and that's as true for the Game Master as it is for player characters. The problem isn't having too many spells to choose from, it's how to know what spells you have available.
When you have great books like Book of Lost Spells or Deep Magic, you have literally hundreds of spells you probably don't know you have. Well, you know you have them, but you don't know what they are. You can flip through a book, review a couple of spells, close the book, and then when it's time to choose a new spell, you forget everything you just read.
For players, it's frightfully easy to fall into the habit of just picking the same handful of spells from your game's standard rulebook.
If you've been playing for a while, those are the spells that are likely top of mind, after all.
And if you're playing with a particularly unimaginative strict Game Master, you might not have the option of using third party spells.
For Game Masters, you probably use spellcaster NPC stat blocks in combat, and they generally have standard spells listed. You get used to those spells, and so when you randomly decide that a player character has just found an ancient magic scroll, the only spell names that come to mind in the pressure of the moment are the same old standard spells.
Essentially, boring choices reinforce boring choices. The more you use a same-old-spell, the more it embeds itself in memory, making it easier for you to default to that same-old-spell the next time you need to choose a spell. Here are five ways that a proliferation of spells can help you be better at [pretend] magic.
The way to learn spells is to use spells. If you know the standard spells in your game's rulebook, you only know them because you've used them over and over again. The same is true for non-standard spells. If you want to have Shadow bite or Dark bolt or Brittling on the tip of your tongue, then you have to assign them to your player character or to an NPC.
Probably for an entire campaign.
I say "campaign" because when you just play through a short module, even if it takes multiple sessions, you may have only used some of your spells once or twice. Due to frequency, cantrips tend to be easiest to learn, so you can get familiar with those pretty quickly through even just a one-off adventure. But spells that cost a slot tend to get used only when necessary, and so it takes exploration and conflict for you to be pressed hard enough to rattle off a spell.
This does admittedly take time. If you only play once a week in a single campaign, then you probably only...
]]>Like a lot of (or all? is this a defining trait?) geeks, I'm pretty obsessive by nature. I focus on things intensely, and work in sprints so I can concentrate my current obsession into productivity (by some definition of "productive"). I work in the tech industry, which also works in sprints, so I've luckily managed to [mostly] make my obssesive personality into a super power for myself. Similarly, I've found hobbies that hold up well to obsession but, as they say, sometimes when you look into the void, the void looks back at you. Much to my surprise, I've learned some new lessons about life from building and painting miniatures.
When I have an idea, I usually focus all my efforts into making it happen. I do that until it's done, and then I wait for the next idea to come along. It's a variation on the work hard, play hard ideology, except it's more like a play hard, relax hard. When I follow through on a fun project idea, that's fun for me. Between projects, I relax. I might spend a few days reading a book, or playing a video game, or just sitting out on the porch thinking. Then I have a new idea, and I start the cycle again.
I enjoy this, so it's by no means a "vicious cycle" I'm trapped in, it's the system I've developed for my life and it works well for me. There are probably arguments that by focusing on exactly one thing, I'm "unhealthily" neglecting something else, but in my experience and for what I do both in my work life and hobby life, it all evens out in the end. There may be a scary week or two where there's apparently no progress being made on project Y because I'm obsessing over project X, but once project X is complete I'm sure to give just as much dedicated attention to project Y and get it done so I can move on to project Z. I'm not inflexible, and there are exceptions. Sometimes things have to happen in parallel, and I'm fully capable of doing that. All things being equal, though, I prefer to work in sprints.
And then I started building and painting miniatures.
When you're working on models, there's a lot of drying time involved. Glue, primer, paint. It all has to be applied, and then it has to dry. It's a sprinter's nightmare. Luckily, for wargaming you're often not just building one model, but an entire army. So you start with soldier 001, glue its torso onto its legs, and then move on to soldier 002, and so on until you reach soldier 032 or so. By that time, soldier 001 is ready for some arms, so you repeat the process in sequence.
However, the reality of miniature model armies is that there are a lot of them and each model takes time, and time adds up. In other words, there are only...
]]>Death is so frequently the lose condition in games that I think you could argue it's a little lazy. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind when a game threatens my game avatar with death. In fact I enjoy it as a threat. Morbid though it may be, I enjoy imaginary over-the-top violence and pretend gore in my entertainment. I suspect it's the adolescent thrill of something that makes other people squeal in discomfort that makes me enjoy them in entertainment, and so I play lots of games built around combat.
In fiction, heroes like Batman and Dr. Who and MacGyver never use guns, and narratively that invariably results in far more creative outcomes than a bullet ever could. Death is an easy and convenient fail state for a game, because we humans all understand that it's absolute, with no chance for reprieve. When you design a game or a game scenario where the lose condition isn't death, you have to think of other ways to inspire dread in players without threatening their avatars in the game with that same old boring penalty. Here are 5 examples of games that have been designed around death.
In many games inspired by Lovecraft or even Sherlock Holmes, you work to find clues that solve a mystery. The clues are often not actual clues, but tokens that represent the acquisition of evidence and comprehension. That means the players don't have to piece together a mystery, all they have to do is collect tokens. Once they have the right number of tokens, the player characters are said to have solved the mystery.
Admittedly, the implied consequence of any Lovecraftian game is usually the end of all reality, as in Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu. After you awaken all the Elder Gods, Cthulhu awakens and devours the universe. That does involve death, but ending reality is a pretty abstract concept, and it's not something you can usually overcome with a fistfight. Players are rarely encouraged to literally fight against the end of the world in a Lovecraft game, and instead spend their efforts avoiding combat so they can gather important clues.
Classically, in a Lovecraft game, the greatest threat is loss of sanity. The idea is that the human mind can't withstand too much knowledge of the evil lurking just outside of our reality, and so prolonged exposure to that existential truth breaks a human's fragile eggshell mind.
It's pretty heavy stuff, and I admit it might not be the gentlest alternative to death as a fail state. However, it's worth considering because of how it changes game play. Instead of looking for somebody to punch or shoot, players spend the game searching for information. They ask questions, they explore, they go into the spooky places they normally wouldn't, because they're desperate for the truth.
The game Mansions of Madness does this both very well and very poorly. Most adventures for Mansions of Madness starts with exploration and investigation, but eventually, inevitably, disgruntled...
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review of it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
This show is 2D animatation, done only in black and white. It's a lot of computer 2D animation but even without the manual inking, you get the feel it's going for. The whole thing is an obvious reference to film noir, with a protagonist who's down on his luck and prone to narration. There's a lot of film noir influence in cyberpunk anyway, and Warhammer 40K definitely qualifies as cyberpunk. There's a little Bladerunner and Shadowrun in this episode, or just a lot of Rogue Trader and hive city life, and it's a side of Warhammer I love.
The initial episode introduces Jurgen, the titular character. The interrogator. Why he's called the interrogator is unclear, because right now he's living in a cheap apartment in Gheisthaven, a drunk on neuro-suppressants to forget the death of a woman named Bellona.
When he awakens from his stupor, there's a woman at his door. She's stern, severe, and has a few thugs to back her up. She's here to offer him a job apprehending a rogue trader who's slighted her.
It's a story thread that doesn't last long, although I'm not positive it won't come back up later. A fight breaks out, and Jurgen ends up getting rescued by a brute named Baldur.
Baldur's got a lead who might have a lead about Bellona's killer. Enough said. The plot's afoot.
This episode is good scifi. It's pure cyberpunk, dripping in atmosphere and attitude. The tech is older than it ought to be, but futuristic all the same.
The only reason I don't say it's great scifi is because this episode's plot is simple. Things pick up next episode, but this one just introduces the main character, his trauma, and his sidekick. Nothing wrong with that, and it sets the tone nicely.
One of the major strengths of this show is Jonathan Hartman's score. Hartman's synthesis work is exactly what I want from Warhammer music and from music in general. It's textured, deep, and ponderous. It's perfect music, and I listen to the soundtrack regularly. In the context of the actual episode, though, the music takes on new meaning, and it adds new meaning to the story. Beautifully done, all around.
This episode is great Warhammer 40K. Warhammer can have practically anything you want it to have. After all, there are millions of worlds in the setting. There's at least one planet for something, and this story is set in noir world. Down and out people doing down and out things. Rogue traders and hab dwellers living on the fringe of the Imperium. They utter praises and curses in the Emperor's name, the city is decorated with Imperial heraldry, the people have augmetics. It's the 40K universe, but maybe an aspect you're...
]]>Recently, I watched the Iron Within animated feature on Warhammer+, and this is my review of it. The feature is about 30 minutes long, of beautifully rendered by somewhat rigid 3D animation. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
In the grim dark future of Warhammer, there is only disappointment. That's the lesson of Iron Within. It's a lesson any new fan may as well learn early, because it's a consistent hallmark of the setting.
This one has a clever setup. There's a war happening on whatever-planet. The Drukhari are raiding the palace, killing Astra Militarum and driving forces into retreat. Things are looking dire when it's uncovered that the governor struck a deal with the Drukhari that was meant to protect him in exchange for the lives of some insignificant number of his citizens. An angry sergeant shoots him dead on the spot, and her lieutenant doesn't so much as scold her.
Her lieutenant confirms that their duty remains unchanged: protect the citizens. It's clear, however, that the Astra Militarum forces just aren't capable of doing that under the present circumstances. From the shadows, a priest offers to undertake an ancient rite to call down the angels of the Emperor for protection.
They say it's a myth, of course. There are no angels, and if there are they're not going to suddenly appear to rescue everybody from the Drukhari forces that are even now slaughtering everyone in sight. Nevertheless, the lieutenant concedes, harbouring the barest hope that there might be some shred of truth to the ancient stories of angelic protectors who descend from the sky in moments of crisis.
Well, it turns out that it wasn't just a myth. The ancient rites send a distress signal out into space, and soon drop pods break through the atmosphere.
It's a moment of real relief, too. All you've seen in the episode up to this point is Astra Militarum being shot down, one after another. Retreat, stand, retreat. It really does feel hopeless. But even the lieutenant starts to believe that the angels might appear, and he bolsters the morale of his troops with several 5+ rolls, and then it actually happens. Drop pods.
It's exciting. Your heart skips a beat. You don't have to imagine the incredulity of the Astra Militarum in that moment, because you feel it too. They've come to the rescue! Some great faction of Space Marines have heard the beckoning call, and are here to deliver the Emperor's wrath.
There's just one minor detail. The Astartes who brought this planet into compliance so many centuries ago were the Fourth Legion, the Iron Warriors. And since that time, the Horus Heresy happened, and Perturabo's Iron Warriors are a traitorous legion.
This episode is great scifi. It's dystopic and horrific, but it's got humans against aliens and then it adds trans-humans.
A lot of these Warhammer shows are proving...
]]>With the exception of a handful of pioneering academics and specialist publications, serious critical consideration of gaming as an art form feels, to me, to be seriously lacking. Sure, it's commonly accepted that gaming is now very much mainstream, but it's pretty clear that what most people are talking about when they say this is Call of Duty and Candy Crush. I'd argue that this is a terrible mistake. High end, complex games are material which should not - cannot - be sequestered generationally. Academics and reviewers who are rich in experience and expertise in other forms need to engage with this art form or face missing out on the richest and most complex thing to happen to creative expression since someone ran a reel of film through a projector. This is driven not least by the necessarily multi-disciplinary approach which must be applied to fully understand such works. There are few better arguments for this than the astonishing master work, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
The sheer scope of the work is awe inspiring. In volume alone, the creative output dwarfs any contemporary work in any other medium, and there's the added consideration that all of this content has been crafted with loving care and attention to detail, and each element linked and interlinked in a decision/narrative tree of mind-boggling complexity. And as if that weren't enough, it's beautiful as well.
Yehezkel Kaufmann's conception of the meta-divine realm may not, on the surface, seem to have much to do with a sword-swinging, bodice-ripping computer game, but then that's not all there is to The Witcher - not by a long shot. Kaufmann's idea that the pagan universe contains a realm of being from which the gods themselves spring is important for many reasons, but here we're focussed on the way this affects ancient versus modern mentalities. In a culture dominated by transcendent monotheism, our understanding of ancient mentalities can be seriously hampered by the lingering formative effect of the big three. The idea that there is a place from which the gods come creates startlingly different interactions with the tangible universe. Depending on the nature of the relevant mythology, commonplaces like blood or water can become imbued with divine significance, and long-forgotten features of everyday life like sacred landscapes and ritual calendars suddenly make perfect sense. By transposing and synthesising many systems of meta-divinity into interactive dramatic and narrative form, The Witcher allows us to experience and understand these mentalities through a faithful and sensitive simulation of sacred liminality. Vaguely remembered and poorly understood superstitions are expanded and explained in a way which promotes understanding of the dim past in ways which history teachers can only dream about. It may seem unlikely, but anyone who has engaged with The Witcher is much better equipped to understand complex ideas like immanence and meta-divinity than someone who hasn't, simply because, on some level, these concepts have been lived and experienced.
The broad premise of the game centres on The...
]]>Most tabletop roleplaying game systems have the concept of rolling dice as a way of determining whether a player character in the game succeeds or fails when attempting a non-trivial task. A die roll doesn't itself have any meaning. A 20 on a 20-sided die is just a number, no better or worse than a 1, or a 6, or a 6 on a 6-sided die. It's up to the game to define what the number of success is, and many game systems leave it up to the Game Master to make that determination. I don't think forcing the Game Master to set target numbers (DC, or Difficulty Class, in D&D) is great game design, and in this blog post I introduce some alternative methods.
In D&D rules-style games, a difficulty class (DC) must be set by somebody, whether it's the Game Master or the author of a published adventure. Players roll die and add bonus numbers in an attempt to reach that number.
There's usually a table in a Game Mastery guide explaining reasonable settings. It's usually something like 5 for something easy, 10 for something requiring effort, 15 for something requiring specialized skill, and 20 for something highly improbable. But this leaves a lot open to subjectivity when you try to map actual tasks to that kind of chart. Is swimming easy? What about swimming all your gear on? Swimming with boots on? What about riding a horse? What about walking a tightrope? On the one hand, there's the argument that the people of your fantasy world would find some of those things commonplace, so maybe DC 5? On the other hand, a lot of these tasks in a game are performed under duress, so maybe DC 10 is better? Or maybe it should be DC 15 because the alternative, in many cases, is death, so you have to assume a player character is giving it their all.
As a Game Master, I don't know what a "reasonable" DC is for most actions. Given enough variables, I can usually find justification for anything to be DC 20. That doesn't make for a very fun game, though, so for the sake of moving the story forward, I can just as easily justify DC 5 for basically anything.
None of the other players at the game table have to make that kind of decision. Sure, every player has to make difficult choices, but it only directly affects their own character. Admittedly, a cleric choosing not to spend an action to heal someone can have an affect on another player's character, but it was the group's collective decisions that anyone requires healing in the first place. The Game Master has a lot of choices to make about the world, and that's the Game Master's role. But only the Game Master is in a position of receiving input from other players, and making a completely subjective decision on its merits. Only the...
]]>At the time of this writing, I'm preparing to run Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. It's been out for a good 5 years, and I've played scenarios from it, but I've yet to run it. As I read through the book to prepare for the game, I've decided to post about my impressions. This review contains lots of spoilers.
I love a good city as a setting, and Port Nyanzaru feels like it could be a fun place to explore. It doesn't feel as easy to digest as Red Larch from Princes of the Apocalypse but then again it's a lot bigger. There's not much to do in Chult, but there's some expectation that the player characters may venture out into the jungles of Chult for a little reconnaissance, and then return to Port Nyanzaru. There are 23 locations described, along with vendors, activities, several residents, and the structure of its government.
Oddly, the book doesn't provide much guidance as to what players are meant to do in Port Nyanzaru. With the ticking time bomb of the rapidly declining health of everyone on the planet who's ever been resurrected, I'd be surprised if most players meander around in the city for long. The one clear task they're given is to find a guide, and even that's optional. I personally dislike running henchmen, so there's no way I'm signing up as an NPC escort for most or all of the campaign, especially an NPC who's meant to have a bunch of answers that players ought to have to figure out for themselves. There's no way I'm playing that role. I have two theoretical fixes, neither of which I've actually tried yet:
There's a dozen "side quests" provided in this chapter. These are less side quests as they are addendum quests, because they usually involve goals the players can just keep in mind while pursuing their main goal. I love this idea in theory. In practice, I know my game group and how rubbish they are at taking notes and remembering plot points from one week to the next. A side quest would only muddle the story, and there will be plenty of additional goals as they venture into the jungle. With any other group, though, I think these side quests would be great.
Chult is ruled by Merchant Princes,...
]]>At the time of this writing, I'm running Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. As I read through the book, I've decided to post about my impressions. Although I started this review before the campaign started, I'm now running this module (using Pathfinder 2, incidentally) for my weekly session, but this review is focused on what I'm reading. I don't intend for this to be a report on how my game is going. This review contains lots of spoilers.
Chapter 3 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is a real relief after the first two chapters. After reading Chapters 1 and 2, I was steadily growing more and more anxious about the intent of this module, especially the part that involves getting the player characters to the place where the plot is. What's the intended failsafe when players just don't know what to do or where to go? I guess you just assign them an NPC guide and hold their hand through the jungle, but to me that feels like lazy game design. I'd been hoping for a Paizo-style adventure, where (at the very least!) players get pointed in the direction of some significant location, which can then lead to another significant location, and so on. I'd settle for a Rappan Athuk-style adventure, too, where there are plenty of entries, and knowledgeable NPCs, pointing to the main plot scattered around the map so that even the most aimless player characters end up in the dungeon. But Tomb of Annihilation is a source book for Chult, and it happens to have a chapter describing a dungeon.
Well, everybody's a critic so of course I have Big Ideas about how I'd (in retrospect, and only after the authors have done all the actual work, of course) restructure the book.
Lots of spoilers here.
First of all, accept that there's nothing wrong with this module. People have run it, they've had fun. It's fine.
Move Chapter 3 to the front of the book. The epicenter of the adventure is the Forbidden City of Omu. That's literally where the plot takes place. Everything around Omu is optional. There's really no reason for players to ever leave Omu, and the book provides no real guidance on how the players are supposed to locate Omu. Even if you hand the players the Game Master's map at the start of the game and declare that the real adventure is reaching Omu, you'll find there are no scripted adventures between Port Nyanzaru and Omu, so have fun with 20 game sessions of random dinosaur encounters or making up your own adventures (which is fine, but then honestly you don't need this book).
So, start the adventure in Omu. As it turns out, there are lots of factions in Omu. There's a group of yuan-ti with plans for world dominiation, a Kobold clan aspiring toward dragonhood, Red Wizards of Thay hunting for the Soulmonger, also the Soulmonger and Acererak, some Tabaxi hunters, and tribes...
]]>This month's game is something of a cheat, because I actually developed it at the end of last year. (To make up for the cheat, I've got a bunch of hacks for my Skuffle Wammer 5-minute wargame, which I'll publish to this blog over the next few weeks, but won't count toward my one-game-a-month goal.) I'd intended to release it in January of 2024, but Itch.io had a big sale at the start of December, so I accelerated the publication date to take advantage of that.
This month's game is called Raid!. It's a one-against-many miniature wargame. Here are my design notes for it.
Raid isn't meant to be a quick game, but it is meant to be small. You can clear a spot on your desk (the size of an A4 or Letter size paper is enough) and then have a game that kind of goes on all day. You can play a round, and then work for an hour, then play another round, and then work, and so on.
Raid is modelled after action movies, like Death Wish and RoboCop and Dredd, in which a singular hero bursts into a hive of scum and villainy, and takes down everyone in the place. The hero is essentially invincible in those movies, and so the hero in Raid cannot be killed. At worst, the hero can be injured, but injury (represented as bonus Injury Dice) actually makes the hero stronger. The problem is, there's a seemingly endless supply of enemy reinforcements. So while the hero never dies, the real challenge is to definitively clear the board.
This is an intermediate wargame, meaning that its rules expect you to know common wargame concepts. You must have one miniature to represent the Hero, and at least 12 miniatures representing Gangers.
The game is asymmetric, so the rules for the Hero and Gangers are different. Instead of player turns, there are two phases.
During the Hero phase, the Hero moves and attacks.
One a small game board, there's no restriction on how far you can move. If you're playing on a larger board, like 60 cm or 1 meter square, you can impose reasonable limits on movement.
The Hero can attack one Gang. A Gang consists of three or more miniatures that move around the board together. To attack, the Hero rolls 1d6 for each Ganger being targeted. For a ranged attack, 4+ is considered High. For a ranged attack, 3+ is considered High.
After rolling your attack, discard the Lows and pass the Highs over to the Ganger player (which may be yourself, in a solo game)....
]]>I'm reading through the Starfinder adventure path Attack of the Swarm. The second module in the series is The Last Refuge. This review may contain minor spoilers.
The previous module, Fate of the Fifth, was a punishing, non-stop chase scene. It was thrilling to read. I couldn't put it down. This module justifiably slows the pace down and lets the players breathe. But that doesn't mean it's a boring module. It's full of intrigue, exploration, and tense social encounters.
At the start of The Last Refuge, the player characters have just evacuated Suskillon, and are on a ship on their way to the nearby colony world Ultraneus with a bunch of other refugees. Unfortunately, the ship is experiencing a whole host of malfunctions, and it's up to the player characters to figure out why. And as they do that, they find that they also must keep their passengers calm because people are starting to get anxious. Losing your entire planet to a swarm of killer human-sized insects does that to you, I guess.
When the player characters arrive on Ultraneus, they find sanctuary in New Grakka. The whole city is gearing up for the inevitable Swarm invasion, so there's lots to do. Even as the city prepares for war, though, there's an half-activist half-cult within the city that preaches submission to the Swarm. The group, called The Reckoners, believes that resistance is futile, and that being devoured by the Swarm is just the natural way of things. Seems hard to believe anyone would be fatalistic about a powerfully destructive force like that, but this is science fantasy, so you have to let your imagination run wild. Obviously in real life, humanity would take whatever action necessary to fend off an impending catastrophe regardless of how insurmountable it might seem.
Part of the reason you play a science fantasy game is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no one has gone before. In the first adventure, players don't get much of a chance to enjoy their fictional surroundings. Even when there was downtime, what civilization remained on Suskillon was crumbling, and the threat of death was around every corner.
On New Grakka, player characters are explicitly given the mission to explore the city. They have to gather intelligence about the Reckoners, and follow leads based on what they discover. It's not exactly a walk in the park, but players nevertheless have the excuse to experience a new setting. New Grakka has a sort of generic science fiction industrial feel to it, but there are little touches here and there that make it feel unique, and of course any gaming group will inevitably end up making it their own.
Even the space travel at the beginning of the adventure is a refreshing chance to walk around a spaceship. Sure, the player characters are actively putting out fires both literal and figurative, but...
]]>At the time of this writing, I'm running Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. As I read through the book, I've decided to post about my impressions. Although I started this review before the campaign started, I'm now running this module (using Pathfinder 2, incidentally) for my weekly session, but this review is focused on what I'm reading. I don't intend for this to be a report on how my game is going. This review contains lots of spoilers.
Chapter 2 is all about the lands of Chult outside the main port city Nyanzaru. Structurally, the chapter is great. There's a half page on basically every point on the map, and it's sorted alphabetically. It's functional, and there are a lot of good locations with little opportunities for encounters and side quests and, I guess, exploration (more on that in a moment).
When you pay $100 NZD or $50 USD for a D&D book, you might think there would be material in the book you could use in your D&D game. Well, there certainly are a lot of words in this book, and you can certainly use those in your game. But everything else in this book so far has baffled me. The maps are beautifully drawn, but they're half a page at best and they contain information meant exclusively for the Game Master. There are no maps suitable for players, either in terms of size or data.
There are some player handouts in the appendix, which I do appreciat. But chapter 2 has a fair few maps in it, all of which are basically useless to me. I guess it's nice to see what the artist imagines the author imagined [sic] when writing about some of these locations, but, ya know, I have an imagination too. If you're going to give me a map, you might as well make it useful, or else just skip the map.
I'm also a little puzzled by the lack of adventure in chapter 2. I understand that this adventure is meant to be a hex crawl. But I've run hex crawls before, and in the published hex crawls I've run, there are explicit opportunities for adventure in many of the hexes. That doesn't mean the players are going to find all of them, but at least it gives the Game Master the chance to drop hints or provide hooks for the players to accept or decline.
But Tomb of Annihilation is almost Middle-Earthian in its approach to just the factual data of Chult. Locations are described. They exist. That is all.
Historically in the RPG world, there have (broadly) been basically three categories of books:
Chapter 2 of Tomb of Annihilation is definitely a valid method of describing a game...
]]>I love the concept of all-in-one starter sets. I think they're the answer to providing an entry point into gaming for people who don't know anything about gaming. Recently, I happened to purchase a Lord of the Rings boxed game plus a mostly-unrelated Lord of the Rings wargame rulebook, and the difference between the two speaks volumes. Here's what I mean.
The back of the rulebook (which was shrink-wrapped, so you can't flip through it to see what you're getting) says this:
This rules manual contains all the information you need to begin your journey into Middle-earth and to unleash your forces on the tabletop.
That's objectively untrue. I imagine Games Workshop would belabour the word "begin", but if you purchase the rulebook and two armies of miniatures, you cannot yet play the game. This book lacks miniature Profiles, which are the stat blocks for each miniature. You can buy Gandalf, but to play with Gandalf you need to know his Move speed, his Fight rating, his Defence rating, and so on. This book contains none of that information, so you can buy this rulebook and every single MESBG miniature on the markety, but you still can't play the game.
It's almost aggressively bad.
I realise that this is not a new criticism about Games Workshop. Many people in the past have pointed out that Games Workshop often seems to want to prevent its customers from actually using their products. There's a strong argument that after you've spend $100 on toy soldiers, and another $100 on paints, and another $100 on rules, you ought to be able to play with what you bought. I don't disagree, but then again it's all opt-in. If they want to charge extra for an army book, that's up to them. It's not OK, though, when it's a surprise.
The back of the book also says things like:
A brand new way of building your armies, and a selection of example armies to guide you on how to build your own force.
And:
6 specially formulated Matched Play Scenarios...
But it's all useless without Profiles and this book has just one complete Profile (for Elrond), which it uses as an example on how to read a Profile (should you ever find one).
I don't actually mind the rulebook not containing the Profiles. I see the value in keeping the Profiles and rules separate, and I understand that as they release new miniatures they also have to print more Profiles. The problem is that the book makes it sound like it's everything you need. In fact, the first sentence of the book's Introduction is "Chances are that at least some people reading this will never have played a tabletop wargame before [...] But fear not, within the pages of the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game rules manual you will be guided upon your journey into the wonderful realm of tabletop wargaming."
I'm using Games Workshop as an example, but that's only because they're the...
]]>At the time of this writing, I'm preparing to run Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. It's been out for a good 5 years, and I've played scenarios from it, but I've yet to run it. As I read through the book to prepare for the game, I've decided to post about my impressions. This review contains lots of spoilers.
The first section is the introduction, which is all about why the adventure needs to happen. The main hook is that there's a global death curse in effect. Anyone who's ever been resurrected is now slowly wasting away by some strange necrotic power. An adventurer, Syndra Silvane, is particularly concerned because in her former life (both literally and figuratively) as an adventurer, she had been resurrected and now she's suddenly growing weaker every day. Nobody knows why, nobody knows how. Syndra hires the player characters to find out what's going on, and to put a stop to it.
This adventure hook is really strong. It's a worthy cause for player characters of Good alignment, and Syndra pays well enough to sway Neutral player characters, too. As countdowns go, this feels pretty urgent. In a way, I feel like if anything it feels too urgent, as if it might make players hesitant to explore, which is what a long-form D&D adventure is all about. However, this adventure has a way to handle that problem, which becomes apparent in Chapter 1.
In fact, if anything, the adventure is designed to work against the players as they try their best to take immediate action to resolve the death curse. There's an advancement table in the introduction, and it defines the level requirements (OK, they're guidelines) for each chapter, with each chapter representing a region of Chult. At 1st level, players are likely to survive Port Nyanzaru. At 1st to 6th level, players are expected to be traveling around the land of Chult, searching for the solution. They know only that the source of the curse is something called a Soulmonger, and that it's somewhere in Chult.
Interestingly, this adventure enforces permanent death. This might seem scary, except that characters can't die in 5e. I do appreciate this, though, because as long as players are up for the challenge, this adds some real gravity to the campaign. I've had characters die, and as a dungeon master I've killed several characters, some of whom weren't able to be resurrected. I believe in the power of character death, as long as players agree. An adventure that does away with a chance of resurrection is a bold move, and for 5th Edition I think it's an important one, because 5th Edition has a definite deficiency in danger of death. (At least for some groups. Obviously people should play D&D the way they enjoy. I just wish Death Saving throws were an optional rule.)
The introduction is a good start to a fun adventure. There are plenty of hazards for player...
]]>Although one of the most famous characters in Lord of the Rings is a wizard, I think many people consider Tolkien's setting to be "low magic". It's a matter of comparison, but in RPG settings like Pathfinder's Golarion or Frog God's Lost Lands, powerful violations of the law of physics can be purchased in shops and learned in magic academies. I never gave the magic of Tolkien's setting much thought, but the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game made me reconsider Middle Earth's magic system.
A quick disclaimer: I'm no expert on Tolkien's lore. Growing up, my family read the core books together every four years or so. At the time of writing this, I've not read the Silmarillion or all the letters Tolkien wrote about his writing (although I've read some, and I've got the Silmarillion on my list). For now, I'm thinking of magic just as a bloke who's read the books and saw the movies.
The most obvious thing about Middle Earth's magic is that there's more to magic than the cantrips wizards cast. Maybe there's less glitter, but there's still a lot of wispy mist. The very premise of the story is that there's a magical ring that not only turns its wearer invisible, but through which its original manufacturer influences its wearer. Maybe it's because of how early in life I was introduced to The Hobbit but for whatever reason, the Ring never seemed like magic to me. It was just always part of the story and part of the world.
There's a lot of subtle magic in Mddle Earth, as it turns out. Swords glow when enemies are near. Certain elves have foresight, others can scry. Trolls and goblins exist. Even as I list them here, it feels a little boring and mundane. That's not because it is mundane, though. It's because the fantastical elements of Tolkien's setting has become our bare minimum definition of fantasy. You can heap as much Greater Polymorph and Chill Touch and Dragonlances as you want to come up with something that feels even more magical, but underneath there's a foundation of incidentally magical fantasy.
But I'm not playing the it-was-groundbreaking-at-the-time card. Instead, I'm noticing that the magic of Middle Earth is integrated into the setting. The fantasy parts of Middle Earth don't seem like fantasy to its inhabitants because it's the folklore of the people inhabiting the world. If I encountered an actual pixie or fairy, for example, I'd be surprised but I'd have context for what I was seeing. My mind wouldn't go into crisis, I'd just decide that all the legends were true, after all. I think the same is true for Middle Earth. Probably most hobbits have never seen and will never see a troll, but when Bilbo tells his story about trolls, nobody is likely to think of it as magic. It's just part of the world, a rare fulfillment of the fantastic.
Even after seeing...
]]>I recently got the Attack of the Swarm adventure path from Humble Bundle, and I've been reading through it. The first module in the series is Fate of the Fifth. This review may contain minor spoilers.
Fate of the Fifth opens up with the players forced into a role as soldiers in the Suskillon Defense Force (SDF), and at first, I admit, I was vehemently indignant. Starfinder already forced players into regimented roles any time they're on a spaceship, and this module forces them into a literal regiment? My head went immediately to potential loopholes, and I started to imagine how I could get out of military conscription.
And then two things happened: The story was too good to ignore, and the 30 pages of backmatter provides plenty of story reasons a player character might find themselves in the middle of an intergalactic war whether they like it or not. There are lots of reasons a player character might end up in the service of the SDF, especially considering that the war zone in question is the entire planet. You can't be on Suskillon and not be involved with the fact that The Swarm is overrunning ever square inch of it.
You can casually stroll through the story of Fate of the Fifth for about a page. After that, it demands your full attention. As a Game Master, you'll be captivated at the elegance of the plot, and as a player you'll fear for the safety of your character. And it stays that way until the end of the module, 35 pages later.
It's not just the turn of events that captivate, although to be clear those are marvelously laid out in the book. As the Game Master, you're told explicitly what the major plot beats are, and big subheadings alert you as to what each beat is. Players can do whatever they like for as long as the Game Master likes, but when the next event happens, the game changes.
The challenge in this module is that the Suskillon Defense Force (SDF) is losing the battle for the planet Suskillon. As a result, the player characters are on the run from the start. There are rescue missions, extraction missions, and surprise encounters, set against a background of the ever-present threat of a massive insect invasion.
All the military outposts the characters encounter are in various states of evacuation. Infrastructure is actively being destroyed by the SDF itself to keep The Swarm from using it, and other infrastructure is being destroyed by The Swarm because that's what the Swarm does. Cities are in ruin, abandoned. Highways are littered with so much wreckage that you can't even drive on it. Off-road is sometimes clearer, but then you risk the burrowing Swarm Dredgers (stats available in the Alien Archive in the back of the book).
Even when the player characters aren't actively fighting human-sized insects, they're running from one checkpoint to another, trudging through harsh terrain, fighting desperate...
]]>I hear a lot of people praising dropper bottles for paint. In fact, they're the bottle of choice for most miniature paint companies, as far as I can tell. Everybody but Citadel. Citadel uses little plastic pots. You shake them up, pop the lid open, and touch your brush to a sort of shelf built onto the pot lid, which has paint on it now because you rigorously shook the paint pot for a full minute. So who's right? Everybody or Citadel? Here are 3 reasons I prefer Citadel's paint pots to dropper bottles for my miniature paints.
People seem to like dropper bottles because you can produce a predictable and consistent amount of paint from a dropper. This is useful when you want to mix paint. You can remember a recipe for a specific shade or hue by knowing how many drops of one paint to add to another: one drop of yellow to one drop of red, two drops of white to one drop of green, and so on. That's the theory, anyway.
The problem for me is that I often don't need a whole drop of paint. What I really want is a brushful of paint: the amount of paint a brush can hold. To get a brushful of paint from a dropper bottle, you generally have to put a drop of paint onto your palette, and then load your brush from it. The paint left behind is wasted.
Also, I think people are probably over-estimating the consistency of "one drop". A "drop" is not a scientific unit of measure, and to me there's not a significant difference between the concept of a drop and a brushful. A ratio of paint is basically the same whether it's one brushful or one drop, and a brushful is very often all I need.
I can't prove it, but I feel like the paints I own that come in dropper bottles get thicker over time. Maybe my tolerance for how thin a paint is has changed over time, but I honestly feel that most of the first set of Vallejo Xpress Color paints I purchased were almost water-thin. But now when I use them, I feel they're all universally a syrupy consistency. Unless my definition of what a thin paint is (which is possible) has changed, I've begun to suspect that the paints in dropper bottles have been slowly evaporating and thickening. I know it seems unlikely because the dropper bottles are kept closed, but by comparison the first Citadel Contrast paints I purchased, well before I knew about Vallejo Xpress Color, are still as thin as ever.
It's gotten so noticeable to me that I've been adding medium to my Vallejo Xpress Color before using them, which I never used to do.
I haven't done any scientific tests on whether my hypothesis is correct, so I wouldn't defend my suspicion about evaporation if challenged on it. Maybe my complaint is actually that...
]]>I used to hear how bad resin was for board game miniatures. Every time somebody mentioned Forge World, they ended their sentence sadly with "too bad it's resin." I had no idea why, just that they were bad. Recently, I wanted some historical miniatures that I just couldn't find from any miniature vendor. I ordered them from a local vendor, who essentially had a 3d printer and a license to print and sell some STL files from a variety of sculptors. It didn't occur to me that I was buying resin miniatures, and I'm not sure I would have cared had it occurred to me because, as far as I knew, plastic was plastic. I couldn't have been more wrong. Here are 3 reasons I'm avoding resin miniatures from now on.
Forget resin for a moment. Here's what "normal" plastic is like.
I didn't really realise it until I started building Games Workshop Citadel miniatures, but I enjoy the process of building [some] things.
Sure, I have a level of tolerance, but Lego and Citadel miniatures are about the right amount of work for me.
It takes time and effort, but not too much of either, and in the end you have a cool toy you get to play with.
Especially with Citadel miniatures, that might seem superficial. Unlike with Lego sets, when you build a wargame miniature you're assembling pieces of a model that only fits together one way, right? Well, as it turns out, not really.
Citadel miniatures frequently have build variants, meaning you have different options for how you build them. In the [excellent] Genestealer Combat Patrol box, you can build a Goliath Rockgrinder or a Goliath Truck. They use the same vehicle chassis, but they're otherwise drastically different models. In the same box, you can build Acolyte Hybrids or Hybrid Metamorphs. Even the Magos has a different option for what she's holding in her left hand.
The same goes for the Adeptus Mechanicus Ironstrider models, and the Knight Armigers.
Sure, very often the basic profile of a wargame miniature doesn't change all that much no matter what choices you make, but there are meaningful choices. It's no Lego set. Except when it is.
It turns out that after you've bought and built a few model kits, you have a bunch of bits and pieces left over. Those bits and pieces quickly become raw material for model hacking ("conversion"). I started doing this early on, because it seemed like the obvious thing to do. When you have 2 sets of 7 traitor guardsmen to build, you don't really want every two of them to look exactly the same. Sure, a different paint scheme for each helps, but why not take a spare spike from this mutant arm that never got used and stick it onto this guardsman's armour? How about an extra tentacle poking out from the head of this genestealer cultist? It's can be surprising how much you can change a model...
]]>I decided I wanted a Roman and an Egyptian army so I could play out some skirmishes around the siege of Alexandria and the Battle of Actium. I figured Rome and Egypt were probably pretty popular armies, and a cursory search online suggested that there would be lots of miniatures to choose from. So I saved up, planned a few scenarios, thought about paint schemes, and finally started shopping. And that's when it all fell apart. It turns out that historic wargaming can be harder than it looks. However, it's not impossible and, I think, it's actually really rewarding. Here are the five things you need to know about historical wargaming.
Finding the right miniatures for historical wargames has been more difficult than I'd expected. There are lots of variables, it seems. The first hurdle has been availability. Maybe historic wargaming isn't as popular as I'd thought, or maybe I'm just being surprised again by living in New Zealand (as I do). Every historic miniature I could find had to come from overseas, which meant that shipping was frequently at least a third of the cost (but usually more like half).
I ended up finding a local service that offered resin 3d prints of STL files. Seems easy, right? Well, I guess it made it possible for me to get some miniatures on the table, but the brave new world of digital miniature delivery turned out to be more complex than I'd imagined.
First of all, you have to endure resin.
Secondly, there's that old spectre of sizing. This can theoretically be corrected by just scaling the STL source down but in practice it seems imprecise. Maybe it's just the printing service I used, but my Roman soldiers are comically riding ponies instead of horses, judging by the height of their mounts, and the soldiers don't fit. (I think the printer scaled the horses but forgot to scale the riders.) I could have sent them back and demanded a re-print, but by the time I'd noticed the mismatch, everything had been painted and I was just about to glue the riders onto their mounts.
And finally, there's style. Maybe this is common for historical wargamers, but it was basically impossible for me to get complete-ish armies from the same sculptor. So my Romans are by one artist and my Egyptians are by another. It works out alright, I guess, but the Egyptian soldiers are dynamic and fluid and exciting, while my Romans are stiff and blocky. It feels a little like taking Lara Croft and dropping her into Minecraft. It definitely requires more imagination than, say, pitting Space Marines against Aeldari, both designed and produced by Citadel.
I specifically wanted Roman Imperial and late [late, late] Egyptian armies, but I guess Octavian's pursuit of Mark Antony isn't really a popular match. I couldn't find the combination I wanted from any single vendor. I could sort of find Roman armies (although it seems Roman...
]]>The Army Painter products are probably the first miniature paints I remember seeing in hobby stores. Before I was fully aware that people bothered painted miniatures, way in the back of my mind I knew that there were paints available for...something. Now that I paint miniatures myself, I still haven't tried their paints but I have been using their brushes and I'm pretty sure they're my go-to miniature brushes now. Here's why.
Early on in my miniature painting hobby, I looked into buying some Army Painter paints because, aside from Citadel, it was the only brand I knew. But then I started seeing bad reviews about "the reactivation problem". Apparently, some Army Painter paints that had dried on your miniature had a habit of re-liquifying when you painted over them. This seemed bad, to me, because I'm not the neatest of painters and tend to have to paint over stray bits of paint regularly. The last thing I wanted was to make a messy paint job messier with old dried paint coming back to life.
I've since learned that some people actually appreciate this quality, because you can do some interesting blending when paints soften up and mix together. That's probably beyond me yet, but maybe in the future I'll try it out.
Regardlessly, I sort of wrote off The Army Painter when I discovered Vallejo Xpress Color. Between Citadel and Vallejo, I feel like my little paint box is well stocked, so who needs Army Painter?
I didn't know brushes went bad until I started painting miniatures. When I bought my first brush, I'd expected to buy exactly one brush for the rest of my life. Turns out brushes don't last forever. My first brush, which I got in a Citadel Starter Kit, got destroyed by a friend who, although a very talented painter, had no idea how to treat the tools. Entire pots of paint dried up, the paint brush got encrusted with paint, the brush handle had a layer of paint over the entire thing. The whole kit was ruined.
Lesson learned: Be careful who you invite over to use your hobby tools.
My second and third brushes were Citadel brushes. One came in a second Starter Kit to replacet the first, and the other was a "Layer S" brush meant for fine detail work. The Layer S brush was $22 NZD, and within a month, the bristles had split apart, rendering it useless for detail work (and it's too small as a general-purpose brush). As for the brush from the kit, the bristles curled, causing paint to move in unexpected directions when I painted with it. Pretty disappointing.
I tried a fourth brush from a general art store, but I'm not used to brush sizes so I ended up buying a brush that's WAY too big for miniature painting. (It looked small in the store.)
Finally, I happened to be in game store looking at board games when...
]]>In addition to not being a particularly good miniature painter, I also have no fashion sense. Life has taught me one great truth about how to combine clothes, and that's that black goes with everything, especially more black. Left to my own devices, I'd probably just paint every miniature I have Black Legion and Guilliman Flesh. The problem with that is that it creates a really monotonous (er, monochromatic) army. Or maybe the result would be super cool and dark and moody, but functionally looking out at your tabletop and seeing a legion of black miniatures creates a bunch of mental cycles for you to figure out which blob of murky soldiers is which. Colour makes your army easy to distinguish, but if you dare take it a step further, colour also helps you identify individual troops.
If you paint miniatures, that might come across like a bold statement. My own feelings on it actually waivers, depending on several factors. Mostly, I agree [with myself] but here are the variables involved in whether I paint an army uniformly or with all the colours of the rainbow. Here are four of them.
From what I can tell in my completely unscientific research involving Wikipedia and Youtube, uniforms weren't really a thing until the 1700s or so (give or take a century). Prior to that, people were conscripted by their local lord, or else they were land owners who needed to defend their holding, and either way everybody showed up to the fight with the clothes and gear they happened to own. Even the professional soldiers of the Roman Imperial legions wore whatever clothing they could afford, aside from the armour issued to them by the state, (Again, I'm not a scholar, I could have details wrong, so don't quote me or take my word for it.)
Whether or not my research is accurate, the concept is persuasive enough for me to give myself permission to paint green tunics on my contubernium gladius (sword squad) and red tunics on my contubernium pilum (spear squad). My cavalry mattered less, because they're on horses. They're hard to confuse with infantry, which leads me to...
Colour coding a squad isn't too important when the squad is visually unique from other squads around it. My Roman infantry is distinct from my Roman cavalry, so it doesn't matter to me what colours the cavalry wears, at least until I get more cavalry and have a need to distinguish contubernia apart. In Warhammer 40,000, Skitarii Rangers and Skitarii Vanguard look very similar, from a distance. Their heads are different, so they're not identical, but I have to admit that Vallejo Xpress Velvet Red robes on one and Vallejo Xpress Plasma Red on the other might help them stand apart from one another. Vallejo Xpress Velvet Red on one and Vallejo Xpress Storm Blue on another would really differentiate them from one another, but dare I deviate from the box...
]]>I've run the mega-dungeon Rappan Athuk twice so far. Once in AD&D, and currently in 5e. From its marketing, Rappan Athuk is "legendary," but I'm honestly unclear whether that's a claim about real live people knowing and loving the book, or whether it's a reference to fictional people in the game world regarding the fictional dungeon as fictionally legendary. I guess in the end, it doesn't matter. The point is that it's a big, sprawling, messy dungeon, and it's just waiting to be explored.
Warning: This post features spoilers. Not major spoilers, but it's all about entrances to the dungeon, so if you don't want to know anything about Rappan Athuk before playing, abandon this post now.
As far as I can tell, there have been several editions, re-releases, and conversions of Rappan Athuk, to say nothing of expansions and supplements. On the one hand, that sounds amazing because there's so much content! On the other hand, that can be really intimidating because there's so much content. Both times I've run the dungeon, I've run it from a PDF, and I got so thoroughly confused in the AD&D edition that I all but dissected the 5e version of the PDF in preparation for my next game.
First of all, each level of the dungeon got its own PDF. Then I extracted all the maps. (Edit: I recently discovered that you can instead purchase player and DM versions of the maps, which is well worth it when running the game virtually.) In several instances, I extracted the maps entirely from the book just so I wouldn't have to flip past them while searching for important information.
It's almost impossible to truly understand the layout of Rappan Athuk, but you can understand the logic and that's what matters.
In the book, there are levels, sections, and rooms.
Rappan Athuk's numbering scheme is structured around this taxonomy. For instance, 5-9 refers to level 5, room 9. And 10A-41 refers to level 10, section A, room 41.
Some editions (or all?) of Rappan Athuk feature chapters about a nearby town (Zelkor's Ferry) as...
]]>The Curse of Strahd (5e) and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (3.5) modules feature the use of fortune teller cards to determine certain aspects of the adventure. For Curse of Strahd, the deck of cards is called a Tarokka deck, and in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft you're told to use a Three Dragon Ante deck. In both cases, you also have the option to use standard playing cards instead.
I've been meaning to purchase a Tarokka deck because I do love cards and the art is, predictably, amazing. But in New Zealand, a store with the Tarokka deck in stock is suprisingly difficult to find, and a deck isn't exactly cheap. It's not very expensive, but when I'm standing in front of a bookshelf full of amazing D&D books with $100 NZD in your hands (yes, a $50 D&D books costs $100 NZD after importing and currency conversion), I find a deck of cards a hard sell.
Of course, you can also use a Tarot deck, which is the obvious inspiration for Tarokka. However, I also don't own a Tarot deck! I do intend to get a Tarot deck because they're great for game design, but so far I just print a black-and-white deck on card stock when I need raw materials for a game design. Until I find a Tarot deck I really like (and there are many brilliantly designed ones out there), I'll definitely make that purchase, but so far I haven't needed one enough to justify the hunt.
By chance (or was it...fate?), my co-worker Laurie got me a deck of cards asa Secret Santa gift a few years ago. It was a standard poker deck, designed by Gent, called the Fae Deck. The Fae Deck, as its name suggests, is built around the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of the Faeries. All of the cards are black as midnight, with light grays and white and sometimes even black (there's nothing more stylish than black on black) ink. The designs are vaguely celtic and all-round old-world.
The face cards, used as the "focus cards" for Madame Eva's reading, are beautifully illustrated etchings.
Because I didn't purchase these cards myself, I don't know how much they cost, but it was for an office Secret Santa celebration so I believe the deck was probably quite affordable.
At first, even with my fancy Fae Deck, I was a little nervous about using playing cards instead of a Tarokka or Tarot deck. I felt like my players would surely want an image to look at as their fate was being decided upon. I was incorrect, and I think I wasn't accounting for a few things.
I'm preparing for a historic wargame between Roman Imperial and Egyptian armies, and while I paint the miniatures I wanted to listen to a relevant audio book. Unfortunately, I wasn't exactly able to find anything beyond some documentaries on Youtube. There are some really good ones on there, and I've watched hours and hours about the cultures (civilian and military and religious). I'm no scholar and I don't really know where to look for historical texts about the time period I'm interested in, but as I searched I stumbled across a guy named Herodotus. It's the wrong century by almost 500 years, but I was suprised to find his writing fun, funny, intriguing, and I guess probably even educational. This is my review of the first volume of Herodotus's Histories.
Herodotus was born in 484 BCE, and he documented a lot. In fact, he wrote so much that he's sort of considered the first historian. None of it's useful to me for my game research, except that it does help me imagine I'm getting into the mentality of people who lived so long ago that their world is basically a fictional fantasy setting from my perspective. I can't really envision what life would have been like in 500 BCE or 40 CE but Herodotus's writings is often about essentially tourism, combining what he himself experienced in his travels, as well as stories he was told by locals about regional cultures and conflicts. It shouldn't be, but I guess it's always a little surprising when you hear about somebody who lived thousands of years ago with basically the same thoughts that you often have. You feel a connection with these people, as they make good and bad decisions, as they strive to do their best, as they look for their place in the world, for love and acceptance.
The humans are the same as ever, but the world has obviously changed since Herodotus. Or rather, human perception of the world has changed. From Herodotus, it occurred to me that religion wasn't exactly an institution back then, as it is today. Religion was just a part of nature. Herodotus speaks of gods, both his own Hellenic gods and foreign pantheons, both as a casual assumption and as something sacred, depending on the context. When he speaks of the gods casually, it's like you and I might talk about a mobile phone or a café or a TV show. You don't have to explain the concept of these things, and you probably don't often ask yourself why and how they exist. They're just part of your world. Things you don't think about. That's how Herodotus treats the gods. Gods are assumptive, so innate in the world that it precedes being taken for granted.
And yet Herodotus also recognises, just like you and I would, that there's such a thing as respect. Some things are too personal, precious, or "sacred" to be talked about casually. There are several times...
]]>I'm a lifelong Lord of the Rings fan, to the point that (for better or for worse) my name is even in the credits of some of the movies. I've yet to read the Silmarillion, I can name the individuals in the Fellowship but I couldn't tell you all the stops they make along the way, and I don't love that so much canon is derived from Tolkien's letters and posthumous works. But I grew up with the books and its lore is firmly implanted within my brain, one way or another. I recently purchased the rulebook for Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game by Games Workshop, and this is my review of it as a book and a game.
I'd known that Games Workshop maintained a Middle Earth wargame, but I somehow thought it was sort of an obligatory thing they did, sort of as a way to keep Lord of the Rings (LOTR) safely in British hands. I guess because they don't own the IP, they don't exactly have the proliferation of related content the way they have for 40k and Sigmar (and Fantasy before it), so it also doesn't feel like they do much to promote the game. Recently, I read a positive review of one of the LOTR roleplaying games, and then I saw a battle report for a really fun scenario for Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game (MESBG), and then Games Workshop decided to promote their boxed game Battle in Balin's Tomb direct to my email inbox. Third time's a charm, because I purchased the boxed game because I enjoy Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City, and I had to admit that Balin's Tomb looked really good. While I was at the store, I picked up the [mostly unrelated, but more on that later] rulebook for Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game because I was getting miniatures in the boxed game and, who knows, maybe I'd like to use them for the wargame too.
Well, I may as well get the unpleasant part out of the way first.
There's no indication of this anywhere on the rulebook's back cover, and the book comes shrink-wrapped so it's inaccessible even if you go to the store to see it in person before you buy, but you can't play the game with just the rulebook. To players of Warhammer and even Pathinder and D&D, this is probably not surprising. Are there even games where you only have to buy one book to start playing? Don't all games require bestiaries or something?
Well, no. There are lots of RPG and wargame systems that bundle everything you need into one volume. Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game is not one of them. You need the rulebook and the Armies of Lord of the Rings (if you bought LOTR miniatures) or Armies of The Hobbit (if you bought The Hobbit miniatures) book.
Buying the rulebook and a box of miniatures is not sufficient. You must have an army book....
]]>Pariah Nexus on the Warhammer TV streaming service has reached its third and final episode. I hadn't expected such a short series, so this episode came as a surprise to me, but it didn't disappoint. And if the series wasn't dark enough for you so far, this episode 100% remedies that.
In this episode, Sister Danica and Brother Sa'kan continue their trek through a broken, war-torn world toward the evacuation site they can only hope still exists. The world fades into the background for the first time in the series, though, and the story happens mostly within the thoughts of our main characters. And that's a tricky thing to pull off, because this story takes place in a hellscape most of us don't dare imagine. But amazingly, the writers manage to both craft characters with thoughts completely alien (but not actually alien, as I'm obligated to point out when discussing Warhammer) but also who we can connect to.
The inner world of characters in Warhammer 40,000 is lightyears away from how we see things. It should be, after all it's meant to happen tens of thousands of years in the future. The internal logic, the social conditioning, the concerns and fears ought to be foreign to us. And actually most of it is. You have to extrapolate a lot to identify with these characters, but that's what's great about this episode. The entire series has leaned heavily on the Warhammer 40,000 setting, but this episode most of all. Danica isn't clinging to her faith because she needs to believe in the Emperor, she's clinging because she believes the destruction of her planet was a personal failing. Sa'kan finds new meaning by vowing to hunt down the Deathmark plaguing the planet. And killing civilians, even children, makes sense to the Astra Militarum because hatred is the greatest gift the Emperor has ever given humanity.
The scariest thing about 40k is that its grim dark logic feels like it makes sense, given the circumstances. Who cares about the Necrons. What's most terrifying of all is finding yourself nodding as an enraged zealot derides somebody for taking shelter during a war. I don't know how the writers accomplish that level of complexity, but it's impressive when it works.
And in Pariah Nexus it works. Possibly it works too well. The series has been dark, but this episode takes it farther than anything else I've seen on WarhammerTV.
It's interesting that the glimmer of hope in this series comes not from the civilians, not from the Sister of Battle, but from the Space Marine. Sa'kan has single-handedly made me a serious fan of the Salamanders. In your desparation to find a Good Guy in the 40k universe, the Salamanders, as it turns out, seem like a pretty close match. Protectors, shields of the innocent, literal dragon slayers. They're not really the good guys. They're cogs in the same machine as everything else. But even when Sa'kan threatens...
]]>Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Instead of running CoS, I sometimes run Expedition. It's fun for players who have never experienced Ravenloft before, and it's got a few surprises for players already familiar with Curse of Strahd. I'm reviewing the 3rd edition book, chapter by chapter. There will be minor spoilers in these posts, so this is primarily intended for Dungeon Masters.
Chapter 4 is the castle.
I hate to start with the weak points, but the maps in this chapter are pretty bad. As much as I love the layout of the Expedition to Castle Ravenloft book, I have to confess that I find isometric maps unhelpful and confusing. I'm not sure why they're isometric, aside from tradition (and even then, why were they ever isometric?) but it only makes it harder to reproduce the floors as a 2d battle map.
The castle is also big, with over 80 numbered locations. For some reason, all locations, regardless of which floor they're on, are prefixed with K (K1, K12, K78, and so on). The castle would be so much easier to navigate if only each floor had been given its own letter prefix: K for the ground floor (because K was the next letter after the previous chapter), L for the first floor, M for the second, N and P and R and S for towers and rooftops and so on.
Those are the two aspects of this chapter I don't like. The rest of it is flawless.
The thing about Castle Ravenloft in this adventure is that it's Strahd's lair, and so he could be around any corner. Madam Eva's fortunes foretell exactly where Strahd can be found within the castle, but she doesn't exactly give the player characters a location and encounter number. She gives clues that are likely meaningless to anyone who's never been to Castle Ravenloft, and pprobably pretty vague to even people who have. So Strahd is pretty much equally likely to be in one given room as any other, and if it's not Strahd waiting for the PCs, it's probably something nearly as dangerous. This isn't just a dungeon crawl, it's a manhunt.
The intriguing thing about Castle Ravenloft is that it was once a fortress of good. By all accounts, Barov and Ravenovia, the parents of Strahd, were benevolent rulers. Accordingly, there are hints of that still, however decayed and faded, in the castle today. That adds a little sadness to the castle, but it's only one of the many small stories embedded within the walls of Strahd's home.
As players move through the castle, histories emerge. Some stories have little to do with Strahd directly, and others can have a huge impact on him. It's difficult to tell one from the other, of course, and even more difficult to know who's safe...
]]>Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Instead of running CoS, I sometimes run Expedition. It's fun for players who have never experienced Ravenloft before, and it's got a few surprises for players already familiar with Curse of Strahd. I'm reviewing the 3rd edition book, chapter by chapter. There will be minor spoilers in these posts, so this is primarily intended for Dungeon Masters.
Chapter 3 is all about the lands of Barovia.
The introduction to the chapter provides an overview of the land surrounding the central village, and most importantly introduces the three hags. Players of CoS will think these three hags are Morgantha, Bella Sunbane, and Offalia Wormwiggle, but they're not. They don't live in a windmill, they're not night hags. They're entirely different people, and I won't betray their identities or exact roles on the story here. It's fun, though, to see players adjust expectations as it becomes clear that the hags they're hearing about aren't the ones they've been imagining.
A word of warning: there is no windmill in this adventure unless you add one in. I mention this because if you run Death House as an introductory adventure, as I have in the past, then you need to either change the deed to Old Bonegrinder to something else or be sure to put Old Bonegrinder in Barovia somewhere. Six hags in one adventure seems a bit much, so I wouldn't inhabit the windmill with hags, but there are plenty of other threats you could add in, if you wanted to make it an encounter, or you could make in a benign headquarters for the PCs, or whatever.
The crossroads location is a literal crossroads that characters encounter because it inevitably lies between Barovia, Castle Ravenloft, and Tser Pool. At the crossroads, players meet Sir Urik, a Knight of the Raven. In the lore of Ravenloft, the Knights of the Raven are an ancient order of noble fighters sworn to defeat evil wherever it may appear. Unfortunately for the order, Strahd appeared in Ravenloft and dominated the land and its people, and so the order's numbers have dwindled to one or two members. Mechanically, a player character meeting specific requirements can join the order, taking on a prestige class and gaining new abilities, including the very cool ability to smite undead (a turn undead ability that smites instead of turns) and a raven companion.
As with the Lightbringers, I want to adapt this for 5e but I have nothing organized enough to post as of this writing. You could either adapt the features yourself, or you can just use the Knights of the Raven as flavour, maybe with a token benefit here or there (maybe a slight boost to a cleric's turn undead ability to make it more lethal, and a raven sidekick according to the rules described in Tasha's Cauldron).
Sir...
]]>I've written before about how much I love Citadel's Contrast paints. I recently decided to try out a similar line of paints from Vallejo, not because I'm looking to replace Citadel Contrast but because I want more. I love painting with auto-shading pigments, so I wanted to see what colours Vallejo had to offer.
At the time of writing, the Xpress Color line consists of 23 colours. I didn't buy all of them, because many of the colors I felt were either similar enough to what I had in Citadel Contrast for me not to miss (how many reds or blues do I really need?) or I already felt I had as Contrast paint (I'm happy with Guilliman Flesh, so I didn't buy Vallejo's Dwarf Skin). I was buying online from Australia (as of this writing, there's now one store in New Zealand that carries Xpress Color), so selecting which colour I wanted to invest in was subject to a lot of guesswork. I looked at colour swatches and photographs, but results were always variable due to lighting, undercoat, and paint style. I did my best, however, to select colours I felt were unique to Vallejo.
Here are the colours I bought:
I find it odd when something is only discussed in comparison to the other thing. It's probably safe to assume that someone looking into buying Vallejo Xpress Color has likely painted with Citadel Contrast paints, because Citadel is ubiquitous. However, I don't want to assume familiarity with Contrast paint. For most of this post, I'm pretending like Contrast paints don't exist. I'm talking about Vallejo Xpress Color based on its own merits.
The Vallejo bottles are dropper buttles. I'm not a fan of this design. Being dropper bottles mean you have to predict how much paint you think you're going to need. I find myself either under-estimating and just putting one drop onto my palette, or over-estimating and pouring out a big puddle of paint that I inevitably don't use.
Verdict: I'm not a fan of the dropper bottle design. I'd rather have something I could open and dip my brush into.
The bottles are clear plastic, so you can see the paint contained in it. You might be surprised, though, at how similar Omega Blue, Black Lotus, Deep Purple, Copper Brown, and a few other dark paints look when they're just sitting in a bottle.
The bottle labels have no indication of what colour is inside (aside from some text way down at the bottom), and each bottle inexplicably has an orange ring around the black bottle cap. I really wish either the ring or the label reflected what colour paint was in the bottle. Obviously I wouldn't expect the colour of the label or the ring to actually match the expected shade of...
]]>The Fallout video games are the story of a desolate and dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Each Fallout is a computer RPG known by varying degrees for branching story paths, player agency, a unique real-time yet turn-based combat system, and character customization. The board game attempts to capture all of that atmosphere and flexibility in a tabletop game, and it does a pretty good job of it.
In Fallout, you lay tiles out and start exploring. As you explore, you encounter raiders and super-mutants and other threats, dangerous radiation levels (you have a radiation counter, so this matters), and also settlements and ruins. Each of these encounters has a different effect.
Enemies lead to combat. For combat, you use some specially marked dice that governs whether or not you take damage from the enemy, and where you manage to hit your enemy. Enemies have different vulnerable areas, so some of your hits go unnoticed, but when you score enough of the right kind of hits, you gain XP for defeating your foe. The graphics on the dice evoke the VATS system from the video games, so superficially it feels familiar. You can also use skills and special perks to re-roll a failure, and as you level up, you get more skills, and so there's a good feeling of constant improvement. Well, unless you die.
The one problem with the dice is that they change context between skill checks and combat. During combat, the bullethole icons represent hits against you. But during a skill check, the bullethole icons represent your level of success. So in one, it's detrimental to you and in the other it's beneficial. It works, but it requires mental acrobatics every time you do it, and I almost guarantee that you'll find yourself getting excited about a result only to realise moments later that you should be sad, and the reverse is also true. It's almost annoying enough for me to just use standard dice, but then I'd have to map out what numbers indicate success and what numbers indicate failure. I really wish they'd just included another set of 3 die in the box with different iconography, although there is some small part of me that admires the re-use of existing assets.
Settlements have stores and NPCs you can interact with. NPC interactions use a huge Encounter deck, full of cards strung together like a choose-your-path adventure game based on the choices you make. Because the tiles on the board can differ from game to game, there are several different adventures in the Encounter deck, you get a lot of mileage out of the deck before you start to feel like you're repeating the same old story. As with an RPG, though, there are lots of characters to choose from in the board game, so even if you are on a familiar quest, you may be approaching it diffferently from the last time when you played a different character.
The game does emphasize combat, whether it means to...
]]>What Next? by Big Potato Games is a cross between a game book and a cozy party game. It's essentially a choose-your-own-path adventure written on a deck of cards. There are three decks of cards in the box, each with a self-contained adventure. Pick a deck, and turn over the top card. Read it, make a choice, and advance to whatever card it specifies. That's the game. It is absolutely a choose-your-path adventure story.
The twist is that there are physical mini-games you must complete at certain points during the story. These invariably take the place of dice rolls. Instead of rolling on a skill written on a character sheet, you're actually testing your skill in some way that's vaguely related to the story. For instance, if the character in the story is trying to throw a rock at something, then you might be challenged to flick a puck (included in the box) along a ruler but not past the end of the ruler. When you succeed, something good happens in the story. When you fail, something bad happens.
Instead of taking damage the way you do in an RPG, this game has a bunch of oddly-shaped blocks that you have to stack each time you make a serious error. When your tower inevitably falls apart, the game is over and you have to start back at the beginning. This is a clever idea, but I'm not convinced it works all that well. After enough failure, you're pretty thoroughly discourages from playing again because you just don't want to go through the start of the deck again. And once a player loses faith that failure has meaningful consequences, the player is probably going to start skipping past the parts of the story they can recite by heart. Or the player just ignores failure and plays through to the end anyway, but then where's the game component? That's the weakest part of the game, and I think if I could change anything about it, I'd introduce some kind of whacky reward system for failure. Instead of stopping the game, I'd have players gain a silly and fun item card that claims to be a penalty in world but is actually either harmless or maybe even beneficial (after all, a player failing often enough is basically a player asking for assistance). Hardcore gamers will want to re-play the adventure until they can complete it without any penalty cards, and everyone else will have a laugh at how narrowly they managed to get through it.
Photo by Riho Kroll using the Unsplash License.
Mansions of Madness by Fantasy Flight is an investigative RPG with a scripted Game Master. In fact, game play is guided by an app you can run on Steam or on a mobile device. The app tells you what tiles of the board to set out, what tokens to mark the board with, and helps you through exploration and combat.
Three or four scenarios are included with the game, but you can easily re-play them. The solutions to the mysteries don't change, but like many RPG adventures, there's often not that much of a mystery to solve. This isn't a spoiler but, believe it or not, in this Lovecraft-themed game, pretty much everybody's a cultist out to summon Cthulhu. If somebody's benn murdered, they're probably a sacrifice to, you guessed it, Cthulhu. Sure, the first time you play through an adventure, you'll get some surprises, and the more you become familiar with the adventure the less there is to uncover. But there are plenty of characters in the box to play, so by my reckoning you could play each adventure at least 3 times, once each with a different pair of characters and have a drastically different experience each time.
The adventures aren't short, either. I think the shortest estimated time is 60 minutes, and you can expect it to take a lot longer.
In other words, there's plenty of game play in the box.
The "problem" with Mansions of Madness is that the game master isn't a living being, at least by default. If you play the game as designed, there's no way to talk to NPCs the way you would in an RPG. It's like a Lone Wolf book or a video game. You get a few scripted options for what want to say or do at any given point, and you're locked into those choices. When the game calls for yet another monster to barge through the door, that's exactly what happens because there's no friendly game master around to protect you.
Then again, another way to look at Mansions of Madness is as a box of game assets available for both a scripted game master and a live one. You and a friend could play Mansions of Madness as a sort of structured RPG, with one person running the mansion and developing a story as characters explore, and the other runs the characters. Or, you can just play it as a board game, as intended, and have just as much fun. It's just a different kind of fun.
Photo by Riho Kroll using the Unsplash License.
In my review of the Mansions of Madness board game, I noted that you could play the game with one player running the mansion, making up a story, while other players could play the characters. Like in an RPG. There are a few games like this, but the ones I own and enjoy are Mansions of Madness and Fallout (both Fantasy Flight games, interestingly), and Wrath of Ashardalon. I think this represents a missed opportunity for traditional RPG like Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant, and I'd love to see an RPG-in-a-box, with a bunch of common assets you could use as a highly structured but unscripted dungeon crawl or RPG adventure.
First I demonstrate how each of the games I've mentioned implement this concept, and then I describe what I think would be a great product for a tabletop RPG-in-a-box.
In Mansions of Madness, there's a clear adventure template:
The app used for the 2nd Edition of the game, or the book in the 1st Edition, tell you which tokens to use, which tiles to lay out, and generally guides you through one of three unique adventures. But it's all smoke and mirrors.
Whether you meet "Lord Withersby" or "Gravedigger", the NPC tokens on the board don't really have names. Whether it was a cultist summoning Dagon or a scholar reading a forbidden spell on accident, the result is that something bad happened and it needs to be solved or escaped. It's always, basically, the same adventure using some subset of the same assets in a different order than before.
That's really easy to duplicate. Place an entrance tile on the table. Let the investigators start exploring. When a potential clue is found, the game master secretly rolls some dice. Success means the clue is absolutely connected to the mystery, while failure means the clue is absolutely not connected. Either way, the game master connects the clue to the mystery.
Eventually, based on the clues you've randomly drawn from the deck, the players start to form some notion of what's happening. The game master can make adjustments to the backstory to help clarify things, and in the end the players must turn in the clues they believe are connected to the mystery.
The players roll dice. The number of clues they get on the dice are the number of clues they're allowed to get wrong. At the end of the game, as long as players have enough clues to solve the mystery, they win.
Like Mansions of Madness, the Fallout board game is also a tile-based game with lots of story elements added in to make it feel like a an RPG. The choices you make matter to the outcome of a specific quest, and affects how much Influence and XP you earn.
But I often play Fallout using a quest random table I generated. The...
]]>In 2009, Pathfinder became the successor of D&D. It literally took the existing rules and re-published them with a bunch of improvements as Pathfinder. It was so successful with RPG players that it's spawned a video game, a board game, and a card game. I've played several rounds of the card game on Youtube because it's really really fun, but also because it's an almost puzzlingly effective implementation of roleplay through cards.
The setup is actually pretty simple. You create a few Location decks representing towns and caves and dungeons in the game world. You send your Character card to a Location and rummage around in hopes of hunting down the villain. Usually, you don't find the villain right away, because the villain is sneaky like that, and instead you find either a Monster, a Trap, or some cool Item you can use to give yourself more power or health. Regardless of what you find, you roll dice to determine how the interaction goes.
To be fair, that's pretty much what you do in an RPG, so the game meets the brief. But what makes Pathfinder Adventure Card Game really special is how it flavours the game experience.
You get to choose a character, for instance, and each character has different special abilities and powers. These are expressed, in part, through dice. A character good at ranged attacks, for instance, uses a d12 to roll in combat, while a character bad at magic only has a d4 to roll when dealing with magical items). Other character abilities are reflected as rule-breaking exceptions. Normally a character has to be in the same Location to help another character in combat, but Harsk the dwarven ranger can help when he's not in the same location because he's a ranged fighter.
Locations get a lot of flavour, too. A holy temple, for example, tends to be loaded up with more magical and healing Items than with Monsters. A desecrated temple, or a dungeon, or the rough part of a town, is loaded up with lots of Monsters and Traps and very few benefits.
To get through a scenario, you have to strategize and decide which character is going to visit which Location, or whether the party should stay together in one Location, and you have to manage resources and health, and it's all expressed through cards.
There's a learning curve, but only as much as any tabletop game. This isn't Magic the Gathering by any stretch of the imagination. This is an RPG-like in card form.
Photo by Riho Kroll using the Unsplash License.
Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Instead of running CoS, I sometimes run Expedition over Halloween. It's fun for players who have never experienced Ravenloft before, and it's got a few surprises for players already familiar with Curse of Strahd. I'm reviewing the 3rd edition book, chapter by chapter. There will be minor spoilers in these posts, so this is primarily intended for Dungeon Masters.
Chapter 2 is all about the village of Barovia.
Players wandering into Barovia in this adventure find the mountain village of Barovia boarded and barricaded. The townsfolk aren't trying to keep out vampires, but a horde of zombies. While there have always been stories of ghouls and ghasts roaming the woodlands outside of town, a zombie invasion isn't normal even for Barovia. The players are greeted by gangs of wandering undead almost immediately though, so from the very beginning of the adventure (assuming you start them in Barovia and not the forests surrounding it) they're fighting for their lives.
This can make for an abrupt start to the adventure, and in a way it's a misleading beginning. The zombie plague has only a tenuous connection to the main plot. It's mostly incidental, but it serves a few important purposes for the game. First, it gets the players caught up in a plot that doesn't propel them straight to Strahd, who they couldn't handle in a fight yet anyway. Secondly, it sets the tone and establishes the world they're playing in. Thirdly, it places the players on high alert, as they navigate a town beseiged by enemies, and then transforms them into heroes as they fight for the town. And finally, it serves as a really good first adventure in Ravenloft.
The one thing the adventure doesn't address is how the players are meant to get past the anti-zombie barricades. I would assume that the barricade in the town square meant to keep out zombies would also keep out living PCs, but in the book it assumes that the PCs just walk right into town. There are mini-scenarios in which pubcrawlers step outside to help repair the barricade, but never a mention of how the PCs can get past it. I understand that the Dungeon Master can improvise an encounter at the barricade, but it strikes me as odd that it's not addressed or described in the book. Is the barricade just a nominal blockade, creating difficult terrain for incoming zombies? Or is it a makeshift city wall? Are there guards shooting anything that approaches or is it unmanned? Ultimately you'll have to play it however you envision it, or based on player expectation.
As a Dungeon Master, reading the description of Barovia and looking at the encounter map for the first time can be a little deceptive. As is often the case, the way forward will seem obvious. But to...
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review of the final episode. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
Over the past two episodes, my interest in Interrogator was starting to falter a little. They were obviously filler episodes, and I wasn't confident that the series knew where it was going any more. I felt like the mystery had been solved a long time ago, and for some reason we were just watching Jurgen bump around Gheisthaven with that mohawk lady with the funny voice from the bar. What was it for?
Well, in retrospect I still don't know whether those two episodes were strictly necessary for story or for lore, but maybe they were for pacing because I admit they feel a lot more worth it after the final episode.
The final confrontation between Jurgen and Heroth lasts for maybe 15 seconds. Jurgen shoots, Heroth dies. The end. Almost a little disappointing, at first. But then Jurgen says that because Heroth is dead, he's no longer a null, he's just a corpse like all the rest. Which means that Jurgen can read his [presumbly fading] thoughts.
That feels like it unlocks a lot in the canon, to be honest. I think if I were playing Imperium Maledictum or Wrath and Glory and that became problematic (kill a blank, read their thoughts for free) I'd rule that there's a time limit as impulses and neural connections dissipate, and also that the thoughts must have been top of mind at the time of death, or something like that. But really, probably not even a problem, just kind of cool from a lore viewpoint.
Even more interesting is the memory that Jurgen accesses. It explains the bulk of the little story threads we've seen throughout the series, and gives several of them new meaning. It answers a lot of questions, some of which you may not even remember having, and because there's been so much obsession over getting answers through the series, you don't feel like it's a surprise switcheroo tagged on at the very end.
In fact, ruminating about whether the revelations of what was really going on, I'm pretty sure it only works as a last minute reveal. And it works well because even though it's a last minute reveal, all the pieces were in place from the start. It's not imparting new information that shifts the whole plot, it's new information that provides new context for the plot. You don't feel angry that you didn't figure it out yourself. There's just enough new information that you understand that you weren't expected to figure it out yourself, before Heroth's memories explained everything to you. This is how we were meant to uncover what was really happening. Right along with Jurgen.
What all the new information means to Jurgen hits hard, too. There are definitely implications to what Heroth...
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review of the penultimate episode. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
So we know who's killed Bellona, Jurgen just has to exact his revenge. But the killer got away at the end of the previous episode. This episode is the final hunt, such as it is.
The hunt doesn't take all that long, but it's a proper noir hunt. First, go to the blackmailer with dirt on the Adeptus Arbites agent guarding the entrance. Show to the Adeptus Arbites the vaguely threatening family photo, make some snide comments about how it would be a shame were anything to happen to the family cat. Walk in with guns blazing.
That's mostly how it happens, except the part about the family cat and the guns blazing. But Jurgen gets in with the help of the punk managing the pub from episode 1 or 2. She rescued Jurgen in the previous episode, and she sticks around in this one long enough for some exposition and general backup, and gracefully bows out before the scene is set for the exciting finale.
To be honest, this is filler episode 2 after the previous one. It's enjoyable, and I definitely appreciated seeing Adeptus Arbites, so it's not a bad episode. But the mystery was solved episodes ago, and there haven't been any actual blockades since the Duke episode, aside from proximity. The killer is still definitely in Gheisthaven, he's definitely the killer, Jurgen is definitely angry with him. The past two episodes haven't really progressed the story.
I don't mind episodes not advancing the story, but in that case I'd love to make up for it with lore or atmosphere. There hasn't been much of that in these past episodes, either, so these truly are episodes that could probably have been condenced into a 45 second sequence of Jurgen angrily marching across town to Bad Guy Central, and cue episode 9.
That, of course, is next episode. The exciting conclusion! I'm pretty sure I know how it'll end, but I'm still in the dark about the motive, so there's a lot to look forward to.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
Today, Pariah Nexus was released on the Warhammer+ streaming service. It seems to be about the Adepta Sororitas (or at least one of them, anyway) and the Necrons, so I've been excited about the series since it was teased months ago. I enjoyed the first episode, and this is my review of it, arbitrarily broken into a list mostly to keep myself from rambling. This is free of major spoilers (partly because it's the first episode and there really aren't many spoilers to be had yet), but if you want total surprise then watch the episode first.
The episode is mostly set on a wartorn world. It's been utterly decimated by a battle between the Astartes with the support of the Astra Militarum, and (presumably) the Necrons. It's the very picture of a Warhammer gaming table. If the site of the pretend ruins of civilzation makes your heart flutter with post-apocalyptic delight, then the setting of this episode is exactly what you're looking for.
Better yet, the only two survivors appear to be a solitary battle sister and an Astra Militarum soldier. They happen to meet outside a ruined cathedral, after the battle sister has been uttering prayers to the Emperor. The soldier, it seems, isn't a exactly a true believer, at least not any more if ever she was.
That's the plot of the initial episode, in fact. A debate between blind faith and pragmatic humanism. It's a shrine world, you see, so the battle sister fully believes that saving it is worth any price. The soldier doesn't see it that way.
It's early yet, but so far the Necrons we do see are the least interesting characters. They're the baddies, and they kind of come across as generic evil xenos, which to be fair is kind of what they are. The Necrons have a fascinating backstory and culture, and maybe some of that will come through in later episodes, but so far they basically say mean things and look cool.
To add gravity, I imagine, there's a convention of naming each "chapter" within the episode. There are something like 8 or 9 chapters, and the episode is only 22 minutes long, so it seems pretty silly. The first "chapter" lasts all of 30 seconds. It sort of works as pacing, but after the fourth or fifth chapter title, you just kind of want them to get on with the story. Nice try, though, and I respect what they were going for.
The final shot of this episode is, to put it bluntly,highly effective. I won't spoil it, but it does Warhammer very well.
The modeling and texturing and lighting is great. The animation, however, struggles. Sadly, 3d humans are still really hard to animate, and like Angels of Death Origins, this series appears to be structured around human characters, and I think it's going to suffer a little for that. The Necrons are...
]]>A new series called Pariah Nexus is out on the Warhammer TV streaming service. I enjoyed the first episode, but the second episode is easily one of the best episodes of any series on Warhammer TV. This review is free of major spoilers, but if you want the show to be a total surprise then stop reading now and go read about something else instead.
Superheroes are hard to do. It probably doesn't seem like it today, given the success of Marvel movies. But before Marvel changed the landscape of TV and movie superhero fiction, it was rare to see a really good superhero story. And outside of Marvel, it still is.
There are two typical problems. One leads to the other, and then back around. It's an endless cycle. A superhero that starts out super powerful and basically undefeatable is boring to watch. So we tell stories about superheroes we watch develop super powers throughout the story. When the superhero reaches full power, the story has to end, because that's the fulfillment of the story's promise. But then we don't get to sit and watch the superhero be a superhero. So we go back to the superhero being super powerful and undefeatable. But that's boring, so we're back at the beginning.
It's a notorious problem, and it's ruined many a childhood fantasy. All I ever wanted as a kid was to see Luke Skywalker be the ultimate jedi. I got a glimpse of it in Jabba's palace, but after that the story demanded that he literally throw his lightsaber away in a refusal to be the jedi that I wanted him to be. Decades later, some apocryphal movies get released that claim to be sequels, and rob me again of the power fantasy by writing Luke as if he were Uncle Owen.
I've yet to see a Batman movie I enjoy (although the Animated Series had it all figured out.) The modern Superman is baffling, and the Wonder Woman movies were profoundly disappointing.
It's hard to do.
Space marines aren't superheroes but in some stories they fill that role. And when they're written as the protagonists, they do it well. They're big, strong, powerful, nearly invincible, at least from the perspective of a human. And maybe more than most superheroes, the Astartes are written within the uncanny valley of post-humanity. Humans recognise that the Astartes exist to protect and defend, and they look human, but they're so obviously, almost frighteningly, different. That's exactly where the Astartes ought to be. Like Judge Dredd or RoboCop, the space marines are both sanctuary and threat, depending on what side of their law you are on, and the really terrifying thing is that you often don't know which side of their law you fall.
At the end of the previous episode (if you're reading this, I assume you've seen the first episode or else just don't care about spoilers), a lone space marine emerged from the ruins of the...
]]>Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. I run this adventure around Halloween, sometimes starting with Death House, the free introduction to Curse of Strahd. It's fun for players who have never experienced Ravenloft before, and it's got a few surprises for players already familiar with Curse of Strahd.
When using the book with players who own Pathfinder rulebooks, the adventure is ready run as is. Very minor conversion is required here and there to account for differences between 3rd edition and Pathfinder. For instance, CMB and CMD don't exist in this book, and Spot and Hide checks are mentioned instead of Perception and Stealth. As long as you've run a few Pathfinder games, you don't even notice the difference as you naturally ask for checks that make sense according to the Pathfinder character sheet and Core Rulebook.
When using the book with players who own D&D 5e rulebooks, the adventure does require conversion, but less than you might fear. Almost invariably, you can just substitute monsters mentioned by name in this book with monsters of the same name from the Monster Manual. A zombie is a zombie, a ghoul is ghoul, a ghast a ghast, a rat swarm is a rat swarm, and so on. If anything, I feel like 5e is safer for player characters than previous editions, so you're most likely to experience underpowered encounters initially. But as you play, you get a feel for player character abilities, and you can either add another monster to an encounter as needed, or else buff a monster with an extra ability or use a similar monster with a little more bite (yeah, I know) to it.
I think Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is a great alternative to CoS, and in some ways I even prefer it. Over the course of four blog posts, I'm going to review the book chapter by chapter. There will be minor spoilers in these posts, so this is primarily intended for Dungeon Masters.
The introduction to the book explains how the adventure's lineage, and specifies that it's intended for four 6th level characters. Strahd is CR 15 in this version of the game, so starting at level 6 ensures that players have some leveling up to do before facing Strahd, but that they're able to withstand, say, hordes of undead (should the need arise) in the meantime.
The first section of chapter 1 provides Strahd's stats and talks about important NPCs who serve as agents of Strahd early in the game before players are equipped to face Strahd in combat.
If you're playing this in 5e, Strahd is the most significant exception to swapping out monsters with an easy equivalent from the Monster Manual. The 5e vampire lacks many of Strahd's abilities (one of which is a key component of this adventure). The spellcasting vampire variant is...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
After two surprise Age of Sigmar episodes, this one returns to 40K and finishes off the series. This surely must have been the pilot episode, because it's stunningly good. A lot happens, and I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll be vague in everything but my praise.
The plot is that scene from Children of Men. Two desperate parents take their newborn infant through the war-torn streets of a city under attack. It's a strong setup, and it's a perfect recipe for all possible emotions. I'll try to step through the major story elements without giving anything away, but no matter what I can't possibly encapsulate it all. This is loaded with intensity and mixed emotion.
In the first scene, the husband hurries into a small apartment, and tells his wife they have to get off world. Now. She protests, saying that they can't leave everyone behind, and anyway they'll all be protected. She points out that there's a city-wide curfew, and that if they go out, they'll be shot on sight. It doesn't take much to put yourself in their shoes. When is it time to abandon your home, when faced with possible disaster? Could you do it, if it meant leaving most of your loved ones behind? Would you do it if it meant you might get shot the moment you stepped outside?
Once outside, the husband and wife, with their newborn swaddled close, keep to the shadows. They dart between buildings, biding their time as soldiers and civilians run past. Air raid sirens echo through the sky, and warnings to stay inside, by order of the God Emperor, are blasted from loudspeakers on every corner.
They receive help from a few family members along the way. The baby's aunt knows about a maintenance tunnel, and is able to use it to get them past a brewing riot between citizens and the Astra Militarum. The baby's uncle is in the Astra Militarum and has managed to secure them spots on a shuttle headed offworld within the hour.
The problem is, half way through the journey, the threat makes itself known.
The atmosphere is stunning, and the story is surprisingly complex despite the relatively straight-forward (at least in the physical sense) plot. But it never lets up, and there's a surprise or a new horror around every corner.
Sometimes, media has a strange effect on you. It's so good, and takes such a hold of you, that you just can't bring yourself to go through the emotions a second time. That's what this episode is. It's such an amazing episode that I'll probably never watch it again. And in this context, I mean that in the best way possible.
This episode is great scifi....
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Playground is a story about the back alleys, or equivalent thereof, on a space station. This review contains minor spoilers.
This story is difficult to parse because it's written in the voice of a homeless guy with a unique interpretation of his surroundings. I have a strong appreciation for fiction written so soundly from a fictional character's point of view that the reader isn't entirely sure how to comprehend it. I've tried this trick myself before, but in early books and I wasn't always successful, because as an author I think you can fall prey to the self-imposed expectation that you need to explain your story to your reader. That expectation isn't without merit. We read stories because we want a story, and the mundane (or unhinged, or disconnected, or whatever the hook is) observations of a character's world isn't always the best way to convey a plot.
The story, such as it is, of Playground is accordingly kept very simple. It boils down to a single encounter between the "king" of the playground and a (familiar, to us) spacer passing through on his search for a free place to sleep for a shift.
The encounter lasts for a few paragraphs, but those paragraphs are spread across several other paragraphs of the narrator's musings about the hierarchy of "the playground", a derelict public park (I think) on a space station (I think). Like I said, it's a little difficult to parse exactly what's being said in this story, because the narrator has very specific ideas about territorialism and hierarchy. He's observing the encounter, and commenting on it in a his own peculiar patois.
What exactly happens on the playground, and whether or not it's at all important or even notable in Ejoq's life is a little bit of a mystery by the end of the story. But what you do get, unquestionably, is insight into a highly unique character living in the Stardrifter universe. Maybe this is before the events of Street Candles. Maybe this is the moment that Ejoq internalized when embodying a homeless beggar on Barlow. Or maybe this is long afterwards, and it's just a tiny blip in Ejoq's life that he barely remembers. We don't know, and we don't need to know. This lends character and depth to the Stardrifter setting, and that's value enough.
]]>I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy, and this is my review of the second book in the series, False Gods by Graham McNeill. There are minor spoilers in this review.
This is it. This is the book where it all happens. The previous book introduced us to Horus himsulf, and managed to make him pretty endearing. He's charismatic and surprisingly attentive and compassionate and diplomatic. When his captains urge him to go to war with the Interex, he refuses, saying that the goal of the Great Crusade isn't to fight with disparate human words but to enlighten them. He's the Warmaster, but he doesn't seem all that eager to wage war.
It made us believe that this Horus could never betray the Emperor of Man. Maybe, somehow, despite the name of the book series and despite 20+ years of everyone in the Warhammer hobby knowing the lore, it would turn out different.
This book, I think, is almost entirely about simultaneous faith and rationalism, two opposed mental processes that the human (and post-human, for that matter) mind can, for whatever reason, balance without conflict. In the first chapter, two Titan crewmembers are discussing their machine of war. One character happens to have recently joined the Imperial Cult. As they talk about Titans, there's subtext of their feelings toward religion. The religious character is scolding the Titan pilot for anthropomorphizing the war machine, saying that it smacks of superstition, while the Titan pilot scolds the cultist for believing in gods.
You almost have to read it twice to make sure you have the characters sorted as you read, yet the dialogue is something you may have had yourself with a friend. Something like "aliens exist because of probability, but there are absolutely no gods" or "I believe that a god designed the universe, but I distrust science" and so on. It's brutal realism that we human types are able to mix and match beliefs that imply certain conclusions, but discard the logic that prevents the ideas from fully resolving.
In the book, it's not just a human trait. The Astartes do it, too. When the Warmaster falls in battle, they're beyond terror. Their world stops. They literally trample over humans to get Horus to the apothecary. (And I mean so literally that it's a major plot point.) The Warmaster is an idol to the supposedly godless space marine chapters.
Even more profound is our own ability to do the exact same thing as we read. You know the Imperium is bad, you know the powers of the warp are bad, and yet as you read Warhammer fiction you do tend to pick a side. You have to. That's how stories work. There's a protagonist and an antagonist, and you identify with the protagonist and hate the antagonist. Somehow, it doesn't seem to matter that the protagonist of one book, or heck even one chapter in a book, ends up being the antagonist of another book or another chapter....
]]>Another surprise Age of Sigmar episode. I really wasn't ready for so much Sigmar from Hammer and Bolter, and I wish they'd interspersed these seemingly random diversions a little better.
This episode, like the one before it, landed a little flat for in terms of the plot. However, there's a strong element secreted away in this episode that I feel makes it worth watching and probably re-watching.
The episode starts with this quote:
Sigmar is a false god. The Mortal Realms belong to the Dark Gods. So it was, so it will always be. —Jorvak Brand
I thought nothing of it because all episodes start with a "flavour quote".
At some point during the episode, though, two enemies confront one another, and one of them accuses the other of being a demon worshipper.
He responds: "There are no demons. We swear our oaths to proper gods, old man. Always have. Gods that give us strength."
It's a brief conversation, but it says so much about the Warhammer settings. That's the perpectual state of Warhammer: it's a matter of perspective. And it's not a matter of perspective to see the one side that's "right". it's just a matter of perspective to see how both sides are "right". Good is good from one point of view, and people are willing to die for it. And that same thing is the worst thing in the world to somebody else, and they're willing to die to stop it.
Wait, did I only say it's the state of Warhammer?
This episode is good fantasy. Towering war machines (to say nothing of demons) against the barbarians, clashes of faith, conflict within clans. It's a rousing fantasy battle outwardly, and a raging fantasy battle internally. It's what you want in fantasy, and I'd probably score it "great" if only I understood who these characters and clans were.
This episode is good Warhammer. The battles are exciting, the culture runs deep, and the moral conundrum is front and centre.
This might even be a "great" Warhammer story. I'd like to re-watch this episode later (much later) after I've read some actual Sigmar lore.
I recognize that my judgement of the AoS episodes may be different now than they may be after I'm more familiar with the setting. It makes me wonder how the 40K episodes that came before would be received by someone unfamiliar with that setting. I'm perfectly happy with fiction aimed squarely at a specific fan base. In fact, I probably actually prefer it. I've seen too many movies made for "mass appeal" when they'd have been better off playing to their actual core audience.
On the other hand, I've benefitted from that same principle. I've never played or read anything about...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
As I write this review, I've recently read the Dragonlance novella "Wanna bet?" by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss. It's a fun story about Reorx, a god with a gambling problem. He appears as a dwarf on Krynn and gets our heroes into all kinds of trouble through his compulsive wagers. Of course you don't learn that he's the god Reorx until the very end of the story, but you just know there's some kind of scheme happening throughout.
Double or nothing is a story about a drifter (or is he a grifter?) who wanders by a battle being waged by humans and orruks (orks in the Mortal Realms), and he offers to solve the problem. (This was a surprise to me, because I'd thought Hammer and Bolter was Warhammer 40K exclusively, but this episode (and the next) are set in the Age of Sigmar.)
The drifter claims to be a big important hero, Hamilcar Bear-Eater, except that nobody seems to have heard of him. That doesn't slow him down, though, and he walks right into the orruk camp and challenges the boss to a duel, betting his reputation.
And he gets clobbered.
Hamilcar yields before he's too badly injured, though, and admits defeat. Just before he can skulk away in shame, he offers a second wager.
And he gets clobbered. Then a third wager, same results. A fourth wager.
You get the idea. The guy is Cool Hand Luke. He doesn't know when to quit, and his self-pride and self-importance never seems to wane.
Eventually, of course, he makes the biggest bet of all, and the fate of the nearby human city hangs in the balance. Double or nothing. Can he do it?
I didn't know what to expect from this episode, and while it's not quite as clever as many of the previous stories, it's entertaining. I've never read any Age of Sigmar fiction, and I've barely looked into its lore. I know the basics (the Old World came to an end, Sigmar ended up on a big rockfloating in the void, and so on) and I like the artwork I've seen, but it's largely a brand new setting to me. I don't know whether this was the best introduction to the world, and I feel like maybe I should have already known Hamilcar Bear-Eater for this episode to reach its full potential impact. I could be wrong. Maybe he was invented just for this one episode.
EDIT: Hamilcar Bear-Eater is well known Astral Templar, and the subject of an entire Black Library series. Now I know!
I did enjoy how Warhammery Sigmar felt. It's not space marines and xenos, but you can see the family resemblance. I'd like to delve into the lore a...
]]>I've been painting lots of Pathfinder and Cursed City miniatures lately, using my Citadel Contrast and Vallejo Xpress Color paints. Because I've been using them a lot, I thought it might be useful to provide a review of each Xpress Color paint based on how I've been using it, and what I think it's generally good for.
I can only review the Xpress Color paints I own, which isn't the full range. I started with 8 on 9, and then bought 8 or 9 more, but I didn't invest in some of the really obvious duplicates of shades I already own from Citadel.
Viscosity: Almost the consistency of a wash, Black Lotus flows right off the brush onto the miniature.
Colour: When you're painting with it, it almost looks like a wash. You'll wonder whether you're painting grey or black, and it's a fair question. When it dries, it's likely to look anywhere from 80% grey to gunmetal grey with strong black lowlights, depending on surface area and coverage. If you want a proper Abaddon Black, you've got to do two coats, and even then I'm not sure you really get there. I imagine this was an intentional choice, though. Were I designing a black paint, I can imagine deciding to make it a strong grey so that the painter could choose whether to settle for the suggestion of black or apply a second coat for a true black. Solid black is, after all, very black. It's devoid of shade (because black is all the shade, in analog colour) so there's no nuance to it. A strong 80% grey, though, lets you interpret it as black while retaining the contours of its shape.
I use this for black armour as well as for "silver" metals. This is one of my favourites, and I anticipate having to buy more soon.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
This is a perfect auto-shading black paint. It looks great and has great contrast with one coat, and with a second coat it looks great as a deeper black.
Viscosity: Almost the consistency of a wash, White Templar flows right off the brush onto the miniature.
Colour: This was the colour I was most excited to try. It's bold to assert that you can add contrast to white. White, in the non-digital world, is by definition the lack of shading. It's #FFFFFF, meaning it's all shades mixed together with no variation. When you add contrast to white, it's no longer white.
And indeed, this is a really tricky paint. For the first few weeks, I hated it because, well, Templar White isn't white. It's 10% grey, with the grey particles intended to be the shading for what, I guess, is otherwise clear. From what I can tell, the success of Templar White depends entirely on what you're painting.
A lot of people say that all contrasty paints aren't great for great big flat surfaces. That stands to reason, because auto-contrast...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
Deep in the Ozarks lives a girl called Clemency McGill, and she's psychic. OR she's a THRUSH agent trying to trick UNCLE into delivering top agents into the hands of evil.
That's the episode, more or less. Unfortunately, it's actually less than more, in this case. The premise sounds silly, but it's initially done really well. UNCLE is summoned by some scientists who believe they've discovered an actual case of extra-sensory perception (ESP), and at first UNCLE is highly skeptical. But they do their due diligence and test her, and they're ultimately baffled. It seems she actually does have an almost supernatural second sight.
I know it was the 60s and all, but the rigorous testing scenes are the first signs of weakness in this episode. The scientists are, for whatever reason, brought in to help administer the test, so right away you're likely to suspect that maybe there's an accomplice. UNCLE doesn't think of that, though, and end up convinced enough to let her hang around, especially because she promptly predicts that Ilya Kuryakin is in great danger. They give him a ring on Channel D, and sure enough, he's in grave danger.
Through a series of psychic tips from Clemency (Joan Freeman), Ilya ends up in Transylvania. A THRUSH franchise owner named Count Zark (Martin Landau) has genetically altered bats so that they're able to jam the RADAR frequencies of planes, and intends to unleash them upon the world just as soon as he gets some important mail. THRUSH is mailing him the special frequencies he needs to call the bats back home, and Ilya Kuryakin managed to intercept those codes.
Count Zark and Kuryakin take jabs at each other while Clemency and Solo pursue romance. At first, Clemency seems guarded against Solo, telling him that her grandmother warned her about big city men like him. Strangely, in their very next scene together she's complaining that he shows no interest in her as a woman, and is using her for her psychic powers. He protests and "reluctantly" starts to court her, and then everything is revealed.
I won't spoil whether Clemency is a THRUSH agent or whether she's actually psychic. I will say that the resolution is both clever but not altogether satisfying. Itis answered definitively. You're not left wondering. It just doesn't quite add up, at least not for me.
Still, the premise is clever. The plot feels like a pretty average THRUSH plot episode, and the introduction of bats and self-styled vampires (he's not really a vampire, he just acts like one) is quirky and a little puzzling. My guess is that they either made the plot silly to appeal to a TV audience that wanted light entertainment, or that this was the closest thing to a Halloween episode they had back in the 60s.
I'd love to see this concept played a little more for...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
There's a [fictional] micro-nation in Europe that exists exclusively as a safe haven for international criminals. Got a price on your head? Go to Ingolstein, where everyone is welcome and there's no extradition treaty.
It's a pretty clever idea, really, and one that I kind of wish had been developed and used in a better episode. This one was obviously written to take advantage of the medieval set the studio had occupying a soundstage that week. Or more likely, it's a script that somebody wrote as a midieval story, but that got adapted for Man from UNCLE, because Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin are very much background players.
Through a technicality, Waverly realises that Ingolstein's rightful ruler is actually a Duchess, called Vicky (Valora Noland), living in Paris. So he tells Solo and Kuryakin to instate her as the rightful ruler. This turns out to be surprisingly easy. They go to the boarding school where Vicky is staying, take her to Ingolstein, tell some people she's in charge, and the job is done. It all happens before the first act is over.
Through some other technicality, one of the criminals, Artie King (Don Francks), who's staying in Ingolstein has a claim on Ingolstein (I think it's because he paid the property taxes, but honestly the little bureaucratic twists and turns of the episode went in one ear and out the other). So some people decide that he should marry the Duchess. Vicky's uncle (not UNCLE) persuades her to agree to the marriage, and she inexplicably does.
Waverly doesn't like the criminal Artie King, though, so he orders Solo and Kuryakin to kidnap him and take him out of the country. They do, but in his absence another worse criminal named Lucho Nostra (Bruce Gordon) announces that he'll marry the Duchess instead. He conveniently manages to pull a sword from a stone (yep), which gives him the right to marry her, no questions asked.
Well, Waverly likes this even less, so he orders Solo and Kuryakin to bring Artie King back into the country. They do. He challenges Lucho Nostra to a duel for the hand of Vicky, they fight, Artie King wins, and everybody is happy.
In short, the episode makes no sense and takes a lot of storytelling liberties. Vicky and Artie King fall in love after one conversation, and he turns out to be a pretty nice guy, if you can judge a guy from one conversation (you can't). But hey, he gives her a ring, and everybody knows that when a guy gives a girl an engagement ring, it must mean it's true love, right? (That's wrong.)
The laws of Ingolstein make no sense, and it seems that the micro-nation both has a long history and is a complete scam, all at the same time. I didn't really understand most of what happens in this...
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
Easily the best episode yet. In fact, probably calling it the best episode yet is underselling it, because that implies that its greatness is constrained to just this series. This is a work of art. The disjointed storytelling works in favour of the narrative, and the narrative really progresses in this one (although I'm not exactly sure where to, but that's a strength of the episode.)
The episode is sort of split into two parts. There's the politics phase, and the psyker phase.
Sometimes I want politics in my sci fi, and sometimes it gets provided to me but it turns out to be boring or over-thought or both. This episode gets it exactly right, though. As is its habit, it takes notes from film noir and fits all the politics it needs into one quick scene, keeping it simple and succinct.
Duke Klore (which due to the British accent sounds exactly like "Juke Claw" to me, which I thought was a pretty cool sci fi name) is the head of a powerful House (presumably House Klore) on Gheisthaven. He suggests to Jurgen and Baldur that the only reasonable thing for them to do is to admit that they assassinated the governor, and in return he'll ensure that their public execution is swift and painless. The fact that the governor's assassination was by Inquisitorial mandate doesn't seem to matter now that the Inquisitor is dead.
Jurgen and Baldur are obviously not going to accept it, so why bother including it as a story beat? It might seem like a blank story beat, but it demonstrates that a prominent and rising house within the power vacuum of a post-Rift Gheisthaven need Jurgen and Baldur to be dead. It also introduces us to the power structure of Gheisthaven. I didn't know it had powerful houses that wanted to rule. I didn't know that several houses were fighting to grab power. You'd probably get to this conclusion eventually, if you gave it enough thought, but making it clear in one quick scene is nice.
The end of the episode delves deeper into the psyker experience than we've seen yet. It's a powerful and disorienting sequence. As far as I could tell, Baldur and everybody else in the cell block gets fried by a burst of energy from Jurgen. I'm assuming the show wouldn't dispose of Baldur that way, so my guess is that I'm misinterpreting the visuals, but they're really effective visuals.
At the end of this episode, I have basically no idea where anyone stands, and yet I know almost everything there is to know about the story. It's a great midway point, and I'm desperate to see where the story goes.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
The Horus Heresy book series is set in the 30th millennium, just 10 short millennia prior to Warhammer 40,000. It's the story of how the Emperor of Man found his lost sons, the Primarchs, from all across the galaxy, and ultimately how one of them turned against him, causing civil war within the nascent Imperium. It was, by chance, my proper introduction to the universe of Warhammer and although I've read books set in the 41st millenium since then, the Heresy era stories remain some of my favourite Warhammer fiction. I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy, and this is my review of the first book in the series, Horus Rising by Dan Abnett. There are minor spoilers in this review.
The first book of the series has some severely impossible challenges to overcome. The obvious one is that we all know the end of the story already. Warhammer 40,000 and the Imperium and the Emperor all exist in the "current" [fictional] timeline, so obviously Horus loses. So what's this series going to be about? How is this initial book going to make us believe it might be worth reading a series of, say maybe 10 books (just kidding, it blew up into a 50+ books)?
"I was there the day horus slew the Emperor."
That's the opening line of the book. There's no way a book about the [fictional] history of the world of 40k could possibly be more effective at grabbing the reader's attention. Because it's obviously wrong and also it doesn't make sense for the book about the infamous Horus Heresy to start at the end of the Heresy.
That's kind of obvious, though. It's an obviously good opening line. What I love about it is that it works even if you don't know your basic 40k history. Even if you don't know that the Emperor wins in the end (if sitting catatonic on a life-support throne can be called winning), this line apparently gives the end away. Some guy named Horus, for whom this series is obviously named for, has killed an Emperor. A few short paragraphs later, you learn that this is a flashback and that Horus may have killed an Emperor, but that didn't take the title for himself. He's called the Warmaster, and he serves some other Emperor. Whatever's going on, it's clear that it's complicated, and that you have a lot of catching up to do.
But so does everyone. Everyone's thrown for a loop with this opening line, and the whole first part of the book (it's divided into three disctinct parts) is about a planet populated by a branch of humanity that left Earth millenia ago, and called its new home Terra, after their old home. A man rose to power on the planet, and he calls himself the Emperor of Man. They've had a whole history, fighting for survival, struggling for unity, probably fighting off alien invasion, and everything all the other planets in the galaxy have to go...
]]>I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
No way to sugarcoat it, this is a filler episode. The previous episode changed everything, and this is the tidy-up episode. I guess if you were binge-watching this series, this would be important to give you the chance to process what just happened. I'm not binge-watching it, so I had time to process the previous episode, write a blog post about it, get some sleep, paint some miniatures, and then watch the next episode.
This episode does confirm, however, that Baldur is really dead. Or at least, it continues to insist that he's really dead. I hope he is dead, not because I didn't like him. On the contrary, he's the most likable character. But I do appreciate when a series kills off a character and doesn't go back on it. We'll see what happens.
In this episode, Jurgen goes to deal with the Blank (or whatever he is, but I think he's a Blank) and nearly gets killed by an augmented bodyguard. Somebody in the shadows saves him with a well-timed headshot, though. Who is his mysterious saviour?
Roll credits! (That was a nice touch, and admittedly made a filler episode feel worth while.)
Lately I've been pondering just how effective a cliffhanger is in storytelling, whether it's in writing or narrated as a Game Master. Every time I plant a cliffhanger, it feels forced. I have to squint a little and hope nobody notices the gimmick. And interestingly, nobody ever does. And even if they do, they appreciate it.
This episode accidentally demonstrates the absolute effectiveness of a cliffhanger, because with the cliffhanger it's a complete throw-away. In fact, with the cliffhanger it's a complete throw-away, but the cliffhanger makes it feel good despite its lack of story. I don't know how often you can get away with disguising filler as the ramp up to a cliffhanger, but it clearly works in moderation. And for the episodes with actual story content, it's even better. I'm taking notes.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
It's obligatory. If you're in the IT business or hobby, and if you get into Warhammer 40,000, then your favourite faction has to be Adeptus Mechanicus. Well, it's not actually obligatory at all. You can do whatever you want. It's your life. But it feels obligatory. The Cult of the Omnissiah is the closest thing to an IT department that the Imperium has, and Adeptus Mechanicus travel far and wide in search of new ancient technology they can put to good use. They're against AI but excited about old Kastelan robots and meatware servitors. Interestingly, though, that's just the superficial connection between an IT person and Cult Mechanicus. There are some good reasons for latching onto the Omnissian faithful, and it's got less to do with cables and screens than you might expect.
In the grim dark future of Warhammer, there is only ignorance.
The Adeptus Mechanicus are super cool cyborgs who despise the weakness of the flesh and favour the power of technology. However, like everybody else in the 41st millennium, they're crippled by blind and vehement faith. They don't actually understand how most technology works, and they honestly believe that there's a "machine spirit" that governs how well their equipment functions.
As an IT person, this is hilarious, and I laugh out loud every time it's talked about in a book or on WarhammerTV. You don't have to be a C programmer to understand the reliability of math, and math is all that governs programmable machinery. There aren't any machine spirits in real life or, I think, in Warhammer 40k. And I like to think that no real world society could fool themselves into believing that machines are fickle, subject to moods and emotion and "spiritual" health. Deep down, though, I know better.
In real life, lots of People without an understanding of how computers work ascribe personalities to their devices. And they blame that invented personality when something goes wrong. It's not unlike our ancestors assuming that gods or land spirits controlled weather systems and earthquakes, but we still do it. I try not to, but if my car breaks down 80 kilometers away from the nearest town, I wouldn't be surprised to hear myself utter a few requests to its machine spirit.
The Adeptus Mechanicus, though, are the technology experts of the Imperium. Take your laptop to Mars for repair, and they won't even both opening it up, because they can't interface with microchips. They can attach a loose cable, or solder a bad power connection back together, but as far as we can tell they have no ability to overwrite firmware, for instance. I might be underestimating them because, unsurprisingly, there aren't any Warhammer books containing the source code and usable blueprints of the Mechanicum, but the implication in the novels is that they're amazing power users of tech, but not progenitors.
Since 1983, most of modern IT is actively pushing back against the idea that data...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
Evil THRUSH is after Dr. Remington, a leading geologist. What does THRUSH want with a geologist?? Nobody knows, but UNCLE figures that if THRUSH wants to kidnap him, it's probably important, and anyway they're UNCLE and they like to protect people.
Kuryakin has managed to get the good doctor to a hotel, but knows that THRUSH agents are watching. They wait nervously for an extraction team.
Inconveniently, there's a sort of low-level con man named Buzz Conway (Jack Weston) staying at the same hotel, currently on the run from his many debtors. Just when UNCLE moves in to retrieve Dr. Remington, Buzz Conway climbs out a window, ducking out on the angry landlord. Because THRUSH has photos of all UNCLE agents but not the scientists they want to kidnap, they instantly believe that Conway must be Dr. Remington and pursue him instead.
UNCLE manages to foil THRUSH all around, for once, rescuing both Dr. Remington and Buzz conway. At the same time, they realise that they've inherited the perfect decoy. THRUSH already believes that Conway is Remington, so Waverly orders Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin on an escort mission to get Buzz Conway to some place for some reason.
And it works!
There are all kinds of complications as THRUSH follows UNCLE around and plants bugs and drones everywhere, but they eventually capture the decoy, and I don't think they ever really believe that he's not the real Dr. Remington. This is a very average episode, but for a few moments in THRUSH headquarters when Conway is doing what he does best, it's awfully intriguing. He's used to taking odd jobs he's not qualified for. He'll do anything to make a buck. So he plays the role of Dr. Remington, the geologist. He looks at THRUSH's plans to dig a subterranean hole so the human race can move underground (I lost track of why that would be a goal, but it has something to do with the main villain being highly photosensitive, I think).
Nothing comes of the charade, sadly. It ends up being a minor delay tactic so Napoleon Solo can arrive and save the day. Bit it's clever and well done, and I'd have loved 40 minutes of it instead of the escort mission.
The THRUSH agent in charge of the pursuit is Narcissus Darling (Barbara Bouchet), a beautiful woman who, as her name suggests, is a chronic narcissist. She thinks of nothing but appearance, and most of all her own. She's a quirky character, and like Buzz Conway, I enjoyed what she brought to an otherwise plain episode.
Also like Conway, nothing really ever happens because of Narcissus. She's in the right place at the right time, and then the wrong place at the right time, and then she's arrested with a smile and a wink about how kooky it is that...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Lacey and Time is a story about two people on a spaceship. This review contains spoilers.
I'm an absolute sucker for character studies. I think when they're done well, they're the maybe the purest form of fiction, because ultimately there's no [interesting] fiction without the pretend people. That element of human interest is vital to the stories we enjoy.
You see this in all the best stories, even outside science fiction and fantasy (which I mention specifically because they're the only correct genres). Once, I was stuck in a small town for a few weeks with nothing but the Stephen King book Thin and a Somebody Koontz book called Intensity to keep me company. I'll bet they're both really good authors because they're really popular, but I read about half of the Stephen King book and all of the Koontz book and didn't much care for either, And while I don't remember what those books were about, I still remember aspects of the characters in them.
Humans, in stories, are like humans in photographs or films. When they're there, we find a way to identify with them. And when they're not there, we might still enjoy aspects of the thing, but the emotional connection is different or entirely missing.
So Lacey and Time is about two humans on a spaceship, and really that's all it's about, and that's fine.
Technically, this is a sequel to The Proposal, at least in the literal sense. Sequentially, it happens after the events of The Proposal. And probably there's not that much time between the two, because the experience of The Proposal is still fresh in Ejoq's mind, and the emotions are still raw. Lacey, in a way, is a vehicle for Ejoq to talk it out at us, the readers. We get to hear how he's feeling, and Lacey herself gets to suggest alternate points of view. She gets to challenge his ideas, his own interpretation of the subtext of that story. We don't know exactly what's right and what's wrong, what's real and what's subjective. It's a conversation. You've probably not had a conversation on exactly the same topic, but you've had "heavy" conversations before.
This is one of those.
There's subtext to this story too, though.
I think this story is a gentle reminder that a conversation isn't ever just two people throwing phonetics at one another. An authentic conversation is one where people are listening and talking to one another, and then listening to their own thoughts and processing those, and then repeating the process. When that happens, it's not just two people. Those two people mean something to one another, even if only for a short while.
Conversations happen a lot with people you know, the people around you all the time. There's something unique, though, about the conversations that take you by surprise. The ones that...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story The Proposal is a story about a special-ops mission performed for a mysterious client. That's the same elevator pitch I used for the previous story but, believe me, the two are nothing alike. This review contains no spoilers.
Noblespace is a strange place in the Stardrifter universe. It's sort of the Dune or Rogue Trader corner of the galaxy, with noble Houses controlling every aspect of people's lives, both inside and outside the borders. We've gotten glimpses of this in previous stories, particularly Street Candles. In this story, we get a view into the backroom politics of Noblespace, and not surprisingly, it ain't pretty.
A young nobleman is engaged. He's in love. The marriage has been announced, the public is abuzz with excitement. All the news outlets are tracking the progress of the engagement, and the wedding date grows ever nearer. And then the nobleman is kidnapped.
Actually not a big deal. That sort of thing is basically expected, or at least it's an attack vector that's been accounted for. The family is practically insured against it. The young nobleman has literally been trained for a kidnapping scenario all his life. It's easy. Cooperate with the kidnappers, assure them that the family will meet all ransom demands. It'll be over before the day is out.
There's an interesting language barrier between the nobleman and some of his kidnappers. He speaks Ceicion, so one of his kidnappers has to speak through a translator. It's usually something that's sort of introduced and then breezed past in stories, and to some degree that's what happens here. Obviously the story must go on, and this is the future, so the translator gets integrated into the storytelling. But it's introduced as being clunky and awkward, with the kidnappers stumbling through their demands in untintelligible Ceicion. It's all delivered to us readers as English, of course, but it works perfectly. There's no real impact on the story. It's just a nice storytelling touch.
The problem isn't the language barrier, though. It seems that this time, the kidnappers aren't asking for ransom. They don't seem to be interested in money, but they also don't seem to be interested in doing harm to the nobleman. In fact, they seem more interested in his assistant more than anything.
What happens next? Does Ejoq and a special ops team crash through the door to shoot all the kidnappers and rescue the nobleman? Or maybe one of the kidnappers throws off his robes to reveal he's Ejoq, and he's holding a thermal detonator. I'm keeping this review free of spoilers, so you'll have to read it to find out. It's worth the read. You learn more about the Stardrifter setting, you learn something about some familiar characters, and it's the lead-in to the next story, Lacey and Time.
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
In this episode, we get a break from THRUSH, with the main villain being a British mob keen to monopolize the global supply of diamonds. To ensure their success, they team up with Delgado, the so-called King of Diamonds, an expert diamond thief. But when the episode starts, Delgado is serving time in prison, and curiously diamonds are turning up in plum pudding. That's the setup.
Or at least, it should have been the setup. The actual delivery is a little off.
A diamond turns up in some pudding, and then the UNCLE agents are tasked with protecting a billion dollars worth of diamonds. Then they visit Delgado in prison, who promptly escapes in one of the most juvenile schemes possible (climbs into a laundry basket and gets wheeled right past the warden). Then the UNCLE agents go to steal the diamonds, but Delgado's gotten there first. They chase him to Brasil, and Delgado himself rescues them from the mob because he decides that being a criminal has gotten boring and that there might be more of a challenge in being wanted by the mob.
I get what the story was going for. All the elements are there. There's the heist, the charming thief who can't be contained, the tenuous alliance between the cops and the criminal, a beautiful plum pudding vendor. All the usual story elements. But they seemed out of order so they didn't fit right. They didn't meld together, like a bad plum pudding improperly steamed.
(All the deliberate plum pudding references make sense once you see the episode.)
The most interesting thing about this episode is the cultural and historical meta. This episode features some comically bad British accents and several improbable depictions of Brasil. Both can probably be blamed on budget, but I think only in part. It occurs to me that in the days before the Internet, world culture must have been impossible vast for most people. I wonder whether most TV viewers in the 60s knew just how bad the British accents were, how bad the Italian was, or that Brasilians speak Portuguese not Spanish.
It could be that they did, but that the demand for realism was just different then. I understand that, and in fact every time i watch a Marvel movie today I find myself cringing in anticipation of how annoyed we'll all be 20 years (or hours, depending on your tastes) from now when we look back at the predictable and obligatory wisecracks and the silly special effects. For whatever reason, the levels of suspended disbelief shift every decade or so, and maybe in the 60s close enough was good enough.
Whatever the reason, this episode betrays its age in an unexpected way. I admit that when I write several paragraphs about how an episode makes me ponder sociology and history, it's...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Hunter's Moon is a story about a special-ops mission performed for a mysterious client. This review contains spoilers.
Here's a question. How do you make paperwork exciting? One obvious way is to sprinkle action sequences between scenes about paperwork. That might seem like a cheap trick. You might argue that a story that's serious about paperwork ought to really dig in and stay focused on the different forms and documents. And in the 8ase of Stardrifter, that's a legitimate argument, because in Stardrifter the paperwork, or at least the process, is gripping. It's hard to understand until you read it, but in Stardrifter stories the "boring" stuff is engrossing, like troubleshooting make-believe gunnery systems, repairing pretend starjump drives, or processing invoices for a special-ops job gone wrong. Somebody in the future's filling out tax form 14A-tack-52? Sign me up!
In the case of Hunter's Moon, the paperwork doesn't disappoint. But because it seems ridiculous for me to insist that paperwork of the future is interesting, I'll distract you with action sequences first.
A small team of operatives have been tasked with obtaining a MacGuffin. They don't know what the MacGuffin is beyond a briefcase, and neither do we. All we know is that Ejoq Dosantos, looking a little older than last we saw him I think, is on the job and he's brought a bunch of new toys for his gunnery station to fire.
The action sequences are pretty brutal. It starts out pretty tame, with the usual ship-to-ship combat. Before all that, though, there's an interesting stand-off. Ejoq and his team come face to face with an enemy fleet. The enemy ships could make short work of Ejoq's team, no problem. But instead they just sit there, quietly hanging in space, locked in a more or less super-threatening stance, and delivering on none of its promises.
What's going on?
Is Ejoq's ship in stealth mode? Is it somehow posing a greater threat than even Ejoq and his team realise? Has something malfunctioned?
It's an uneasy and seemingly inexplicable deadlock, and the process of figuring it out is engrossing. You almost want there to be a poll included with the story. What do YOU think is up with the enemy ships? What should Ejoq and his team do next?
There aren't any absolute answers, in the end, although there is a resolution based on the theories that Ejoq's team devise. They're probably right, and either way everything eventually turns out alright, of course. But it's not without a fight. And it's not without desperation. Things get dicey, and frankly we see some ugly mercenary work. You have to put on your heist visors, the ones that allow you to justify everything done by the Good Guys, even when it involves pulling people's helmets off of them to let them suffocate in zero atmosphere. Big action scenes, action...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
It's an episode about the Death Guard sorcerer Ephisis and his single-minded mission to corrupt the Imperium with the, um, blessing of the diseased dark god, Nurgle. If you love disease, infection, and mutation, then this is the episode for you.
I don't love those things, but I loved this episode.
If you're not comfortable with horror, it's probably not an easy episode to watch. There's a lot of physical corruption in this one, lots of (animated) disgusting body horror. Throughout, it's a perfect picture of hell.
Ephisis is a gleeful sadist, but he doesn't hold a candle to his herald Nex. There's a scene outside a locked gateway in which Nex must perform a ritual to produce corruption strong enough to break through the door. It's an amazingly depraved scene, during which the purpose of one of the Death Guards they've brought along on the quest becomes clear. It's pretty sick stuff, and the transformation of Nex during that scene beautifully (that's not really an appropriate word in this context) mirrors the constant corruption of everything the Death Guards touch.
This episode is great sci fi. There's a minor space battle, there's an undefeatable alien (or demonic, I guess) disease. It's a dark space opera.
This episode is great Warhammer 40,000. Nurgle is disgusting, and the Death Guards are gross, but this story is inspiring. Ephisis might be turning all living matter into gloop, but you have to admire his determination and his strength. It's just a good story, and it moves from a dead world to outer space to an astropath's temple. Absolutely worth watching, as long as you enjoy plague horror.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
I'm a fan of the Fallout New Vegas and Fallout New Vegas, as well as the Wasteland series. When I found out there was a Fallout board game called, appropriately, Fallout the Board Game, I bought the last copy available in New Zealand (or at least at Mighty Ape, but I couldn't find it anywhere else). I've spent several months with it now, and this blog post is my review of it.
In many ways, the board game seeks to mimic the experience of the Fallout video games. And I do mean it tries to mimic the video games. I think if somebody told me to create a tabletop game using the Fallout IP, I would do what Modiphius did and create an pen and paper RPG. But that's not what Andrew Fischer and Nathan I. Hajek at Fantasy Flight did. They deliver a boxed RPG-alike, plus lots of the video game subsystems, with all the convenience and limitations that comes along with that. And amazingly, it works! t
The biggest problem with the game is its failure to explain the most important part of the game: How to win. I may as well address that single negative aspect first, to get it out of the way.
The win condition of the game is technically clear from the rulebook. The goal of the game is to gain 11 Influence points. You gain Influence by completing quests for inhabitants of the Wasteland, like you do in the video games. So far, so good.
The problem is, the rulebook doesn't explain what Influence is. The board game has a tracker for everything: rads, HP, level, conditions, SPECIAL attributes, inventory, faction progress, shopping, loot, encumbrance, and more. But it appears to not have a tracker for the one thing you must track in order to win.
In the Board Game Geek forum, it seems most people believe that when you gain an Influence point, you take a card from the Agenda deck and add it to your inventory. The rulebook doesn't say that, though. The rulebook never equates Agenda cards with Influence, and in fact it consistently uses two terms ("Agenda" and "Influence") to refer to them.
In the game, when the Agenda [Influence?] deck runs out, a Faction progresses. When a Faction reaches the end of its track, the game is over. There's a variable number of Agenda cards depending on the number of players, but as an example there are just 11 Agenda cards in the deck in a solo game. If the Agenda cards truly are the currency for Influence points, then the more Influence you gain, the faster the Factions advance, forcing the endgame at an increasing pace. That makes some story sense. The more you Influence events in the game world, the sooner one Faction or the other grows into power.
As a mechanic, though, it's a little counter-intuitive. You only have 2 moves a turn, no matter what stage of the game...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
A group of Chaos Terminator space marines are busy fighting some Necrons, when one of their dying prey attempts to bargain for its life. It reveals that, in exchange for its life, it will reveal the location of an important artefact.
Seem like a trap? Nah, it's probably fine.
When the Chaos marines arrive at the location, they find a https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Drukhari-Incubi-2020 and a strange dead-yet-still-alive spaceship, a handful of unknown enemies, and some pretty cool traps. Will they survive? You have to watch to find out.
This is a really good episode. It's cool to get to ride along with Chaos marines. They're brutish and slovenly compared to the Imperium's Space Marines, but their armour design is pretty slick. I have a squad of Chaos marine miniatures, and they're fun to paint because it's basically Abaddon Black, and some gold and silver, and you're done.
It's also neat to see Necrons being [mostly] slaughtered. I love Necron lore and design, and I love that this episode cuts straight to the chase in even its title. You don't go to Necrons for just the memories of a dead civilisation, you're really there for the archeotech. And in this episode, the MacGuffin is a powerful artefact.
The best part of the episode, though, is a two-line interaction between two of the Chaos marines:
Chaos Marine 1: "There's still power? This wreck is millenia old."
Chaos Marine 2: "A lifetime of war in the eye of terror, witnessing the power of demons and the miracles of dark gods, and this seems a mystery to you?"
How many RPG and fantasy or sci fi wargame players have asked themselves the same question? It always amuses me how, in a world of magic or impossible technology, we players get taken out of the immersion by something mundane. We can believe that characters can produce lightning from their fingerprints, but when there's a commercial building in a residential zone, the whole fiction of the world is spoilt.
This simple quote sums up a lot of spectulative fiction, for me.
This episode is great sci fi. There aren't any space battles, but this feels like marines in space doing space military things.
This episode is great Warhammer 40,000. The Terminators are the bizarro Space Marines. The Necrons are classic foes. It's really clear, unlike the previous episode that flirted with actual militaristic pride, that there are no good guys here. You can cheer on the Terminators or the Drukari or the Necrons, but they're all pretty malevolent and they all deserve what they get.
And all the stuff they get is really fun to watch.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
If you use miniatures in your tabletop games, it's easy to get spoiled when you start buying Citadel miniatures. Games Workshop miniatures tend to be high-quality, highly detailed, and super imaginative. In fact, if anything, Games Workshop is too imaginative. Really. Some of their sculpts are bizarre, but that's because they're mostly made specifically for either Warhammer 40,000 or Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and those are shockingly unique sci fi and fantasy universes, respectively. However, there are miniatures with the Citadel range that happen to be "normal" enough to nicely fit in to other games. The Citadel miniatures I've gotten a lot more play out of than I'd ever expected are the Traitor Guardsmen of Blackstone Fortress, and here's why.
There are 14 of these little guys in the Blackstone Fortress game box, 2 each of 7 distinct sculpts. I admit I was a little disheartened at first when I saw that, and for the whole time I was building and painting them. I felt like I'd been cheated. I bought a box for LOTS of NZ Dollars (everything in New Zealand costs a lot, even after currency conversion, because everything has to be shipped here and everything is far away), and I'd been promised 60 miniatures, but 14 of them were these boring humans! And then I had to build, undercoat, and then paint each one. That's 14 and 14 and then 14 AGAIN. That's, like 42 works, and at the time that seemed like a lot of work.
Then I looked at them, all painted and ready for the table, and I realised I had two teams of 7 soldiers with a variety of weapon types:
This is a kill team, or a unit in a slapdash combat patrol, or a gang of raiders for my Fallout board game, or my entire team for Space Station Zero or Reign in Hell, all the baddies I need for Raid, and so on. PLUS, there's the game I got them in.
The traitor guardsmen sculpts are, as usual for Citadel, sharp and detailed and meticulous and imaginative. There's a guy with a shovel strapped to his back. The one with the flamer has a spare fuel tank on his belt. The guy with a pistol and a chain sword has a grenade on his belt. Some of them wear furs, others chains, some have heraldry of sorts (well, they have some rags they drape over their armour). They're not just rank and file filler units. They look and feel like important figures on the battlefield. Heck, they sure have more personality than most uniform space marines.
Every single sculpt has a unique pose. And they're all action-oriented.
The grenade is being thrown. You can see the pin in the guy's free hand, that's how urgent it is.
The rifle's being carefully aimed.
The pistol guy is one just one foot because...
]]>I've been watching the Angels of Death animated series on Warhammer+. This post is a review of the series, from the perspective of someone who's mainly read Horus Heresy books, along with the odd rulebook here and there. There are minor spoilers here.
The previous series ended with the beginning of the story. This episode returns us to current events, resuming with the death of the Rafael, the Skeletor-looking bloke. In the meantime, the Sword of Baal is rammed and boarded, and things are looking pretty dire for everyone.
Everyone except Tech Priest Magos Domina Castia Theta 9, that is.
In the previous episode, we learned that an Adeptus Mechanicus had been on the planet, although it wasn't clear when or whether she was still here. As it turns out, Tech Priest Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 has been biding her time somewhere in the undercity, and she starts putting her carefully calculated plans into action.
The voice of Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 is almost certainly the same voice as the Tech Priest in Kill Protocol of the Hammer and Bolter series. Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 has an augmetic left hand, but a flesh right hand, as did the Tech Priest in Kill Protocol. Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 does have flesh on the upper portion of her face, though, while the Tech Priest of Kill Protocol did not. I want these to be the same people, but obviously if Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 dies in this series then that doesn't quite work because if anything this has to be an earlier version of her (due to the flesh on her face).
Further data is required.
This episode is the previous episode, over again. Really, all that happens is that we hang out with Tech Priest Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 and shoot up some baddies with the Blood Angels. It's fine, but you could actually skip it and miss nothing.
"I am the death of foes."
Things start to ramp up, now. All the forces have assembled, both planetside and aboard the Sword.
On the planet, everybody's in position for the final battle. There are some reinforcements on both sides, and a few new players altogether. The ship is still tethered to the station, unable to break away (which seems like particularly poor space station and ship interface design). But the one space marine still on the Sword of Baal is Adeptus Mechanicus, and he's got a few tricks up his ceramite sleeve.
This is a rousing episode, appropriately enough, and I'm really not sure how many Blood Angels we're going to have left by the end of it all.
This is the final episode that's not quite the final episode, and it's very satisfying. Space marines go in and do their space marine thing. It's quick, methodical, and ruthless. This is it. This is the last stand.
One of...
]]>Interested in playing a wargame that isn't Warhammer 40,000? Wargaming is a complex landscape of gaming possibility, and it can be a little confusing to navigate at first, especially if you venture too far away from firmly established franchises. I do think that Games Workshop, the creator of Warhammer, makes it [really easy to get started in the hobby](https://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/blog_warhammer40k-get-started, so if you're looking for the easiest entry point I recommend that. However, there are other options, and that's what this post is about.
Here are the five steps to becoming a wargamer.
Do you want to assemble your own game from parts, or do you want to buy into one company's wargame system? There's not a wrong answer, but you need to understand the difference because it'll effect your end result.
When you pick up a random wargame from Wargame Vault, you're just buying rules. It's up to you to equate those rules to models you have, or else to buy models to fit neatly into the rules. The problem is, now you have to learn about the very scattered market of miniatures. There are different scales even within the same scale, because being 28mm in size doesn't imply anything except that the miniature is no taller than 28mm. You could buy a battle mech at 28mm scale and a miniature of the pilot who's supposed to be inside the mech also at 28mm when obviously the pilot should be more like 8mm in relation to her mech. It can be confusing, especially if you're buying mostly online so you're unable to compare one model to another.
But there are advantages to this disparity, too. Assembling your own motley collection of miniatures means you get a wide variety of styles, quality (for better or for worse), and prices. If you enjoy the eclectic, or you're happily unfocused, then trying to fit into one system may well not make sense for you.
But you have to be ready for what you're signing up for. Imagine this. You've got 50 miniatures spread across a 6-foot table, and your army is getting slaughtered. You notice a rule about a special ability for soldiers with plasma rifles, and you realise it would turn the game in your favour. The problem is, none of your miniatures are holding rifles because you're playing with random models you got on Ebay. So you cross-reference your list of which models are supposed to be what, and you see that all the soldiers in blue holding swords are actually your plasma rifle guys, which is different from the guys in black holding rifles, which are normal non-plasma rifles.
Put simply, it can get confusing and overwhelming when your rules talk generically about models, or uses different terminology than what you're used to, like when the model you bought is called "Genescuplted cyborg" but your rules talk about a "Specialist with power fist".
So what's the other option? Well, when...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Cherchez la Femme, is an ode to spaceships and what they come to mean and represent in the Future. This review contains spoilers.
In this story, Ejoq winds up in jail over a holiday weekend for some minor infraction in the Jarden system. It's unclear what happened, and Ejoq claims it's not his fault, but it's a holiday weekend and nobody's around to hear his plea right now, so he settles into his cell.
Sharing his cell is an old man. The man shares his story with Ejoq. It seems that the man spent his entire life on a spaceship, and that ship's being decommissioned. His home, his whole life, is literally being torn apart. And he feels it deep inside. He tries to drink it away, but when he gets brought in to cool off in jail he doesn't have access to drink, and so he just has to sit with his pain.
I have to admit that I find it hard to identify with the sentimentality of "home". I moved every 2 or 3 years as a kid, and even as an adult rarely stayed in any one place more than 5 years. I understand in a sort of academic way that people feel sadness when a familiar place changes, but I don't understand it on an emotional level. So in a way, this is the least effective Stardrifter story for me.
And yet, the older I get (which I make sure I do every day, and when I achieve it 365 times in a row, I celebrate with cake), the more I understand that change is a heck of a powerful force in the world. Your favourite café goes out of business, a website goes away, a community wanders away from its usual hangout, culture changes, politics shift, landscapes alter. You look back five, ten, twenty years into the past, and you realise that the world isn't the same world that used to be. And not only has your environment changed, but you've changed. Your perception of the world, and the world you used to know, has changed. It seems every moment in your past, instead of being preserved in your memory, constantly changes.
That helps me somewhat understand the sentiment.
What I really connect with in this story, though, is beautifully subtle homage to space opera. In space opera, spaceships are anthropomorphized to the extreme. I get that in real life, people use the feminine gender when referring to ships, for whatever reason. But in space opera, a captain is dedicated to a ship as if it's literally his wife. There's no room for human relationships in space opera, because the machinery is just too important. It occupies not just the hero's time, butthe hero's every thoughts.
This story is the emotion of that space opera trope. Space ships in Stardrifter...
]]>Interested in playing Warhammer 40,000? Don't make the mistakes I did! Whether you're playing Warhammer or something else, wargaming requires preparation before you can actually play the game. This is different than what you're probably used to, if you play other tabletop games. You don't just go to the store, buy the box, and start playing. You have to build and paint miniatures, you need to read the rules, and set up a battlefield.
Here are the five steps to becoming a Warhammer player.
Get the Warhammer 40,000 rules as a $0 download. Read the rules cover to cover. It's 60 pages, which is a lot for a board game but pretty typical if you're used to, for instance, tabletop role playing games. The pages are full of photos and graphics, so it's not 60 pages of text. You can get an overview in my review of the rules.
The easiest way to start playing is to get a Combat Patrol box containing a playable army. Each Combat Patrol box also includes special missions for you to play. There are more missions on page 208 of the official Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, which also has a lot of lore and background material. That's a separate purchase, but I think it's well worth it just to have the rules in a nice physical form.
There are starter sets too, but I don't own one and can't vouch for their effectiveness.
Once you've got an army, you have to cut the model parts out of the plastic sprue, shave off the unsightly plastic "flash" (mold lines), glue the models together, prime them with white or gray spray paint, and then paint them. For that, you need modeling tools (clippers, knife, file, paint brushes, paint).
Citadel offers lots of tutorials to help you get started.
Citadel Contrast paints and Vallejo Xpress Color are both excellent lines of paint.
And it can take months! The good news is that it's a lot of fun. But you do have to factor it in. From the time you decided to play Warhammer, you're probably well into your third month now.
Once you've got the rules and an army, there's little to do but to play. At least, that's the theory. In reality, you also need terrain (ruins of buildings or walls or other obstacles) and objective markers (you can use glass gaming tokens or coins or whatever) and a battle mat and dice and rulers and random game accoutrements.
Some of those components are more common than others, but terrain is a challenge. Luckily, you can buy terrain or build it yourself from junk. I used those little plastic pots you get when you buy a seedling for the garden. I painted them with craft paint and set them up on my battlefield, and they look like vaguely like shipping...
]]>Have you ever tried documenting a Lego model you've invented? I've tried to track how I constructed My Own Creation (or "MOC", in the lingo of Internet brick builders) using graph paper, but getting the angles right can be really hard. Lacking freehand illustration skills, I recently decided to use technology to solve the problem.
I have several years working in a virtualized 3D space (even longer in actual 3D space, for what that's worth). I'm comfortable with 3D applications, but all of the ones I've used have been specific to motion graphics and film production. They are, like film itself, generally just for show. How you build something is less important than whether the thing looks good. If you have to "cheat" what's physically possible to ensure that something looks cool, that's OK, because the thing you're building only exists in a virtual space.
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is different.
CAD software replaced old style drafting, in which specifications are created to demonstrate how something may be built, once or 100 times, in the real world. There's an expectation of precision and realism.
Because Lego fans are legion, there is a prolific community of builders creating Lego models using CAD. The advantages are obvious: you can document what pieces you need, and what steps you must take, to build a model. This isn't a replacement for real Lego bricks, unless you love CAD more than you do Lego, but it's a great augmentation for your hobby.
To build a virtual Lego model, you need two components:
There are a few ways to satisfy each requirement, but I've found I prefer the open source, modular approach.
You can get nearly every Lego piece ever created from the open source LDraw project. LDraw is an open standard for Lego CAD, which includes consistent measurements and relative dimensions, and a simple language for how bricks are oriented. As a part of LDraw's work in defining bricks, the community also provides 3D models of each brick. That means you can download thousands of brick definitions in a relatively small download (42 MB or so).
Virtual bricks are a lot like images on a website or fonts on your computer: as long as the application using the files knows where to find them, you can keep them anywhere.
On Linux, it's common to put bricks in /usr/share/LDRAW
.
On Windows, they're usually installed to C:\Users\Public\Documents\LDraw
.
The LDRraw download only provides specifications for each brick. Here's what a 1x1 brick looks like in its raw form:
0 ~Brick 1 x 1 without Front Face
0 Name: s\3005s01.dat
0 Author: John Riley [jriley]
0 !LDRAW_ORG Subpart UPDATE 2004-01
0 !LICENSE Redistributable under CCAL version 2.0 : see CAreadme.txt
0 BFC CERTIFY CCW
0 BFC INVERTNEXT
1 16 0 24 0 0 0 6 0 -20 0 -6 0 0 box5.dat
4 16 10 24 -10 6 24 -6 6...
]]>
I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
In this episode, the comms are down in the Astra Militarum trenches, so a Galipoli-style foot messenger runs from HQ to the frontline to get the commander's orders. He's just a runner, and there are aliens actively attacking, so it's pretty harrowing. He gets an armed escort back to HQ, but the journey is doubly terrifying because the aliens have broken through the lines. There's shooting, there's death, and eventually the messenger finds the strength to shoot at things.
"Cadia stands" is a war cry for the trenches, because although Cadia actually fell years ago, it stands within their hearts. By the end of the episode, the runner understands this, and intones it as he exits the HQ, having successfully delivered the commander's orders.
This episode is OK sci fi. I'm biased against it because I didn't love the plot of a coward turning into a proud soldier through witnessing atrocity. There were some really good sci fi elements, though. There's enough shooting of aliens to make it a fun 15 minutes, and some interesting concepts of sneaky explosive mines.
This episode is OK Warhammer 40,000. It's not very dynamic. They're in trenches, they try to hold the line. The aliens are deadly. I think I'd have enjoyed this more if it had been set on a spaceship.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
First of all, I'll say that I get it. Looking at a "season" of The Man from UNCLE compared to modern TV shows, it's amazing to see how much got produced. There are thirty episodes in season 2 alone. That's a very rigorous schedule, and a lot of stories to invent. Not every one of them can be great, and I'm not entirely sure the people making this show knew yet that re-runs would be a thing. I think it was a general assumption that these shows would be ephemeral. I guarantee they didn't expect a random guy to be reviewing them 50 years later on the Internet.
There's no nice way to say it. This isn't really an episode, it's a long and convoluted lead up to a single punchline that isn't very good.
The punchline, meant to be emotional and sentimental and romantic, is this: "Do you remember who I am? Then you're somewhere." For that line to work, the episode's story sets up two mechanisms:
A story is retrofitted into this structure, and comes out just dismally. In a nutshell: Napoleon Solo goes to a town called Nowhere and is promptly captured by THRUSH. Just before they knock him out, he pops a new amnesia pill that erases all knowledge of UNCLE. This seems like a really bad strategy to me, because it makes THRUSH believe that he's being obstinate while making him incapable of escaping because he has no memory of being a secret agent in the first place.
THRUSH already knows he's an UNCLE agent, because secret identities aren't a thing in this series, and so they look into his file and finds that he really likes women. They have a female THRUSH agent act as if she's his ally. Predictably, Solo falls in love with her but, surprise surprise, she also falls in love with him (women, amiright?).
In the end, she decides to take a superdose of amnesia pills that won't wear off, so she can forget her life of THRUSH programming and join UNCLE as Napoleon Solo's 35th wife. She takes the pills, blinks, and says "I don't remember anything. I only remember a town...called Nowhere."
Holding her in his arms, Solo says to her: "Do you remember who I am?"
"Yes," she says tentatively.
"Then you're somewhere."
Roll credits, forget this episode was ever made.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Robot Overlords, is a story about a troublesome AI (which I know sounds like the very tropiest of science fiction tropes but it's not like that, I promise). This review contains spoilers.
It's bold to write a sci fi story featuring artificial intelligence. Maybe in another century it'll be safe to do it, but the justifiably profound impact that 2001: A Space Odyssey has had on the genre is today still unavoidable. Maybe that's why David cheekily titled this story Robot Overlords. It's a gag in itself. Robot overlords? Rogue AI? Let's just address the elephants in the room, acknowledge them for what they are, and then move on. You get over your own expectations early on.
Or do you?
The AI in question is the shipboard instance of Zooks, and the story starts out with Zooks explaining to the portion of the crew that's still actually doing their jobs that it does not consider them friends. They're not like Litany, who appreciated and was kind to Zooks. Of course, Litany is also egotistical and manipulative, but she's charismatic and she had most everyone fooled. Including, it seems, the ship's AI.
This is the first hint at the real story, and it's a good one that I won't spoil here. It's not giving much away to say that Zooks doesn't understand humans like humans understand other humans.
No wait, that's wrong.
Zooks doesn't understand humans the way humans don't understand other humans.
Maybe it's an obvious comparison to say that some humans don't quite connect with other humans. Call us geeks or nerds or "on the spectrum" or whatever, but some of us find meatware difficult to decode. It's easy to imagine that an AI might have the same trouble. So when a charming and charismatic crew member like Litany appears to take interest in you, and makes you feel like the centre of the universe, you might be likely to believe it. Zooks believes Litany is its friend, and it does favours for its friends, and ignores the rest.
Here's the actual conflict of the story. Some shipments have been auto-deployed and are scheduled to rendez-vous with a cargo boat later. The problem is, the shipment contains faulty parts, but because it's an automated process they'll be stowed on the cargo boat and distributed without anyone realising that the new parts they're using are guaranteed to fail.
The Sheila has been sent out to make sure the shipment doesn't get to the cargo boat.
The Sheila is too far out to get a weapons lock on the shipment, though, and the AI refuses to assist because the equipment Ejoq wants to destroy is company property. (Actually it's not strictly company property, as Zooks explains several times, but it's being rented by the company and so destroying it seems an awful lot like corporate sabotage.)
Frustrating? A little,...
]]>Last year, shortly after the 10th edition of the game was released, I played my first game of Warhammer 40,000 and recorded my process, the battle, and my thoughts. I have no fancy White Dwarf style photos to go with this post, but I think it's interesting to see a game through a new player's eyes, so here it goes.
I downloaded the free rules upon release, but as soon as I got to a Warhammer store I also purchased the hardcover book. The hardcover book is nice because it includes an overview of the lore, and also it's a physical book, it's actually not a necessary purchase.
In some ways, at least in terms of rules clarification, I'd say it was even a little bit of a disappointment. I'd anticipated a section on building armies, but there is no such section in the book. In fact, it tells you flat out that to build an army (which you absolutely need to do before you can play the game!), you need a book called the Munitorum Field Manual or the index for your faction.
This starts to feel like a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, if you overthink it.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd have just bought two Combat Patrol boxes (and probably will buy one, eventually, for games at the club).
Bottom line: If you're just getting started, buy a starter set or two Combat Patrols.
I thought I had so many Citadel miniatures, but as I tried to assemble two armies, I realised I didn't have even one army. I have a bunch of miniatures from Blackstone Fortress and I can use some as character models in an army, but I don't have anything near a complete army. I could have proxied an army or two, but that gets confusing because none of the miniatures look like what they are on the index cards.
In the end, I just grabbed a handful of 2nd edition Warhammer space marines and chaos marines I had lying around. I was still doing a lot of proxying, but at least there was a vague resemblance between what was on the table and what appeared in the index. It wasn't ideal, though, and to make matters simple I just declared that all models in each unit had the same weapon, regardless of what they were actually holding.
Bottom line: Honestly, just buy a starter set or two Combat Patrols.
As if I hadn't made enough mistakes already, I had decided to use the indices for each army off the mobile 40k app. It saves you $50 for a stack of index cards from Games Workshop, or saves you from having to print them yourself if you downloaded the PDF, but it's a lot of clicking and scrolling on a mobile phone. It slowed my game down almost beyond...
]]>I haven't been painting miniatures for long. In the past, I've purchased pre-painted miniatures because I didn't have the time, money, or bravery required to paint miniatures myself. Recently, I've felt comfortable enough with my personal budget to spend a little money on a paint kit, and I buy a miniature every now and again.
I've got my favourite paint brand, and I chose it based on exactly these meaningless qualifications:
Yes, I haven't shopped around, I haven't tested different brands, or even researched what's available. I walked into a store, grabbed a paint starter set off the shelf, and bought it. I did it this way because it was easy, and filled with minor conveniences that let me get started painting quickly and without a substantial barrier to entry.
When I started painting, I heard from people that actually paint is paint, and there's no need to invest in special paint just for plastic miniatures. They told me I could go to any art supply store and buy any brand of acrylic paint, and use that instead. I did try that, and I had some success. However, I'm not actually sold on the idea, technicalities aside. Sure, maybe acrylic paint is acrylic paint. Maybe I'm overpaying for special "miniature" paint.
Or maybe I'm not. Maybe paint made for miniatures actually do have some special features and conveniences that are worth paying for. Here are six reasons, from a novice painter, that miniature-specific paints exist, and in my opinion are worth the money.
I don't have an eye for fashion. When I'm staring at a dull gray miniature, trying to decide what colours to put onto it, I'm almost always at a loss. And even when I settle on one end of the colour spectrum (a "cool" colour or a "warm" colour), I still don't really know what other colours to pair it with.
I could do some planning with applications like Kontrast, or I could refer to existing art. I know the resources available to me. But then you have to translate that research into paint, which you have to purchase if you don't have it yet.
Most of the people making and selling popular brands of paints for miniatures are really clever. They know what kind of models are out there, they understand the tropes. And they package their paints accordingly. I purchased a single starter kit when I started painting, and it came with colours I'd never have expected. I would have never assembled this kit myself. But to this day, my models get painted primarily in colours from that starter kit, because those paints go together really well.
Honestly, I consider the starter kit itself a work of art. I can't explain what it is about Averland Sunset (yellow) that makes it go so well with Macragge Blue AND...
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. Litanies of the Lost is a book containing four adventures that can be run independently or as a continuous campaign. The framework requires the IMPERIUM keyword, and the first adventure is for Tier 1 or 2 characters.
This review contains spoilers.
The second adventure is called Vow of silence. It's got a great setup with three different stories happening:
Player characters get the mission, go to the planet, get ferried over to the island, and the rest of the plot is up to them. It's a dungeon crawl, except the dungeon is under military occupation. They can stealth through it, or march in with guns blazing, or hang back and study the premises for a few days, or whatever they can dream up.
As a Game Master, you have the bare minimum to manage. You need to keep track of the map of the monastery (there's one included) and where the player characters and NCPs are at any given time, and you need to keep track of a few NPC motivations. Mostly, though, this is one of those adventures where you don't run so much as react.
The one thing about the adventure that feels a little jarring is the xeno race that's occupying the monastery.
Is it the Aeldari?
Nope.
The Drukhari?
Good guess, but still no.
T'au?
No.
It's orks.
I understand that it's possible, and that some orks have different strategies than the stereotypical WAAAGH!! And these orks have actually crashed on the planet. They're not here by choice, and they have no obvious way off the planet. So it does make sense that an ork clan, prone to stealth and a little actual strategy, might camp out in a monastery they happen to crash near and not kill everyone in sight while they try to figure out what to do next.
But, two things:
To make the orks even less fitting, their occupation of the monastery is confusing. It seems that they took over the monastery and killed most of the monks, but for some reason they've allowed some to not only live but to freely wander around the...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
I work in IT in real life, and it's possibly because of my affinity with computers that one of my favourite factions in the Imperium is Adeptus Mechanicus. Of course, this is Warhammer 40k, so much of my enjoyment of Adeptus Mechanicus is my dread for it. They're the IT department's own private nightmare. It's a culture of people who depend on and worship machines, while obstinately refusing to understand them. Imagine if every modern human, in today's world, carried around a mobile device in their pocket but couldn't even tell you the difference between BIOS and EFI.
Oh, no. The Adeptus Mechanicus is inside the house.
Anyway, this episode is about an Adeptus Mechanicus, voiced by Zehra Jane Naqvi, is on a quest to find Archeotech. I felt fine about this. I've played the Mechanicus video game. I've been on this kind of quest.
The Adeptus Mechanicus in this episode is entirely on her own. She has a robot along with her, but otherwise she's on a savage world on a quest all her own. There are a few ork attacks, but she and her robot manage to survive. They come across a local soldier, though, and he asks where the rest of the Imperial troops are. She explains that there are no more troops. They've all left, because the number of remaining orks is not considered a threat. Victory has been declared.
Looking at the planet, though, you get the notion that this isn't what the locals expected "victory" would look like.
Of all the powers within the Imperium, though, an Adeptus Mechanicus doesn't care. And so she continues on her quest. I won't spoil what she finds, but you get the sense that she maybe learns a few things about herself.
For me, there were more than a few moments where I groaned at the Adeptus Mechanicus tendency to anthropomorphise (or whatever the spiritual version of that is) their machinery. To my surprise, though, this wasn't just the usual Mechanicus flavour. It ended up being meaningful, in the context of a lone Adeptus Mechanicus on a wartorn world. This time, among the harsh dystopia of Warhammer's aftermath, you find some unexpected moments of compassion, and weakness, ecstasy, and hope. And you find it in a human that's mostly robotic. It's really effective, and while I'm generally a big fan of cyborg fiction, I think this particular cyborg is one I'm not likely to forget.
This episode is good sci fi. Its two main characters are heavily augmetic. The moral of the story, or at least what I take it to be, resonates with an open source geek like me.
This episode is great Warhammer 40,000. The Adeptus Mechanicus are one of...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The third book, called Risk Analysis, is a proper spy novel that manages to hit all the good tropes, while deftly avoiding the tedious ones. This review contains spoilers.
Every chapter starts with a flashback. The first one appears to make no sense. Maybe it's a nightmare? Somehow, Ejoq has found himself outside a spaceship...in jumpspace. What impossible circumstance could have possibly resulted in this scenario? Well, as it turns out that's what the book is going to be about.
I have to believe (because I haven't asked him personally) that this highly effective narrative sleight-of-hand was something David introduced during the editing process. I wasn't sold on it at first. It felt a little jarring to keep cutting to some scenario that didn't tie directly into the current timeline of the rest of the book. But eventually I came to understand that the book was leading up to the flashback (well, I guess they're technically flash-forward) events, but I also came to realise, delightfully slowly, that the flashbacks were about a double agent. Whomever it was that Ejoq was at odds with in these mystery flash-forward events is somebody in the story. That person is somebody you're getting to know over the course of 20 chapters, and it's up to you to try to guess who it is before Ejoq explains it to you.
Does it work?
You betcha. By the third or fourth chapter, I couldn't get enough of the flash-forwards. I got into the rhythm of them, I anticipated them. I gathered as much future evidence as I could. Did I correctly guess the identity of the double agent? Well, I've never been great at solving mysteries, and this book is no exception. The culprit was a total surprise to me. But hey, if I wanted something predictable I wouldn't be reading Stardrifter.
As is often the case in Stardrifter stories, the driving forces of the story are the seemingly incompatible dramas of characters and corporate culture. The first act of the book takes place aboard the Shady Lady, a tiny boat of maybe 3 or 4 rooms (cockpit, common room, bunk, and engineering) and an assortment of closets for duty stations. The crew consists of the pilot Mavis, engineer Dieter, mission lead Chris, sensor specialists John and Stinna, and of course Ejoq. It's a secret mission for an oversight organisation that needs intelligence about something happening in Corporatespace. The orgs involved, United Humanity (UH) and Meerschaum Agency, are big and influential, so doing well on this gig would be a valuable career boost for each team member, and the mission does involve actual spying, so there's a lot of pressure for a lot of different reasons for it to go smoothly.
Ejoq being who he is, drama arises pretty quickly on the Shady Lady. His crew mates find him abrasive, he finds them inefficent...
]]>Here's the thing about traps. They're the ONLY encounter in an RPG that players cannot opt out of. Once you encounter a trap, whether your character is physically trapped or you're just being blocked from progressing the story by a really hard puzzle, you basically have no choice but to deal with the trap. Contrast that with encountering, for instance, a dragon. It's the most fearsome monster in the game, but if you don't feel like fighting it, you can just run. Traps are frustrating. And frustration cancels out even the thrill of victory. All you remember after being stumped by a trap is that you were stumped for a lot longer than you'd have liked.
But I really lke traps, and I use them in my games. I've never had any complaints about them from players, and in fact I usually get positive feedback about them. Here's five ways to make traps fun in your RPG.
Because traps often involve the threat of damage, I think most of us equate them to a form of passive combat. That's not how I see traps, though. I treat a trap like an NPC encounter.
When players meet an NPC, there's no right or wrong way to interact. There's probably an optimal way, but players can do whatever they want. Certainly, players are rarely stuck in an NPC encounter because they haven't said some special phrase to release them from that encounter. Players mostly remain in control of the situation, which is pointedly not frustrating.
Imagine a trap as an NPC, though. What kind of conversation would this trap NPC have with a player character? The trap isn't actually going to talk (unless you want it to), but as the Game Master you can "talk" for it, and you can reveal information about it the same way you would reveal plot or lore in a conversation with an NPC.
Engage your players with descriptions of how the trap works. That'll probably give away how to decommission it, but that's the point of the encounter, just like the point of a typical NPC encounter is to reveal hints about how to "solve" the plot. If you don't give the players the information, then the game stops.
Just like an NPC encounter, you don't have to give literally everything away about the trap all at once. This is a literal conversation between the players and the Game Master, so talk it out. Bounce ideas off of one another. Collaborate. Not everything has to happen in-world. The trap encounter, just like any encounter, can pause the game and make room for table talk. Once everyone feels confident that they understand how the trap works and they've devised their plan on how to defeat it, un-pause the game and see what happens.
In my super-simple RPG Havoc, traps deal damage automatically. Not all systems exactly allow for that, because there might...
]]>I've been watching the Angels of Death animated series on Warhammer+. I thought the series was over, but there have been releases of prequel episodes lately, the latest of which is In the company of Death. This review contains minor spoilers, but nothing you wouldn't learn from the episode description and from general Warhammer lore.
Blood Angels Kazarion and Chaplain Raphael are searching for a missing space marine (Lucius, I think?) in a mining complex. You can't really tell it's a mining complex, but the episode description says that's what it is. Unfortunately for the Blood Angels, the complex is infested (you might say) with the traitorous and plague-ridden Death Guard. As they journey deeper and deeper into the complex, the threats loom larger and hope seems to dwindle.
One of the key elements of the Blood Angels' lore is their literal bloodlust. Sanguinius, their Primarch, taught them to wield their fervour during battle, but also how to keep it in check. Still, some Blood Angels succumb to their need for blood and enter a battle rage so intense and blinding that they become trapped in it permanently, turning against even their own battle brothers. As Kazarion and Raphael travel through the stench of plague and corruption, Kazarion fights to maintain control of his feverish need to kill. While this side of the Blood Angels was mentioned in the original series, I don't recall it ever being a plot point, but in this episode it's the primary source of struggle. The Death Guard are there as physical enemies, but the real war is waged with Kazarion as he fights for his own sanity, and within Chaplain Raphael as he fights to go on after one of his hearts fails after he's shot by a Death Guard.
From the many Black Library books I've read, and from the shows on Warhammer TV, I'm confident that the authors of Warhammer, more often than not, manage to give space marines something interesting emotionally to grapple with. That's why Warhammer manages to be as broadly appealing as it does. If it really were just 80s action heroes shouting as they unleash endless rounds of ammo into the meat sacks they call enemies, it would only hold the interest of a small audience. It's because even space marines are emotionally vulnerable to something, whether it's a religious zeal, allegiance to their chapter, fraternal loyalty, or something else, that their stories are relatable. One of the reasons the Blood Angels are one of my favourite chapters, though, is because the emotional struggle is built into their lore. It's really easy to show weakness in a Blood Angel. They must fight the horrors of the Black Rage! But even as they fight this, they must continue to wage war against the horrors of the traitor legions. It writes itself.
This is great Warhammer. Lots of classic Blood Angels lore, a good plot setup, some good action sequences, and a whole bunch...
]]>I've been watching the Angels of Death animated series on Warhammer+. I thought the series was over, but there have been releases of prequel episodes lately, the latest of which is Patience of iron. This review contains spoilers.
In the first series, Tech Priest Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 is more or less the sole survivor on Niades, a planet overrun by genestealers. In this episode, we spend some quality time with her, learning how she acquired her servitors and, I guess, why she's even on the planet in the first place (although I feel like that question answered itself by the end of the series).
I'm a fan of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and I really love the voice actor of Tech Priest Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 (I think it's Zehra Jane Naqvi, the voice actor for the Hammer and Bolter episode Kill Protocol ), so this episode is enjoyable for me no matter what. Maybe I know too much about the Adeptus Mechanicus, but I do feel the plot of the episode is a little weak. I like what it's going for, though. As with a horror movie, if I take sides with the monster,then it's fun to witness the false hopes of the people to whom Tech Priest Magos Domina Castia Theta 9 offers sanctuary. And that's why the people end up in her bunker. Imagine it. Running from the genestealers, you find yourself at a dead end in some maintenance tunnel. Suddenly, a Tech Priest of Mars is standing in front of you, beckoning you into her secret hideout. By the Emperor's grace, you're been rescued.
That seems like a compelling pitch to me, and I think the horror would have been greater had the story gone exactly that way. This episode mixes a little more conflict in, though, by having the Tech Priest kill one of the injured military guys who arrive at her front doorstep, making his teammate pretty upset from the start. He gets placed in what appears to be a holding cell and has to deal with a fellow prisoner who's been on ice for several days, and claims that the Tech Priest is up to no good. It's atmospheric, I guess, but it tips the episode's hand. Not only does anybody familiar with Warhammer lore know exactly why these humans have been saved, but now the humans suspect it themselves. As a viewer, I can't do my evil laugh because the humans are already worried about their apparent saviour, and I don't feel all that bad for them because I have no reason to cheer for them over the Tech Priest I already know from the first series.
So there's no emotional journey here, but if you take it as documentation of [pretend] events that [fictionally] happened [in the future], then this is a valid Adeptus Mechanicus story. That doesn't seem like high praise, and I guess it's not, but there is value to this kind of thing....
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this is one of the best Man from UNCLE episodes I've seen yet. It ranks up there with the pilot episode, and shockingly it doesn't feature Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin. The Moonglow Affair was a sort of backdoor pilot episode for a spin-off series called The Girl from UNCLE. In logic that only the 1960s understands, the stars being introduced in this pilot episode are not the stars of The Girl from UNCLE. I've seen some episodes of The Girl from UNCLE but it was a long time ago on late night retro TV. I have no memory of it, and it didn't last long, but this pilot is gripping.
I've observed that The Man from UNCLE frequently relies upon the UNCLE agents failing to generate anxiety in the audience. Several time each episode, Solo and Kuryakin are captured, discovered, and doxxed until the very end when they finally triumph. The technique kind of makes sense, on the surface. When the agents are in danger, the viewer has to stick around to find out how they survive, and if the plot builds toward an end for which the agents are apparently unprepared, then the viewer will be excited to find that they succeed against impossible odds.
On the other hand, when you only see the highly trained heroes of the show fail, you might start to wonder whether they're qualified at all for their jobs.
Well, maybe the 1960s just didn't have the story "technology" to convey a successful hero who nevertheless inspires anticipation in the audience? Maybe the language just didn't yet exist for that kind of tale.
No, it did exist, and this episode proves it.
In this episode, the main character is the youthful (age 24) Agent April Dancer. Like Solo and Kuryakin, she's attractive and friendly. Mary Ann Mobley, the actress portraying Agent Dancer in this episode alone, brings an interesting angle to her, though. It's subtle, but you catch it when the character switches from her real personality to her assumed undercover persona. April Dancer is at ease in social situations, but the girl she's posing as is timid, naïve, and not terribly self-confident. Or maybe she is self-confident, when she's talking to someone new and the situation requires it. In other words, Mary Ann Mobley plays April Dancer playing different "characters" as a different undercover situation demands.
Throughout the entire episode, Dancer succeeds. Everything she tries actually works. But it doesn't come easy. There are close calls, there are moments when she has to ditch some spy gadget and you're just sure it's going to resurface later as proof that she's not who she says she is. I was actually nervous during this episode. I had to pause it because I was just too afraid that Dancer was going to be caught, and I didn't...
]]>There seems to be a lot of talk these days about character death in D&D and other roleplaying games. It seems that there's an audience that doesn't want their player character to die. Ever.
Which, admittedly, is the point of the game mechanic. If players don't care about death, then there's no point in having a death mechanic because it wouldn't influence the game. The game needs the player to fear character death, even though everybody knows that when your character dies, you just build a new one.
But some players don't seem to like the idea of character death, which is fine. Everyone should play D&D the way they want to play it. I happen to like the threat of character death, both as a player and as a game master. I think there are aspects to it that some people may not have considered. I believe death can be more fun than it may at first seem.
When I started playing D&D, I had no external conditioning that it could be a goal of the game to have a player character reach 20th level. I was introduced to D&D in elementary school, and at the time there was a lot of noise about how the game was actually an occult ritual in disguise. Believe it or not, adults around me legitimately believed that playing D&D summoned actual demons. The game was banned at school, so it wasn't an easy thing to get into as a kid. However, my friends had learned from their older siblings how to build D&D characters, so we spent lunch breaks rolling a d6 (as I recall we didn't know you were supposed to roll 3d6) building characters that would never be played. We were really just rolling stats, and then making up a backstory for what we rolled. We didn't fill in all the other abilities, like bending bars and lifting gates and spell abilities, and so on. But we had fun believing we were builing characters.
Once I started playing the actual game, I viewed levels as a gateway to new abilities. Just like in real life, there's such a thing to me as being "wealthy enough." I never felt I needed all the powers, I just wanted to have enough cool powers to maximize my fun.
So when a character dies, I don't spend much time mourning its loss. I roll some die (or whatever the system demands) and make up a new character.
In Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Forestmaster the unicorn tells the heroes to never mourn someone who dies fulfilling their destiny. I'm not saying I never wanted to play a wizard that gained access to Power Word Kill or something cool like that. I'm not saying all characters should die before they gain 9th level spells or other cool abilities.
But not every character build has to reach the proscribed maximum possible potential. Just because a book...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
Lucius the Eternal of the Emperor's Children and a champion of the chaos god Slaanesh. Prior to the Horus Heresy, he was an extremist who disfigured himself to celebrate his victories in battle. Eventually, Fulgrim transcended his own mortality into a daemon, and Lucius himself was transformed into a masochistic and eternal force of chaos.
Lucius is eternal thanks to a special curse embued by Slaanesh. Should anyone kill Lucius and then take any amount of pride in the act, then that person mutates, mind and body, into Lucius. Only their face remains imprinted somewhere on Lucius's new armour.
In Eternal, a Chaplain and a Judicar of the Exorcists (Space Marines working under the Ordo Malleus) are hunting down Lucius. They've captured one of the Emperor's Children and have interrogated him for who-knows-how-long. They're always questioning him about Lucius, and finally one day he cracks and tells them where to find him. But he warns them that nothing can kill Lucius, except maybe Exterminatus carried out by a mindless servitor.
As you can imagine, the Exorcists don't exactly heed the warning. After all, they're Exorcists. One of them has even taken a vow of silence. These guys are blessed by the God Emperor himself. They eat chaos for breakfast.
Act 2 is pretty simple. The Exorcists go to where the big bad lives, and they fight. If you're in the mood for seeing space marines in melee, this is a good sequence. Obviously a lot of space marine battles are just a bunch of big dudes firing bolters at each other, so seeing a proper duel is good fun. The animation isn't amazingly fluid, but you get the idea and your brain fills the details in.
Things happen, and Lucius has a really really clever use for the imprinted face on his pauldron, and in the end Lucius basically wins. That's not a spoiler, because ultimately Lucius always wins. It's in his name. He's eternal.
But seeing how he wins is fun. It's almost so fun, you could imagine a entire series about that. I wouldn't want to have to write it, but I sure would watch it.
Seeing an unkillable baddie always makes me think of what I would do. I figure the captive was mostly right. A mindless servitor pulling the trigger would probably work. But with all the genetic engineering that's possible in 40k, I wonder if somebody could just design a really skilled warrior with no pride. I know the Emperor is the most skilled at it, but surely somebody could give it a shot? It's worth a try, anyway.
This episode is good Warhammer 40,000. I don't think we've seen Exorcists in an...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Unit 19 is a tense story about piracy (or something like it) in outer space! This review contains spoilers.
Classic Stardrifter, and by "classic" I mean it's in the same column as Motherload. It's set on a spaceship, there are people up to no good, there are other people who are just trying to do their danged jobs and really need the baddies to just cut it out.
As with Open All Night, Ejoq is a somewhat minor player in this story. Technically, he never makes an appearance because he's locked in a closet the whole time, and all he can do is call out on the local network. It's a good thing he does, though, because it's his alert to the two total newbies on patrol that something's amiss.
The story is set on a spacehauler, which is sort of a railway train of a spaceship consisting of a tugboat (yeah, I'm mixing metaphors now) at the head and a bunch of container storage units in the middle. When a few systems glitch, two low-level crewmembers are sent to investigate each and every storage unit, one by one, until they figure out what's causing the disruption. When they hit Unit 19, they're contacted by the voice of Ejoq, who has likewise detected something abnormal using his targetig array. It seems there's activity on the hull of the ship.
Ejoq's superpower is his compulsion that the components of a system ought to aligned correctly and utilized to the maximum of their potential. He may have certs in gunnery, but at heart he's a hacker. He figures stuff out, and then uses what he's learned.
That's the plot of a lot of Stardrifter stories, but in this story it's practically written on in the page margins. Ejoq is effective at gunnery in part because of his urgent need to have remote access to all of his systems. In Street Candles that wasn't the setup on GRIZZELDA, and so he tinkered until it worked, and in the end it made a huge difference. In Cold Passage it wasn't supposed to be possible, but he got a tip off from somebody that some systems were connected in a specific way, and so he poked around until he found what he needed. In Unit 19, he's able to be a voice over the radio that affects the physical world because he's keyed into vital systems and can see some things that nobody thought could be observed.
For all his faults (and he has many), Ejoq is kind of brilliant. Actually, he's not brilliant at all. He's just thorough. If that's the greatest complement I can give him, he's still got a lot on James Bond, who's just really good looking and has a catchy ID number. And really it is a great complement. I like operational systems, I appreciate dilligence,...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. Believe it or not, the short story Open All Night is a story about a diner and its struggle to retain its business license, but this is a Stardrifter story so there's a lot more to the actual story than just that. This review contains no spoilers.
The story of Open All Night is literally about a diner on 4th Street of some space station that's recently encountered some competition. The problem is, space is so limited on a space station that competition doesn't just mean your customers might choose a different restaurant for lunch, it means you have to justify your business license to the station business committee. Unfortunately for the diner's owner and employees, their competition has several friends in high positions in the station's governance, so things don't look so good.
Over the course of the story, we meet the owner of the diner and we learn that he feels entitled to his business license because he's been in business for so many years. In fact, he seems to take a lot in life for granted. His regular customers aren't really people so much as they are his regular customers. His girlfriend is his girlfriend and always will be, whether he bothers saying things like "I love you" or not. The new guy he hired recently will always be the new guy.
The new guy, in fact, is Ejoq, looking to pick up some extra cash until the next boat he's contracted on departs. When the competition across the street starts to push people around, Ejoq lends a hand here and there in some pretty clever ways. He does what he does best: his agreed-upon job, plus a little minor engineering to get both technology and people into advantageous positions.
Ejoq is a minor character in the story. He comes up now and again, but he's definitely a background player. The rest of the diner crew gets most of the attention, with the owner, Max, emerging eventually as the main character. While the conflict seems clear, the real enemy of the story is the threat of change.
Change is a tricky threat, because if you look at it one way it looks like an enemy, but from a different angle it often starts to look like an ally. In this story, Max spends a lot of time fighting the oncoming change that the new restaurant represents. It's a flashy place with high profile owners, probably a celebrity chef, and interiour design that's just so. It represents the new 4th Street, the one where "normal people" can't afford to go. It's gentrification, and it's targeted Max and the diner and the whole neighbourhood.
Ultimately, Max learns that there's a difference between change and adaptation. Change happens no matter what. It doesn't need a mastermind or a conspiracy to drive it, change is a constant. Whether the diner goes or...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Another Show at Twenty-Two is a sequel, of sorts, to the haunting Street Candles novel.
This review contains spoilers. It's a short story, so by discussing it at all there are contextual spoilers, but this review does spoil a reveal. Don't read on if you haven't read this story yet and want to experience it fresh.
The terse review of this story is that it's Star Trek's The Conscience of the King in the Stardrifter universe. I've always recognized the poetic justice of The Conscience of the King, but I admit it never really affected me. I imagine that people who lived through the political turmoil of the 1940s to the 1960s probably found the episode therapeutic.
Another Show hits its mark because we've read Street Candles. We were all there the day the worst of the political demonstrations took place. People we cared about died that day (er, that chapter, I mean. I know it's a work of fiction, honest I do).
A washed-up comedian performs at a small night club somewhere in the expanse of space. The crowd doesn't love him, he doesn't much care for the crowd. He gets a few chuckles, and some guy in the back coughs a lot. When his set is over, he gets off stage and takes a walk in the park.
In the park, the comedian is approached by somebody from the night club. It's Ejoq, and he heaps compliments onto the comedian. Great act, funny jokes, had me in stitches. The comedian is flattered, so he lets Ejoq stick around to chat.
The conversation is what you'd expect between a fan of convenience and a smalltime performer. A couple of awkward moments but mostly obligatory small talk peppered with some verbal pats on the back. Until the conversation turns because Ejoq mentions a planet familiar to them both.
THE COMEDIAN IS PAOLO.
Paolo, the master of ceremenies at one of the horrific pivotal sequences in the Street Candles novel, has left Barlow under an assumed identity. No longer a popular talk show host, he's been reduced to a circuit stand-up, writing his own material probably for the first time in a long time, and generally wearing thin as a performer.
I won't spoil the ending, but this short story had me musing about a few things.
First, it's interesting to see Ejoq lean so heavily into social engineering. I knew he was nobody's fool, and I knew he could fake his way through a wide variety of situations. But he had me going for the first half of the story, back when I thought Paolo was just another comedian. I really thought Ejoq just happened upon him in the park and thought to talk to him just to give him a little boost to the ego. Sure, it doesn't really seem like...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The second novel in the series is Street Candles and it's one of the most intense and emotionally taxing things I've read in a long time. This review contains no spoilers beyond what you'd read on the back cover of the book.
You know how in sci fi, rebels stand up to the evil empire, and through persistent struggle and indefatigable resolve they overthrow their oppressors, and ewoks celebrate and credits roll? It's such a common storyline in sci fi that it sometimes seems like it's hard to find sci fi that's NOT about that. Street Candles is a book about rebellion and persistent struggle and oppression, and it's nothing at all like the other ones you've seen or read. David's version of the evil empire is one where the rebels and the government are two different sides of evil empire, except there are three sides because in rebellions there are often factions that find conflict in the power vacuum they create. Street Candles isn't really a story about the rebels or the government being overthrown, though. It's a story, of course, about the ordinary people doing ordinary things in the background, and whose everyday actions sometimes affect a whole planet. Or, more importantly, the life of one person
The first part of the story is classic Stardrifter space opera stuff. Ejoq is in a bind because his finances are being transferred from one bank to another, or something like that, and so he desperately needs work. He gets a job interview, he aces it, he joins the small crew of the GRIZZELDA, and they depart for a routine cruise to the planet Barlow. Their passengers are a news crew with a cheeseball reporter and the odd assortment of producers and camera operators. It's an easy gig, at least in theory. Shuttle the reporters to Barlow, chill out while they get their footage, and then shuttle them back home. What could go wrong?
The GRIZZELDA has 10 crew members including Ejoq. The last thing the ship owners (the senior officers of the crew) expect is to run into space combat, so having gunnery onboard is mostly an insurance policy. For that reasons, Ejoq has little to do all day, at least in theory, so part of his responsibilities are KP and steward to the passengers. In addition to that, though, he finds that the previous gunnery operator was maybe not as experienced as he could have been, and the ship's weapons systems are pretty much in shambles. So he spends every day literally catering to the passengers and overhauling the weapons computers.
This section of the story level-sets for what normal is like. It's a little like Motherload part 2. Shipboard life, troubleshooting systems, making up for other people's incompetence. I enjoyed this part because I identify strongly with it. Every early IT job I had was exactly this story. You walk into...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
Quick summary: Ilya Kuryakin and an airline attendant get stranded in the Sahara and stumble into the clutches of a captain who believes he's commanding a regiment of the Foreign Legion. Obviously there's other stuff that happens. THRUSH gets involved, Napoleon Solo attempts to come to the rescue, disrobed skydiving, betrayal, reunions, and more.
The plot doesn't really matter, because this is a concept episode. I believe this episode is about the many sides of fantasy, from repression to passion to enchantment. Of course, in a show about spies it could be argued that nearly every show is about a kind of fantasy, because spies necessarily deceive people, spinning fantastic illusions for people in order to whatever it is they want. But in this episode, the concept of fantasy is expressed in several different ways.
First, there's the delusional captain himself, who believes he's fighting in the Foreign Legion. He actually was in the Foreign Legion, but the country they were fighting in was liberated and so the Legion retreated. Well, everyone retreated but Captain Calhoun, anyway. He claimed and remained in the Fort, which was far away enough from civilisation that people just let him stay. The Captain lives a docile life, often gazing lovingly at a photograph of a woman from his past.
He has a faithful Corporal who has stayed with him. The Corporal knows the Legion has gone, and that the Captain is delusional, but he enjoys his regimented subservient life and so helps persist the illusion.
Make of that what you will.
The reason the Captain is delusional surfaces later, during a fever dream he has while recovering from a gunshot wound. It turns out that he was branded a coward while serving in the Irish army, and was forced into exile, when he joined the Foreign Legion. He calls out the name "Terence" several times, but it's unclear who that is.
Ilya Kuryakin's companion throughout the episode is Barbara, a French airline attendant. She says she's engaged, but it's hard to miss the chemistry between her and Ilya. OK, so Ilya is pretty stoic throughout, but she's devoted to him. I don't think the implication is that she's cheating on her fiance, but you might get the sense that this is her one-last-fling fantasy, even if the fling in question is just a lot of flirting.
It's with Barbara that Ilya Kuryakin, dressed only in his underclothes, skydives into the Sahara desert. She ends up fashioning him a thawb out of the parachute for Ilya to wear, and from then on they're inseparable, and it's really really charming.
Napoleon is also caught up in an unlikely situation. He's captured pretty quickly, of course, on his way to rescue Ilya. Conveniently for him, one of his captors is the alluring Aisha, a lonely housewife looking for a...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Code Black is a prequel to everything, and I do mean everything.
This review contains spoilers. It's a short story, so by discussing it at all there are contextual spoilers. Don't read on if you haven't read this story yet and want to experience it fresh.
The story of Code Black is literally about childbirth. That's not my favourite subject in the world, but I recognize that it's pretty important in the grand scheme of things. This particular birth happens on the CIC of a space station or ship in trouble.
The story opens during emergency evacuation of a space station or ship or something. Everyone's being shuttled away to safety. But amid all of that, a pregnant woman is pushing her way back toward CIC.
When she arrives, it's clear that she's a crewmember, and she's got vital information to relay. But everything's in chaos. Everyone's repsonding to an incoming threat, so much so that they don't even notice when the woman is bowled over by the sudden delivery of her child. There's somebody there who luckily manages to assist in some small measure, and he asks the woman what the child's name will be. It appears she hadn't given that much thought yet, and as she cradles the child in her arms, she listens to the crew around her frantically calling out "ejection on que" over and over as they manage the resources they have in the battle.
Ejection. On. Que.
The story's really short and there's not much to it aside from A Thing That Happened This One Time. I'm fine with those kinds of stories, and I'm happy to take the bait and discuss it.
First of all, evacuation means evacuation, so I feel like Ejoq's mother (presumably this is the story of Ejoq being born) is out of line here. I'd probably feel differently, were it demonstrated that she had brought indispensable information to the CIC, but I didn't get that that's what she'd done. The way I read it, she ultimately was just in the way. She'd probably been told to evacuate for her own safety, but instead she defied orders and ended up giving birth in the middle of an emergency situation. Not good for the bridge crew, not good for her, not good for her baby.
I don't think this is by any means an accident. I think author David Collins-Rivera is telling us something about Ejoq with this seemingly tangential story. We've learned a few important things:
I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
This episode successfully demonstrates the surprising depth of Warhammer 40,000. This is as aspect of Warhammer that's easy to overlook when you're focusing on just the tabletop games, or video games, or a subset of books. It's easy to think that Warhammer 40k is fiction about big guns and theocratic military campaigns. You might even think that the Imperium are the good guys.
I think you learn about the relativity of "good" pretty early on in Warhammer, or else you put it down and never come back to it. I almost did, after reading the first few books I'd bought. The protagonists in the book were on a literal crusade against an alien species, and the crime of the alien species was that they weren't human. You cannot cheer for that kind of protagonist. So you either put the book down, or you accept that you're engaging with a disturbing and horrific and, unfortunately, apt vision of humanity. You start to look at the story objectively, letting the series of plot events happen much as events happen on the news. You register them, and you catalogue them, and you promise yourself to never echo them. In fact, you do everything in your power, in real life, to embody exactly the opposite of the traits you've seen in this horrible dystopic future.
What's fascinating, though, is that there are no contant protagonists in Warhammer. What's "good" is defined by whatever that story's (or game's) protagonist wants.
In this episode, the protagonists are a band of Aeldari. They're space elves, and I vaguely know they exist from the tabletop games. I have no real experience with them from books, and what I know of their culture comes almost entirely from this episode. In other words, they're strangers to me, and I have no reason to favour them over the ork boyz of the Old Bale Eye episode or the Adepta Sororitas of A Question of Faith, and certainly not the space marines of Angels of Death.
It's worth saying that I'm watching this series ond the Angels of Death series in parallel. I've got 20 or 30 space marine miniatures that I use for tabletop games. I've read lots of books about space marines.
In this episode, the space marines are the antagonists. You're on the Aeldari side in this episode, just as you would be if you brought an Aeldari army or kill team to the tabletop.
I don't really know of any other fiction where you, as the participant, change allegiance so often. Usually, and possibly especially in sci fi, there's a clear good guy and a really obvious bad guy. Often, the baddies are bad because that's the way they were written, and we often...
]]>My first experiences in hobby shops (specifically, but not exclusively, a Warhammer store) were not great. And yet some of my best experiences in the hobby have happened in a Warhammer store. I think there's a secret to turning a geeky hobby, like building and paintng 28mm toy soldiers so you can play with them in a board game, into a non-threatening and fun experience. It's not always easy, depending on your disposition and other factors beyond your control, like the mood of the people around you. But it is possible, and it's a good skill to learn. I'm not perfect at it, but here's what I've discovered about making a social hobby fun.
I'd wandered into lots of Warhammer stores over the past decade or more, both in the USA and New Zealand, and every single time I was entirely or mostly ignored. It wasn't until I went into one after I'd started painting miniatures for Pathfinder games and approached the counter and asked directly for help choosing paint (I don't think I really understood yet that Warhammer wasn't just a general hobby store) that somebody talked to me. And then the information I got was way too much. The manager told me about paints, and then told me about the factions within Age of Sigmar, and the release schedule of the latest Citadel miniatures, and on and on. Completely overwhelming.
It seems there's no way to win here, right? I'm saying Warhammer either gave me too little attention or too much. But actually I've had the exact same problem in general hobby shops, too. And there is a middle ground, here.
The middle ground has to do with normal, everyday conversation. I'm an introvert, so I'm saying this about myself as much as I am about the Warhammer store manager. If you wander into a Warhammer or any hobby shop, tell the friendly staff why you're there. That might mean you have to ask yourself why you're there first. Then present your thoughts to the staff, and let them continue the conversation by either suggesting products for you to buy, or painting or building techniques, or whatever it is you're there for. I think it's fair to argue that in an ideal world, you shouldn't have to figure this out yourself. In an ideal world, maybe, the shop owner would approach you (because you're the customer with the money) and ask you probing questions to discover the best way to force you to part with your cash. For the amount of money you're potentially going to spend, don't they owe you that service? But then again, maybe that's not what you want. Maybe there's a kind of freedom that you can walk into a Warhammer or hobby shop and just browse without being interrogated about how the staff might surprise and delight you today.
The truth is, yes I've had some of my worst experiences in hobby shops at a Warhammer store, but I've...
]]>Deliver us from evil isn't quite a horror movie, but a supernatural police thriller. That's not usually my kind of movie, but I didn't know what kind of movie it was when I started watching. To be honest, it captured my attention for a while, as the two lead cops in the story (Sarchie and Butler) tried to piece together the connection between three different criminals they very conveniently interact with within the span of a few days. It was pretty obvious early on that it was possession, but of course Sarchie and Butler don't see that until the third act, even though they meet a plucky Jesuit priest convinced that something beyond human nature is the cause of all the violence.
About half way through the movie, the story starts leaning into a pretty traditional exorcism storyline. The priest convinces Sarchie that demons exist, and that only he can expel them from the bodies of the possessed. Sarchie resists at first, of course, and then act 3 happens. One of the big bads goes to Sarchie's house and kidnaps his daughter and wife, and then hangs around for Sarchie to give him an ultimatum. Sarchie surrenders to Satan and allows himself to become possessed, or his family dies. Luckily Sarchie has been well prepared for this kind of spiritual warfare by his new priest pal, and does not surrender to the demon's demands and instead takes him down to the station for an exorcism.
Exorcism happens, Sarchie gets his wife and kids back, months later his wife has a baby, whom they immediately baptise, and officially renounce evil as a family. We're told in a quick onscreen postscript that Sarchie later quits the police department and continues his work with the priest.
I think I don't like exorcism movies because the rules of an exorcism ritual are never clear. I have plenty of experience with [pretend] exorcisms and demon summoning in roleplaying games and fantasy novels, and the rules aren't just spelled out, they have goals and conditions and requirements, each one with actual number values so you can tell when something's succeeded or failed. When you're dealing with demons and devils in a game, you understand why one demon is able to telekinetically blast a holy symbol out of your hand, while the lesser demon could just jeer at you from within the circle of protection you've carefully drawn for it. Those [pretend] rituals make sense.
The rituals in movies might make sense to its writer, but it's not explained to the audience. Apparently the Judaeo-Christian god has power over demons, but demons can fight back? So it's not absolute power, I guess, which makes you wonder about just how powerful this god is supposed to be. Or is it the weakness of the cleric channeling the god's power who's weak? It's confusing.
Deliver us from evil does better than most, though. Before the ritual begins, the priest explains the six stages of an exorcism:
When I find art I love, I'm usually compelled to share and promote it, because that's what we humans do when we're excited about something. With independent art, though, that can be tricky because sometimes the art you love is literally one-of-a-kind, or it's only available from the artist directly, or worse yet it's no longer being distributed at all. This means that the art needing promotion the most can be the hardest art to share.
There are a few things that make sharing artwork complicated, and they're not all restricted to independent art. Here are 3 things you can do to make your art easier to share.
When you're a starving artist trying to sell artwork that nobody knows about and therefore doesn't want, it may seem counter productive to grant permission to your audience to indiscriminately share your work. It's basically like putting a "steal me" sticker on your work. But if you look at it another way, it's also a lot like getting a bunch of free advertisement.
The entertainment industry doesn't seem to want to admit it, but it has demonstrably benefited from the public's ability to make and share copies of movies and music. The copies themselves don't directly generate income, but it can successfully get an artist into the public's view, and some subset of that public has disposable income to purchase more of what they've discovered. People with disposable income buy entertainment for lots of reasons. Sometimes they do it to support the artist, sometimes to legitimize their collection, or because they're completionists, or because they want a physical copy, or because they want a limited collector's edition, and so on.
The problem is, the entertainment industry works pretty hard, as many corporate interests do, to focus on direct income. They tell people that sharing art is illegal and immoral, and this has created an awkward environment where people love something enough to share but feel bad about sharing it.
As an independent artist, be explicit about your stance on sharing. If you want people to share your work with friends, then tell them that. If you don't want people to promote your work, then tell them that.
Selling your art but letting people give away copies isn't a guarantee that people will become fans and customers, but it does grant your fans permission to promote your work.
If your working in a digital medium, it's a real favour to fans to create an archive of your work. Back when I started collecting independent art I found on the Internet, it never occurred to me that one day I might be the last person with a copy of it. I have digital paintings and music albums and short films and podcasts and audio books from 15 years ago that I just can't find online any more. Maybe they're on the Internet Archive someplace, but I can't locate them.
I'm not a one-of-a-kind kind of guy. I don't...
]]>In a previous post, I wrote about how tracking encumbrance made loot more "valuable" by enforcing a weight-based economy. However, tracking encumbrance can be hard. In theory, it's exclusively the responsibility of each player, but if the game master (GM) doesn't announce the weight of each item then a player can't accurately track weight. And anyway, if no one's ever checking to see whether the weight limits have been exceeded, then is there really a weight limit?
Here are some of the ways I've helped weight limits matter in games.
Assign a party treasurer. It's this player's job to track each member's items.
When I've used this method, the player who ends up as treasurer is often the one who actually cares about in-game accounting. It's the person who enjoys tracking weight and rations and who's got what. Because of this, I've never felt compelled to audit the spreadsheet as the game master.
Create a shared spreadsheet using Ethercalc or similar. Players maintain their own inventory, and the game master can audit.
I like to be able to audit the party inventory not to make sure everyone's playing "honestly." Instead, it helps me prepare the game. When I know what player characters have in their inventory, I can create opportunities for them to get good use out of the items they have.
As a game master, if you want your players to track weight, then you must provide the weight of each item a character picks up. Frustratingly, D&D rarely provides the weight of loot in a module, which means you have to turn to the Equipment chapter of the Player's Handbook, cross-reference the item, and provide the weight. It's frankly a lot of work and can slow the game down.
This is why it's often nice to have a party secretary. A party secretary is in charge of looking stuff up while the treasurer enters items into inventory. This gives the party something to do while looting a corpse or a hoard, which is nice for the game master because that means there's suddenly time to read ahead and prepare for the next encounter.
However, Starfinder elegantly abstracts weight to "bulk." An item is either 1 bulk or some fraction of a bulk, and in my experience Starfinder modules reliably provide the weight of loot in bulk, making it easy to tell players what the characters have found and how much it weighs.
Erasing and re-filling in the inventory list on a character sheet can get messy. For my in-person games, I've used a system where I deal cards to players to represent items. I'm not talking about special item cards, I just use standard poker cards. Here's how the system works.
In the Warhammer 40k universe, there were originally 20 chapters of space marines. Two have been lost, leaving 18 today (meaning in the 41st millennium). There's a convenient even split within these 18 legions, with 9 being loyalist troops in service to the fascist Emperor and the other 9 being dedicated to the selfishness forces of chaos.
Because each chapter of space marine has factions within them, you do sometimes hear a lot of names being thrown around, and it can make it hard to remember what's at the top of the family tree.
This is a list of the 9 space marine loyalist chapters and the 9 traitor legions as they exist in the 41st millennium. They're listed by legion number, along with their primary colour scheme (using Contrast Paint name, when available from Citadel), a notable trait, and Primarch.
Lots of material to explore! You really get to know the Primarchs in the Horus Heresy books, and obviously the Black Library and Codexes have lots of material to read.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The second story in the series is Hull Breach. This review contains no spoilers.
Here's the unnecessary but obligatory disclaimer! I know the author, David Collins-Rivera, personally (he and I wrote the RPG supplements d100 OSR Traps and d100 Cursed Items together) but that doesn't influence what I write about his books, because I only publish positive reviews on this blog. When I don't like something, I don't waste time writing about it.
In the previous book, Ejoq battled space pirates and lived to tell the tale (well, if you read it, you know what I mean). In this story, he's teaching a certification course on civilian ship gunnery systems. He's actually a minor character in this story, though. This story is about a 16 year girl who's unexpectedly pregnant, living with her very conservative aunt and uncle after having been raised on the streets for most of her life. They aren't happy she's there, she's not happy to be there, she has no idea what she's going to do with her life, and so she's enrolled in a certification training course that she's not really ready for and that she'll probably fail.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is what makes the Stardrifter setting great or, said another way, it's what makes David such a great storyteller. The f irst book was all about magnetic alignment systems in a power core and a power struggle within the ranks of not-so-magnetic personalities. This one's about a working single mother-to-be, named Talu (I listened to the audiobook, so I could be spelling it wrong), who's out of her depth in life and in school, and who receives an unexpected revelation from an off-hand remark made by a convenience store clerk.
That's not sci fi, that's just...normal drama. But that's what Stardrifter can be, when it needs to be. It's a setting for space opera and for soap opera.
I know that pretty much any setting can withstand a little personal drama. I've seen an episode of Warhammer TV about a woman's love for her pet (sure it was a robot, but it's the future). There have been entire episodes of Star Trek that were about minor cultural differences, or fears about starting a new job, or getting funding for a school. Stardrifter isn't exactly forging new ground by telling stories about the humans within its universe, but this story broadcasts a few things about both humanity and the Stardrifter setting.
First of all, humanity's holding the line in the future. In the first book, after Sally reported her ex-husband for abuse, the authorities did something about it. They didn't write it off as a personal matter between her and the man she made the mistake of marrying. In this story, there's a lot of compassion. Talu attends classes expecting failure. She's been set up for it all...
]]>In hacker culture, there's the adage that you should always "use the source". In programming, the source is code, like Java or Python. It's usually called, literally, the "source code". In other sciences, it's a series of steps you can repeat to achieve specific rezults (it's an algorithm). It's important for a lot of reasons, but one the most obvious reasons is that it establishes that what you think you know is actually correct. And when you pass on that knowledge to someone else, looking at the source helps the affirm that what you claim to be true is actually true.
For example, if I told you that I just transferred a million dollars to your (I'm talking to you, dear reader) bank account, then you might not believe me right away. After all, I don't know you, I presumably have no way of knowing your bank account number, and I have no reason to gift you a million dollars. But if I continue to insist that I've given you a million dollars, you might be compelled to go look at your bank account. Your bank account is the source of truth for the purposes of your personal finances, so when you check it to see whether I've deposited any money for you, you're going to the source (and finding nothing but disappointment).
In real life, you develop trust relationships to help you constrain how often you feel compelled to check the sources of information you receive, and you also make choices based on your own priorities about whether you care to check the source. You trusted your parent or guardian implicitly for at least some part of your childhood, so everything they told you was perceived as not just the truth but also the source of that truth.
If you believed in Santa Claus as a child, you probably believed because your parent or guardian told you Santa Claus existed. As an adult though, you've learned to be discerning about what people tell you. It takes time and repetition for anybody in your life to reach the trust level of unquestioning acceptance. When your partner tells you something, you probably accept most of it (but not everything) as true because you trust your partner. On the other hand, when your boss at work tells you something about work, you might accept it as true because you're not getting paid to investigate whether the company's assumptions or assertions are correct or not (unless you are, in which cas you probably do question it as part of your appointed duties).
As an adult, you understand that you can discover the truth about something that actually matters to you by going as far back to the source of the statement as possible. When someone tells you that a new herbal extract has hundreds of health benefits, you know you can either accept it or you can hunt down repeatable and reliable studies proving or disproving the claims. It's not always...
]]>Last year, I developed and published Skuffle Wammer, the universe's smallest wargame. It's designed to be played in 5 minutes or less, with the intent of being the tabletop gaming equivalent of a good stand-up-and-stretch at work. The play area is an A4 sheet of paper, you throw out some miniatures and some dice, and play to the end. The dice are used as both ammunition and as hit points, and each mini possesses just 3d6, and its rules are just half a page, so it really is a fast and fun game, and easy to play. Lately I've been experimenting with expansion ideas, and my first idea is to bring some ghouls into play.
If you've read my first dev diary entry about zombies in Skuffle Wammer, then you know I've already done half the work for ghoul rules. In fact, in a way I've done the hardest half: the parts that don't work. So I started this process feeling pretty confident in what I wanted.
Ghouls are undead, so they're brittle. They come apart pretty easily, so a ghoul starts with 1 die less than the opposing miniatures.
However, they've got really sharp claws and really big teeth (just take a look at the ur-ghul from Blackstone Fortress, or any ghoul in any fantasy property). To reflect its lethality, a ghoul in Skuffle Wammer hits on 1 or higher (1+) on a d6. Functionally, that's an auto-hit, but it does cost a die so they have limited use of that ability.
Based on early zombie playtests (which, due to a mix-up, were actually done as ghoul playtests anyway), I expect an equal number of ghouls to be defeatable. By the numbers, the "good guy" miniatures could stand around and take 2 hits each from the ghouls, and then roll their remaining die and win the game with just one hit. But that assumes 1:1 distribution of hits, and any Shadowrunner knows that ghouls run in packs. A group of 3 ghouls swarming a single miniature kills it in 3 hits, and then can move to the next one to kill it with their remaining 3 hits, and then there's one more ghoul left to deal 2 more damage to the third marine. You still end up with 4d6 to roll against the ghouls, but you need 2 hits of 4+ to win. Looking at it that way, it's kind of anybody's game.
In the first playtest, my marines won with only one casualty, wiping out every single ghoul. It sounds like a slaughter, but I really wasn't sure which way it was going to go during play. Rolling 4+ to hit is uncertain, and the marines rolled pretty poorly at first. One had a chainsword so I moved him into melee right away, and he hit on 3+. That helped a lot, and I think when you're going up against ghouls you...
]]>I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The first book in the series is the novella Motherload, and it introduces not only the main character of the Stardrifter series but also the sci fi universe that serves as the setting. This review contains no spoilers.
Here's the unnecessary but obligatory disclaimer! I only publish positive reviews on this blog. When I don't like something, I don't waste time writing about it. The fact that I know David Collins-Rivera personally (he and I wrote the RPG supplements d100 OSR Traps and d100 Cursed Items together) doesn't influence what I write about his books. I'm only writing about his books because I enjoy them.
David describes Stardrifter as "stories about an ordinary guy doing ordinary things" and the first part of Motherload threatens to make good on that unspectacular promise. I picked up Stardrifter because I needed less "science fantasy" on my reading list and more hard sci fi. Well, the first third of Motherload is pure procedural science fiction. A ship's flux capacitor (or dilithium crystal, or something) is out of alignment. Sensor readouts are analysed, power generators are repaired, conduits are connected through tubes and over wires. I mean, it's serious technobabble, and it's convincing enough that it awoke memories of my time in computer labs, troubleshooting motherboards and reading serial output from ROM chips. I know this isn't real, and yet it appeals to that part of my brain that loves nothing more than sitting by the fire and reading technical manuals.
It was an incredibly tense couple of shifts. Sally and I did a hasty EVA to rip off the housing around the feed lines to the plasma exhaust. We used hydraulic grippers and vibrosaws that the others said had made a heck of a racket inside. The job, once done, was really messy. It would be a costly repair for the consortium that owned DAME MINNIE, but I figured we weren't going to be hired again anyway...
But wait, it's not all pretend technical jargon. It's actually a clever vehicle for introducing you to the crew of the ship, a random assortment of blue collar workers who happened to get hired to man the vessel (or the "boat", as they call it, which I love) . They don't all necessarily like each other, or even know that much about one another, and not all of them are very likable in general.
Ejoq is the main character of the series. He's a little overweight, maybe shorter that he'd like, and functionally he's a space handiman. Actually he's a gunnery specialist, which I'd forgoten since my first read of this book, but really he comes across as a jack of all trades. He knows a little bit about a lot, he can usually fake what he doesn't know, and for crying out loud all he wants is a steady pay check. In other words, he's my perfect idea...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
A two-part episode. It's mostly good, although the main plot is the least interesting thing about it. The story is something I feel like we must have seen before, or maybe it's the reverse of one. There's a new science thing that reverses age, and UNCLE wants to keep it out of the hands of THRUSH. It's an easy MacGuffin plot.
What's great about these episodes are the unexpected subplots, and because it's a two-part episode there's plenty of time for those to be developed. Here are some examples.
Ilya Kuryakin is in London, tracking down stray cats. He does it mostly under the cover of night, and it's a lot more contentious than you might expect. There's a major confrontation over one of the cats. Somebody gets shot. Why cats? Nobody knows.
A bitter fashion designer blames men for keeping her out of politics. But she's in love with an aging man who was once an instructor at her school. She's willing to do anything for him.
One of the scientists who developed the age reversal process is getting younger. Trouble is, he's gone missing.
There are endless plot gems like that in this episode. They're little hints of intrigue that don't seem to connect, until they do.
It doesn't happen often, or maybe it does but you miss it at first, but it was this episode that made me realise that Waverly is written to be infallible. He's not a good spy, he's the definitively great spy. I knew he was sarcastic and witty, and maybe disturbingly casual about near-death experiences, but I hadn't noticed the pattern that when Waverly is called in, he consistently takes over the operation and is absolutely effective. In this episode, he chides the THRUSH agent holding him at gun point, and then taunts him by speculating that his umbrella could very well be a deadly weapon. It isn't, but it does have a lighter at the end of it, which he uses to light the THRUSH agent's cigarette. He lets himself be captured, but comments to Napoleon Solo that he's got to be back in New York by noon, so he can't take too long. Of course, they're out of captivity within minutes, triggering the end game.
As I've observed before, this TV show uses failure as a central plot device. Solo and Kuryakin have to fail more often than they succeed, because that's the way the show conveys suspense. I don't think the modern technique of escalating threats, or weaving a more complex plot as a response to success, had made its way to USA evening TV yet. This isn't Dr. Who, where the protagonist has the upper hand and yet still faces real challenges. This is The Man from UNCLE, and THRUSH has to win a lot in order to be a valid threat, and to compel viewers to...
]]>Everybody has their own tolerance levels for how much paperwork in an RPG they feel is fun. For some people, updating their character sheet is a milestone system for their character. It's as much a part of the game as NPC interactions, decisions, strategy, solving puzzles, and so on. For others, a character sheet is a perfunctory obligation performed at the start of a game, and only begrudgingly updated. In either case, it seems that one of the most laborious tasks is calculating a character's limitations for carrying loot. Not only are you meant to write down an item you've acquired during a game session, but you're supposed to write down the item's weight, add it to the total, but you're also meant to remove items and weight when you sell or use an item. It's a fair bit of work, and if you're using paper then it's a lot of erasing.
I acknowledge this, and I don't think tracking weight is necessarily for every game. But in some cases, me and my players get a lot out of enforcing encumbrance rules.
When every item you pick up weighs nothing, the value of every item is essentially equal. There are minor differences that may make one item more valuable than another to a player, such as the amount of damage a weapon deals. Aside from that, though, ignoring weight makes all loot the same. It's some imaginary stuff you throw into an imaginary bag and then forget about.
This has some severe effects on your game.
First of all, you should never feel that loot is imaginary. Obviously we all know everything in the game is imaginary, but you still feel anxiety when a big creature pops out of the shadows. Likewise, you should earnestly feel excited when you find loot. You should feel anxiety when you have to decide whether to drop the gemstone you found earlier so you can pick up the gold-encrusted skull.
Just as importantly, you should feel a sense of accomplishment when you have just the right item at just the perfect moment. And you should feel frustration when you had the right item, but left it behind because you were carrying too much and really really wanted that gold-encrusted skull instead.
These are game moments you don't get when there's no carry limit. When you're able to collect everything you ever encounter, there's no decision to make. And when there's no decision to make, you can't you look back at the path you've taken and reflect on how clever you were for arriving at this moment.
If you did have to consider how much stuff you could carry, what would be the deciding factor for what you picked up and what you left behind? You might consider damage amount and type for weapons, anticipated monetary value at the next market you encounter, significance of the item to an important NPC,...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
Warhammer is an impossibly complex world, but nobody really cares about that. The reason we care about Warhammer 40k is because the stories told in its universe are also impossibly complex. This episode is pretty straight-forward. Two Adepta Sororitas are standing guard in their fallen fortress. They've clearly been under seige by cultists of Khorne, and they're the last two battle sisters left standing.
One of the sisters relates the story of Saint Josephine, who did some brave stuff in battle or something. Who knows, doesn't matter. It's saint stuff.
The Khorne raiders reappear, the sisters fight to the last, and when everything looks hopeless, one of them says a prayer to Saint Josephine.
The reason this is a great episode has less to do with its plot than the questions and reflections it might inspire in the viewer. Basically this is a Christmas episode. Bad things happen, and then through faith, something magical happens. It's maybe a little too neat and tidy, and it's also absolutely effective.
Whether you decide to start saying nightly oblations to Saint Josephine (I recommend against it, for the record), this episode is likely to make you think about your own method of generating hope in your life. What are the myths you hold onto? What kind of miracles are you waiting for? What impossible thing do you actually, maybe secretly or maybe proudly, believe to be possible?
This is good sci fi. The story is simple, the action is routine, but the way it makes you think about belief and faith is pure confrontational science fiction.
You don't have to see it that way, of course. Warhammer 40k isn't hard sci fi, so any amounts of faith or magic in this story is easy to accept as actual magic. Maybe there's no provocation here. Maybe the Emperor really is a god. But then again, maybe not. Maybe blind faith is, or force of will, or some aspect of the warp.
A lot of people love when sci fi makes you question your assumptions, and I think there's real potential that this episode is designed to do just that.
This is great Warhammer 40,000. I'm as fascinated by the Adepta Sororitas as the next guy, but I know nothing about them. I haven't read any book about them, I don't own any miniatures of them. I'd never heard of Saint Josephine, and I'm not sure anyone had until this episode because I couldn't find any information about her after a minute of searching online. But by the end of this episode, you believe in the power of Saint Josephine.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
The Angels of Death series on Warhammer TV is one of my favourite Warhammer shows. The Origins series provides, as its subtitle implies, prequels to the original story. The first episode, Kill Command provides the history of how Solken came to be in command of the Sword of Baal. This is my review of the episode, and it does contain spoilers.
I like the Blood Angels as a space marine chapter (the Flesh Tearers specifically, for possibly obvious name-related reasons), and Shipmistress Livia Solken is one of my favourite characters in this show. Solken is easy to appreciate, and also dangerous enough to warrant appreciation no matter how you feel about her. On one hand, Solken is a fiercely determined captain with super cool black-mask eye makeup, unshakable resolve, and a cool Imperial Naval uniform.
On the other hand, she exists in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. That means she's a total religious and militaristic fanatic. In the Warhammer universe, though, those are good qualities to have, and I'd definitely want her on my side in a tabletop battle. Over the course of the first series, we didn't get a lot of time with Shipmistress Solken, and yet her character still stood out against the rest of the cast. By the end of the series, we knew enough about Solken to know what to expect from a prequel, and her Origins episode doesn't disappoint or betray her established character.
Kill Command opens after a catastrophic battle has left Sword of Baal crippled. Most of its bridge crew is dead, and only Livia Solken along with the Master of Ordinance and Constance, the Master of Augurs, remain. After making the executive decision to not remove the debris that has literally impaled her, for fear of bleeding out, Solken decides to assume command of the vessel. The Master of Ordinance protests based on time of service (he and Livia are equal in rank, but he's been aboard longer), and then explains that there's no use in staying to fight because firing weapons now would overheat and destroy their own gunnery deck.
Solken, practically growling with conviction, explains that it's not their duty to run from a fight. After all, Sanguinius didn't run from his fate (and he even had forewarning of his death). She says "Only those absent the darkness of despair can be permitted to sail in the black of the Void" and then shoots the Master of Ordinance, dead with a single shot.
And that's how Livia Solken became Shipmistress.
It's hard to tell brutality from nobility in the Warhammer 40k universe, because in the wargame there's no difference. These animated shows are tabletop wargames come to life, so in the fiction there's functionally no difference as long as it's the protagonist. In this context, Shipmistress Livia Solken is the protagonist, and she's flat out unquestionably amazing.
Once she's assumed command, she must appease the machine spirit of the Sword of Baal. This is a procedure...
]]>I track the passage of time in my RPGs, and so should you, and it's actually easy. This blog post tells you how.
A deck of cards. If possible, use Pathfinder or Starfinder cards, or something similar. You'll see why.
Set your deck of cards on the table. When an hour of in-game time passes, take a card from the deck and place it in the discard pile.
How do you know when an hour passes in-game? It depends.
Tracking time in a dungeon (or a similarly insulated and linear environment) is easy: 1 room on your map equals 1 hour.
Yes, sometimes players go into a room, do a single perception check, and then leave upon finding it empty. It takes 20 seconds of real time. But in-game, this simple interaction represents player characters moving cautiously into a darkened room, shining their torch into every corner, and painstakingly searching every crevice for a hidden panel or secret door. Even when nothing happens in a room, the assumption is that the players tried to make something interesting happen. That's what they're there for. They're delving into dungeons for wealth or for fame or to find a kidnapped noble or to defeat a nefarious plot. They are NOT breezing past alcoves, they're not obliviously speed-walking through corridors. They're moving slowly, methodically, and carefully, and it takes time. One location on the map = 1 hour, no exceptions.
when something does happen in a room (PCs find some loot, or a secret door, or engage in combat), you have the option of adding another hour to that location. Even though combat happens very quickly, it's fair to assume that recovering from combat (calming your nerves after a near-death experience, cleaning your weapons, looting the body) adds considerable time to the event.
When gameplay is happening outside of a dungeon, it's a little harder to track time. Story progression in dungeons usually rely on changes in location. When players move from one room to another, they encounter the next plot point. Outside a dungeon, the location may not need to change as frequently for the story to progress.
I find that a good indication of stuff happening outside the dungeon are dice rolls. Whether it's a nature or orienteering roll to find your way through wilderness, or a persuasion or diplomacy roll to convince an NPC to help you, or just plain old combat, when there's dice rolling, it probably means an hour passes. As in the dungeon, sometimes an hour seems like a lot. After all, combat happens in 6-second rounds. A simple persuasion check to convince a vendor to give you a discount on chainmail surely wouldn't take a whole hour. But actually, I find that when dice roll, it's usually because activity is happening. Maybe the roll itself is for a simple interaction, but the player characters had walk to the store, they had to meander around, get the...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
There's a mole in UNCLE! Classified documents have been removed from headquarters, and it's Napoleon Solo's job to find out who removed them. Waverly has to go to Japan, so he gives Solo a priority ring, colloquially known as a "Waverly ring". It's sort of like a class ring, only it explodes ("more of a boom than a bang," Waverly assures Solo) if you remove it. The upshot is that it affords the wearer ultimate authority over any UNCLE agent. Not magically or scientifically, it's just a special ring that all agents know indicates that its wearer has the same level of authority as Waverly.
It's up to Napoleon to uncover the traitorous spy, so obviously all the new faces we see around the UNCLE office are instantly suspects.
One of the prime suspects is the unnaturally likable agent George. He's officially a security specialist in Division 4. From what I know of the physical security at UNCLE, I have to admit that George is a pretty good candidate. In season 1, THRUSH agents strong-armed their way into UNCLE offices, a woman wandered into the UNCLE office while undressing, and Waverly's brother pen-tested the office and nearly put UNCLE out of business. Honest mistakes, or carefully designed backdoors successfully exploited? Only George knows for sure.
As with the previous episodes dealing with questionable alliances, this was a really engaging and clever episode. It doesn't hurt that the guest cast is so darned likable. Everyone in this episode is a pleasure to spend time with, and I honestly wondered whether George was being prepared as a backup plan in case Robert Vaughn or David McCallum (Solo and Kuryakin) left the show, he's that likable. I'll never know, but this was a fun episode and it really did have me guessing right up until the end.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I think a lot of us gamers think that tabletop roleplaying games are exhilarating at the beginning, but that they tend to taper off toward the end. Commonly, this is expressed as "the problem with high level play." I sense that it's seen as more of a problem in class-based systems that emphasize the goal of leveling up, specifically D&D and similar systems. I've written before about how I think D&D essentially shifts the roles of player and Game Master after level 10, with the players being the "defendants" at the start of the game but changing to the "prosecution" by the end. I think there's more to high level play than that, though, and I think that high level is fun, or can be if done correctly, in both class and skill based systems. Here are 5 ways to ensure high level play for your favourite game is satisfying for everyone.
First of all, no matter how high level a character is, damage still kills. No player goes into an encounter thinking there's no chance of losing. There's always a risk, especially in an imaginary world.
Use that to your advantage. Try luring players into combat with a threat well below their level. Once they've taken the bait, trigger something big. The oil rig they've hunted the low-level gang to self-destructs (that one's from experience), the castle suddenly gets swallowed by a volcano, the abandoned spaceship comes to life and sends disruptive surges of energy through the beings infesting it. Whatever it is, make it hit hard. It's scary no matter what your level when the Game Master shrugs and says "Oh that's not too bad. You just take 71 points of damage."
This isn't an all-the-time thing, it's just a good way to remind players that death is a possibility even for a level 20 player, or a player with a pool of 21 dice, or a player with 10 ranks in a d10 skill.
Other times, the exact opposite approach is the right approach, which leads me to...
The more experienced the character, the more they're likely to have at their disposal. When a character has seen it all, endured every threat, maybe even died once or twice, that character probably has all the skill ranks or all class features they'll ever get. Hitting that character over the head with the biggest creature your favourite bestiary has to offer can get a little repetitive after a while.
Instead, use environmental and external factors as threats. A character might have a hacking skill that's essentially impossible to fail. But that doesn't help against that new hybrid biotech virus that's been going around.
Or maybe a character has immunity to every kind of damage possible in the game. But that's of little use against the magical field causing rapidly increasing levels of exhaustion.
Direct damage gets players' hearts pumping, but it's the environment...
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. Litanies of the Lost is a book containing four adventures that can be run independently or as a continuous campaign. The framework requires the IMPERIUM keyword, and the first adventure is for Tier 1 or 2 characters.
This review contains spoilers.
The first adventure is called Grim Harvest and it's almost entirely social intrigue. First, the Game Master reads up on the troubled society on an agri-settlement called Ancra. Then the players are let loose in that world to solve all of its problems.
The background information is deceptively detailed. There's 17 pages of background for the Game Master, and the actual adventure is only 11 pages. However, most elements in the adventure's setting are flexible, so the Game Master only has to understand a few key conflicts of interest. The rest is just reacting to the actions of the players.
Ancra (the agri-settlement) has fallen behind on food production. The player characters are sent in to fix the problem.
That's the setup. When players help any one faction, the other two start asking questions and throwing around accusations of favouritism. Players can choose between a delicate balancing act of diplomacy, or a firm hand of absolutism.
With a little investigation, players inevitably discover that all isn't as it seems on Ancra. It turns out that the drop in production is due to the mysterious disappearances of whole shifts of agricultural workers out in the fields. The local population has come to call the phenomenon "the grim harvest", and a militia called the Children of Dawn has sprung up in the superstitious belief that nearby ancient ruins are somehow related. The more the Adeptus Mechanicus wants to explore the ruins, the more the militia protects it for fear of angering ancient spiritual forces, and the more they work to sabotage the servitors in use to offset the effect of the depleting workforce.
This is a well-structured adventure, with lots of opportunities to sit around a table together and debate, both in character and out of character, the merits of each faction. I certainly have a personal bias toward Adeptus Mechanicus, personally, but were I playing an Adepta Sororitas character obviously I'd defer to the Ecclesiarchy. But then again, the Administratum surely ought to have the final say in how production proceeds, so other characters could easily argue for working with it.
There's an opportunity to "dungeon crawl", should the player characters manage to get into the ancient ruins. If you're used to D&D-style adventuring, then this is a fascinating exercise in how game design can express the same actions in a completely different way. In this adventure, there's no...
]]>Some people have the impression that solo games, or playing multiplayer games by yourself, are consolation for people with no friends. The assumption is that it's "normal" to buy a game for your family or your game group, and that you'd only resort to a solo game when there's something wrong. Maybe you're one of those people who can't find friends, and has no family, or whose partner thinks games are a waste of time or too complex. While those are all valid reasons to play a game designed for one player, they're not the only reasons. Solo gaming has no gatekeeper. You're allowed to buy a single-player game regardless of your social circumstances, and here are 8 good reasons you should.
In this blog post, I'm using "solo game" to refer to three types of games:
Some solo gamers wouldn't consider the last variety true solo games. To an extent, I agree. A game designed exclusively for multiple players should never be advertised as a possible solo game, because nearly all games are solo games to someone willing to control multiple player tokens. However, I've played several multi-player games as a single player, sometimes by inventing my own solo rules and other times by playing several roles, and it can be a lot of fun.
In the context of this blog post, a "solo game" is anything you might enjoy playing as a single player.
Playing a game solo means you get to play a game exactly the way you want to play it. You don't have to follow the rules included in the box. You can add your own rules, you can ignore rules in the rulebook. You can bring a gun to a knife fight. You don't have to play the game from start to finish. You can introduce new challenges, you can mix two different games together, you can use 12-sided die instead of 6-sided die, you can do whatever comes to mind.
Whatever you want to do is fair game when you're the only player.
The concepts of being a good sport, and of being a team player, are vital for making games fun for everyone involved. And when you're the only one involved, none of it matters. When you play a game solo, you can do whatever is the most fun for you, even if it would normally aggravate or cheat other players.
That might mean making up your own rules, or conversely it might mean adhering to the rules as written regardless of how broken they are. Or it could mean playing for some goal other than the win condition.
Playing alone also means you don't have to be sociable. I enjoy gaming with friends, but for it to be fun for everyone...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
Tiny.
Killer.
Bees.
That's the episode. But the actual plot is about failure.
Everything Kuryakin tries in this episode fails spectacularly. He fails to apprehend the villain, he leads the villain into UNCLE headquarters and still fails to apprehend him, he caves under torture, he fails to protect the civilian he ropes into his mission, his private communications are overheard. He's not the only one rubbish at his job, though. He and Solo enlist a common taxi driver to outrun professional secret agents, leading to an unsurprising car wreck. Solo snoops around and gets captured and subdued by an old scientist armed with a single killer bee.
It's a disaster, probably the worst secret agenting yet. At first, it really annoyed me. I guess it still does. However, it also made me realise that actually this is one of the show's main formulæ. Any viewer that's made it to this point in the show's run has to be used to Solo and Kuryakin screwing up. They do all kinds of stupid things all the time. They don't wear disguises and are recognised as UNCLE agents more often than not. They don't make plans in the face of impossible odds, and the plans they do make usually fail. When their plans fail, they have no contingency. They endanger the lives of civilians, they get captured and nearly killed.
Basically, they're a joke, and kind of have been since the first season. It's pretty obvious why. The show needs drama and tension, and our protagonists failing is one way to generate that.
Modern shows often position the protagonists as an undefeatable force. They're the best at what they do, they always have the upper hand, they can't fail. I don't think that's a modern invention, but it's pretty common these days and so it seems a little odd for UNCLE to fail so often. But I think the idea is that things don't always go well for the protagonists, so they have to figure out how to get out of threatening situations. The danger to that technique is that it can sometimes look like comedy. Put too much failure in one episode, and you've got Get Smart instead of UNCLE.
What makes this episode work to the extent that it does is from constant failure comes the elation of success in the end. It's a surprising twist, actually, and it's actually exhilarating to see Kuryakin get frustrated enough at his own performative imbalance that he tries one last daring act...and succeeds. And it's all the sweeter, of course, that it's all for the love of a pretty lady.
The killer bees plot is OK, although it feels perfunctory. It's obviously just an excuse to tell the story of Illya Kuryakin's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. By the end of it all, I think it successfully pulls it off, and now that I...
]]>I've run Sunless Citadel, originally published for 3rd Edition and most recently printed in the Tales from the Yawning Portal book, a few times and thought I'd give my thoughts on running it in either Pathfinder or D&D. In my experience, it's more or less a perfect adventure for almost any purpose. It's flexible, at least within the confines of being a dungeon crawl, with lots of controls for making it a short or a long campaign, and a diplomatic or hack-and-slash game.
Potential players: This post includes minor spoilers, but only if you plan to play it and you want everything to be a total surprise. I'm not discussing any plot points, but I mention mechanical aspects that may reveal a thing or two about the map and general setting.
The module as printed in TFYP is just 21 pages, but don't let that fool you. It took a group of 3 players 8 weeks, playing 2 hours a week, to complete the adventure, and even then there were rooms left unexplored. There are over 50 locations in the adventure, and that's not including the nearby town.
And the initial map you see in the book is just the first level. There's a lower level to the dungeon that's not evident until three-quarters of the way through. And the lower level is not small.
Fortunately, the plot of this module is both simple and flexible. As Dungeon Master, it's easy to keep the story focused or to allow the players to draw it out as long as they want. Here are the "control knobs" I've used:
Long: Tell the players about the goblin and apple plot line and the missing adventurers plot line.
Short: Use just the goblin and apple plot. As they delve into the dungeon, they'll learn more about the origin of the apple, and come to understand their ultimate goal. The missing adventurers are relegated to unexplained backstory elements.
Long: Leave it up to the players.
Short: Plant a secret door somewhere that leads to the boss fight. Alternately, there's nothing saying the boss can't be mobile. Bring the fight to the players.
There are two warring factions in Sunless Citadel, and your players can either choose sides or attempt to bridge the gap between them and come to a peaceful resolution.
I feel like the adventure assumes players are going to choose sides, but arguably there's no right choice, at least not within the bounds of alignment. Do you want to help the kobolds nurturing an evil dragon?...
]]>I play a lot of tabletop RPG and wargames and board games, and I'll admit I'm often drawn to the ones with complex rules, but that doesn't mean I want every game I play to have complex rules. Sure, part of the fun of tabletop gaming for me is seeing how the interaction of rules affect the simulated world of the game, but tabletop gaming is called "gaming" for a reason. Sometimes I actually want to just sit down and have fun. And that's why I developed Havoc, a simple RPG with 6 hit points and a death wish. And I've just released it under the new ORC license.
First thing's first. The fun part. The game itself.
You can watch this article on Youtube.
Havoc core rules fits on one page, but the book I've published on Drivethrurpg.com contains about 20 pages of detail in case you need more explanation, and 40 pages of ideas for the Game Master. I designed the game to answer a few problems I have with most RPG systems. Here they are, one by one, along with how Havoc solves them.
The relationship of mechanics and a game's genre is one of the most fascinating aspects of RPG game design. Why do most fantasy games favour a class-based system, while modern and sci fi games tend to use skill-based systems? Is it habitual, because the first RPG used a class-based system, or is there really something to the idea of quasi-historical archetypes and myths that just make sense for that genre? Why does a d100 system seem reasonable for some games but not for others? The list goes on, and it's fun to ponder, but I think it's actually academic.
No matter what genre of RPG you're playing, it all boils down to rolling dice to find out whether what you want your character to do is what your character actually does. Havoc has no genre. Its rules are simple, governing success or failure and little else. Play it in a fantasy setting, a sci fi setting, horror, secret agent, whatever you want.
Nobody wants to get invited to a game only to spend 2 hours filling out tax forms, and that's what character creation can feel like. Character creation in Havoc is this:
That's it, start playing.
The one thing I tend to hate about being a Game Master is setting target numbers (such as a Difficult Class in Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder). It feels too much like playing god when I just...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. The final chapter is a bestiary with an assortment of new monsters for Ravenloft. D&D monsters are a pretty easy target. Dungeon Masters always need new monsters, and Ravenloft-inspired monsters not only provide new terrors for players to contend with, they're also an opportunity to expound upon the already [morbidly] fascinating lore of the setting.
The chapter introduction took me by surprise, though. It's a section on creating your own monsters. That's already been explained in the Monster Manual, but this method takes a different approach. It mostly uses the old "re-skinning" technique, where you invent your own creature concept while using the stats of some monster that approximates what you're imagining. Maybe instead of fire damage, you tell your players they're being dealt cold damage, and maybe instead of an earthquake effect you impose an ice storm effect, but all the adjustments you make are pure "flavour." The intro of this chapter, though, describes reflavouring an existing monster, plus some customization by borrowing abilities from other monsters.
I know not every DM requires "permission" to mix and match monsters, but I think it's great to have a discussion about building monsters here. It emphasizes the flexibility of the game, and the importance of DM creativity. It takes a little experimentation and a lot of experience, but once a DM understands how to balance their game, the ability to customize threats to a party is essential. No two parties are exactly alike, and if you try to limit challenges to off-the-shelf monsters, the game just isn't as fun for anyone. The first couple of pages in chapter 5 do an excellent job of explaining how to do that.
The one problem I have with this bestiary is that the monsters lack alignment. I realise that in 5e, there's almost no need for alignment any more, because very few spells or abilities use alignment. In previous editions, there were very cool abilities that relied on alignment, which simultaneously limited and empowered players. For instance, you might have a bane or smite ability that only works against evil creatures. This made you extra powerful against some creatures, and send you running for your life when faced with a neutral creature. D&D 5e doesn't really have abilities like that, and the concept of alignment seems to be falling out of favour.
That's fine (although I do prefer the added layer of game play) but there's another function alignment serves. Say you open a bestiary, and find a dark and mysterious creature that appeals to you. It seems to suit the adventure you're running, the challenge rating is about right, and the stat block looks good. Yes, this should pose a problem for your players. And then you read the description. The monster you've stumbled upon is a force of good, dedicated to protecting innocent folk...
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. Null hypothesis is an adventure for Tier 3 or 4 characters. The framework isn't specified, but the quest giver is a rogue trader, while the subject of the rescue quest is Imperium, so there's an argument to be made that anything goes. It would be unexpected to find, say, an Aeldari going on a mission alongside Adeptus Astartes, but I think with a little roleplay you could imagine a temporary truce necessitated by the Gilead System's isolation, or defector xenos.
This review contains spoilers.
The mission is simple. Rogue trader Jakel Varonius hires the player characters to find a "navigational artefact" among a cloister of Sisters of Silence. It sounds like it's archeotech, but the lackey detailing the mission has no information about it. This confuses me a little, as a Game Master, because it seems suspicious and stupid to send players on a mission to find a thing that nobody can describe. Also, the mission doesn't match up with what Varonius actually wants. This is a major spoiler, but what he really wants is the help of the Sisters of Silence, which is convenient because they want to join his flotilla anyway. In other words, I don't understand the point of the mission as delivered by the booklet.
A better mission, from my point of view, would be to go rescue the Sisters of Silence because they're under attack." Simple and direct, and accurate. But for some reason, the adventure has Varonius hiring the player characters to go find an artefact that doesn't actually exist because he wants the Sisters to come join his flotilla. But the preamble says they're already keen to join his flotilla. And how does sending people to go find a non-existent artefact end up with the Sisters hanging out on Varonius's ship? The best scenario I can think of is that the player characters go looking for the artefact, fail to find it, and then come back empty handed. There's no reason for the player characters to go looking for the artefact, fail to find it, and then come back with all the Sisters of Silence in tow.
It makes no sense. But I guess you could go with it, and send the player characters to Plinio with a false mission and then just let the adventure play out. It does work, and most players probably won't notice the failed logic of the premise. Alternately, you could just tell the player characters that the sisters are under attack, but Varonius has need of their assistance, and so he's hiring somebody to go rescue them.
The Sisters of Silence are defenders of the Emperor who are, as the name of their order suggests, sworn to silence. But they are also psychic "blanks". They nullify any nearby Psyker's powers, and it's because of this unique trait that Varonius is interested in them. He believes...
]]>I decided that during 2024, I'd remix one game every month. Last month I created Rebel Blackjack. This month, I've created Magick jack, an extreme remix of Blackjack.
The colour pie in Magic: The Gathering (MTG) isn't often appreciated by people who don't play the game, but it's a useful concept. As a player, you claim a colour before the game starts, and that colour essentially becomes your avatar in the game. This allows the game designer to develop game mechanics that affect each player differently, based on the distribution of a specific colour in their decks. If you have lots of green cards in your deck, then you expect to usually win in contests of size and strength, while a lot of blue in your deck means you'll probably win in contests of knowledge and information, and so on.
The "colour pie" of Blackjack is simpler than in MTG. There's only red and black. That's enough, although you could declare all face cards a third colour if you felt the need for more variety.
In Magick jack, each card suit represents a different card type. In MTG, those include creatures, artifacts, spells, enchantments, instants, and so on. With a standard deck of playing cards, it's naturally hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. This helps define what cards are affected by any given rule-breaking exception. Without this constraint, it's difficult to design selectively, because either everything gets affected by every rule, or it's impractically complex to decide what does ("all cards with an even number less than 10 but greater than 4...").
The game is requires 2 or more players.
Shuffle the playing cards. This is the draw deck.
Winner: The first player to hit exactly 21 wins.
If the draw deck is depleted without anyone reaching exactly 21, then the player closest to 21 wins.
[arabic] . Each player must tap (rotate so that it's oriented horizontally on the tabletop) all red cards currently in their hand. A tapped red card is worth only 1 point, regardless of its face value. . You may sacrifice (move to the bottom of the draw deck) 1 of your face cards to move any 1 card from an opponent's hand to the bottom of the draw deck. . Steal any 1 card from an opponent's hand and add it to your own. . Place a +1 counter on any card in an opponent's hand. . Discard any 1 card from...
]]>I decided that during 2024, I'd reinvent one game every month. This month, I decided to fix Monopoly.
I can't think of a board game as famous, or as reviled, than Monopoly. Nobody's ever accused Monopoly of good design, and while probably some people enjoy the game it's usually because they've unknowingly developed their own house rules to make the game more fun than it is by design. Most modern tabletop gamers hate it for its poor design, but I think we tend to hate it all the more for its damaging ubiquity. Because so many people's initial experiences with board games often includes Monopoly, a lot of people refuse to try modern tabletop games under the assumption that all board games are as bad as Monopoly. Even though really good games like Settlers of Catan and Exploding Kittens have become almost as ubiquitous, it doesn't seem that anything's displaced Monopoly as the baseline definition of a board game yet. I decided to lean into this and make some severe modification to the rules of Monopoly to create a game that uses the same physical assets but changes the gameplay into a game that resembles a modern tabletop game.
Monopoly has been around since 1935. It's about the buying, selling, mortgaging, and auctioning of real [pretend] estate. Fundamentally, it's a feeding frenzy game, in which each player attempts to buy up as many squares on the board as possible, and then to build houses and hotels used to earn income from other players. The game ends when all but 1 player goes bankrupt.
It's a surprisingly gritty and cutthroat game, and it does admittedly have some "modern" touches in it. For instance, players are able to bid on unwanted property in a mini game (an "auction"). There are 2 decks of special cards to provide random surprises throughout the game. The board itself, with its many potential pitfalls and misfortunes, serves both as a timer (once a player bypasses a square, they can only hope to have another chance at it during the next circuit) and as a factor of randomness (if you land on a square someone else owns, you must pay rent).
Problems cited with the game include the last-man-standing win condition. Imagine a 4 player game of Monopoly in which you're the first to go bankrupt. You have to wait around, with nothing to do, for 2 other players to go bankrupt before a new game can begin.
Another problem is that it mirrors life possibly too accurately (and yet not accurately enough). You start out with a lump sum of $1500, and then spend all your time hemorrhaging money for stuff you'll never directly use, in the vain hope of clawing past your fellow humans in an attempt to survive an expensive and apathetic world. To all but the most financially privileged, this is just the tip of what we're up against every day of our actual real lives....
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Casually hidden away at the end of chapter 4, there's a Ravenloft adventure called The house of lament. The back of the book says nothing about this, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover it. This is my review of it. This post may contain mild spoilers.
I've run a player character through this module, and I've run the module as Dungeon Master.
I really enjoy a haunted house module. I don't know of all that many, and there were some that I played so long ago that I can't be sure whether they were modules or just something my Dungeon Master invented off the top of his head. I've run The sinister secret of Saltmarsh several times, and also Death House. I have yet to run The house of lament, but I'm happy to have another haunted house adventure to add to my list.
This adventure is about 20 pages long, but it's secretly three separate adventures in one. There are three distinct plots happening within the eponymous haunted house, and you're free to either focus on one of them or muddle all three of them together. It's a lot of material to work through, and arguably it's just plain too much. I have no idea how a Dungeon Master is meant to convey a coherent story, with clues pointing to three separate plots. When I ran the game, I tried to focus on the Halvrest story, but I mixed in the Dalk Dranzorg story because there was just so much of it throughout the house. The third story, about a witch, is pretty easy to ignore as just another haunting. I'm not sure how you'd focus on the witch story and ignore the Halvrest and Dranzorg ones. I guess maybe you're meant to let all three stories come through, but focus only on one story during the in-game séances, but from the player's perspective, it's nearly impossible to extricate all the plotlines and understand what relates to what.
Through a series of three séances, you're able to give player characters prompts about a plot point they should pursue. Through encounters and hauntings, you can give clues about what happened in the house's past, and eventually the player characters are likely to stumble across some solution (even if it's aimlessly confronting an angry evil spirit that needs vanquishing.) Many stories unfold, and it's up to the player characters and their spiritual guide (conveniently played by the Dungeon Master) to determine what mystery to solve.
The module doesn't do the Dungeon Master any favours and mostly fails at summarizing the plotlines. Dalk Dranzorg and the witch are pretty straightforward, but the Halvrest story is pretty confusing, and there are lots of characters to track. If you focus on the séances, you can probably manage to point...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
In this episode, the UNCLE agents go to a small Hellenic island called Circe, after the goddess. In myth, Circe's island was called Ææa and I'm assuming that the show producers were equally mystified by its pronunciation as I am and wisely chose to just call the island "Circe" instead. The island, as I understand it, doesn't actually exist so what name it's given doesn't much matter.
Modern day Circe, in the fictional world of UNCLE, is poverty-stricken and full of 1950s actors who have only vague notions of what a Greek accent might sound like.
The plot is a good one. The evil but jovial Mr. Hubris (yep, that's his name, and I respect it) has been sent to Cerce to receive a package scheduled to be delivered by drone. Unfortunately for him, the UNCLE agents have done something right for a change, and have constructed a jammer to bring down the drone. They do, but they're arrested almost immediately after jamming the signal and so they lose the package. But so does Mr. Hubris.
Solo and Kuryakin aren't arrested by THRUSH, for a change. They're arrested by the sole policeman of the island, who wants very badly to marry his sweetheart. She won't marry him until, in accordance to local tradition, her older sister is married.
Now the UNCLE agents have two problems:
Well, arguably they only have one problem, but I guess it depends on your perspective.
UNCLE episodes are sometimes too short, and this is one of them. The show could have used a few extras, too, because by the looks of it there are only five people living on the island (the barkeep, the policeman, and the two women and their father). But I really enjoyed the citizens of Cerce, and would have loved to see more of them. The ladies and the policeman are amiable and fun, the barkeep is friendly but just suspicious enough to keep you on edge, and the father is a loose cannon because he's old and forgetful. It's actually a really fun episode, but you don't feel like it's trying too hard. Everyone plays the story straight, and there's not really any comedy in it so much as there's just a good cast.
Mr. Hubris is really good, too. He's got a small band of criminals he brings along with him, and of course they get picked off one by one so their actors don't get more than day rate. Hubris himself is actually pretty clever, very patient, and seems to be enjoying his time on Cerce.
This was a good episode. I'd watch it again.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the...
I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 4 contains Dungeon Master advice, and several new mechanics including a whole new type of playable character. That's a lot of content, but that's not all chapter 4 has to offer. Just when you think you're getting a feel for what the chapter's all about, it surprises you with a 20-page adventure module! No wonder they had to limit each domain to 6 pages!
The introductory sections are all about to present a game of horror to players. Ostensibly, this section is about running a horror adventure, which implies that it's talking to the Dungeon Master. Interestingly, though, much of the section actually applies to all players at the table, and to a lot more than just horror. The section mostly urges you to be considerate of the people you're playing the game with. In one way, it seems like really obvious advice. It's stuff that might even feel insulting at first. Of course I wouldn't force a player into a situation that made them personally uncomfortable. I want the game to be fun. But then you start to realise just how easy it is to not know, even when you think you do know, what a player does or does not want.
And it can seem like a puzzle. How do you give a player the chance to tell you that zombies are not fun for her without also explaining the whole plot of the adventure? Are you supposed to just let the player read the whole adventure first, and spoil all the surprises? Surely it's not possible to uncover every possible thing that makes anyone uncomfortable and still have time or story left to play a game?
Well, as it turns out the key is communication. Communication is a diverse skill, too. You can use your INT, WIS, or CHA modifier to achieve optimal communication, and the DC is surprisingly low. Make your table an open and comfortable place, where everyone feels good about sharing information about themselves, and you're half way there.
The book has lots of definitive advice on how to handle game-related communication, and I guess Tash's Cauldron has a section on that, too.
I was fully prepared to skip this session, but once I started reading it, I was surprised that I recognised myself in some of the paragraphs. I mean, sometimes I saw mistakes that I've made before, and I also saw things that had been done to me as a player in the past. A lot of them are little things, and probably don't really matter in the end, but other things have stuck with me.
It's safe to assume that there's always going to be miscommunication, and non-optimal interactions. We're never going to vanquish that, as gamers. But that's not the win condition. What matters is that we try. We must try...
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. Affliction Ascendant is the fourth and final book in a quartet of adventures, preceded by Bloody Gates, On the wings of Valkyries, and Lord of the Spire. The books aren't quite sequential, and instead each adventure occurs during the same military campaign to liberate Tora Armis.
This review contains spoilers.
Being the fourth book in a four-part series, Affliction Ascendant is a Tier 4 adventure. That means player characters are likely to be very powerful archetypes, like an Primaris Intercessor or an Inquisitor. Using the Forsaken System player's guide, players have access to the Canoness archetype of the Adepta Sororitas and the Astartes Apothecary, the Astartes Chaplain (the one with the skull heads), the Astartes Librarian (a battle Psyker), Primaris Reiver, and Tech-Priest Dominus. The booklet recommends that player choices include the ASTARTES keyword, but allows for archetypes that don't have it, so players can theoretically level up archetypes they've been playing and bring their character into this adventure.
Predictably, this adventure is pretty action-packed. After all, by the time you get to be Tier 4, brute force is pretty much a natural talent whether you want it or not.
It's a little confusing at first, but there are actually two baddies in this story, and while they're not opposed to one another, they're also not working together, although they are working, essentially, toward the same general goal. You have to read it carefully as the Game Master, because there's a lot of nuance to the indirect conflict between the two sources of conflict in the adventure. The potential for players to get confused is probably pretty high, too.
First of all, you have to keep the two bad guys separate in your head. Botuthrax Clostidia is a daemon, and Lord Putradyne is a Death Guard traitor marine. Botuthrax is an incidental threat and has basically nothing to do with the plot. Lord Putradyne is the actual architect behind the Tora Armis rebellion, and has been using the psychic energy unleashed by the conflict to powerup.
Secondly, you have to keep their individual goals in mind. Botuthrax wants to recover from having been trapped in a sealed vault for thousands of years, while Lord Putradyne wants to ascend into daemonhood.
Finally, you have to understand how the two baddies relate to one another. Essentially, they aren't aware of each other, and the problem is that they're both unknowingly competing with one another for the same resource. Both of them are using the psychic and Warp energy generated by the battle for the spire to powerup. Even more inconveniently, Lord Putradyne mistakenly believes there's a cache of virus bombs buried deep beneath the spire. He's wrong. It's true that there was a great battle in the location that is now Tora Armis, but it wasn't virus bombs that the Space Marines of 3 millennia ago buried. It was a greater...
]]>After you paint a hundred miniatures or so, you might find that you start to get a sense that some miniatures are fun to paint, while others are less fun. It might seem strange that there would be a difference. It's tempting to assume that one hunk of plastic is the same as any other hunk of plastic. But as it turns out, the sculpt matters, and sometimes one miniature feels like a slog and another is engaging and inspiring and fun. It's a matter of personal preference, of course, but here are 5 things I've noticed about influences on whether something's fun to paint or not.
I've written an entire blog post about this, but the quality of the sculpt makes all the difference. The subject of a miniature sculpt could be your favourite hero from your favourite book, but if it's impossible to distinguish the hand from the sword hilt, or the hair from the overcoat, or the jewelry from the clothing, then it's frustrating to paint. There's no way around it. Even if you're a skilled painter and you manage to suggest different elements entirely through paint, the best you can achieve is a 2d texture on a 3d surface, like those poorly-skinned video game assets that look great from a distance and look like pixellated wallpaper up close.
Poor quality sculptures just aren't fun to paint. Unless you're just painting to learn, consider spending extra money on a good sculpt, even if it means painting fewer miniatures.
Aside from quality, the most important thing about a miniature is the story it tells. Some miniatures, like those for Tales of the Valiant or Malifaux, don't have a specific story and instead are blank slates for you to develop yourself through gameplay. Other miniatures, like iconic characters from Warhammer 40,000 or Pathfinder, have appeared in novels and have lots of lore associated with them. And some miniatures are somewhere in between, being iconic but generic, like a stormtrooper from Star Wars, a mech from BattleTech, or any number of rank and file troopers from any given war game.
When a miniature inspires you, it means you're imagining half-baked story ideas as you plan out how you paint it. A colour scheme can reveal much about a character, so you're hinting at stories with the paint you apply. And once you actually start painting, you can spend hours imagining the miniature's past and future exploits as you meticulously get the paint just right.
One of my favourite models to paint is the Adeptus Arbites of Warhammer 40,000, and it's just because they remind me of Judge Dredd and RoboCop. I have no reason to own an Arbites miniature. I don't play them in a game. Heck, I'm not even sure what game they're meant for. But I like painting them. If you're a fan of orcs, or kobolds, or halflings, then a miniature of...
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. The final chapter, called Corruptions and haunts contains some mechanical effects for the particularly evil GM and the particularly adventurous PC.
Unfortunately, the section containing corruptions is mostly useless because this book doesn't contain the rules for corruptions, and neither does the Core Rulebook or even Game Mastery Guide. The book containing corruption rules are is Horror Adventures, and sadly the Humble Bundle package I purchased to get this book didn't include its most obvious companion volume.
I've decided to squarely blame Humble Bundle for this. Once I realised that this book expected you to own Horror Adventures, I read the front and back cover to find out whether there was any way of knowing about this dependency. Paizo makes it very clear on the back cover that this is an expansion for Horror Adventures. Humble Bundle, for whatever reason, decided it was reasonable to sell essentially part 2 of a two volume set.
It's mildly annoying, and I do mean only mildly. This is still a really good book with lots of great content. And yes, it has sold me on purchasing Horror Adventures, so this has been a successful underhanded marketing strategy (to be fair, I'm not a hard sell for buying RPG books.)
The first section of this chapter contains tables of suggested monsters according to the genre of horror you're running. I love this kind of reference, and this spans all five of the Pathfinder bestiaries. There are suggestions for body horror, cosmic horror, dark fantasy, ghost stories, gothic, psychological, and slasher. The one thing that's missing from these tables is the CR of each monster, so you do have to do a little homework in advance.
Despite not having the complete rules for how corruptions work, this section is a very fun read, and I already love the curruption mechanic. A corruption can come from one of several sources. Eleven are detailed in Horror Adventures but three are provided in this book.
There's Aboleth corruption, demonic corruption, and plagued corruption. "Corruption" isn't just a fancy name for a curse, though, and that's what makes it so fun. When you are corrupted, you gain "gifts" from the source of your corruption. For instance, with demonic enhancement, you gain a +2 profane bonus to the ability score of your choice. Not bad! However, a corruption also imposes a "stain". For instance, with demonic enhancement, you also get a -2 penalty to the ability score of the GM's choice.
There's some stuff about a "manifestation level," but those must be explained in the Horror Adventures book, because there's no information about it here.
So it's a mechanically useless section without Horror Adventures but it's still a great source of inspiration, and really sells the other book....
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so I'm posting reviews as I complete each section.
The final section in chapter 2 is set in Ustalav, the classically gothic horror location on Golarion. Ustalav is a well-known region in Pathfinder lore as the home of Tar-Baphon, the Whispering Tyrant, and his 600-year undead empire. Although Tar-Baphon and his empire was defeated by the Shining Crusade in the 3800s, echoes of it remain all across the land, and there are tales of vampires and werewolves and the walking dead even today.
To prevent necromancers from reclaiming equipment or magic from fallen crusaders, many fallen knights were buried by their comrades in unmarked graves. These deaths were officially unacknowledged, and so the graves collectively became known as "honorless graves." Alcrion Tornavich was a knight in the crusades killed by an arrow bearing such dark magic that his soul has yet found no peace, even though one of his lieutenants returned to his unmarked burial site and built a shrine to him.
The town of Satravah formed around the shrine, and that's when things got really bad. Koslav, one of the town's preeminent elders, believes that agents of the Whispering Tyrant are out to steal magic from the shrine. To protect the town's shrine, Koslav and his supporters patrol the surrounding area at night, viciously attacking travelers under the assumption that they're agents of darkness. You may (or may not, depending on how much you pay attention to the real world) think that killing random strangers to protect a shrine representing bravery and holiness seems anathema. Koslav actually realises this, and that's why he removes his victim's eyes: obviously corpses with no eyes don't remember the atrocities they witnessed before death, so it doesn't count. It makes perfect sense!
This pervasive evil has empowered more evil to move into the area, including the Bloodletter's League, a guild dedicated to procuring occult artifacts and human blood for local vampires. Koslav holds public meetings to ensure that the townsfolk support his late night murderous rampages, and pretty much everyone does.
This is a disturbing and almost too-realistic setting. There's a lot of poignancy to the final setting in this book reminding us that ultimately the most horrific of deeds are the results of a just an everyday human.
To me, this is a unique kind of slasher horror story. You know how in slasher movies, the hero knocks on the door of some local to ask about the strange goings-ons, and the local refuses to talk about it and hastily slams and double-locks the door? In Satravah, you can knock on somebody's door to ask about the murders, and they'll enthusiastically tell...
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so I'm posting reviews as I complete each section.
Content warning: Physical pain and self harm.
Uskheart is in Nidal, and if you're familiar with Golarion lore at all you know that, on some level, this alone qualifies it as a "horror realm." Nidal is an old nation and it's a region of predominant worship of Zon-Kuthon, the god of pain. Followers of Zon-Kuthon believe, at the very least, that pain is a significant and important part of life. It's hard to argue with that. But devotees of the Midnight Lord believe that pain is a blessing and a virtue. Fanatics seek out pain, engaging in severe self-mutilation and body modification as a form of worship.
If you've ever played an adventure module set in Nidal, you know that it's a pretty dark place. In addition to Zon-Kuthon worship, it's a nation that allowed itself to be dominated by neighbouring Cheliax, and Cheliax isn't exactly a pleasant place either.
In Uskheart, though, there's an added dimension to this darkness in the form of the Shades of the Uskwood, an ancient and sinister druidic organisation. The Shades of the Uskwood have such long, slow, and convoluted schemes against Cheliax that no one in sees them as threats. As it turns out, the Shades of the Uskwood have formed an alliance with alien entities known as "the hive," as they see this force as nature's way of restoring balance to Golarion.
Unfortunately, this book contains no information about the hive, and instead points you to Horror Adventures. I gather that the hive is an all-consuming swarm-based force, a little like the swarm of Starfinder.
Whatever the hive is, there's a location in this book with a hive camp, and some significant druidic sites. Much of the horror, though, is apparently meant to be derived from the hive, and without any notion as to what that is, this section fell pretty flat for me.
Nidal itself is pretty terrifying. Uskheart, however, doesn't strike me as any more terrifying or horrific than the rest of Nidal. I guess sinister druids can be horrifying, but they don't feel like something out of a horror movie unless, maybe, you reveal them slowly throughout a story, like a sort of nature-derived slasher movie. But that's not the plot that's provided in this section, so it would be up to you. This very much feels like an off-cut from the Horror Adventures book, and unfortunately I don't own that. I don't know whether to blame Humble Bundle for selling me part of a set of books, or to blame Paizo for not just publishing one book, but I think there's obviously...
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. Litanies of the Lost is a book containing four adventures that can be run independently or as a continuous campaign. The framework suggests the IMPERIUM keyword, but two new frameworks specific to Cult Mechanicus are provided as alternatives. The adventure is for Tier 2 characters.
This review contains spoilers.
One of the suggested patrons during Litanies of the Lost is Archdomina Aexekra Vakuul, a regent commander of the forge world Avachrus. She's an easy connection to Grim Harvest, at least, and because she's of the Cult Mechanicus, it could make sense that she'd have sent the agents to fetch a potential source of power in Vow of Silence. In this adventure, she's an easy patron because the adventure takes place on Avachrus itself.
That's the obvious entry point into the adventure, but the book has some interesting alternative suggestions. One is to use agents with the INQUISITION keyword, and assume that an Inquisitor has ordered them to investigate Avachrus. The other is to use the CHAOS keyword, and let the agents go to Avachrus on a rescue mission.
All three suggestions are enticing, and I can imagine replaying it thrice, each time using agents with a different keyword.
Whatever setup you choose, at the centre of the plot is a stasis coffin. Nobody knows what the coffin contains, but it's presumed to be someone or something of great significance. The problem is, the coffin got stolen, and Archdomina Vakuul (or whomever you've got giving the agents their mission) needs it back promptly and discretely. She needs this job done discretely because whatever the stasis coffin contains is of apparent interest to the Inquisition.
In Warhammer 40,000, the Inquisition is a faction tasked with uncovering heresy within the Imperium. They have, more or less, carte blanche to do whatever's necessary to find and end it. You can use this as a constant underlying threat throughout the entire adventure. Should the agents attract too much attention to their mission, then the Inquisition can show up.
To retrieve the stolen stasis coffin, the agents must find out who stole it and where they've taken it. Much of the game is, accordingly, an investigative adventure. Agents start on Avachrus and attempt to find out who took the coffin, and what they intend to do with it. Once the agents discover that, the adventure becomes a retrieval mission.
Investigation adventures aren't always the easiest to run. It's not uncommon for players to feel that they're on a guided tour through clues that only serve to reveal the actual game. I've been on both sides of this equation. I've been the player who's put all the clues together but who hasn't been permitted by the Game Master to go to the final confrontation because all the clues hadn't been revealed yet. And I've been the Game Master who's tried to string clever clues together that...
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so I'm posting reviews as I complete each section.
Far from the Inner Sea region of Golarion is Tian Xia, home to the Dragon Empires, and the perfect setting for samurai-inspired fantasy stories. There are powerful empires located there, but in the centre of the continent lies the Shenmen region, which dates back to the first great empire Yixing. Lumber and silver were found to be abundant in Shenmen, and so the people settled there. Everything was fine for about 399 years, until somebody took some silver from a spider's lake without saying a prayer of gratitude. The spider was actually a jorogumo, and when it changed into its human form the ungrateful man sexually harassed her. Ever since then, Shenmen has been dominated by the jorogumo.
Being overrun by magical spider people changed Shenmen in many unexpected ways. The fey realm in the region is corrupt, and woodland that was once home to happy spirits now harbour malevolent ones. Ettercaps roam the forests, vermin erupt from felled trees, and ghosts roam the land.
The town of Pek Peh is ruled by a bandit warlord named Lord Howin, whose general Tin Jiayi patrols the region for wanderers and small settlements to exploit.
The horror genres listed for Shenmen are dark fantasy, ghost story, and psychological horror. For me, this barely qualifies as horror and is really just dark fantasy (which I don't really consider horror). However, I know that for some people spiders are naturally horrific, and certainly the atmosphere of the region is dark and dreary enough to be described as spooky. So Shenmen gets by on a technicality.
Besides that, I think the supernatural curse of the jorogumo can justify any variety of horror story you want to tell. The region exists, there's a nonspecific curse on the land, so I don't think any player would be surprised to find any brand of horror you want to introduce.
This is a nice region to have on Golarion, and I think in a way it embodies Paizo's approach to the concept of settings. You don't need a special demiplane or a even a separate plane for horror. You just rope off a corner of each continent, put a curse on it, and you have a working setting. I love plane hopping, but I have to admit I also like the convenient surrealism of Paizo's approach (why don't people Just Leave? well, they Just Don't, and who cares why?). Every continent ought to have a spooky region, and Shenmen is a good one for Tian Xia.
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. Lord of the spire is the third book in a quartet of adventures, including Bloody Gates, On the wings of Valkyries, and Affliction Ascendant. The books aren't exactly sequential, and instead each adventure occurs during the same military campaign to liberate Tora Armis.
This review contains spoilers.
Being the third book in a four-part series, Lord of the spires is a Tier 3 adventure. That means player characters are likely to be some of the most iconic archetypes available, which includes a Space Marine, a Tech-Priest of Cult Mechanicus, a Commissar, a Crusader of the Ministorum. With the Forsaken System player's guide, there are several Adepta Sororitas archetypes, as well. Regardless of the archetype, the framework is based around the Inquisitors.
In this adventure, Inquisitor Tytrona Dikaisune (profiled in Forsaken System page 74) of Ordo Malleus sends the player characters to Tora Armis to uncover why the spire was sealed off in the first place. She suspected heresy from the moment the spire withdrew from communication, and now that it's been cracked open by the Astra Militarum (in Bloody Gates), she needs a team to move in, investigate, and purify.
Has a company ever done anything so reprehensible that you just want to go and give the CEO a stern scolding? That's this adventure.
Sure, Tora Armis fell to the powers of Chaos through the combined actions of its thousands of inhabitants, but the Inquisition knows that ultimately it's the leader to blame. Like the captain of a ship, the leader of a spire is ultimately responsible for what happens, and so Lord van Staten is the subject of the player character's investigation.
The problem is that the Lord's palace itself has been altered by the energies of the Warp. The walls are fleshy, with polyps and digestive acid and "pendulous organs". There are rivers of blood and waves of Nurglings and several other randomly-generated threats. It's a sort of dungeon crawl, only the dungeon is alive and wants to digest you.
At the centre of it all is Lord van Staten, who has melded into his monstrously fleshy palace and has been providing corrupt "palacefruit" (don't ask) to the hungry masses of his spire. Player characters have the opportunity to put Lord van Staten out of his misery, putting an end to Nurgle's incursion into Tora Armis.
This is a repulsive adventure, with what I'd describe as internal body horror throughout. If you're excited about that kind of horror, then this is an adventure to try. It's disgusting and really satisfying. There's lots of fighting against the environment through sheer force of will (or dice, anyway) and lots of fighting against daemons through brute force of the Imperium. It's not quite as direct as this blog post makes it out to be, but only just. All in all, this is a pretty straight-forward story, but...
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so I'm posting reviews as I complete each section.
Content warning: Mold and fungus.
Kalva is in the Land of the Linnorm Kings, a frigid northert region home to the Viking-like Ulfen people. The island of Kalva is located south of Icemark and, as it turns out, is the very embodiment of a biological horror story. Because this is a Paizo book, there are indeed mechanics to the terrifying story of Kalva and so I won't spoil too much here. Suffice it to say, though, that Kalva is overrun with molds and fungii from another realm, and that the people of Kalva are perfectly happy with their alien overlords.
Most of the horror in Kalva is derived from mold and fungus, so I would say that the predominant horror genre here is body horror. If you have players who find that kind of thing too unpleasant for a game that's meant to be fun, I think it would be relatively simple to re-theme the enemy as magical crystals or some other form of magical energy. You could even turn it into psychological horror by having the problem be opt-in. Maybe everyone in town is voluntarily indulging in the smoking of a specific herb. It seems harmless at first, and everyone in town is pushing it onto the players. Once it's been tried, you could use addiction mechanics from the Game Mastery Guide to force it onto players, and of course, it turns out to have dark and terrifying repercussions when abused. None of the mechanical effects rely on the substance of mold and fungus.
The island has other interesting features, like the Crow Witch Tribe, a linnorm (a dragon-like wyrm) called Liefbrenner, and a ghost skald named Riborg who haunts an ancient offshore outpost. Oh, and did I mention that the Ulfens of Kalva are proud cannibals?
Look, I felt compelled to put a content warning at the top of this post to warn readers about icky fungus. Cannibalism is a normal and fiercely protected way of life on Kalva. There may or may not be an entity from the outer realms (or the Abyss, or who knows where) influencing the culture of the island. This is truly unsettling horror. I have to be honest, I probably wouldn't run a game here. It's just too gross. Well done, Paizo, and no thank you!
]]>Blacktalon is an Age of Sigmar show on WarhammerTV, focusing on Stormcast Eternals. Its lead character is Neave Blacktalon. I thought the previous episode was the final episode, but I was wrong. There was yet one final episode, and this is my review of it. This review contains spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen the episode yet.
Well, I like to cut right to the chase. The previous episode should have been the last episode. It's not that this episode was bad, it's just not as powerful an ending as the previous one. Obviously the previous episode would have ended with a lot of plot points left unresolved, but then again is anything ever really resolver in Warhammer? It's not like Neave returning to Hammerhall means the Mortal Realms are safe forever now. The battle, as always, will go on. All the plot devices to threaten the Realms with danger were fine as plot devices leading up to Neave's revelation and decision to return in episode 5. I didn't really need to see her return for the obligatory boss battle against a villain who, to be fair, was really only revealed in episode 4.
In this episode, the Stormcast Eternals are fighting the servants of Nurgle and Thysis. Hendrick Silverwolf reveals to the others that Neave got herself killed, and she still hasn't been reforged, so they'd have to make do without her. Everyone looks sad for a moment or two, and then go on killing daemons and cultists and things.
The battle is exciting enough. It's a fantasy battle, so there are impossibly beefy enemies against really sincere and powerful heroes. It works well, and if this had been episode 5 I think it would have really felt exciting. As episode 6, though, to me I have to admit it felt like we were here because the "history" of the story demands it, even though the emotion of the story resists.
In the end, of course, Neave returns. Like in the episode title. She kills a bunch of things, too, and then victory happens, and then all the Stormcast Eternals go back to Azyr to hang out.
As they talk about how great they are, Hendrick welcomes Neave back to the land of the Eternals and asks her, super casually, what she remembers. This is the best scene of the episode. That's not by chance. This is the part of the story that we're actually emotionally invested in. It's basically the entire episode. You can cut the first 14 minutes and the last 1 minute, and just have this. One. Scene.
In response to Hendrick, Neave just stares in silence. I'm not kidding, it feels like a full minute goes by but of course it's mere seconds. It hits hard, though. For a moment you almost (I said almost) feel for Hendrick, just for the sheer social awkwardness of it.
But then he continues his lie, makes up some more lies to cover...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains spoilers.
In many ways, this episode feels like "classic" Man from UNCLE (and by "classic", I mean first season). The plot is a little unpredictable, at least by second season standards. You think you know where things are going, but then the baddie is caught by the end of the first act. It caught me so off guard that I checked the time, thinking I'd blinked and missed 30 minutes, or that I'd hit a key and skipped past half the show.
Where do you go after you catch the baddie before the first commercial break? Well, if you're first season UNCLE, you recruit a beautiful but quirky dame to do most of the rest of the work for you. And that's exactly what happens in this episode.
Jo-Jo is a free spirit and petty criminal. She hangs around a rough crowd, and it so happens that she's dating a THRUSH agent during Act 1. She accidentally discovers his allegiance, and he quickly blackmails her to join THRUSH as an alternative to being shot. She verbally agrees, but luckily things go badly for the THRUSH agent and UNCLE storms in and rounds everybody up, Jo-Jo included.
Next thing you know, UNCLE is recruiting Jo-Jo to continue on in THRUSH until she can meet Simon Baldanado, a local THRUSH boss who seems to have a crush on her.
Pretty standard stuff so far.
But things get genuinely interesting when Jo-Jo meets Baldanado. It turns out that Baldanado is actually smitten with her. Like, he actually likes her, and not in a creepy way (or at least, as non-creepy as a murderous mob boss can be). It takes you by surprise, this development, because we're used to the baddies being heartless baddies. Sure, maybe some act refined, but they're all ultimately shallow and heartless. But Baldanado is in love with Jo-Jo.
Don't get me wrong. The relationship is not a healthy one. Baldanado is a killer, and he arranges for Jo-Jo's former lover to stay dead (never mind, it's a long story), and of course Jo-Jo is 100% faking her affections the whole time. But that's what makes this so intriguing. Baldanado's twisted version of love is real, and Jo-Jo's ability to turn on the charm and to apparently change alliances on a dime in a totally convincing way is just magical.
It's captivating to watch. In some other plot you might even start to feel that Baldanado maybe is turning away from THRUSH? and maybe Jo-Jo is actually falling in love in spite of what she knows? But no, that's not the story here. It's pretty clear that everything you as the viewer know about these characters is exactly spot on. What you see is what you get. That knowledge is what makes Baldanado's story strangely affecting.
He's the dupe.
His men know it.
Jo-Jo knows it.
UNCLE knows it.
You...
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so I'm posting reviews as I complete each section.
The region of Geb is know as the domain of the dead, and its entire population are undead victims of a long magical war between Geb and Nex. Its ruler is the wizard Geb himself, although he's isolated himself to such an extent that the true ruler is the corrupted former demigoddess Arazni, raised unwillingly by Geb as a lich. How's that for a macabre introduction?
The genres listed for Geb in this book are body horror, dark fantasy, ghost story, and gothic horror. I'm not sure about body horror, but with all the undead and necromancy, it definitely qualifies for all the others. Living beings aren't forbidden in Geb, although they aren't exactly welcome either. They're officially protected by the Dead Laws, but I can imagine that a group of player characters going into Geb to steal an important item could run into formidable resistance.
I can also imagine a rising anti-living sentiment, a little like Eox's Corpse Fleet in Starfinder, causing concern. Whatever the reason, Geb could serve easily inspire tension for the living visitor. Alternately, the living could be genuinely welcome guests, brought in to solve a haunting or to ease a restless spirit.
This section provides a little background on Geb (more can be found in Inner Seas World Guide), but most notably it provides some interesting NPCs and a whole island called Crabfield Island where the living are welcome. There are several locations detailed here, including the Yellow Mire, the Golder Garden (a sinking mansion from long ago), the gemstone mines of the Iron Chelae mountains, and the trading town of Crabfield Point. The island is governed by a living arcanist ranger named Arabin Solswith, but there's lots of undead across the small isle, including the undead elf Liara Tepteki, deathspore zombies, gold musk zombies, and pale-puff musk zombies.
This is a natural horror setting. It's Army of Darkness after the Necronomicon has been removed from its resting place. Lots of undead and horrors from beyond the grave, peaceful enough to mind to their own nation but just disdainful enough of the living to make you wonder. There are some good locations on Crabfield Island, and a few good NPCs to add personality to an adventure.
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
Three high-ranking space marines sit around a gaming table deep within a fortress on a frozen planet. They're playing some game that uses the fangs of animals as player pieces. They each have three pieces, and as they start to lose pieces to one another's strategies, they start mentioning that with luck they'll get reinforcement tokens soon.
Cut to three strapping young men, each alone in the frozen wasteland, as they hunt for something. We follow each one as they hunt down a different fanged animal. One hunts a giant bat. One hunts a polar bear. And the third hunts a wolf.
I get the feeling of early Conan or Thundarr. The hunts are basically impossible, as you might expect, but accordingly exciting. The bat hunt especially makes no physical sense.
The important thing is, though, that not all the hunts succeed. This story is, refreshingly, not just about the exception. In this episode, we get to see the ones that fail. And there are more that fail than the one that succeeds.
For that alone, this is a great episode. Most of our myths are necessarily about the one exception. They have to be, or otherwise they wouldn't be myths. The reason we enjoy stories is because they tell us about the one wondrous thing that happened that one time. You missed it because it's really really rare, but you get to share in the experience through storytelling.
The problem is, the more myths there are and the more often they're told, the less rare they appear. We hear about so many exceptional heroes in science fiction and fantasy worlds that after a while, you start to assume that everybody is heroic. Heck, in many fictional universes, the same hero literally saves the world multiple times. This is why normal humans are so important to fictional universes. You need the plain and ordinary and mundane to balance out the magical.
This is the episode that tells the complete story.
You get to see more failure than success. And the success you do see? That's the one who follows in the path of Leman Russ, becoming a marine in the Space Wolves in an honestly rousing final scene. The sense of accomplishment you feel is real, and there's a real sense of inheritance and tradition. In-world, this must be Imperial propaganda, and it's effective. Even if you don't play Space Marines on the tabletop or enjoy Space Marines in your books, this episode manages to convert you for at least the duration of the final shot.
This episode is OK sci fi. It's arguably not science fiction, and most of it could happen anywhere. It's a good story, and the idea of a board game that relies...
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so I'm posting reviews as I complete each section.
Farnvale is a small town located in Galt, a troubled region formerly under Chelish rule and now in a seemingly eternal state of revolution. If you know your Golarion lore, then you know that masked avengers called the Gray Gardeners normally try to police the towns and settlements of Galt. However, Farnvale is small and isolated, well out of view of the grassroots security forces. And what does it matter? Everybody in Farnvale is content, and life there is nothing if not mundane.
Incidentally, the horror genres listed for this location are psychological horror, body horror, and dark fantasy.
Farnvale is mostly a lumber town, so it's surrounded my dense forest. Within those forests there dwells a great and terrible evil, which I won't spoil here as it's likely to be the central plot your players are going to face when they visit.
This is a strong horror setting. The townfolk's complicity with the evil forces at play within and around their town is chilling, and even the kind town doctor, Cherise Allerique, has a dark secret.
I can imagine bringing players to Farnvale and get them out into the woods. Once there, I'd occupy them for a while with a woodland adventure like Tales of the Old Margreve or Fane of the Fallen, and then surprise them with the Farnvale plot. It's just too easy.
]]>When I started reading Warhammer 40,000 novels, it was nearly without any context for what I was getting into. I knew I wanted something sci fi, but also something I could play. I'd grown weary of the constant disappointment from Star Trek and Star Wars. Dune is pretty reliable and has gaming options, although I admit that its reliance on House Atreides starts to wear thin after a while.
Warhammer looked like it had the right atmosphere to suit my tastes, and I'd seen novels at my local library so I knew it had an extensive book line. I got started with The Horus Heresy, which was a great place to start for background on the Space Marines but an awkward place to start for getting a sense of the 41st Millenium (because it doesn't take place in the 41st Millenium, and the Empire is a very different entity then).
I think Warhammer 40K is an interesting world. It's definitely not for everyone. If you're thinking about looking into it, here are three things I think you need to know.
Broadly, Warhammer stories are often about humans and aliens (collectively called "xenos") fighting. Sometimes, it's about humans fighting other humans, or xenos fighting xenos, or chaos demons fighting pretty much everyone.
There are three divisions of humans:
Within the Imperium and Chaos, there are countless factions of human soldiers and organisations. There are millions of populated worlds in Warhammer, so the depth of culture and diversity is intentionally inestimable.
The Astartes (ah STAR teez) are transhuman. They're genetically engineered superhumans built and bred for war. They're the guys in the enormous suits of power armour, and they're kind of Warhammer's most ubiquitous character type. Being ubiquitous doesn't make them the "good guys", because there are no good guys in Warhammer (more on that later).
Rogue traders don't seem to come up much any more, at least in what I've read. You can play one in the Warhammer: Wrath & Glory RPG, if you're into roleplaying games. Rogue traders aren't important, but in that way they're representative of what actually powers the Imperium and Chaos and a bunch of different alien races that dominate many of the stories. There are millions of billions of normal humans, or humans who are mostly normal but for a few government-issued cybernetic implants (augments), out there in the Warhammer universe.
They're not all rogue traders. Most, in fact are just hab-dwellers, living and working on a planet dedicated to producing some vital resource for the Imperium. They, like you and I, are the peasants of the setting. They're the cogs in the machine making...
]]>I love Lego. Sadly, I've moved far away (in the physical sense) from the Lego collection of my youth, and shipping a closet full of classic Lego sets all the way around the world is an expensive proposal. Recently I discovered Goxel, a shockingly easy 3D modeling application that makes no conceit of being Lego-based or even Lego-adjacent, and yet the sensation of building models with 3D pixels is surprisingly similar to the satisfaction of building with Lego bricks. You can think of Goxel as a pixel paint program, but in 3D.
Goxel takes a unique approach to 3D modeling, and it's geared specifically to low polygon modeling. This isn't the application to use if you're looking to sculpt life-like models. But if you like the aesthetic of Minecraft and other low poly art, then you need to try Goxel.
You can install Goxel as a Flatpak on Linux from Flathub.
For Android, Windows macOS, and iOS, go to goxel.xyz to download an installer.
Goxel is open source, released under the GPLv3 license.
When you first launch Goxel, you get an empty "room" or container in the middle of the Goxel window. This is your canvas.
It's in this container, and only within this container, that you'll build your models. In most 3D modeling applications, depth perception is an acquired skill, so Goxel constrains the space you have to work in to prevent you from ending up with models and model parts miles away from each other. Goxel also restricts your movements in a strict grid. You can move up and down along a Y-axis, right and left along an X-axis, and "near" and "far" along a Z-axis, but only in segments of 1 3D pixel (or voxel, as they're called.) For all intents and purposes, the voxels of Goxel are the virtual Lego bricks you use to build your model.
There aren't many tools in Goxel, and that's a real feature for a 3D modeling application. By default, you've already got the pencil tool active, so you can start building right away by clicking your mouse any place within the voxel container.
Try clicking around the container to see where a voxel gets added. Goxel makes it relatively easy to see where your pencil is about to add a voxel, and it treats voxels like bricks by assuming that when you're near an existing voxel, you want to connect your next voxel to it. Even so, 3D on a 2D screen is difficult. Sometimes voxels get added in a spot you didn't realize you were pointing at. The best way to ensure your voxels get added where you mean for them to be added is to rotate the container often. You can rotate the container using the arrow keys on your keyboard, or you can click and drag the middle-mouse button. A right-click and drag moves the container within the Goxel workspace, and the scroll-wheel of your mouse zooms in and out....
]]>I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so I'm posting reviews as I complete each section.
The introductory section of this chapter clarifies its focus. It acknowledges that there are several different genres of horror, and that this chapter features:
Seven genres, seven far places in the chapter. Probably not coincidental.
Actually, it's entirely coincidental. Each section in this chapter actually lists a few genres for each location.
The first location is the Crown of the World, an icy region of Golarion in the far far north. The horror genres listed for this region are cosmic horror, dark fantasy, ghost story, and psychological horror. There's also a listing of common monsters found within this region, which is great for the Game Master either inventing or scaling an adventure here.
Confusingly, there are also "Horrific locations" listed, and yet only one of them is mentioned in the subsequent text. In fact, each section is only 3 to 4 pages long, and the book refers you to other books for more information about sites within the region that aren't, I guess, particularly horrific.
What you do get, then, is a clearly defined adventure location: the Witch-Fen of Azra Sahota. And I do mean clearly defined. You get a map complete with a grid, with numbered features that include threats, traps, environmental hazards (such as an avalanche), monster lairs, and so on.
For Crown of the World, there's also a new mechanic called Wendigo delusion, an affliction you become susceptible to when you find yourself lost in the icy wastes. I love this, because there have been so many times I've had a party roll for survival without anything aside from a random encounter as a consequence. Wendigo delusion is a fun (for the GM) alternative.
Oh right this isn't Ravenloft so there aren't dark lords. How about "horrific nemesis" instead?
Azra Sahota is a female winter hag (from Bestiary 4). She's the witch of "Witch-Fen", and appropriately she sits in front of her cauldron waiting for an ogrekin called Larianth to bring her corpses. Otherwise, she's a pretty generic creature with no special backstory provided. I feel like a side bar at least with an inkling of an idea would have been nice, but as it is she's just another encounter. That's enough of a reason for her to exist.
I'm a sucker for winter settings, and I love horror, and yet this location doesn't particularly stand out for me. It's wintry, but not particularly horrific. I appreciate the map and the threat areas, but I guess the lack of...
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. On the wings of Valkyries is the second part of a quartet of adventures, including Bloody Gates, Lord of the Spire, and Affliction Ascendant. Each adventure occurs during the same military campaign to liberate Tora Armis.
This review contains spoilers.
Being the second part in a four-part series, On the wings of Valkyries is a Tier 2 adventure. I love the disconnected continuous narrative of this series. The first adventure has the players breaking through the barrier around Tora Armis as if to enter the spire, and this adventure takes players inside the spire but not through the pathway they helped clear in the first adventure. The story feels like it connects, but actually it only introspects. You get a brief vantage point of the next part from the story you're playing, but the parts never directly converge.
Assuming you play the first part, you see the ground troop's view of the eponymous Valkyrie ships taking flight for the spire. It's a brief moment that gets notated in Bloody Gates for the Game Master to mention to players. I love that idea, and I look forward to playing this whole adventure from its many different angles.
In this Tier 2 booklet, players are a special strike team who enter the spire at an upper level, and make their way down to neutralize the enemy from within their own stronghold.
In the first section, players must transfer themselves from their Valkyrie to the spire. The Valkyrie can't land, so players must rappel down to a landing zone that's equipped with enemy anti-aircraft turrets and troops. Obviously, it's a pretty immediate start to the action.
In the booklet, there's actually 8 pages leading up to the "immediate" start of the action, but a lot of that's background for the Game Master. There's a half-page of content that the Game Master is told to read or paraphrase to the players, but I think it would only be necessary if the group hadn't played through Bloody Gates.
In the next section of the adventure, players must rappel further into the spire. They meet up with a contingency of loyalists who've been hiding out within the spire and are eager to assist the strike team in defeating the heretics. This is interesting, because it provides players a friendly encampment while they're otherwise behind enemy lines, and also serves as a reminder of why they're fighting. These loyalists are a bunch of ordinary Imperium citizens who had been living their normal lives when a group of fanatics decided that the Emperor was dead and that the spire would serve as a focal point for His glorious rebirth.
Of the loyalists, there are 8 who are able to accompany the players further into the spire. They help guide the player characters through the spire, and they can also help fight when needed. I...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covered over 30 domains, but in its final section it discusses those within Raveloft who brave the Mists.
The section Travelers in the Mists is a fun and inspiring look at some of the organisations and individuals from the lore of Ravenloft. Some I'm familiar with from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, other I was vaguely familiar with from previous source books, and still others were new to me (and possibly new to the world, for all I know). What this section provides most of all, though, are "sketches" of NPCs and story ideas to add to your Ravenloft campaign.
None of the ideas in this section are described in detail, which I think is appropriate in some cases and not ideal in others, but I imagine which is which depends on what you're most comfortable improvising. For instance, prompting me to create a secret society dedicated to taking down Strahd is pretty easy for me, but it's pointless to ask me to invent a clever but coherent mystery to stump a super detective.
Still other elements look far too abbreviated to me, but probably only because I happen to know the lore from previous source books. For instance, the exploits and studies of Gennifer and Laurie Weathermay-Foxgrove is pretty extensive. They literally wrote the book on the Mists and its curious properties, and it's so insightful that Van Richten forbade them from publishing it ("what you are writing is dangerous. It can only lead to sorrow, not only for you and your sister, Laurie, but for everyone that you hold dear.") Larisa Snowmane has a whole novel dedicated to her story, and here her riverboat becomes a convenient deus ex machina available for the DM who needs to rescue a party quickly. Obviously all of these stories (and many others) wouldn't fit here, and I think it's probably this book's hope that curious readers will hunt down old source books and novels to learn more. That's certainly the effect it's had on me. Whether you do or not, there are plenty of ideas in this section to add variety into your game.
]]>Tales of the Valiant (ToV) is a tabletop roleplaying game developed by Kobold Press, replacing Dungeons & Dragons 5e. The game is fully compatible with 5e, meaning that you can use content from any 5e book in a Tales of the Valiant game. It doesn’t mean everything in ToV is suitable as a one-for-one replacement in 5e, though. In other words, it's moving forward even as it reserves space for what came before. Compatibility can confuse people. It's easy to think that "compatible" means "the same", and anyway if that's not what "compatible" means, then why not just make a completely different game? Here are 3 important reasons why there's value to compatibility for gaming.
You might find that you can play Sixth Edition content with just a 5e rulebook, but it's still not clear that third-party publishers are invited to participate. The post-Sixth Edition world is likely to be mostly Wizards of the Coast content, and just the few content creators who can afford to pay licensing fees (or who are sponsored by Wizards). Sure, Wizards has historically produced really good content, but then again do you really just want the one choice? If Paizo and Pathfinder have taught us anything, it's that gaming is healthier and more fun when there's diversity and choice.
Tales of the Valiant ensures that the 5e ruleset remains open to everyone. There are no licensing fees. Anybody can create content for it, with no fear of legal repercussion. That not only encourages a diverse pool of contributors, it ensures that there will be gaming content. At the very least, Kobold Press and probably other companies, like Roll for Combat, who don't want to pay licensing fees to Wizards, will publish adventures, new monsters, spells, classes, and so on, for ToV.
A game needs a community. Without fresh ideas and exciting new releases, a game languishes. Wizards of the Coast is closing its doors, locking people out of participation. But Tales of the Valiant is opening up a new space for players and content creators.
There's a lot about 5e I would change. I'd get rid of passive perception, I'd add a skill explicitly for picking locks and disarming traps, I'd add rules for climbing onto a larger creature during combat, I'd get rid of death saving throws, I'd scale back HP, I'd fix the CR system. That's just off the top of my head. Any longtime player of RPGs probably has even more great ideas.
And Tales of the Valiant isn't going to do any of it.
ToV isn't D&D 5.5. It's not Advanced D&D. It's 5e in maintenance mode, allowing for minor adjustments here and there to make the game better for most modern gamers.
5e is a decade old at this point, and the way we game now is different than it was before. There are little things that require adjustment. Monster stat blocks could be improved so they're easier to reference for...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. The first part of chapter 3 covered 17 domains or so, and this second part dedicates two paragraphs to each one of the other ones. Having read through the featured domains, I think it's probably a good call. The "domains" in this section are really just thoroughly entertaining and inspiring story seeds you could use almost anywhere within Ravenloft. A headless rider, evil toys, a ghost dancer, a shapeshifter who must feed on flesh, a hounted lighthouse, a supernatural detective agency that's been drained of all colour, and much more. Every single entry, a mere two paragraphs though they may be, are brimming with story ideas.
By this point in the book, you know Ravenloft well enough. You don't need pages and pages of travel guide tours of each domain. No matter what the origin of the story, you can guess that the domain is spooky and macabre. It's Ravenloft. The real value here are the stories.
It does make you wonder, though, why the domains are necessary at all. Why not just have a setting that contains all of the macabre locations? I love reading about Ravenloft, but even with the featured domains I sometimes struggled to find what was unique among some of them.
In Pathfinder, Golarion is essentially a catch-all setting. When you want gothic horror, you go to the gothic horror regions. When you want high fantasy, you go to the high fantasy regions. That's how Ravenloft is in the material about the domains of dread in old 3.5 source books. Back then, Ravenloft was a proper campaign setting rather than just a location in the Shadow Plane. The old domains, although separated by mist, had interactions and relationships and politics, and mercantilism and trade routes, and even espionage.
But the 5e domains are more or less self-contained, unless you happen to have a domain talisman to find your way from one to another. I'm not sure what the benefit of this design is, and I feel like 5e Ravenloft would make more sense to me as a contiguous setting instead.
The 5e domains of dread are small worlds with essentially one major theme and plot each, and so the lore for each can, and arguably should be, brief.
For me, Ravenloft is stronger as a setting than as a location in the Shadow Plane. I'm a fan of lore, and part of the satisfaction you get when you're a fan of lore is answers. Things get explained through lore. Sometimes they're things that define the setting, and other times they're trivialities that will probably never be mentioned in any game. It's not the significance of the information, it's that the lore exists.
Ravenloft in the Shadow Plane is confusing. Are the people in a domain of dread soulless reflections of real-world people? Or are they...
]]>Blacktalon is an Age of Sigmar show, focusing on Stormcast Eternals. Its lead character is Neave Blacktalon. It seems like the previous episode just got released, but now the fifth (and final?) episode is out, and I've eagerly watched it. This review contains spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen the episode yet.
Up to this point in the series, we've gotten a lot of clues about Neave Blacktalon's past. She's desperate to learn more, and apparently has been since before she was reforged. In the previous episode, Hendrick Silverwolf literally stabbed her in the back to prevent her from learning too much.
The conclusion seems pretty obvious.
Neave Blacktalon, in life, was Thea, a warrior of Ghyran the Realm of Life. She had a child and a husband, and they all happily tended to their farm until one day Nurgle arose to spread his gift of disease. It makes sense, and given everything we've seen, it seems to add up.
And it's completely wrong.
This was an amazing episode. Took me completely by surprise, and I'm not going to spoil anything in this post aside from a warning to forsake your expectations. I suggest doing that because on my first viewing, I was actually impatient. I thought the setup was yanked straight out of A Christmas Carol (it doesn't help that the spiritual guides escorting Neave back to real life keep telling her that the visions she's having are all in the past and cannot be changed, just like the Ghost of Christmas Past keeps telling Scrooge). I thought the conclusion was inevitable. I didn't understand why this episode was necessary.
And that's when it all fell apart, just like Ghyran under Nurgle. All illusions shattered, complete shift in reality. It's the lowest-key bait-and-switch I've seen in a long time. It's so low-key, in fact, that I think warning you is doing you a favour. Watch this episode without trying to guess what's going on. It's better that way, I promise.
I haven't seen any indication of how long this series is meant to be, but this kind of felt like it was the final episode. I could be wrong. Possibly we'll get back to normal adventures next. Or possibly Hendrick Silverwolf will apologise for being a jerk. Or maybe Neave will try a different strategy to remember her past. I don't know.
If this is the last episode, then it was a really great series. I enjoyed every episode, I liked the mix of Neave's story arc to general Stormcast adventuring, I liked the music, I liked getting to see so much of the Age of Sigmar setting.
If it's not the last episode, that's even better. I'm ready for more Neave Blacktalon and her band of plucky Stormcast Eternals.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
Tales of the Valiant is a new tabletop roleplaying game, developed by Kobold Press, to replace Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e). Back in December 2022 until January 2023, it was urgent that somebody replaced 5e, because Wizards of the Coast was claiming it had the right to control who could publish or even homebrew content for it. There was a monumental community backlash that forced Wizards of the Coast to back down from that specific course of action, and for many people it felt like the battle was over. The 5e rules remain an irrevocable community asset, so why bother replacing them? The battle isn't over quite yet, and there are 3 good reasons the 5e rules need to be replaced.
Wizards of the Coast hasn't changed its goal, it's only changed its strategy. Instead of force, they're relying on attrition.
Game rules last basically forever. People still play D&D 2nd Edition right out of the book. It works really well. On the other hand, not everyone plays 2nd Edition. The meta of a game moves on for several reasons, and Wizards of the Coast knows this.
First of all, even a robust game system that everyone loves, like the 5e ruleset, eventually wants an update. Ten years from now, we'll all see something about 5e that we don't like any more, and we'll homebrew a solution, and it'll be fine. Except that when a new player comes to the table, they won't recognise the game. What's written in the SRD will have become outdated based on what the community actually does at the table. That's what it means to have "support" as a game. Somebody needs to be standing by, watching how gamers are playing, and then decide to update the rules to match. Because 5e is now officially in the Creative Commons, anybody can do that, so technically we don't need Tales of the Valiant. Except, we do. When you play an RPG several times a week, you want to have a nice copy of the rulebook for convenience alone if not because you like how it looks on your bookshelf. Kobold Press is an experienced publishing company, and at least for now they're a great candidate to be the centralised source of rule support.
Wizards of the Coast knows that as long as they abandon 5e and push their sixth edition content, gamers are likely to migrate. As new players find the hobby, they'll naturally buy into Sixth Edition because that'll be the current edition. Wizards claims, for now at least (it's foolish to trust them, at this point), that Sixth Edition will remain compatible with Fifth Edition forever. But the more content they push to their digital platform, the less that's going to matter. To buy an adventure, you'll have to log into their digital platform, and once you're there you may as well just play Sixth Edition.
Wizards expertly engineered a schism in the D&D...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
This is the final featured domain in the book, meaning that the next section is a collection of one-paragraph domain descriptions of the "left overs". Valachan is a domain of rain forest and jungle and seaside. It's an untamed region, with clusters of civilisation that include not just a few weretigers and werepanthers. Giant beasts roam the forest, always on the prowl, and yet also in danger themselves from the fiercest huntress in all of Ravenloft: Chakuna.
In the 3.5 version of Ravenloft, Valachan's darklord was Baron Urik von Kharkov. He was actually quite a tragic figure, having been a werepanther abused by an evil wizard. After escaping from the evil and abusive wizard, he got mixed up with the Kargat in Darkon, and was essentially enslaved by a vampire there. After escaping from the evil and abusive vampire, the Dark Powers granted him his own domain. Unsurprisingly, considering his upbringing so far, he turned out to be an abusive and evil leader.
In the 5e version, Chakuna from the village of Oselo has decided to put an end to the baron's reign of terror. She burns his palace and kills him. (She also rips out her own heart and eats his, which is some seriously cool mythology.) This makes her a liberator of Valachan, and a hero, and so she's uniquely a darklord by choice rather than by imprisonment.
This brings up a lot of questions about the nature of 5e Ravenloft. What happens when the assigned darklord is vanquished? It was stated at the start of the book that most people in Ravenloft lacked souls because they were just pawns that the Dark Powers used to torment the darklord. In this case, it seems that one of the pawns has done away with the darklord, so is this a domain that's just running a simulation for the sake of the simulation? It doesn't make much sense to me.
The central plot of Valachan in 5e seems to be the Trial of Hearts. This is a battle royale trial by combat, in which the winner gets to not die, and also gets escorted out of Valachan. Chakuna herself takes part in the trial, so you're as likely to be killed by her and her pet displacer beast as you are to be killed by any other contestant. Part of the Trial of Hearts is also to find a shrine while not being killed, so there's plenty of opportunity for a dungeon delve into a forgotten jungle temple, a nearby seacave, or whatever you dream up.
This seems like a pretty simple plot, and it's absolutely sufficient for an adventure in Valachan. The darklord is intriguing and, I think, could easily be...
]]>In response to Wizards of the Coast's morbid efforts to erode the stability of fantasy roleplaying games, there's a (successfully funded) Kickstarter for Tales of the Valiant. Inspired by the D&D system reference document (SRD), Tales of the Valiant is a project by Kobold Press that improves upon, and maintains compatibility with, 5th Edition. It offers greater licensing flexibility than 5e, and places the care of a "Core Fantasy" system with a company that has notably NOT worked to undermine the RPG community.
You might think that Wizards of the Coast has repented for its attempts to steal D&D from its community. But their latest announcement that they were raising the price of their books feels an awful lot like an attempt to discourage players from investing in hard copies of books for a game that the company is trying to move into a digital-only model. Wizards of the Coast's business model is to lie to its customers, and sadly it seems that that's been the case since 4th Edition, a few brief relapses into honesty notwithstanding. There's little hope for WOTC as a company, but there's great hope for OpenDND. Tales of the Valiant is funded, and it's looking great.
A roleplaying game's character sheet says a lot about the game. Not everything a character sheet suggests about a game is necessarily definitive, but it's always fun to look at a character sheet and think about why it looks the way it does.
For instance, my simple rules for Starship Combat in Starfinder uses a ship "character" sheet that's just half a page.
It's not rocket science (although it is rocket fighting). The simple character sheet reflects how simple the system is. Not much to think about, not much to track.
The character sheet for Call of Cthulhu looks a little complex, with lots of fields for numbers and calculations.
Most significantly, most fields are split into three parts, which indicates that most attributes of a character have three facets (in this case, it's full value for a normal test, half-value for a hard test, and a one-fifth value for an impossible test).
So what does the character sheet of Tales of the Valiant say about the game?
Here's the official character sheet for Tales of the Valiant.
Wrath & Glory is a tabletop RPG system for Warhammer 40,000. I found it through a Humble Bundle sale, and recently I read through the book and ran a test game. I enjoy the system and intend to run more games, but I know that building a character can often be intimidating for new players. In this post, I explain the quickest way to build a character for Wrath & Glory using its Archetype build method.
Before you start, talk to the Game Master to find out what Framework and Tier the game is using. The Framework determines which of the many Warhammer factions you can choose from, and essentially sets a moral compass for the game (no small feat within the Warhammer universe). For instance, a game that uses a Framework with the Imperium as the protagonist probably means that Orks are off-limit to you, while a game with Orks as the protagonists means the Imperium's probably off-limit. A Framework that uses Rogue Traders as the protagonists probably mean nothing's off-limit.
The game's tier informs how much XP you start with. You get 100 × the Tier number in Experience Points (XP) for your character build, and you'll use that XP to buy character attributes in the next steps. There are 4 Tiers:
Write the Tier and Framework on your character sheet.
An Archetype defines what your character does for a living, and what Faction within the vast setting of Warhammer 40,000 they belong to. Archetypes are listed starting on page 22 of the core rulebook. Even more are available on page 100 of the Forsaken System Player's Guide.
Archetypes are specific to Tiers, so select only from Archetypes within the Tier of your game.
Each Archetype entry on page 22 of the core rulebook has a page number by it. Turn to that page for the description and stat block of the Archetype you're considering.
Write down your Species, Archetype, Faction, and Keywords at the top of your character sheet. When you see a keyword enclosed in square brackets, replace it with something specific to whatever you want your character's background to be. For instance, all Adepta Sororitas Archetypes have a [ORDER] Keyword, which you can replace with a holy order, like Order of the Martyred Lady, or Order of the Bleeding Heart, and so on. Adeptus Mechanicus Archetypes have a [Forge World] Keyword that needs replacing, Orks have [Clan] keywords. You can pick something you already know about from official lore, or you can make one up. Not all Archetypes have a replaceable Keyword.
Write down Archetype Abilities in the Talents & Abilities field of the back page of your character sheet.
Write down your Wargear in the Wargear table at the bottom of the first page of your character sheet.
Do NOT record your Attribute ratings or Skills yet.
Deduct the cost of...
]]>Blacktalon is an Age of Sigmar show, focusing on Stormcast Eternals. Its lead character is Neave Blacktalon. The fourth episode just got released, and I've eagerly watched it. This review contains spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen the episode yet.
The series is ostensibly about Neave Blacktalon, but it's actually about what it's like to be a Stormcast Eternal. It seems that in Warhammer, you don't get to be a superhuman for nothing. There's a price. A Space Marine in Warhammer 40k receives horrendous genetic and physical modification. A Stormcast Eternal in AOS gets reforged upon death, but loses something in the process.
In the very first episode ("Reforged"), Neave awakened from having been reforged. She knew then that she'd lost something, but she wasn't sure what. She did have memories, though, of battling some plague-ridden barbarian. At the end of the episode, somebody brought her part of a broken weapon, saying that she'd told him to deliver it to her.
It was clear that before she'd been reforged, she had been in the process of piecing together her forgotten past.
In this episode, it's all explained. Or at least, some of it all is explained.
The intro to this episode shows a happy family living in Ghyran, the Realm of Life, who are suddenly running in terror from a pestilence of insects. The Realm of Life is, as its name implies, full of life, and is considered the rightful domain of Alarielle, the Everqueen and goddess of life. Then again, a realm brimming with life is awfully attractive to another god, specifically the chaos god Nurgle.
The problem is, at least from the perspective of the powers of chaos, Nurgle can be a hard sell for mortals. Although Nurgle does deliver bounteous life in the form of bacteria and virus and fungus and pestilence, that often results in the death of the fragile human being. What's the secret to making Nurgle appealing to humans in the Realm of Life?
Cut to the fruit farmer from the episode intro, as a decaying and cursed tree kin, taking nurglingfruit things to his prisoners in hopes that they'll eat it and join him as a living disease. It turns out, the secret is coercion and torture.
With the help of the Idoneth aelf (whose name I still haven't seen spelled out anywhere), Neave goes to investigate further. Of course, her old friend Hendrick Silverwolf insists on tagging along because it's a show about Stormcast Eternals plural. When Neave realises that the shard of the broken weapon (delivered at the end of the first episode) bears the inscription "Thea", Neave is inundated with vivid flashbacks. Someone who looks an awful lot like Neave herself is living on an idyllic fruit farm in Ghyran, when it's suddenly overtaken by a swarm of insects.
It's all coming together at last. Or at least it would have, if Hendrick hadn't literally stabbed Neave Blacktalon in the back. Turns out, Kendrick...
]]>Warhammer 40,000 is, first and foremost, a tabletop war game. It's also the catch-all name given to a vast fictional universe that includes Space Marines, several species of aliens ("xenos"), independent Rogue Traders, and more, all of which are explored through books, video games, animated series, card games, and board games. Originally, though, Warhammer 40,000 was just the name of a humble little war game, a futuristic iteration of the Warhammer fantasy war game. The latest version (functionally the 10th edition of the game, although its publisher doesn't identify it by edition number) of the core rules were released for $0 on the Internet on 3 June 2023, and I've read them through and played a quick test game. This is my review of the rules.
I don't normally play Warhammer 40,000. I play other games by Games Workshop, and I buy and paint their miniatures, but Warhammer 40,000 the game is a little too big for my current needs. I keep tabs on it just in case I find the opportunity to play it on a regular basis with other people, but currently I'm enjoying solo war games like Reign in Hell: Oculus Spear and Space Station Zero and my own micro skirmish game Skuffle Wammer. Aside from that, I play some Warhammer roleplaying games when I can, and I devour Black Library books and a few different Warhammer 40,000 video games. In other words, my interest in the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop war game is casual at best, in fact almost academic, and not based on hours and hours of game play.
The core rules are 60 pages. That seems like a lot to get through, but there's plenty of whitespace on each page, and several pages are just graphics for either decorative purposes or to serve as examples (there are two pages of photos of sample battlefield and terrain, for instance). Additionally, all key rules are summarized as bullet points throughout the text so if you're familiar with how war games work, you could probably skip over most of the detail and just hit the breakout boxes.
The way I see it, there are two parts to a war game. There's building your army, and then there's playing the game.
Building an army is barely mentioned in the rules. Even when it is, the rules refer you to "other publications, such as Codexes and the Munitorum Field Manual" to learn how to do it.
I'd have written that differently. For instance:
Before playing, you must choose an army. Armies are defined by books called Codexes, or in the Munitorum Field Manual. Browse available armies at games-workshop.com or in your local Warhammer store, and then purchase a copy of the Codex or Field manual for the army that appeals to you. These books tell you which Citadel miniatures you need to buy and paint to create a playable army.
That, to me, is a lot clearer, and it doesn't assume that the...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review contains major spoilers for this episode.
The Very Important Zombie Affair isn't an amazing episode, but it's not bad for what it is. The plot is simple and the setup is predictable from the title. A practitioner of literal Voodoo is creating zombie-like people and nobody can figure out how it's possible. After all, voodoo is just a superstition...
...
...or is it?
I don't know anything about the real world religion, and I assume neither did the producers of UNCLE. Assuming you're onboard for the usual American TV depiction of voodoo, this episode has a little something to say about hysteria.
The story is about "El Supremo", a Caribbean dictator who rules his populace partly by styling himself as an incarnation of a devil. He holds the powers of life and death, and life after death. He can transform his enemies into mindless and obedient servants, and he actually has a small plantation run by zombie workers.
Editor's note (60 years too late): They misspell Caribbean in the title card.
When Delgado, an influential leader, rises up to challenge El Supremo, Delgado becomes a marked man. He receives a voodoo doll, and moments later is transformed into a subservient and mindless zombie pledging his political support to El Supremo.
UNCLE comes to the rescue with a resolution that leans pretty heavily into the "is it real or is it superstition" mystery. But the solution for the El Supremo problem ends up clarifying the message: Sometimes weird stuff happens because hysteria makes it possible. Many years ago, I'd have doubted that any group of people could have mass delusions so powerful that some of them thought themselves to be cursed zombies with no will of their own. I'd have thought it ridiculous that somebody could fall down dead just because he believed somebody else had the power of striking him down. In a post-2020 world, though, I get it. This is stuff people in 1965 were dealing with, and it's stuff people in 2023 are dealing with. There are people whose need to believe in the impossible is so strong that they willingly allow impossible tragedy to happen around them and to them.
This isn't a great episode, but I thought its message was ultimately interesting. I might not watch it again, but I'm glad I saw it.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. Bloody Gates is the first part of a quartet of adventures, followed by On the Wings of Valkyries, Lord of the Spire, and Affliction Ascendant. This is an interesting series, because it's not sequential. Instead, they're four adventures set during the same military campaign to liberate Tora Armis, a minor hive spire on the Hive World of Gilead Primus. In fact, the opening sequence of On the Wings of Valkyries is seen in the distance by players in section 3 of this adventure. It's a fascinating technique and although I haven't played these adventures at the time of writing this blog post, I do like the concept.
This review contains spoilers.
In Bloody Gates, the framework is the Penal Brigade. Players start the game as prisoners, sentenced to service in a brigade called the Gilead Gravediggers. The Gravediggers consists of around 80,000 Imperial citizens, most hoping to earn freedom through acts of valour. In reality, the Gravediggers are a blunt instrument used by the generals who need to overwhelm an enemy with numbers.
The adventure is Tier 1, so it suggests that the Imperial Guardsman Archetype is most appropriate. It's flexible enough, however, for an Adepta Sororitas or Ministorum Priest Archetype serving in the Gravediggers as mentors, or even an Inquistorial Acolyte working undercover.
This is one of those rare adventures that manages to come as close to a skirmish war game as possible while remaining an RPG. You're dropped into battle almost immediately, and from then on you're on the battlefield, pushing ever forward against impossible odds. You move from objective to objective, taking orders from your general as you go.
In the first part of the adventure, the players are delivered to an outer wall of Tora Armis's fortifications in a Chimera transport. Assuming they make it to the wall, they have to scale it and disable an anti-tank gun turret, while dodging enemy combatants in foxholes along the way. It's basically impossible, and that's just the first part.
Then the second part happens, assuming the player characters are still alive. Now that they've taken out the gun, the Leman Russ tanks roll in to advance. The players are told to go out in front and clear a path for the tanks by finding and disarming landmines. Unfortunately for the players, there are enemy strike teams in the minefield, so they have to contend with that too.
Part three takes place at the eponymous bloody gates into the city, and part four takes place on the ground level of the spire. There are complications every step of the way, and it's not always just the obvious battlefield stuff. There are moments of chilling social interaction, with allies out on the field, strangers of unknown allegiance, citizens caught in the crossfire, and lots more.
The booklet's layout is the same as Graveyard Shift, with clear...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Tepest is listed as "folk horror", and so this section focuses on the "quaint" beliefs of the people of the domain, and how they give power to subjugation, abuse, and brutality. The domain's darklord is Mother Lorinda, a green hag who's captured her sisters in a cauldron so she can use their magic for her own goals. Her main goal is to have a daughter, and she uses as much black magic as necessary to try to create one out of twigs and brambles and animal parts for herself. She ends up making monstrosities, of course, but to fuel this and the rest of her power, she demands a ritual sacrifice every quarter. The people of Tepest serenely oblige, in the way that only religious fanatics can.
I think the most disturbing thing about Tepest is the creeping knowledge that everyone in the village of Viktal (the domain's only remaining village) is one wrong word away from zealous rage. Everything's fine until you question their devotion to Mother. Nature and civilisation exist in complete harmony until blood must be spilled. There's nothing strange about Mother Lorinda until you see through the illusory magic. But no matter what, of course, you're the bad guy, not the people leading a town youth out into the middle of a field for ritual slaughter.
I think "folk horror" almost undersells a setting like this. This is psychological horror, with gaslighting and deception at every turn.
Although it has an intriguing backstory, Tepest is one of those domains that doesn't have a strongly suggested plot. As usual, there's an adventure hook table to help you come up with an excuse for the player characters to spend time there, but I have a feeling that eventually most player groups are going to gravitate toward the mysterious nature of the local religion. And if not, it wouldn't be hard for the locals to find something to become angry about. Anything that appears to go against Mother Lorinda will do, and it doesn't even have to make sense. Any player character might say the wrong thing, or look different than what the villagers are used to, or could be deemed "impure", or too old, or too young, or too happy, or too sad. Tepest is a tempest ready to trigger at any moment, or not at all. Either way, the horrorific reality of the Tithe festival, and Mother Lorinda's brutality, is going to become clear, and it's up to the player characters whether or not that's important to fight.
This is a good, creepy, unsettling domain. The next one is the last one (sort of)!
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
In the controversial work Struggle and Victory in the Animal Kingdom, [fictional] naturalist Inard Milhavet wrote that the black rat was the most successful of all beasts. Maybe Milhavet had a point, because rats dominate Richemulot. In its 3.5 version, this domain had a wererat problem. In the 5e version, Richemulot is literally a plagued by rats, spreading a disease called "The Gnaws." Wererats are immune to the Gnawing Plague, and so they've come to view Richemulot as a haven for filth and evil.
On the surface, Richemulot is a nice place, though. It's a got pastoral countrysides, bustling and industrious cities, and the glamourous Jacqueline Renier, a firm and capable leader who also happens to be...a darklord.
Jacqueline Renier is an aristocrat who inherited the domain of Richemulot from her grandfather Claude Renier. Claude was cruel and treacherous, and his power in Richemulot ended when Jacqueline murdered him so she could inherit his power before her twin sister Louise. She didn't murder her twin, interestingly, but I guess Louise is happy for her sister to rule because there's no indication of a power struggle (yet). This isn't an evil twin and good twin situation, either. Both sisters, like the entire Renier line, are evil wererats, with Jacqueline's rat form being an especially vile dire rat.
The Gnawing Plague is the strongest element of Richemulot as a setting, and there are disease rules in effect here. The plague undulates between Stage One (Threat) and Stage Four (Pestilence) at the Dungeon Master's whim or the roll of a d20. The chance for infection bizarrely goes down at Stage Four (1 in 6 chance, although with a very high DC), but the chance of wererat or rat combat goes up. During other stages, Constitution rolls to avoid the disease are frequent.
The disease's mechanical effects are:
That feels pretty fair, and relatively simple to manage mechanically.
Obviously a plague in the real modern world would be relatively simple to eradicate. The population would wear masks, and get a vaccine in the interest of protecting themselves and their fellow human beings. The disease would be starved of hosts and die off. But in the pure fantasy world of Ravenloft, things are not so simple. In Richemulot, the despotic leader is herself a wererat (though she'll never admit to it) and probably encourages poor health. Heck, she may even encourage charlatans among the population to claim that the disease doesn't exist or that reports of its...
]]>One of the classic UNIX commands, developed way back in 1974 by Ken
Thompson, is the Global Regular Expression Print (grep
) command. It's
so ubiquitous in computing that it's frequently used as a verb
(\"grepping through a file\") and, depending on just how geeky your
audience is, it fits nicely into real world scenarios, too (\"I'll have
to grep my memory banks to recall that information\"). In short, grep is
a way to search through a file for a specific pattern of characters. If
that sounds like the modern Find function available in any word
processor or text editor, then you've already experienced the effects
that grep has had on the computing industry.
Far from just being a quaint old command that's been supplanted by modern technology, grep's true power lies in two aspects:
Grep works in the terminal and operates on streams of data, so you can incorporate it into complex processes. You can not only find a word in a text file, you can extract the word, send it to another command, and so on.
Grep uses regular expression to provide a flexible search capability
Learning the grep
command is easy, although it does take some
practice. This article introduces you to some of the features I find
most useful.
If you're using Linux, you already have grep
installed.
On macOS, you have the BSD version of grep
installed. This differs
slightly from the GNU version, so if you want to follow along exactly
with this article then install GNU grep from a project like
Homebrew or MacPorts.
The basic grep syntax is always the same. You provide grep
a pattern
and a file you want it to search. In return, grep prints to your
terminal each line with a match.
$ grep gnu gpl-3.0.txt
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html>.
By default, the grep
command is case-sensitive, so \"gnu\" is
different from \"GNU\" or \"Gnu\". You can make it ignore capitalization
with the --ignore-case
option.
$ grep --ignore-case gnu gpl-3.0.txt
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for
the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to
GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to
[...16 more results...]
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html>.
You can also make grep
return all lines without a match by using the
--invert-match
option:
$ grep --invert-match \
--ignore-case gnu gpl-3.0.txt
Version 3, 29 June 2007
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/>
[...648 lines...]
Public License instead of this License. But first, please read
It's useful to be able to find text in a file, but the true power of
POSIX is its ability to chain commands together through \"pipes\". I find that
my best use of grep
is when it's combined with other tools, like cut
or tr
or curl
.
For instance, assume I have a file that happens to list some technical papers I...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Mordent is a hanted domain, and the horror genre listed for it at the start of the section is ghost stories. Personal drama is high in the Mordent backstory, although much of it is subdued in the 5e version. In the 5e version of Mordent, the ghost of one Lord Godefroy is the darklord of the domain, and he's tormented nightly by the unrestful spirits of his daughter and wife, both of whom he murdered one fateful night in the House of Gryphon Hill.
Not only was Lord Godefroy a murderer in life, he was an extortionist after death. For fear of being discovered, he blackmailed Daniel Foxgrove into spying on the townsfolk to ensure they weren't deducing Godefroy's evildoings. Foxgrove is the father of none other than Laurie and Gennifer Weathermay-Foxgrove, whose correspondence with Van Richten was referenced in the book's introduction. In fact, Van Richten owns and runs an herbalist shoppe in Mordentshire, and when he's away (presumably hunting monsters), Laurie and Gennifer would tend to it.
There isn't a strong plot for Mordent, but as usual there's a plot table to give you some ideas. According to the domain's theme, though, the implication is that you're meant to run a story featuring ghosts, and so there are several tables to help you build a ghost with an interesting backstory. The ghost tables and the plot table don't necessarily always align (one plot hook is the investigation of a giant raven terrorizing a village, for instance) but you could probably either combine the plot hook with a ghost subplot or else just use the motivations and backstory you build with the tables for whatever enemy you end up using.
Mordent is one of the earliest domains in Ravenloft lore, having been introduced in the second-ever Ravenloft module. There's nothing particularly unique about it except that it's a spooky place that's home to more than its fair share of annoyed poltergeist. Its main attraction, I think, is the House on Gryphon Hill. There's considerable nuance to the house, because it's the house that knows of Godefroy's murders, making it conceivably an ally. However, Godefroy currently inhabits the house still, and he's got a staff of servant spirits whom he lords over with the threat of severe punishment by his spectral hounds. So the house could feasibly used as a haunted house in an adventure, or player characters could be called in to rescue the house and the spirits inside of it (with maybe some loyalist spirits presenting the usual threats.) Or, obviously, you could just reimagine the lore a little and make the house complicit in Godefroy's bad behaviour.
Mordent is an easy setting for a supernatural story, which...
]]>I'm reading through the published adventures available for Cubicle 7's Wrath and Glory Warhammer RPG. The third adventure I read was Rain of Mercy, an introductory adventure about a water supply investigation.
In Rain of Mercy, players take on the role of a special task force hired by Rogue Trader Jakel Varonius to investigate a water shortage on the planet Enoch. Or rather, a sudden water surplus. It's complicated. Enoch is mostly a water world, but the water is not only polluted from industrial waste but also it's sea water. Due to the opening of the Great Rift, there was sudden over-population as millions of pilgrims got stranded in the Gilead System. Because Enoch is the primary destination for pilgrims in the system, it bears the brunt of the problem, and that means food and water shortages. The players, using pre-generated characters in the back of the book, are tasked with investigating a local cult claiming to be led by a living saint, and they've been handing out free and pure water.
As with the other adventures I've read so far, the story is simple and direct, with few distractions and no side quests. And like the other adventures, this is a really good Tier 2 introduction into Wrath and Glory.
The rest of this review contains spoilers.
The first 7 pages of the 16-page booklet is background information about the Warhammer setting and the Gilead System. The last 2 pages are the pre-generated character stats. That leaves 7 pages for the actual adventure, starting on page 8.
The adventure begins with planetfall. The player characters arrive and meet Rashida Kandlan, the Enforcer of the city of Mourncleft. She debriefs them on the situation. The "Water Bringers" are lead by the living saint Martika, and they seem to predominantly give fresh water away for free.
After some investigation, the players might discover that a second group, known as The Deluge, is also providing fresh water, although they charge for it.
There's lots of room for variation with this situation. It's stated that some people within the Water Bringers are opportunists and have been secretly charging fees (usually in the form of trades or services) for the water they distribute, and the Deluge is definitely a gang. As the Game Master, you can emphasise the confusion, or you can play the cults as polar opposites. The Deluge may also get intel about the player characters and ambush them, which leads to a minor subplot and some combat.
Once the player characters have established a working relationship with the Water Bringers, they meet Martika who preforms a miracle before their very eyes. Whether it's an actual miracle or some power of the Warp is a judgement call the layers must make. The Ecclesiarchy accepts whatever the player characters decide, either allowing Martika's work to continue or ordering her execution.
The layout of the Graveyard Shift adventure continues to be the best of all the adventure's I've read...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Lamordia is a frozen wasteland, in the process of being desperately tamed, or at least obstinately defied, by its hearty population. Speaking of hearts, it's also the home of demented scientist Dr. Viktra Mordenheim, whose hobbies include stitching body parts together and animating them. If you're tracking tropes, this is the Frankenstein trope, but with some interesting new 5e twists.
In 3.5 Ravenloft, Dr. Mordenheim was almost a carbon copy of Dr. Frankenstein (depending on what source you consider canon, but I'm a Hammer Horror fan myself), with an animated corpse monster called Adam. In this book, Dr. Mordenheim hasn't exactly built a human from parts, but instead saves her dying assistant Elise by implanting an artificial heart, called the Unbroken Heart. The Unbroken Heart isn't magical, it's actual (steampunk) science, so it's considered to be a pretty big deal. Unfortunately, Dr. Mordenheim did a lot of murdering as part of her experiments earlier in her career, and just as she's finishing the implant, constables burst in to arrest her. She awakens in Lamordia.
Dr. Mordenheim's story is refreshingly clear. We don't know what world the "real" Lamordia is on, but we understand when Dr. Mordenheim crosses over from the real world into Ravenloft. Elise, or the Ravenloft version of her, wanders the landscape of Lamordia, lost in every sense of the word. Rumours spread across the land of, essentially, a flesh golem wandering the countryside, with a heart you can see glowing red from within it. No matter how hard Dr. Mordenheim tries, though, she can't track down her missing Elise, nor can she recapture the science of the Unbroken Heart.
To add to the macabre, Dr. Mordenheim experiments on whatever she can in her spare time. For instance, she can perform successful brain transplants. She has the brain of a local politician in a jar.
Dr. Mordenheim is, like the reborn lineage presented in Chapter 1, the perfect solution to a total party kill (TPK). A whole party can be resurrected in Dr. Mordenheim's lab, with any number of modifications either having been made or about to be made.
Lamordia itself is a great setting. As with all the other domains in this book, my first instinct is that there's not enough of it. However, there's a 3.5 Gazeteer with some additional details about Lamordia. Additionally, there's an icy north setting available from Kobold Press called the Northlands and a whole (unrelated) adventure path from Frog God Games called the Northlands Saga. Both of those are for Pathfinder, but I find the conversion from 3.5 to 5e pretty easy as long as you use monsters and traps and rules from the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG).
Lamordia...
]]>I've been watching the Angels of Death animated series on Warhammer+. This post is a review of the series, from the perspective of someone who's mainly read Horus Heresy books, along with the odd rulebook here and there. There are minor spoilers here.
The series is primarily about the Blood Angels chapter of space marines. This chapter was founded by the primarch Sanguinius, who I remember from the Horus Heresy books. It was Sanguinius who fought Horus in an attempt to stop the traitorous Warmaster from attacking Terra. The attempt failed, and Sanguinius fell to Horus. The Blood Angels have this historical martyrdom as a driving inspiration, and of course, as with all space marines, there's staunch brotherhood and loyalty among them.
The episode and series opens with a lone Blood Angel deep within maintenance tunnels. He's fighting something. Zombies? Infected mutants? It's unclear.
Anyway, in the end we assume he's fallen to the horde.
On the command centre of a battleship, Ship Mistress Livia Solken, contends with a Warp Storm raging outside and around the civilized world below. Solken is exactly what you want in a sci fi captain, and she's even better for existing in the Warhammer setting. She's a Goth who went to Starfleet Academy in the Bioshock world, utterly no-nonsense and always at her post. Probably the most fascinating part of this episode is the glimpse we get into the running of a Warhammer 40K starship. At the helm, there are augmented humans, and elsewhere there are astropaths in charge of navigation. And, in general, it's just a bunch of humans. Just like you and me, except most of them have augmetics probably to integrate with the ship.
And then there are the Adeptus Astartes, along for the ride. I love the sharp difference between humans and Astartes, and seeing the dynamic between them I think never gets old.
The problem is, there's no word from Captain Orpheo (presumably the lone Astartes we saw at the beginning of the episode). The Blood Angels are getting restless, and so they finally decide to go down to the planet in their fancy drop pods to search for him.
What the viewer doesn't know yet is that this is actually the second story in the series, but for a clever re-arrangement of the episodes. Episode 5, as you learn later, flashes back to how the ship got here (and what ship it is), why Captain Orpheo descended to the planet, and so on.
This is a strong, albeit confusing, opener. It doesn't feel like it's starting mid-story, but you figure out that there are big chunks of story missing the farther you get into the series.
The reddest of all space marines drop to the surface of the planet and discover that there's a proper city there. However, it appears to be completely abandoned. It's eerily quiet and lifeless.
Until, of course, it isn't. It doesn't take too long...
]]>At Adepticon 2023, Games Workshop announced that Warhammer 10th Edition is imminent, set to release in the [Northern Hemisphere] summer. Nobody was exactly surprised at the news, because apparently it's time for a new edition based on GW's established pattern of a new edition every 3 years. That seems like a short lifecycle to me, but it's 2023 and I guess things move pretty fast.
My impression is that most people are pleased at the news, not because it's a new edition but because it's been explicitly stated that it's a simplified edition. It seems that a lot of Warhammer enthusiasts think recent versions have been over-complex, poorly organized, and generally unwieldy. I agree, and I'm looking forward to 10th Edition, and here's why.
I have a good number of Citadel miniatures. I enjoy painting them while listening to books from Black Library, or watching Warhammer TV. I'm a gamer, and yet I haven't actually ever played Warhammer 40,000.
In fact, many Warhammer enthusiasts play wargame rules from Wargame Vault or [the inappropriately titled] One Page Rules. I was underwhelmed by One Page Rules, but I do play other systems, like Reign in Hell with the Oculus Spear expansion, Space Station Zero, and Mechaforce.
I did read the Warhammer 40k 9th Edition rules after acquiring some Space Marines, and after reading them I simply declined to engage. The rules weren't just complex, they were (in my opinion, at least) clumsily complex. It's 2023 and we humans have been gaming a long time, and we've been describing how to play a specific set of rules for just as long. At this point in game development, even a complex game ought to be advanced enough to condense a complex-feeling experience into minimal game maintenance.
Lots of rules get written to produce a specific feeling in a game because the rules writer wasn't able to produce that feeling in just one rule. It's one of those unobtainable ideals, of course, like trying to write the perfectly short sentence. At the most extreme, you'd be able to encapsulate everything you wanted to say in a single word...but then you've just off-loaded all of your intent to knowledge your audience must either know or look up, and eventually you'd build up an impossibly unwieldy vocabulary. But I do believe it's possible to provide the feel of a frantic and tense military campaign with, um, some number of rules fewer than those in 9th Edition.
A simple and early warning sign, for me, in these kinds of games are the phases of a turn. In 9th Edition, there are seven phases to each turn.
(This isn't quite as bad as something like, say Magic: The Gathering which not only has some unknown number of turn phases, but the "Main Phase" occurs more than once during a turn!)
There's no mnemonic to help you remember what each phase is, and each phase predictably has sub-steps...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Kartakass sounds like a fun and inspiring place. It's a whole region dedicated to natural beauty and artistic performance. There's an entire settlement, called Emherst, where the entire population is the cast and crew of a huge production: seven weeks of preparation, and then a full week of method acting (or LARPing, if you please.) Throughout Kartakass, music is heard echoing over the lush forests, there is no government to speak of, and everyone has an artistic skill they're perfecting.
Of course, this is a domain of dread, so the catch is that there's a rampant lycanthropy problem. In case you're tracking horror tropes, this satisfies the werewolf trope.
The darklord of this domain is a humble (not necessarily by choice) bard named Harkon Lukas. His eternal torment in Ravenloft is that no matter how hard he strives for fame, and no matter how great a performance, he's always quickly forgotten. Unlike many of the other darklords, he doesn't hold an influential social ranking in his domain. Instead, he's just another performer in a land of artists, and his only power is his manipulative and deceitful charm. Harkon Lukas never achieves his aims, though, and very often his relationships end in his inner beast emerging in the form of a werewolf, and multiple deaths.
In 3.5 Ravenloft, Harkon Lukas was actually a wolfwere not a werewolf. In other words, his natural form was a dire wolf, and he sometimes changed into a human. He was able to control the change, so he remained into human form most of the time. Sometimes, he assumed the form of a human male, and other times the form of a human female. In both forms, he was primarily a harpist.
I don't know why Harkon's gender fluidity was erased for 5e. He gains a daughter (and a son, but he's barely mentioned) in this version, and oddly the art for his "daughter" Akriel Lukas shows a human female dressed in the exact same clothes (boots, hat, blouse, trousers, belts, belt buckle) as Harkon Lukas, holding the exact same violin, in a pretty similar pose. I can't help but think that there was an edit of this section where Harkon Lukas was both male and female, but that at some point somebody decided a rewrite was in order. I cannot imagine why. It's the 2020s, at the time of this writing, and in real world gender is widely recognised as an attitude more than a biological trait, and this book is about a fantasy world where shapeshifters exist. It just doesn't seem to make sense.
To that end, when I run an adventure in Kartakass, Akriel and Harkon Lukas will absolutely be the same entity.
Harkon's...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Kalakeri is listed as Gothic horror and dark fantasy, and it's a rich and vibrant setting that also happens to be terrifyingly oppressive. On the surface, it seems like it would be a great place to visit. It's filled with rain forests and a latticework of intersecting rivers. I can just imagine lounging about in a fine hotel in Jadurai, the thousand-year old capital city boasting the heavenly Cerulean Citadel, and later taking a daytrip into the Backwaters to explore ancient sites, sights, and history.
The problem with Kalakeri is that it's ruled, as domains of dread are, by a darklord. Ramya Vasavadan is a power-hungry warlord with two siblings, Arijani and Reeva, competing to steal her throne. Arijani has been rebord as a rakshasa, and Reeva has been reborn as an arcanoloth, so they're both formible enemies.
Each sibling also has a strong faction of followers, and this section encourages you to use the Renown Rules from the Dungeon Master's Guide. I'm a big fan of Ravnica's Guild system, and this feels a lot like that, but with potentially even more at stake. Player characters can gain renown with one faction, and become hunted by another faction as a result. Ramya loyalists are fiercely opposed to rebels, while Arijani rebels are opposed to both Ramya loyalists and Reeva rebels, and Reeva rebels are opposed to Arijani rebels and Ramya loyalists. No matter what you do, you're going to be the enemy of at least one faction, but probably two, and there's no right or even good choice. It's way beyond intrigue. It's pure social cannibalism.
There are a few things that make me wonder whether this was a domain that got developed before the decision to make Ravenloft a product of Dark Powers. As with many other domains of dread in this book, it's unclear when and how Kalakeri got its start. Was there a real world Kalakeri at some point? Did it get absorbed into Ravenloft? Or did Ramya, when she died on the Prime Material plane, cross over into the Shadow Plane to be restored in an undead form in Ravenloft, in a realm that's basically a simulacrum of her previous home? I assume the residents of the Ravenloft Kalakeri are Shadow Plane manifestations invented for the darklord, because the global rule is that the people within domains of dread mostly have no soul.
But as written, the history of Kalakeri seems to have occured in Kalakeri. There's no indication that Kalakeri existed elsewhere, but it was spelled out very clearly for Hazlan and I'Cath that those darklords existed first in one place (Toril for Hazlik, and an unspecified but definitely separate location for I'Cath)...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
I'Cath is a domain caught between reality and a dream forced upon its residents by the darklord Tsien Chiang. The book is admittedly a little unclear about biological details, but from what I can tell, everyone in the domain pretty much sleeps day and night. Those few who manage to stay awake during the day stay indoors, for fear of the jiangshi, wandering spirits of Tsien Chiang's four daughters. I'm not sure what they do to eat, but I guess part of the magic dream state is probably something like gentle repose.
The darklord Tsien Chiang's backstory is one of the clearest and most tidy of all darklords in the book so far. There's a clear beginning, a clear progression, and a very specific point at which she crosses over into Ravenloft. In fact, I daresay this is likely the only one so far specifically written with the "new" Ravenloft in mind.
Before Ravenloft, Tsien Chiang was the student of a Gold Dragon. Eventually, though, she ignored the dragon's guidance and experimented with some dangerous magic. She accidentally killed her mentor, but got the city of her dreams in return. She ruled the city until her subjects came to realise her tendency toward totalitarianism, and so they revolted. She quelled the revolt, and the next one, and so on until finally she used the same dangerous magic that got her into this mess, and after the spell was cast she found herself a darklord in Ravenloft.
Her main ability is to cause everyone within her domain to sleep and to share her dream of how her domain ought to be. She's constantly seeking perfection, and forever unable to achieve it. Player characters caught in her imposed slumber spell do not gain the benefits of a long rest, and in fact gain levels of exhaustion.
Tsien Chiang lives in the Palace of Bones, located at the centre of the city. It's surrounded by beautiful but deadly plants, and the city changes and shifts periodically, making the palace difficult to reach.
I tend to like, in games, a layered game world. I like the idea of switching back and forth between modes, like the living and the spirit world, or the prime material plane and the feywild or shadow plane, and so on. In I'Cath, I can imagine player characters having to toggle back and forth between the awakened world and the dream world, Guacamelee or Ibb & Obb style, to obtain the components of whatever solution will get them out of the domain.
The suggested plot for I'Cath is to disrupt Tsien Chiang's dream. Player characters can do this by helping her daughters find peace, to inspire the citizens...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Hazlan is a vaguely Dark Sun domain, crumbling from the abuse of magic by its darklord Hazlik. Before he arrived in Ravenloft, Hazlik was a Red Wizard of Thay (in the 3e version, he was just a red wizard and his tattoos had been forcefully applied to him as a form of humiliation). As he'd risen in ranks in Thay, he developed a rivalry with another Red Wizard. He went to such extremes to gain power over his competitor that the zulkirs (high ranking Thayans) kicked him out. He ended up in Ravenloft with his own domain, where he reigns as darklord from his castle Veneficus.
Hazlan in 5e borrows a trait from the missing Azalin Rex. In 3e, part of Azalin Rex's curse was that he couldn't learn new magic. In this version, it's Hazlik that can't learn new spells.
What Hazlik is attempting, though, is to use his entire domain as a sort of spell focus or catalyst for greater magic or something. He aims to create a storm in a teacup (with magic being the storm, and Hazlan being the teacup) to get himself out of Ravenloft. He doesn't care that he's ruining his world, because he doesn't anticipate staying around when it finally implodes.
So he's a super-powerful guy causing all manner of ecological calamity with the fallback plan of leaving everything behind when he's used it up. I'm so glad this is just fantasy, because a villain like this in real life would be horrible.
This domain doesn't have just one plot, but it has a good plot table with lots of ideas for why player characters might have to spend some time in Hazlan. Hazlik, the Mulan population, the cities, the alien lodestone buried beloy Toyalis, and even Hazlik's castle, aren't the main attractions in Hazlan. The real excuse for dropping your players into Hazlan is the fact that magic doesn't work the same way in Hazlan as it does elsewhere. Due to the rampant abuse of magic there, all magic use results in a special Hazlan wild magic roll, and potentially a second roll on the wild magic table in the Player's Handbook (PHB). Any MacGuffin will do, and the wild magic is guaranteed to make it worth it.
]]>I recently read through the Warhammer: Wrath and Glory tabletop RPG rulebook, and now I'm reading through the published adventures available for it from Cubicle 7. The second adventure I read was Brass Tax, an introductory Tier 2 adventure about a Space Marine rescue mission.
In Brass Tax, players take on the roles of Space Marine Scouts to located and extract a fellow marine, whose final communication was as he investigated an illegal ammunition factory. It's a simple and direct adventure: Players go to the manufactorum, plan their raid, and rescue their battle brother. How much reconnaissance they do and how they execute the raid are the main variables, and they can drastically change how the adventure occurs. I suspect there's high replayability here, which is a little surprising for such a simple storyline. I'd definitely play it two or three times.
It's a good adventure, especially for fans of Space Marines. As a scout, you're not a full-fledged Astartes yet, but you're big enough to use some heavy weaponry and you've been indoctrinated into a chapter. I think this is a great adventure, and probably a reasonable introduction for existing Warhammer fans.
The rest of this review contains spoilers.
The plot really is simple, but as usual players are likely to make it more complex than it is on paper. The intriguing twist to the adventure is that the Space Marines are acting without the consent of the local Ecclesiarchy. The players have the opportunity to interview a clerk named Phylus, who had met with the missing Space Marine earlier in that week. He can at the very least point them to the marine's last known location, and potentially can help them with intelligence on their target.
Phylus is basically the only NPC in the adventure. There's a second, unnamed, clerk at an Administratum office that's briefly mentioned, and whose sole purpose is to direct the players to Phylus. It's an awkward setup that I think probably would have been edited out, had this adventure undergone any editing whatsoever (And it clearly didn't. As of the 2022 revision, there are more typos in this adventure than in any other published material I've ever seen. It's astounding, but doesn't actually detract from the adventure.)
As a Game Master, I immediately focused in on these two clerks as potential variables. I can easily see myself using one of the clerks as a secret cultist who, unless detected, alerts the others before the Space Marines arrive for the rescue mission. I wouldn't do that on the first play-through, but it's a great opportunity for variation on a second or third play.
The raid on the manufactorum has plenty of variables in it, and is basically a classic video game quest. Players can choose to go in stealthily, they can look for a back entrance, they can barge in with guns blazing, and so on. There's plenty of opportunity for plot variation and for different play styles.
Sergent Viridis,...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Har'akir is Ancient Egypt land, with Ankhtepot, a mummified Pharaoh, as its darklord. When I was a kid, Ancient Egyptian mythology was an exciting alternative to my public school's focus on Greek mythology. I loved reading about mummies and the Egyptian pantheon, and to this day I still can't get enough. I've run a few games in a desert setting, and this one definitely appeals to me.
In his native land before being consigned to a domain of dread, Ankhtepot led a rebellion against an unpopular Pharoah. I gather that this wasn't the greatest offense. I believe his great sin was that he had the hubris to believe he was the best replacement Pharoah, and when he appointed himself as ruler of the land. The people turned against him and he was killed. The gods wouldn't let him into the afterlife, though, and so he ended up a living mummy in Ravenloft.
If you're keeping track of tropes (I'm not intending to, but I think I can't avoid it subconsciously), this fulfills The Mummy horror trope.
A detail that seems to be neither here nor there is that Ankhtepot replaced the people's gods (the Egyptian pantheon as described in the PHB) with false gods. What this means for the setting isn't really explained in this book, but I think it adds a dimension that could add some colour to the game world or become a major plot for an adventure.
Like the god-brain of Bluetspur, Ankhtepot wants more than anything to die. To do that, he requires his missing ka, a piece of his soul stolen from him at death by the true gods.
The plot this book provides for Har'akir is the recovery of Ankhtepot's ka, and it's even suggested that finding it could require the traversal of multiple domains. I can almost see the flowchart of such a campaign. You start in Har'akir, where you discover that Ankhtepot can be defeated (or redeemed?) by restoring his ka. Unfortunately, his ka has been broken into lots of pieces and embedded into artefacts spread across Ravenloft. You find a mist talisman leading you to the next domain, where you go through a great adventure to recover the first artefact, which also happens to be a mist talsiman leading to the next domain, and so on.
The interesting thing about settings is that they tend to fade into the background. That's what they are, after all: literal backgrounds for an adventure. I feel like generic fantasy settings are easy to both forget and remember. When you sit down at a table to play D&D, it's very often understood that the setting is "generic" fantasy. The setting...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
Having come to WarhammerTV only this year, I didn't realise there were to be more Hammer and Bolter episodes. There haven't been new episodes in months, so it came as a surprise to me that a new one has been released. I guess this is the "hammer" part of the title, because this one's set in the Age of Sigmar.
People are missing from the city of Hammerhal Aqsha, and witch hunter Hanniver Toll aims to find out why. Specifically, one of the missing people is of noble birth, and so Hanniver Toll has been commissioned to find him. To help him in his quest, he decides to hire Armand Callis, a down-and-out ex-Freeguild captain, and Callis's rogue-ish ex-lover. He also brings along two NPCs who have no lines and yet manage to be really fun to watch (until the inevitably die, as NPCs going on quests do.)
What a team!
I know the name Hanniver Toll from having read about some Black Library books I want to read. At the time of this writing, though, I haven't read them yet and have no experience with Toll. I have no idea, beyond what they vaguely reveal in dialogue, why Callis is upset with Toll. I don't know anything about Hammerhal.
And none of that matters. This is a great episode.
The formula is flawless. It's a Warhammer Quest, with significant capitalization, because I'm referencing the games. Both Blackstone Fortress and Cursed City, along with some older games, are supertitled Warhammer Quest, and in terms of the tabletop, they're two of the main ways I partake in Warhammer gaming.
Cursed City doesn't take place in Hammerhal, but there are enough similarities that this episode felt pretty familiar to me. The protagonists delve into a dangerous location, they're attacked (in this case by Skaven), and they end up facing a Soulblight. Along the way, they do all the typical D&D stuff. They climb through sewers, they investigate, they kill angry (or are they?) ratfolk, they pick locks, summon spirits, and more. It's perfect.
I say it's a "flawless" formula, and yet that's not accurate. I tried watching the Dragon Age: Absolution series not long ago, and it also had a flawless formula. It's set in Ferelden, it's got the cultural and historical trappings of the games, and it's got a plot that seems rich for intrigue. But I couldn't get into the show and eventually forgot to keep watching to the end. Maybe Absolution wasn't direct enough. Maybe the setting and culture isn't enough. Maybe I wanted a recognizable face, or maybe I was missing some references because I've only played (and re-played, often) the first game.
So the formula isn't flawless, but I got just a hint of Jurgen...
]]>Somebody once told me that paint is paint, and that it didn't much matter what you use for miniature painting. Turns out they were wrong. I've been painting with Contrast paints for the past few weeks, and I don't think I want to paint with anything else ever again (forgive the hyperbole).
Contrast paint is the trademarked term for a line of miniature paints by Citadel. They're designed with particles of varying density, such that darker shades fall into the recesses of a model, and lighter shades settle on the surface. This results in an automatic shading effect, plus an all-round rich texture.
I have no particular allegiance to the Citadel brand, aside from the fact that it's the miniature paint I have the most experience with, and it's the brand that's easy for me to find in New Zealand. I do know that following the development of the Contrast line, other companies have come out with the same concept. The Army Painter's Speedpaint line is supposed to be similar to Contrast, but I can't vouch for the results because at the time of this writing, I haven't tried them.
What I have experienced with Contrast paints so far has taken me entirely by surprise. Not knowing the difference between Contrast paint and any other paint, I recently went to my local Warhammer store and asked for "an electric blue" paint. I had some magical items on some miniatures, and I wanted to paint them with something special. The guy in the store handed me Pylar Glacier, which looked pretty brilliant in the pot. He showed me a miniature that had been painted with some of it, and it looked suitably vibrant.
I bought it, and eagerly went home to try it out. I used it to paint the orb at the top of a staff, and failed miserably. No matter what I did, I just couldn't seem to get the blue onto the orb. I'd dip the brush into the blue paint, but once the brush touched the orb it almost seemed to have turned into clear paint. It wasn't at all vibrant like the pot of paint, and it wasn't nearly as thick as the other paints I had. If anything, it seemed more like a wash than a paint.
I spent several days believing that I'd wasted my money and that I'd never have any use for Pylar Glacier. I still didn't understand, at this point, that I'd acquired a special kind of paint called Contrast, or what that meant. All I knew was that I'd gone out looking for a specific paint, and had apparently failed. If I couldn't even make a purchase right, what hope did I have to become a better painter?
A few weeks later, I got tired of mixing Mephiston Red and White Scar to create fleshtones. I realised there had to be a fleshtone paint in the Citadel line....
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
Falkovnia is a military dictatorship under absolute martial law. In previous editions, its dictator was Vlad Drakov, a sadist who demanded to witness an impaling every evening along with his meal. He tried invading bordering domains with his mercenary force, the Talons. He was fiercely xenophobic and hunted down any non-humans in his domain. Definitely a darklord you wanted to defeat.
In the 5e version of Falkovnia, Vlad never existed and has been replaced by Vladeska Drakov. Valdeska is mostly a genderswapped Vlad: a mercenary who got too powerful and became a dictator, ruling the citizens of the region without compassion, sympathy, or mercy. Any crime is punishable by impalement, and any citizen not in the military serves the military.
This book's Falkovnia borrows a subplot from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (the 3e version of Curse of Strahd). It's a common subplot for horror and it would have been disappointing if this book didn't feature it at least once. Falkovnia is actively, persistently, relentless, being overrun by zombies.
Conditions are bad. Lekar is the only city left standing, or at least that's what this section seems to assert initially. Later, other villages and towns are mentioned in a plot table, but I think it's generally safe to assume that Lekar alone is civilized. But it's only a matter of time before Lekar, too, falls.
As I've come to realise, this book assumes your gaming group is going to have one adventure (give or take) in each domain. The one plot for Falkovnia is the seige of Lekar. The final 2 pages of this section detail exactly how to play it, with tables to generate encounters, major events, and so on. There are new zombie stat blocks in the bestiary.
Interestingly, as the book points out, this is the one domain where the player characters and the darklord are ostensibly on the same side of the conflict. It's the living against the undead, so whether players like Vladeska Drakov or not, they're in this together. I like that idea. To a player new to Ravenloft, Vladeska probably would make a good initial impression. She probably comes across as a brave general fighting against impossible odds. Sure, she's firm, even harsh sometimes, but then again look at what she's up against.
One wonders how the players will react when, after they've destroyed the zombies, Vladeska Drakov continues to oppress and abuse the people of the domain. Unlike most darklords, Vladeska doesn't have the ability to close the borders of her domain, so they could just leave well enough alone, or they could take up a new battle to defeat her.
Like Dementlieu, I think the 5e version of Falkovnia is an...
]]>Learning is hard work, and nobody likes work. That means no matter how easy it is to learn Bash, the language of the Linux terminal, it still might feel like work to you.
Unless, of course, you learn through gaming.
You wouldn't think there would be many games out there to teach you how to use a Bash terminal, and you'd be right. Serious PC gamers know that the Fallout series features terminal-based computers in the vaults, which helps normalize the idea of interfacing with a computer through text, but in spite of featuring applications more or less like Alpine or Emacs, playing Fallout doesn't teach you commands or applications you can use in real life. The Fallout series was never ported to Linux directly (although it is playable through Steam's open source Proton. The modern entries into the Wasteland series that served as predecessors to Fallout, however, do target Linux, so if you want to experience in-game terminals, you can play Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 on your Linux gaming PC. The Shadowrun series also targets Linux, and it features a lot of terminal-based interactions, although it's admittedly often overshadowed by blazing hot sim sequences.
While those games take a fun approach to computer terminals, and they run on open source systems, none are open source themselves. There are, however, at least two games that take a serious, and seriously fun, approach to teaching people how to interact with systems through text commands. And best of all, they're open source.
You may have heard of Colossal Cave Adventure, an old text-based, interactive game in the style of "choose your own adventure" books. Early computerists played these obsessively at the DOS or ProDOS command line, struggling to find the right combination of valid syntax and zany fantasy logic (as interpreted by a sardonic hacker) to beat the game. Imagine how productive such a struggle could be if the challenge, aside from exploring a virtual medieval dungeon, was to recall valid Bash commands. That's the pitch for Bashcrawl, a Bash-based dungeon crawl you play by learning and using Bash commands.
In Bashcrawl, a "dungeon" is created in the form of directories and files on your computer. You explore the dungeon by using the cd command to change directory into each room of the dungeon. As you proceed through directories, you examine files with ls -F, read files with cat, set variables to collect treasure, and run scripts to fight monsters. Everything you do in the game is a valid Bash command that you can use later in real life, and playing the game provides Bash practice because the "game" is made out of actual directories and files on your computer.
$ cd entrance/
$ ls
cellar scroll
$ cat scroll
It is pitch black in these catacombs.
You have a magical spell that lists all items in a room.
To see in the dark, type: ls
To move around, type: cd <directory>
Try looking around...
]]>
I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
The domain of Dementlieu, in previous editions, was essentially just France land. It was the part of Ravenloft where you could go to feel like you were fighting vampires and werewolves in France instead of Eastern Europe. Its darklord was Dominic d'Honaire, a dangerously charming man. When you interacted with him, you had to makea DC 19 Will save (Will was a 3e mechanic) to resist his charms, and after three consecutive failed checks, you became Obedient.
I imagine that the authors of 5e Ravenloft felt like that was all pretty generic, because the 5e Dementlieu is far far more interesting. However, the trade-off is the same as with the other domains in this book: you get a really strong story, but just the one. The 5e Dementlieu has, more than any other domain so far, a gripping backstory and exactly one story.
Dominic Dementlieu is out. He presumably never existed, and it's no great loss. He was basically an incubus, and those are a dime a dozen. In his place is Saidra d'Honaire, a dark Cinderella who was ridiculed for most of her life for not being of noble birth. So she murdered her way to nobility, caught the Red Death, and became a wight.
In her undeath, she masquerades as a living human, and rules Dementlieu in blissful tyranny. It's "blissful" because everyone in Dementlieu pretends to be better off than they actually are. The lower class pretend to be middle class, even though at night they have to go digging through the rubbish bins for supplies. The middle class pretends to be upper class, even though they have to literally starve themselves to afford their lifestyle. Anyone who betrays the actual state of their country is literally disintegrated by Saidra d'Honaire during her ghostly midnight patrols.
As with Darkon, Dementlieu has one strong story. Saidra d'Honaire throws a masquerade ball every week, and everyone in Dementlieu longs to attend. From what I can tell, the intent is that player characters arrive in Dementlieu, work to obtain an invitation to the ball, and then attend the ball. The reason, of course, is a MacGuffin and there are tables to help you figure out what that is.
The horror genre provided for this domain is dark fantasy and psychological horror.
I'm happy to see that Dementlieu integrates the Red Death. In previous editions of Ravenloft, the Red Death was a common threat throughout each domain. In fact, there was even a supplement called Masque of the Red Death, which existed explicitly so you could run a D&D game in "Gothic Earth in the 19th century."
The Red Death and Ravenloft are tightly bound, so it's...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
One of the advantages of having a setting consisting of millions of worlds with billions of people on each one is that its stories tend to shift perspective. I've often felt that a lot of sci fi settings forget that. You don't have that problem in Warhammer books, and happily Hammer and Bolter doesn't make that mistake, either. This episode is told as a series of flashbacks, and from an ork's perspective.
It's stylish, bombastic, violent, gory, and a lot of fun. Dursnang, an ork Runtherd, regales an tale to two ork boyz of his clan. It's sort of a cross between an inspirational and a cautionary tale. The point of the story is to tell the orks how to become stronger, but the story's about a frankly terrifying Commissar Yarrick.
The story follows the ork Warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka and Commissar Yarrick through the War for Armageddon. This was a major war in the Warhammer universe, and it's well documented in the Black Library book War for Armageddon, and in Codex: Armageddon. In short, the Armageddon system became the centre of a massive ork invasion. It was dismissed at first, but after the orks took the hive city of Helsreach it became apparent that they were a serious threat not only to Amargeddon but potentially to the Imperium and Terra itself. Overlord Herman von Strab controlled Armageddon at the time, but the Imperial resistance to the ork forces was all down to Commissar Yarrick. There were many other Imperial commanders (such as Kurov, Helbrecht, and Parol) who would clash with the orks in the Armaggen system, but it was Commissar Yarrick who proved the most formidable.
Commissar Yarrick is brutal, impossibly resilient, determined, and he's still out there. He's the nemesis of Ghazghkull, a representation of everything that the Imperium can be at its best. Er, worst.
This episode is additionally a great glimpse into ork culture. You get to see inside an ork encampment, you see the social structure of ork, um, society. You see orks in battle, in their war machines, at their wildest and, interestingly and surprisingly, at their noblest.
This episode's tone and attitude is different than the previous two, which in itself lends to its subject matter. It's the most orky of episodes, and that's completely appropriate. This is a truly great episode.
This episode is good sci fi. There's a little bit of augmetics combined with interplanetary war. It feels uniquely Warhammer 40K for the orks and Imperial ranks.
This episode is great Warhammer 40,000. Conceptually, the story could work in another setting, but it wouldn't be the same. And anyway, everybody loves a good ork story, and this simple non-story is one of...
]]>The 4th edition of D&D by Wizards of the Coast abandoned the Open Game License (OGL), which essentially locked many third party publishers out of publishing material for it. So that it (and other third parties) could continue publishing D&D content, longtime Dungeon and Dragon and Polyhedron magazine publisher Paizo released their own setting, and basically republished the 3rd Edition (actually 3.5) rules under the brand Pathfinder.
For the first time, the publisher of the D&D brand was not the primary or best selling vendor of D&D. 4th edition was not hugely popular, and Pathfinder had the advantage of third party support thanks to its open license.
Wizards of the Coast quickly returned to the Open Game License with 5e and, anecdotally, the brand is back where it's "meant" to be. And yet Pathfinder persists! And they're both the same game. They are both D&D, they're just different editions (ignore the fact that one grew up to be called "Pathfinder".)
So which one should you play? Which one's the right one for you?
I've played a lot of Pathfinder, and a lot of 5e (and yet not near enough of either, for my tastes.) I've read lots of Pathfinder books, and lots of 5e books. Here are the difference I see between the two games, as objectively as possible.
I wrote this post months ago, back when there was still the illusion that Wizards of the Coast had earnestly committed 5e to an open license. Between writing and posting the article, however, Wizards of the Coast has lost the trust of its the RPG community by threatening to illegally revoke the Open Game License.
For now, Wizards of the Coast has gone back on its threat and committed the rules of D&D to Creative Commons, but you don't build trust by granting a reprieve to a threat you invented (that's called emotional abuse). I no longer recommend D&D Fifth Edition or otherwise. The apparent successor of 5e is Tales of the Valiant by venerable publisher Kobold Press.
I discuss 5e in this post because that's the content and rules I have to compare. As Tales of the Valiant continues to develop, it's sure to differentiate itself from 5e in some specific ways, but I think the comparison will hold true, at least in a broad sense. For that reason, this post discusses 5e historically, and refers to Tales of the Valiant for the future.
When talking about Pathfinder, you're actually talking about three different phases of publication: D&D 3rd Edition (2000), D&D revised 3rd Edition (2003), and Pathfinder (2009). When Pathfinder was first released, it already had a 9 year history. If you bought Pathfinder 1st Edition, you already had 9 years of adventures and supplements from Wizards of the Coast as well as a host of third party publishers who'd been leveraging the Open Game License. You also had as many years of "bonus" content published across Dungeon...
]]>I recently read through the Warhammer: Wrath and Glory tabletop RPG rulebook, and now I'm reading through the published adventures available for it from Cubicle 7. The first adventure I read was Graveyard Shift, a Tier 1 or 2 investigative adventure about the recovery of dangerous xeno tech.
In Graveyard Shift, players are hired by Prodita Mendax, an Inquisitorial Interrogator, to recover a xeno device known as the Revelator. What the Revelator does or why Mendax wants it doesn't matter, and the player characters may be any archetype with the Imperium keyword. The device is apparently on the graveyard moon Daedalon, a planet in the Gilead System with the sole purpose of storing or processing the Imperial dead. The players must find the location of the device, and retrieve it for the Interrogator.
It's a booklet of about 20 pages, and was written by Robert Buckey and Zak Dale-Clutterbuck. I can imagine it being played in one long session, or over the course of two or three sessions. The story is simple, with a healthy mix of social interaction and the opportunity to fight (or not).
I enjoyed reading it, and look forward to running it.
The rest of this review contains spoilers.
The adventure is dividid into five distinct sections, and each section is prefaced with a single sentence clarifying what the section covers. This is brilliant adventure design, and I wish more adventures of all systems would use this. It's a simple technique to help keep the GM on track and to reinforce the important story beats.
I can imagine taking this one step further, with each section prefaced with both the ingress and egress conditions. I'd like to know what the player characters must have accomplished to get to each section, why they're there, and what they must accomplish to consider the section complete. As it is, though, the progression through the adventure in Graveyard Shift is one of the clearest I've seen in an RPG adventure.
The plot of the adventure is almost as simple as it possibly could be. A mission is given, the player characters ("Agents" in Wrath and Glory terminology) go to the biggest city on Daedalon, interact with a few NPCs to get the location of the tomb where the MacGuffin is kept, and then retrieve the MacGuffin. It almost feels like it's not enough, but if you've ever run a tabletop RPG game, you know that that's exactly the right amount. As clear and obvious as the path is for the Game Master, the players have no idea where the MacGuffin is, which lead to follow, who's telling the truth and who's lying, and so on. Even when an NPC provides a definitive answer, the players don't know it's the definitive answer.
The story is flexible, too. There are a few obvious non-combatants, but there are a few situations where players are able to choose between social interaction, subterfuge, or combat. Lots of play styles are...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
In previous editions, Ravenloft was more connected than it is in 5e lore. You could travel from one domain to another just as easily as you could travel from Baldur's Gate to Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms, or from Sandpoint to Magnimar on Golarion, unless a domain's borders had been closed by its Darklord (in which case you got lost in the mists and found yourself, usually, back where you started.)
The fact that different domains are at different cultural levels was just a regional quirk, which I think tends to hold true of certainly Golarion today. A player character might travel from a very classic fantasy town to a city filled with steampunk wonderments, and it doesn't break immersion because fantasy has proven to be a very flexible genre. Fantasy horror is equally flexible.
Back then, Azalin Rex was the darklord of Darkon, and he was a mutually despised enemy of Strahd von Zarovich in nearby Barovia. This minor subplot probably felt awkward in 5e's version of Ravenloft, where each domain doesn't quite seem to know that other domains exist. The 5e Ravenloft consists of little "bubbles" within the mists, with everyone inside each bubble believing simultaneously that their world is infinite and yet also that they are, for whatever reason, trapped within their local region.
So in this book, Azalin Rex is missing. He wasn't just forgotten, though, and it's stated very clearly that he once existed, but is now missing. There are hints about what may have happened to him, but nothing is certain. Darkon has no darklord currently, although there are several characters attempting to take control. In a sense, Darkon hasn't got one darklord but three.
As with other domains, I'm struggling to understand the significance of the darklords in 5e. They don't get stat blocks, and the stat blocks that get referenced for them don't tend to be particularly powerful, and yet Van Richten's Guide tells me to feature them in the adventure. What's to keep players from going from one domain to the other, systematically slaughtering the darklord? It wouldn't be that difficult.
Maybe Darkon is an example of why that's not a great idea. You get rid of one darklord, and three rise to takes its place.
In 3e Ravenloft, Darkon was a dark fantasy domain, with an evil lich, looming mostly unseen, in the background as its ruler. It consisted of several cities, mysterious forests, and murky swamps. Azalin Rex ruled absolutely, and his enforcers were the Kargat, a secret police force of vampires, ghosts, and lycanthropes.
In 5e, Darkon is a disaster. With its ruler missing, the domain is being consumed by something called The Shroud, a particularly destructive form of mist....
]]>Blacktalon is an Age of Sigmar show, focusing on Stormcast Eternals. Its lead character is Neave Blacktalon. The third episode just got released, and I've eagerly watched it. This review contains spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen the episode yet.
A Daughters of Khaine war band has recently liberated a city of Sigmar, and are currently occupying it. They're formally allies of the humans, though, so the expectation is that a human diplomat will be around to render compensation, and to manage a transfer of power. The problem is, a lord commander guy has commanded the Blacktalon team to assassinate the leader of the war band.
Yes, the Blacktalons have been ordered to go against a treaty. This doesn't sit well with everyone, and there's much debate over what they should do. If they follow orders, they'll be putting their faith in their commander. If they disobey, they'll be upholding an important alliance.
I'm a fan of Daughters of Khaine from an aesthetics perspective. To me, they look and feel like something straight out of He-Man or She-Ra, and that's one of my favourite kinds of pulp fantasy. I can't play Daughters of Khaine because, so far, my only connection to Age of Sigmar on the tabletop is Cursed City but I can collect and paint them. Seeing them in action in this episode was a real treat. Admittedly, they don't do all that much aside from stand around and snarl and then fight, but it's still fun.
The other aelf, the Idoneth Soulscryer on Neave Blacktalon's team, does a lot of cool ethereal stealth in this episode, too. There's a lot of magic in this episode that's really fun to watch.
I feel like the theme of this episode is meant to be a philosophical question: What's the difference between murder and war? In the end, while the episode literally answers the question through narration, I don't think the episode demonstrates it. I suspect the better musing might have been whether it's important to follow orders unquestioningly. That does get answered by demonstration, and I think it's the stronger message.
I do find some of the delivery of plot points a little confusing in this series. The solution isn't actually shown onscreen, but suggested through a series of quick and abstract cuts. It's stylish, but it's the goal of the episode, the big "will they or won't they" question posed from the very start, and it's not shown to the viewer directly. One of the biggest threats (a blighted sky that blocks Sigmar's power to reforge a dead Stormcast Eternal) isn't fully explained or resolved.
But if you're comfortable with the stylistic choices of the show, and the sometimes vagaries of its storytelling technique, this was an excellent episode. I continue to very much enjoy the series, and look forward to episode 4!
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
The next domain in the book is Carnival, a fascinating deviation from the formula (such as there is). The carnival is a moving domain of dread. It moves because it is, as its name suggests, a literal carnival.
I admit I was skeptical at first. How could a traveling carnival also be a domain? In-game, I'm as fine with that concept as I am with magic and faeries and all the other fantastical ideas in D&D, but as a Dungeon Master how would it work? It just didn't seem like there would be enough material for it to be a whole domain that player characters couldn't escape. Not because it's implausible, but just because I didn't feel there'd be enough story material.
Then I remembered a horror movie I saw that was set not just in a carnival, but inside a haunted house inside a carnival. And a Tunnels & Trolls solo game that takes place entirely in a bizarro circus tent. In fact, when I run games at conventions, my rule of thumb is three dungeon rooms equal 2 to 3 hours of playtime.
Of course there's enough material for a carnival to be an entire domain.
Then it struck me that if you have this book, there's no way you're going use all 30 domains before 5e is ancient history (or the Earth's ecosystem implodes, whichever happens first.) Problem solved! Trap the player characters in a traveling circus that moves from domain to domain by design. Show them every single domain of dread over the course of 30 weeks.
Of course, this book isn't exactly built to support that, at least not the way Saltmarsh or even Yawning Portal are. By that I mean, this book doesn't have adventures written out for you to run. But it does have plenty of story ideas for each domain, and most domains have plenty of material on what makes the unique, so you have plenty to work with.
I love the idea of a traveling domain, and I love a good carnival setting. The Lightwick Market, a group of straggler fae who follow the carnival around, is a great (and arguably under-developed) idea too. I don't know whether these fae are bound to the carnival or whether fae can just move through Ravenloft freely, but I'm intrigued by Ravenloft being part of the Shadow Plane now, and I think this lore of the Carnival brings a lot of cohesion to the setting.
There are too many clever ideas in the Carnival for me to spoil, so I won't comment any more on this domain, aside from saying that it was a pleasant surprise for how unique it is, and...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
I'm reviewing the episodes The Adriatic Express Affair and The Yukon Affair in one post because, to be perfectly honest, neither really justify a dedicated review.
Solo and Kuryakin get onto a train with a bunch of THRUSH agents. The THRUSH agents are working with a fashion or perfume designer (I forget which) for some nefarious purpose. The UNCLE agents bumble around and foil the plot.
It's not actually a terrible episode, it's just not very interesting or inventive. There's some awkward comedic relief, there's some throw-away suggestions of romance, and the fact that it's on a train oddly doesn't add anything to the story which, I think, you kind of want when a whole show is set on a train.
Solo and Kuryakin go to the Yukon, I guess. There's a lot of snow, and some people playing Inuits with the usual traditions and codes of honour. An evil THRUSH overlord makes things difficult and dangerous.
It's one of those episodes that was pretty obviously not written exclusively for a spy show. You can imagine the same script running on Star Trek or Gunsmoke or the Fugitive.
These are not exactly the strongest episodes, and frankly since seeing these two episodes I've started to doubt my resolve to watch the remainder of the second season, much less the remaining third and fourth seasons. For now, though, I'm pressing on in hopes that the general tone and quality improve. I'm aware that's not exactly the usual trend in television, but it doesn't cost anything to retain hope.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
Since the 3rd edition (or what we now call Pathfinder) of D&D, the mathematical process of the world's most popular roleplaying game has been the same. You roll a d20 to establish a base level of success, and then you boost that chance of success by adding points you've earned during character creation and by leveling up. Your character's innate attributes help some (a +4 Strength modifier, for instance, is helpful when you're prying a locked door off its hinges) but the big boosts come from proficiency in specific trained skills (Athletics, Acrobatics, Sleight of hand, persuasion, and so on.)
The physical tool we use for this is a twenty-sided die (or d20 in gaming terminology.) A d20 represents a percentage of success. Complete success is 100% (that's a 20 on the die). 100 divided by 20 sides is 5, so when you roll a d20, you use increments of 5% when expressing your chance of success. So a +2 to your roll is a 10% (2×5) increase to your chance of success, while a +4 is a 20% (4×5) boost, a +6 is 30% (6×5), and so on.
In practise, though, most actions don't require a full 100% success to achieve your goal. For instance, if you're trying to read ancient runes on an obelisk, you probably don't need to comprehend every word to get the idea of what it's saying, so a roll of 75% might be good enough. A 75% translates to whatever 75÷5 is (it's 15), but if you have a +4 to your roll then you actually only need to roll an 11 (because 11+4 is 15).
The important thing to understand is that your character's bonuses increase your chance of hitting the required number.
Interestingly, although both 5e and Pathfinder both use this exact same system, they manage to express these boosts differently.
In 5e, you choose your skill proficiencies once, during character creation. A proficiency bonus gives you a substantial boost when you attempt an action that falls into a general skill category. When you jump out of the way of a swinging pendulum trap as a 1st level character, for instance, you might have a +2 Dexterity and a +2 Proficiency bonus to your d20 roll. That's +4 to whatever you roll on the die.
As you level up in 5e, you often gain new powers and tricks you can do, but the points assigned to your skills don't often increase. Every four levels, you have the option to boost the attribute that a skill group is based on. It's a weighted system, though, so it actually takes eight levels to get an additional +1 in any single attribute. If you're a 1st level barbarian with a +2 to your Strength, you can add half a point (effectively) at level 4 and another half at level 8 to result in a +3 Strength. There are only 20 levels in 5e, so by level 16 you've only been able to see...
]]>If you think of Warhammer as just a series of video games...or a series of science fiction books, or as a series of miniature toy soldiers to paint, or as a series of board games, or as a war game...then you might be surprised to learn that it's also a tabletop roleplaying game. Or you might not be surprised at all, because the Warhammer IP is clearly nearly as vast as the [in-game] Imperium. I recently read through the Warhammer: Wrath and Glory tabletop RPG rulebook from cover to cover, and this is my review of it.
Wrath and Glory isn't the first Warhammer 40,000 RPG. There was Dark Heresy, a game about Inquisitors hunting down Heretics. Then Fantasy Flight Games released Rogue Trader, in which player characters acquired a Warrant of Trade and explored the farthest reaches of the galaxy. A third game, called Deathwatch was all about Space Marines. And there was Dark Heresy, in which players switched sides completely and took on the roles of Heretics. And finally there was Only War, with Imperial Guard player characters. I may have missed one in there, but the point is that there's no shortage of roleplaying opportunities within the Warhammer setting.
Wrath and Glory, in a way, is a game with the broadest scope yet, with options to play a rogue trader or hive city scum, an ork, an Inquisitor, Adeptus Astartes, Aeldari, and more. It feels very much like a 40,000 sandbox, with some soft limitations imposed by its setting, the Gilead System, which has been cut off from the rest of the Imperium by the Cicatrix Maledictum (Great Rift). If you have no idea what any of that means, that's probably OK, because Wrath and Glory doesn't assume you're a diehard Warhammer fan and does a pretty good job of introducing new players to an impossibly complex setting.
The book is 385 pages long.
Building a character starts with choosing a Framework. The framework basically sets the moral compass, which is important because there's no predefined "good" and "bad" in the Warhammer setting. Warhammer exists primarily as a war game. The player who wins is the "good guy" and the player who loses is the "bad guy" (reverse that when looking at it from the losing player's perspective). When an RPG gaming group agrees on a framework, certain factions are essentially marked as the protagonists and others are antagonists. For example, choose a framework with the goal of protecting the Imperium, and any Imperial character is a logical choice as a player character. Choose a framework with the goal of retrieving Aeldari soul stones back from a Dark Mechanicum cultist who seeks to unlock their secrets, and the Imperium and Dark Mechanicum are antagonists.
I love this idea, and I feel like it's an elegant solution to the age old problem of player character alignment. "Correct" behaviour is chosen up front when everyone agrees on a framework.
The book has four...
]]>Last year, I read through a bunch of books published by Wizards of the Coast, and I wrote reviews about them which I scheduled to publish throughout 2023. I did this because I was reading the books in preparation for some 5e games. I've still got two 5th Edition games running as I write this blog post, and while one's nearing the end, the other is likely to last for several more months. On the whole, though, I'm migrating away from 5th Edition, and certainly away from Wizards of the Coast. The blog posts that I wrote about WotC material will continue to post until November 2023 as scheduled, and from then on I likely won't post about WotC's D&D directly. There may be collateral mentions of it in posts about Kobold Press's Tales of the Valiant system, or Pathfinder 2, or whatever else I write about, but I won't support Wizards of the Coast until they've demonstrated real change.
When Wizard of the Coast attacked its community in December 2022 until January 2023, it unsurprisingly drained most of the energy from its fanbase. I've heard this from several D&D content creators, so I don't think it's just me. When someone you're working with or supporting suddenly threatens you with taxation and maybe litigation, it takes a toll.
You don't earn trust just by not following through on a threat. On the contrary, it's abusive behaviour to threaten someone, and then to expect them to appreciate you for not going through with your threat.
At the time of writing, it's been several months since the attacks ended. It seems that Wizards of the Coast has done everything they intend to do to compensate for their anti-consumer, monopolistic threats. They changed the license of the SRD and promised (again) to never go back on their word, and I guess they expect everyone to believe them.
Whether they think they're telling the truth doesn't matter to me. Because I've lost interest.
Losing interest in something is different than holding a grudge, or from placing something on parole. It's an inactive state of mind. For instance, I'm not buying new Wizards of the Coast content currently because I don't trust the company. That's an active choice. But I'm not reading the books I already own because I've just lost interest.
I don't have a good reason for it. I have lots of reasons it shouldn't matter, in fact. WotC's actions, however vile and disappointing, haven't affected my books. They still contain all the great content I used to love.
For instance, I haven't even read the official Dragonlance book yet. I've been waiting for a Dragonlance release since 5e began. I've been playing homebrew Kinders in 5e for years. I devoured the indie releases Tasslehoff's Pouches of Everything and the Dragonlance Companion before my official book reached me by post. I made a half-hearted effort to poke through the official book, and I played one game of...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
The section on Borca is, in spirit, everything I'd wanted the section on Barovia to be. It provides a resourceful Dungeon Master with all the components required to build up a particular kind of adventure. You get just enough information about the key figures within Borca, and with that information you can take any urban adventure you have in mind and run it in Borca.
The land of Borca is pretty generic. The interesting parts are within cities, and those cities are governed by a selection of nobility. Each family is described briefly in this section, and each of them control specific aspects of the domain. They're a little like factions, really, and I can imagine player characters joining them or fighting them (or both) during the course of an adventure. You get the feeling that the time period is maybe Victorian-ish, but there's a lot of flexibility there, I think.
Outside the cities dwell, I guess, peasants. The common folk don't really matter much within this domain, so you can either play up the squalor of the soulless masses, or ignore it entirely and have player characters rub elbows with just the upper class.
Any city setting will do. I can easily see running Rogues in Remballo or certainly anything out of The Blight setting here in Borca.
Borca has two darklords: Ivana Boritsi and Ivan Dilisnya. Originally, they each had their own domain, but kept in touch (presumably through letters delivered by ravens.) Ivana's was Borca, and Ivan's was Dovinia, but the two got combined by the Dark Powers, and the cousins Ivana and Ivan were forced to share. This book doesn't go into that backstory (see Secrets of the dread realms for more) but the end result is the same. The two darklords both dwell in Borca, each living tortured lives as murderous nobles.
Neither get stat blocks, but the spy and noble stat blocks are suggested for Ivana and Ivan, respectively. In this case, it makes sense that they don't have stats, to be honest. Neither are fighters. In fact they're both poisoners, and in addition to the poisons in Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), there are some new poisons and abilities provided in this section. The power of Ivana and Ivan lies in the high society of Borca, and the loyalty of their fans. It's not hard to imagine masses of oppressed peasants vehemently defending the good names and god-given wealth of the eternally youthful Ivana (she doesn't look a day over 18) or the decrepit Ivan (newly groteque for 5e.)
Speaking of gods, the domains of dread do have a goddess called Ezra. She transcends the mists, so she's not by any means specific to...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
All I knew about Bluetspur prior to reading this section was that it's an uninhabitable domain ruled over by a god-brain. It had no settlements and no apparent citizens. In one supplement, it was revealed that its darklord was an ilithid god-brain, but I don't recall that ever being explained beyond that phrase.
Well, there's not that much more to say about Bluetspur, as it turns out, at least in the same sense that in Starfinder's Pact Worlds source book there's not much to say about Aucturn or Akiton. It's desolate, deadly, and empty.
And yet the authors find interesting and inspiring ideas for players to explore. Mount Makar is a mountain that's not really a mountain, with a significant purpose that I won't spoil here. The Citadel Subterrene is a subterranean city consisting of pods or nodes in which ilithids dwell.
And then there's the god-brain.
The darklord of Bluetspur is an ilithid god-brain. A god-brain traditionally binds all ilithids within a colony together, acting as a kind of knowledge and psionic coordination repository. This god-brain betrayed a bunch of other god-brains, and so they had to destroy it. Unfortunately for the wanderers of the mists, the Dark Powers intercepted the god-brain on its way to whatever hell was waiting for it, and gave it a domain of dread all its own.
Admittedly, so far Bluetspur sounds essentially like just another Underdark. But there's a slight twist, I think, because it's implied that this god-brain actually wants to be put out of its misery. It's implied that it isn't, unfortunately, so self aware that it understands that it wants to be destroyed, so I get the impression that it will definitely fight back. However, the idea of a colony of ilithids that may want to both help and hinder players from destroying a self-loathing god brain sounds pretty great.
I think I'd probably add some third party into the equation, even if it were an ancient third party that isn't even around any more. Maybe the ilithids are dwelling in an old city constructed originally by gnomes (it actually sounds a little like Mount Nevermind in layout, minus the gnomeflinger). It could be part of their dark domain curse that they have to put up with mis-sized equipment. This ancient civilization could serve as a message from the past, urging the players toward their ultimate goal. Or maybe there are Gnomes still in Bluetspur, in hiding, looking to help the player characters destroy the evil overlord. Or you could just have the players stealth around for the entire adventure, encountering no one but ilithids.
Like Strahd, the god-brain darklord doesn't get a stat block. In fact I don't even think the...
]]>It turns out that not all miniatures you buy for your tabletop RPG or wargame are created equal. If you've been painting miniatures all your life, this is probably obvious. But for those of us new to painting miniatures, this is an important lesson. Here are my thoughts on miniature quality.
Miniature game pieces are pretty common. You get over 40 miniatures with the D&D 4th Edition board games, you get 7 with Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, you get 6 with Warriors of Krynn, and so on. You can buy packs of miniatures from Wizkids. And they all look great for most purposes. I know, because I own all of those myself, and the miniatures have served their purpose and they've gone above and beyond by serving as miniatures in other games, too.
Detail and physical "resolution" of a sculpture honestly doesn't usually matter if all you need is a game piece to move around a map. They're small anyway, and you're only looking at them from an arm's length. It honestly doesn't matter whether your 28mm toy soldier is scowling, shouting, smiling, or has no mouth at all. You'll never notice. At the most, you might care about whether a miniature has a ranged weapon (a bow or crossbow or handgun or rifle) or a melee weapon (like a sword or a hammer). And depending on your game, you might not even care about that.
If that describes your use of miniatures, then you probably haven't thought about who sculpted your miniature. In fact, you probably don't think of a miniature as being "sculpted" at all. It's a lump of plastic, and that's a step up from being one of those glass gaming beads, or a little wooden meeple.
All of that may change the moment you place a miniature under a magnifying glass so you can start applying paint.
When I finally decided to start painting miniatures, I started with the lumpy plastic miniatures that had come along with my board games. And they were fine to paint. I could more or less see where the head stopped and the shoulders began, I could distinguish the legs from the torso. It was fine.
The more I painted, though, the more I saw that some miniatures were more suggestion than sculpture. Boots flowed into pants, hands and sleeves were indistinguishable, cascading hair was just an extension of a shirt or a cape. I could force a line of distinction between elements with paint, but often it looked like I'd painted it wrong, not because my paint was out of the "lines" but because there were no lines in the first place. The sculpt was betraying my paint.
For about 60 miniatures, I just thought this was the burden of a miniature painter. It figured this had to be normal. Nobody every said miniature painting was easy, after all. People told me I could do it, but they didn't say it was something I'd be great...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 3 covers over 30 domains, so I'm posting about it as I work my way through the different domains.
The first domain described is also the most famous. Barovia is home to Strahd von Zarovich, the first vampire and subject of Expedition to Castle Raveloft, Curse of Strahd, and many other (most?) Ravenloft adventures. On the one hand, Barovia couldn't possibly be omitted from this book and yet on the other hand, it seems almost silly to have just 6 pages about it when entire source books on it exist. As you'd expect, Barovia is by no means sufficiently described in these 6 pages compared to the 250 pages of the 3.5 Ravenloft Campaign Setting, the 200 pages of Expedition to Castle Raveloft, a gazeteer, and an assortment of Van Richten guidebooks.
I feel like this section would have been better used if it contained some cool artwork (because why not?) along with the words "See Curse of Strahd." In effect, that's what this section is, anyway. It provides you with the general feel for Barovia (it's Gothic horror in an Eastern European style setting.) It briefly mentions Madam Eva, Tatyana, and a few other major characters and locations, although I have no idea what you're meant to do with this information. If you tried running an adventure off of what's provided here, nobody familiar with Ravenloft would recognize Barovia because you'd have to make up most everything from scratch. There's nothing wrong with making stuff up about an imaginary place, and you could always fall back on that as an argument when somebody points out blatant inconsistencies with the versions of very significant locations and NPCs based on the sliver of information you manage to infer from this book.
I think it would have been a far better use of 6 pages to present a Barovia in which Strahd isn't the driving force of the adventure. After all, if you want to run a Strahd aventure, you're going to run Curse of Strahd or one of the historical modules featuring Strahd, or else you're familiar enough with Strahd that this book isn't your source material anyway.
So why not spend 6 pages presenting us with heretofore unknown locations in Barovia?
The problem with this section is that there's no stat block for Strahd himself (page 68 says "His statistics are similar to those of a vampire," so in other words "See Curse of Strahd), and there's no map of Castle Ravenloft. It's silly to pretend that a Dungeon Master is going to read this section and be equipped to run a game in the Barovia that everyone already knows. So I wish they'd just given us building blocks for a new Barovian adventure, one in which Strahd drops in every once in...
]]>I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
One of the things I like about Warhammer stories is that they aren't about a great rebellion. Don't get me wrong. Somebody needs to topple the Imperium in the Warhammer universe, and somebody needs to mend that pesky Eye of Terror to stop Chaos from leaking out into the galaxy. But then what would happen? Most modern sci fi assumes that the only "correct" story arc is that a band of plucky heroes blows up a space base and brings down an entire empire, replacing tyranny with...um, Freedom and Democracy and stuff. There's a vague sense of USA-style "righteousness" to the solution, and while it can be cathartic, it also often feels insincere and more than a little naïve.
Warhammer stories don't have to tackle this problem. The setting exists primarily for a wargame, and if a wargame needs anything, it's war. It benefits almost every aspect of the Warhammer universe for there to be ceaseless conflict. And while it's profoundly sad to say so, it's also realistic. The real world struggles, historically and currently, with the push and pull of theocracy, greed, destruction, and fanaticism. There's no all-powerful central "off" switch for a band of plucky heroes to target, and even if there were, the heroes would be too busy working three concurrent part-time jobs to go on the adventure. The stories in Warhammer 40,000 are sci fi but they ring true in the sense that they're stories about people going about their daily lives, with no regard to their maligned aspirations, depraved morals, horrendous surroundings, or hopeless future.
That's kind of what Bound for Greatness is about.
The entire story is set in a great library, where monks are told by their superiours that "knowledge corrupts" and "do not read". Seems like an odd message for attendants of a palace of books, but those are the rules. Every day, the attendants count books on the shelf to ensure, I guess, that none are missing.
Pretty early into the story, though, one of the monks notices that one of the books is missing.
I have to admit that, like Death's Hand, I'm not entirely sure I understand the end of this episode. Unlike that one, though, I'm not sure you're supposed to exactly understand this one. I get the idea, anyway, and it's dismal no matter how you look at it.
If you're not clear on why Warhammer's universe is considered grimdark, this a good episode to remind you. In a way, I guess it's one of the most pro-rebellion stories I've seen within Warhammer so far. But if it is, it also ends exactly the way you'd expect a rebellious storyline to end in Warhammer: In the heavenly glow of the Emperor's terrifying and oppressive...
]]>Blacktalon is an Age of Sigmar show, focusing on Stormcast Eternals, specifically and unsurprisingly on Neave Blacktalon. The second episode just got released, and I've eagerly watched it twice. This review contains spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen the episode yet.
A stormvault is a magical sanctuary built by Sigmar to hold powerful artefacts. They're the Age of Sigmar version of a dungeon in Pathfinder or D&D. In this episode, it's discovered that a powerful vampire named Kaelena has been living in a Stormvault. She's been sending out her minions to harvest humans from the surrounding towns.
Kaelena was once a warrior of the Old World. When Sigmar offered to Forge her into a Stormcast Eternal, she refused and instead made a deal with Nagash, I assume, for eternal life as a Soulblight.
There are lots of clever storytelling techniques used in this episode, which spices up the setup. There are some flashbacks and non-linear scenes that don't just add to the pacing of the show, but they help disguise some of the undercover characters. You don't anticipate that one of the peasants being hauled into Castle Grayskull could be a Stormcast Eternal, because they haven't even left Azyr yet... OR HAVEN'T THEY?
Eventually the story settles in to what's basically a dungeoncrawl straight out of Blackstone Fortress or maybe Cursed City. There are a bunch of nice and straight-forward battles against low-level skeletons, until the vampire overlord awakens the guardians of the vault. Suddenly, the stakes escalate, with one Stormcast Eternal (Kendrick I think is his name? I couldn't find any information about him on the Internet) battling Kaelena in one realm and the other Blacktalons staving off, well, the wrath of a Stormvault invaded (notably a big old treelord).
This was a fun episode, although I think I like more traps and gimmicks in my dungeon crawls. The action in this one was a little underwhelming for me, and actually I blame the animation. Having seen Hammer & Bolter, I see how cheap animation tricks can be used to effectively create genuinely exciting action sequences. And I don't feel the animation in Blacktalon is quite as dynamic and lively as it was in Hammer & Bolter.
But the atmosphere remains the strongest part of this series. The Mortal Realms are alive and vivid and mysterious. I absolutely want to read more about it, I want the RPG sourcebook, I'm eager for more.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.
Recently, I've purchased some wargames, like Reign in Hell, Space Station Zero, and Mechaforce, and they all require miniatures. I knew they needed miniatures when I made the purchase, but they're all intentionally indifferent to what miniatures you use. My plan was to use RPG miniatures, and I figured I could buy a few new minis to account for anything I lacked.
What I didn't understand then was that in a wargame, there's no character build. I knew you built an army, not a character, but I had no concept of how you generated an army. In my mind, I guess I thought you just reached into a bucket of miniatures and called it an army. In reality, there's almost as much nuance to building an army for a wargame as there is in building a character for an RPG, but the expression of that army is largely through the miniatures you use. And I mean "expression" in both the sense of self-expression (style and emotion) and game mechanics.
In a wargame, you have a lot of little characters in an army. Even in a small-scale skirmish, that's 8 or 10 or a dozen pretend people running around a battlefield. There's no way you're keeping track of all their names, backgrounds, skills, proficiencies, and so on.
And so you classify them. These 2 over here are snipers, these 3 here are foot soldiers, this one's a medic, and these two are officers, and the big fancy one is the squad captain. Classification happens by way of what kind of uniform or garb they're wearing, and maybe what weapon they're holding. Their skills are almost entirely based on what they've got on them. The wargame community calls this WYSIWYG, which expands to exactly the same phrase as it does in the computing industry: What You See Is What You Get. That means when you have three miniature elves way in the back holding longbows, those are your elven archers, and when you have two armoured human fighters rushing out at the front of the line, those are your human fighters. The elves are skilled in ranged attacks using longbows. The humans are skilled in melee, and have a higher armour rating than the elves (because the human miniatures have armour on).
It's obvious when you see it written out, but the concept was new to me because in tabletop RPG that's not the case at all. In an RPG, you choose a miniature that's roughly the right size and shape for your characters. Something short is a halfling or dwarf or gnome, while something tall is anything else. They may as well not be wielding a weapon at all, because you're going to find a new weapon once you get deep enough into the dungeon, and then you'll be swapping back and forth between your sword, a ranged weapon, and a spell or two. Nobody cares what your miniature appears to be doing or what it...
]]>At the time of writing, Wizards of the Coast has just held a "summit" for D&D "influencers" and publishers. The event was well covered by Enworld and some Youtubers. I understand that it's in the spirit of reconciliation to take WotC at its word, to believe that they're sorry for what they attempted, and that they're eager to make amends and to move past their indiscretion. I don't like to hold a grudge, and I'd like to trust WotC. However, being willing to change isn't the same thing as being trustworthy, and I think there's a lot happening lately that continues to demonstrate that WotC is not to be trusted.
Wizards of the Coast has used a common business technique to make a drastic change in hopes of maximizing profit: Do it at the expense of customer experience, and then beg for forgiveness. To make amends, WotC is assuring us that the threat to go back on their agreement with their community was a mistake. To demonstrate good will, they've placed the System Reference Document under Creative Commons, a soundly lateral and perfunctory move.
But that doesn't change the fact that they threatened their community.
This is an awkward problem to have, because WotC obviously can't go back in time and undo their legal threat, the lies intended to redirect the community response, and the accusatory and aggressive interactions that followed. It's the problem with loss of trust. The only way to regain it would for the breach of faith to never have happened in the first place, which is impossible. So everyone's supposed to work toward reconciliation and toward rebuilding trust.
Can you rebuild something that's never been there, though?
For longtime D&D players, the trust afforded to WotC throughout 5e was given on credit. WotC changed licensing for 4th Edition in an effort to sideline other RPG publishers. They lost community trust then, and they made only the barest effort to regain it for 5e by crowdsourcing playtests, and their community returned. That's not rebuilding trust, though, that's just not working against the community. For many people, it was no surprise that WotC tried the same thing once 5th Edition became overwhelmingly popular.
It's time to face it. There's a latent, cultural problem of anti-consumerism at Wizards of the Coast. And I don't believe it's just down to new executives like Cynthia Williams and Chris Cox, either. It's a deeply ingrained tendency that extends to the way management treats employees (assuming the leaks from WotC employees are to be believed).
It might be hard to see from the outside, and it might be even harder to see if you've never worked for a company with a healthy and open culture. This is a problem that's baked into the identity of the company. It can be fixed, but it takes more than a quick apology and hasty reversal of public policy. The whole company needs to commit to the principles of an Open...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter 2 is about creating your own domain of dread. I love story starters, plot seeds, and D&D and horror, and that's mostly what this chapter is. I have to admit, though, I don't anticipate creating a domain of dread, so this chapter is just a bunch of inspiration for when I need it.
As a Dungeon Master, I tend to be lazy. I enjoy reading RPG adventures in the way many other people read books, and once I've bought an adventure module it only makes sense for me to use it. I have a book shelf full of adventures I still need to run, and they're really really good, written by people who sit around and think up fun ideas and mechanics all day long. I may love to sketch out dungeons in my graph paper notebook, and I do run those regularly, but I appreciate the expertise of really good game designers. I run adventures as written, because they require less work from me for a really good experience for the group.
Gaming is also a social experience for me. It's one of the few social experiences I seek out, in fact. I like bonding with other gamers over famous D&D adventures, like the Tomb of Horrors or Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Annihilation or Out of the Abyss.
I'm not by any means against the idea of creating a domain of dread, I just know that, realistically, I'm not likely to go to the trouble. There are over 30 of them in this very book, and I want to play in every singly one of them. I don't have time in my schedule to create my own.
Having said that, though, I always appreciate inspiration and plot guidance. Even if I'm just going to sit down and run my own dungeon, or a dungeon I create as I go, I'm inevitably going to need at least a suggestion of a story. The Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) has great tables for building stories around dungeons, but it's nice to have a little extra material in this book for additional concepts.
This was a fun and engrossing chapter, even though I don't expect to use it for its stated purpose. The last 10 pages are full of tables with plot ideas, sorted by horror genre.
The next chapter plunges straight into the mists and details each domain of Ravenloft, and there are literally over 30 of them. Hopefully it'll be horrible.
]]>I like to treat painting miniatures as a craft project, not as an artistic one. Thinking about my process of painting in an objective and purely functional activity makes me less precious about it. I don't feel the weight of my own expectation. I don't sit staring at the unprimed miniature in dread, for fear that my first brush stroke will ruin the beauty and purity of the object. So I don't think about what I'm doing as "art", and I think of myself as a guy who needs to paint a toy soldier so I can add it to my game board and play. That's not a stretch, because that's literally all that's going on at my hobby table.
However, I have seen a lot of really expertly painted miniatures at the Warhammer store, and at my local game store, and online. I recently learned, in fact, that the Wizkids miniature company hand paints their pre-painted miniature line, which I've bought before. I don't know how I thought they got painted, but I never imagine it was an actual human being. It's almost humbling to see such precision work, and certainly by comparison it does tempt me to think of my work as just functional painting and the work of professionals as "art".
But that's one of the worst uses of the word "art", the one that's actually a euphemism for "better than what I did". I have a feeling that none of the artists, or at least any of the ones I'd care about, would themselves say that their work is inherently more valuable than my work. "Art" isn't usually intended as a value judgement, even though we sometimes use it that way in conversation.
Sometimes, when you paint a miniature because you need it to be Macragge Blue instead of grey, you also decide that it might be fun for there to be some blood splattered across the model's arm. Or while you're painting a dreadnaught or mech, you decide it could be interesting for some of the "paint" to have scratched off, revealing the cold metal underneath. Or you decide a battle-worn tank or a chopper could have a little rust gathering around its seams.
Those kinds of details are "lies". There's not really blood or mud or rust or wear on the miniature. The "paint" on the mech hasn't really chipped away to expose metal underneath it, the metal is actual paint. For me, that's where the art of the project starts. Art is the stuff on a miniature that goes beyond fulfilling the job of hiding the grey. Some paint justifies the model, but the paint that's art is the paint that tells the story of the character the model represents, and that character's history.
The cool thing about these artistic flourishes is that they start a lot earlier than you might expect. It starts out pretty rudimentary. You sit down to paint, with your one miniature and dozen paint pot...
]]>A new series released today on Warhammer+ and I started watching it today. Blacktalon is an Age of Sigmar show, focusing on Stormcast Eternals, specifically and unsurprisingly on Neave Blacktalon. The first episode is good, and it's got me hooked for more, but it also reminds me about how behind I am on Sigmar lore. I know little about the AoS setting. I've not read a game book, played a game, or Black Library novel set in Age of Sigmar, and this is definitely a series made for existing fans.
This review contains spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen the episode yet.
The first episode in this series shows Blacktalon being "reforged". That is, she's been killed by some powerful and noxious foe, but she's a Stormcast Eternal so when she dies she returns to Azyr and is reforged by Sigmar. It seems, however, that death has a small price. When you're reforged, you lose something, and in Blacktalon's case, at least this time around, she's lost some significant memories.
I'll admit that I don't love that the series is opening with a hint of the [very old] amnesia trope, but luckily it's got a light touch. Blacktalon is still Blacktalon, it's just that she doesn't quite recall the circumstances around her death. As the episode progresses, bits and pieces of the recent past come back to her, until she's able to determine that she'd been battling for an outpost against the minions of Nurgle. But someone else, aside from her and her opponent, had been present during the fight. Due to the infectious nature of Nurgle, that could be problematic, and so with the help of a sorceress, Blacktalon hunts down the soldier who'd been there to witness her death.
When she finds him wandering the wastelands, she confirms that he'd been infected by something. Maybe I'm supposed to know what it is, but my lack of knowledge about AoS keeps me in darkness. I mean, I assume it's a really bad thing. It doesn't look good, whatever it is. Anyway, the sorceress takes the pestilent blob for further study, and all the Stormcast Eternals admit that they should have supported Blacktalon in her efforts to remember stuff, and they're all back in Azyr in time for tea.
Before the episode ends, though, Blacktalon receives a mysterious message from someone she apparently commissioned before her most recent death. He has information for her, and a fragment of someone's weapon. Whose weapon? I guess we'll have to wait to find out.
Here are some random observations about this episode, from a relative newbie to AoS.
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter 1 is called Searchers after horror and it's all about player options. The first section of the chapter acknowledges that characters inspired by horror may not integrate naturally into a traditional fantasy seting. This is significant because Pathfinder's setting, the world of Golarion, tends to be an all-inclusive setting. It does have different planes of existence and it does have a solar system, but as a gamer you don't go out and purchase separate source books to explore different settings so much as you just travel to some other region of Golarion. You want gothic horror? Go to the far off land of Ustalav. You want space age technology? Go to Numeria. And so on.
So the first section of this chapter encourages players to recognise the uniqueness of their horror-themed character, and work to justify it in whatever setting their game is set in. It might seem obvious to many players, but this section is a good reminder to try to keep in mind that Pathfinder is a roleplaying game.
Some Pathfinder classes are practically designed for horror as it is. The Witch, the Spiritualist, the Mesmerist, and the Inquisitor classes all fit easily into a horror setting, but this book apparently feels that the Bard and the Arcanist could use some new options.
And when Paizo advertises horror themed, they do mean horror themed.
For the Arcanist, for instance, there's an ability called Blood tears, in which you can spend 1 arcane point to bleed from the eyes. This protects you from gaze attacks without causing your enemies to gain concealment from you. You can then wipe the tears from your eyes and flick them at your enemies for a chance to stagger them for 1 minute.
Fiendish proboscis causes you to grow a proboscis out of your mouth. You can attack with this proboscis, and even drain magic from a magic user to restore your own arcane reservoir.
The Bard class gains options for damaging performances, some of which feed on your own Constitution.
These player options are the closest I've seen to some of the actual character flaws used in Shadowrun. They aren't really that bad (Shadowrun has charater traits you can take that actively hinder you in some way), but they read pretty horrific. This is some dark stuff.
Did I mention this was a dark chapter? This section is for any class with an animal companion (Druid, Ranger, Witch, probably others that I'm not thinking of off the top of my head.) The section on accursed companions introduces the concept that maybe your animal companion died and came back as essentially your own personal haunting. There are other ways to theme it. Maybe your animal companion was tortured by your enemies before it was...
]]>Painting miniatures is hard, and I'm no artist. Before miniatures, I'd painted walls, and that was my experience with paint. That was pretty intimidating, honestly, and it was a significant block for me to start painting as a hobby.
Once I started painting miniatures, I discovered something I hadn't expected. As the painter, as it turns out, you don't have to see yourself as the artist. There are other artists involved, and those are the people who designed and sculpted the miniature I was painting. All you have to do is accentuate what they've provided.
When I paint miniatures, my mission is to highlight what the scupltor has done. I'm not "painting" the way you think of an artist standing in front of a blank canvas. I'm just the make-up department.
It might sound self-deprecating to disavow yourself of artistry. After all, painting miniatures can be a legitimate art form. I've seen some amazing painting at local game stores and on glamour shots on the internet, and I absolutely believe that painting miniatures is legitimately fine art.
But it doesn't have to be. And that can be liberating if you're not aiming for a painting award.
I paint for myself, for the fun of painting. I try not to compare my results with painted models at the Warhammer store or the ones I see online. It can be hard not to see the errant splotches or the lack of texture or nuance in what I do. I know my skills will eventually improve, but part of improving is painting often. So it's quite a relief to be able to recognize the beauty of the model itself, and to accept that the miniature is a work of art already. The paint I add to it, whether it's precise, perfect, and artistic prevarication, is a filter through which the model is presented. It's a way to see past the paint, when the paint isn't perfect. And frankly, is the paint ever perfect? Award-winning painters find fault with their results, and while you might have to look harder to find those "mistakes" than you have to look at your own paint, they're always there. It's a well-known and unavoidable curse of artistry at any level.
For being a mostly solo hobby, painting miniatures is, strangely, a team effort. Choose models you love, and add something to it. Experiment. Have fun with it. No matter what happens, you've still got a model you love.
T'au soldiers photo by Seth Kenlon.
I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter 1 provides new player options, including new races, subclasses, backgrounds, some "dark gifts", and some horror-themed trinkets. It opens with another warning, in case you missed the warning in the introduction, about what it means to play a "horror" game. It reiterates that each gaming group should discuss the implications of bringing horror into the game. Presumably because this is a chapter intended solely for players, there's the expectation that someone could see just this chapter, so I guess the warning bears repetition.
A lineage, at least in this context, is a collection of traits you gain through some experience. The transformative experience may be something that occurred before your character's (in-game) conception, during gestation, at birth, or even during the Ravenloft adventure you're playing. A lineages isn't bound to a specific race, although the traits of your lineage officially replace your racial traits. For instance, you can be a dhampir regardless of whether you're human, dwarven, halfling, gnome, and so on.
The lineages are:
Tainted by a vampire's blood or curse, you're undead with vampire-like abilities and weaknesses. Like the Shadowrun ghoul, this is a great way for players to feel and act like a vampire without being absurdly over-powered.
You've been influenced or cursed by a hag, and you have characteristics and some powers resembling a hag. Lacking a Witch class, this lineage nicely helps you get witch-adjacent in style and abilities. You also get some "hexes" (really they're just the usual spells that you can cast a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus) and the ever present threat of being transformed into an actual hag NPC.
You've been reanimated, resurrected, or reincarnated, possibly through weird science, technology, magic, or some uneasy combination of the three. This one intrigues me less as a racial mod than as a Dungeon Master tool for character death. I've used gods and goddesses, the Infinite Staircase, the Astral Plane, Dustmen, and resurrection spells in exchange for quests to get player characters out of being dead. And now I can't wait for the next character death, so I can just hand the player this lineage. Clean and easy rebirth, and possibly a fun side quest of getting out of the dark domain of Mordent.
Dark gifts are "non-racial racial traits" or feats, except they're just supernatural gifts granted by some mysterious entity. The book says they're intended as player options, but that Dungeon Masters can also use them as rewards or bargaining chips during an adventure.
I never complain about more options, and these qualify. I love the idea of using these as a currency within the game. I can just feel the scene in which a demon or a hag offers a player character extra power for the low low cost of their immortal soul.
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Because I started reading Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft recently, I figured I'd also read Horror Realms for Pathfinder so I could compare the two. It may not be a suitable comparison, but from a quick glance at the table of contents there appear to be parallels. There's no reason for comparing them, either. They weren't release anywhere near each other, and I have no reason to believe they were influenced by one another. However, they both talk about the horror genre in a D&D game, and so I may as well read them in tandem.
The introduction, such as it is, to this book is entirely in-world. It's a treatise called The pattern of killers by scholar Rifza Dilatru. But wait, the plot thickens. Rifza Dilatru is missing, while investigating a mysterious link he believes exists between all murders. The treatise found in the introduction was found among his belongings, left at Rust Dragon Inn in Sandpoint.
What an opener. This is one of the many reasons Paizo has the loyal following it has. They're not just master storytellers, but artists of presentation.
We'll probably never find out what happened to Rifza Dilatru (or maybe it's a plot point in one what must be hundreds of Paizo adventures I've yet to read) but what a great seed for a game, and what a great way to set the mood for what follows.
I noticed that the introductory treatise, somewhat amusingly, does take the time to define "killer." The first thing I thought when I read the title was whether or not player characters who, more often than not, necessarily slay hundreds of creatures on their journey to level 20, The treatise is sure to point out that it's interested only in psychopathic murder, not in everyday killing for self-preservation or to eliminate evil monsters.
I've been a Paizo customer long enough to know that the real introduction is on the back cover.
Horror Realms helps bring the spine-chilling terrors presented in Pathfinder RPG Horror Adventures to the Inner Sea region and beyond, presenting new rules, detailed ghastly locations, and unnerving character options for your campaign.
This is a book of player options, setting information, and special mechanics. It's roughly what I would expect from a Paizo book, and Paizo rarely disappoints.
Apparently there's a book called Horror Adventures, which I don't [yet?] own. I do own a possibly related book called Classic Horror Revisited, which details several monstrous races in great detail, but there doesn't appear to be a mention of that volume so far.
The first chapter is all about player options. With the wealth of classes that Paizo provides for Pathfinder, I can't begin to guess which ones are getting horror-based variants. The more...
]]>I picked up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
Ravenloft is a D&D setting named after a very particular castle just outside of a land called Barovia. You have to separate the name "Ravenloft" from "Castle Ravenloft" for this book to make sense. This isn't a source book just about Castle Ravenloft, or just about Barovia, but about all of the Domains of Dread.
There's a conceit that the book, and presumably its title, exists in-game. Maybe there's one of those Victorian-style subtitles that hasn't been revealed to us. Something like Being a Compleat and True Account of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft & the surrounding lands of mist, called the Domains of Dread.
Despite the potential confusion of what exactly this book is a guide to, it's particularly refreshing that the in-game flavour it employs are letters between Van Richten and the younger generation of monster hunters he calls family. Nowhere are there snarky and silly quips in the style of Volo's Guide or Xanathar's Guide or Tasha's Cauldron or Fizban's Treasury. You don't turn the page of this book to read more about the horrors that lie through the mist only to be highjacked by a margin note declaring that the mists of Ravenloft actually smell faintly of freshly baked apple pie.
The game characters here work with the book to keep you in the game. It's a minor thing, but I appreciate it.
You wouldn't think there'd be that much in an introduction, but actually there are a good 8 pages before you get to chapter 1. The first section introduces the setting, and somewhat clarifies that Ravenloft is a realm named after the infamous castle within it.
It does a lot to set the mood of the book, too, with in-world correspondence between Van Richten and his younger monster hunting pals. It does just as much to forewarn unwary readers that the book is likely to contain elements of horror, and to warn Dungeon Masters that you can't run a horror game for people expecting a "typical" D&D high fantasy game. Both are fair warnings. Broadly speaking, I'm a fan of horror, so these warnings are lost on me. They feel similar to people warning me about spicy food, not knowing that Carolina Reaper is where my spice-o-meter begins. But for many people, this is a good reminder that yes, a book about a dangerous vampire could be frightening, and that there's more to this book than just vampires. It's also a valuable reminder for a Dungeon Master whose threshold for horror may be extremely high that not everyone is as comfortable with the subject.
The introduction also presents the concept of Darklords to the reader. Each domain of dread has a Darklord, and in fact each domain revolves around its Darklord. In fact, a domain of dread literally exists only to imprison...
]]>Miniatures are small.
Impossibly small.
So it's no surprise that you might think that painting miniatures would be a nearly impossible task. I have poor eyesight, and terrible eye-hand coordination. My hands tend to shake, I usually have an abundance of nervous energy, and my depth perception isn't amazing. And yet, I'm painting miniatures.
The trick is that you don't actually "paint" miniatures. Painting miniatures is actually a 3d colouring-in book.
If you're imagining Da Vinci or Van Gogh standing before a canvas, waving a brush mystically to unveil previously unseen images, then you're on the wrong track. That's not what miniature painting is, or at least it doesn't have to be. Sure, sometimes you get a proper brush stroke in, but "painting" a miniature involves a lot more osmosis than I'd realised.
It works like this: You dip just the very tip of your brush in the paint pot, then you hold your brush close to the spot on the miniature you want to colour in. You keep holding the brush close, and closer, and closer, until suddenly the paint isn't on the brush any more. It's on the miniature.
That's my technique for a good 88% of my painting. I don't know whether it's right or wrong, but it's what works for me. I hold the brush near my miniature, and the paint spreads onto the region I want to paint. And because the model is 3d, there are lots of ridges and dips in the surface of the miniature, so the paint that I nudge onto it usually stays where I intend it to go.
For instance, one time I had to paint some leather straps of a backpack. On my first try, I tried to paint Bugman's Glow (that's the name of the brown I was using. I told you, I just use paints with cool names and it comes out great.) paint on the strap. Paint went everywhere. All over the chest plate, all over the shoulders, on the head. So I waited for it to dry, and then painted over the mistake. No big deal. Mistakes happen, you just cover them up with more paint.
The next model, I discovered my paint-nudge trick. Instead of moving the paintbrush over the model as if I was painting a canvas, I just gave the miniature a light touch with the tip of the paintbrush. The brown paint's surface tension released, and Bugman's Glow poured off the brush along the strap, and it even stayed within the lines of the strap. This has been my go-to trick ever since.
I have since learned another trick from a master painter at my local Warhammer store. It's the "flick" or "fly-by" method.
You probably think of painting as pointing a brush at something, and then pressing down. That works on broad surfaces, but it's rubbish when you're painting a badge that's a 2mm square on the shoulder of a 28mm...
]]>As is often the case with me, it was the soundtrack of the Hammer and Bolter animated series that initially convinced me to watch it. The composer is Jonathan Hartman, whose name I didn't know when I started listening to the soundtrack releases, but I found the mini-albums extremely satisfying. Heavy synth work, cinematic tunes with less emphasis on melody than on mood. It's exactly the stuff I gravitate toward, so I decided it was probably time to see whether the rest of the show was any good. The short answer is yes, the show's amazing, and so over the course of several blog posts, I'll review each episode. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
I've read several Warhammer 40,000 novels, most set during the Horus Heresy. Hammer and Bolter is the first time I've watched a show set in the 40K universe. It's actually still difficult for me to accept that in M41 it's normal to be religious and superstitious. For a lot of Warhammer fans, that's probably hilarious. But when your journey into the universe began with Loken dutifully carrying out the (non-vegetative) Emperor's crusade against superstition, it takes a while to get used to the Imperium as a theocracy.
This episode opens up with a fortune teller doing a Tarot card reading for the Inquisitor Kiamoro. My first impulse was to think that Inquisitor Kiamoro would kill the fortune teller for, well, heresy. But no, not at all. We're in M41, and Inquisitor Kiamoro is there earnestly, to hear his fortune.
The problem is, he's not happy with the results. No matter what soothsayer he asks, Inquisitor Kiamoro's death is foretold. Of course nobody can tell him how, when, or why because even in the far future I guess fortune tellers are just scam artists (he doesn't visit Chaos fortune tellers, obviously).
Inquisitor Kiamoro spends most of the episode trying to outrun his inevitable fate, which is actually twofold. There's that the prediction of his death that's been bugging him, but he's also being summoned to Terra, where he feels he's going to essentially be put out to pasture. A rival Inquisitor shows up to escort him back to Terra, and tensions run high.
There's a good fight scene, and some intrigue, some interesting flashbacks. I'll be honest. I didn't quite understand the ending. I watched it twice, and both times the visual setup failed me. I understand what happens, I just don't understand how certain key figures get to the physical locations they need to be for the events to occur the way they do.
And strangely, it was still satisfying.
This episode is good sci fi. It hooks into the existing worldbuilding of 40K, tells a tidy story, and uses sci fi elements in interesting ways to move the plot.
This episode is good Warhammer 40,000. The setting, honestly, isn't essential. This story could have been...
]]>I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. In this post, I discuss Chapter 6: Bestiary.
I say it about almost everything in D&D, from spells to magic items to player options, but I'll say it now about Dragons. You just can't have too many. In my experience, nobody plays D&D just for dungeons. Some people don't play it for dungeons at all, in fact. But everybody loves a dragon. They're quintessential fantasy, and whether you care about fantasy or not, they're majestic creatures. Having Dragons of all sorts means that every player has the opportunity to have an encounter with the kind of Dragon that appeals to them. Having Dragons of all challenge ratings means that players get the flavour of Dragons in their game world from even low-level adventures.
The bestiary is filled with new Dragons. Not just Dragons, but all kinds of Dragon-adjacent creatures. Some are so strange, I daren't spoil them, but I may as well mention a few of my favourites.
Well, they've been hinted at and referenced throughout the book, and they finally appear in the bestiary. Psionic, neutral-aligned, crystalline Dragons, Greatwyrms, and a few surprise offshoot creatures and NPCs I won't spoil. The Gem Dragons are:
While the breath weapons of Chromatic and Metallic dragons are iconic, but for Gem Dragons get inventive. Crystal Dragons, for instance, exhale colourful radiant energy. An Amethyst Dragon can generate a "shining bead of gravitational force" in its mouth, and then emit that energy in a 60-foot cone.
The value of Gem Dragons, for me, is how enigmatic the Neutral alignment can be. I like the moral simplicity of D&D monsters, so I like that my players know that a Chromatic Dragon means trouble and Metallic Dragons are descent. But Gem Dragons are a big question mark. I know that Dungeon Masters have the freedom to create exceptions, and this book reinforces that in the personality trait tables of Chapter 5. But I appreciate the "short hand" of the Alignment System, and so I appreciate the convenient ambiguity of Gem Dragons.
I've been playing with Draconians since 5e was released, having ported them from AD&D myself. But I love seeing Dragonlance monsters officially updated, because the 5e designers obviously know the system a lot better than I do. In the Dragonlance universe, Draconians were the product of Metallic Dragon eggs corrupted by an evil cleric of Takhisis named Wyrllish. When a Metallic Dragon egg was captured, Wyrllish would cause the inhabitants of the eggs to multiply, and then opened a portal to the Abyss to summon Abishai, which inhabited the creatures. This lore isn't explained in this book, but the general idea is still the same, although it expands the potential target of corrupted eggs to those of Gem and even Chromatic Dragons....
]]>For the longest time, I had no interest in painting miniatures. In an RPG, miniatures aren't essential components of the game. I've probably played as much tabletop RPG with miniantures as I have without. I've never played with miniatures in Shadowrun, for example. So when I did buy miniatures, I bought them pre-painted. I often only had a handful of monster tokens, and usually used glass game tokens to mark monster positions on the map. Miniatures were fun to use, and I always enjoyed seeing what people at the local game store painted, but I felt that painting just wasn't a worthwhile investment of my money, time, and effort.
Then I started playing wargames.
Here's a list of the reasons I resisted painting miniatures. If you're not painting miniatures, but you play games that involve miniatures, I'm going to guess these will sound familiar to you. Here were my reservations, and what I've learned since giving in:
Painting a miniature isn't like painting on a canvas or a wall. The only similarity, as far as I can tell, is that they both use the physical medium of paint. In my limited experience, painting a miniature is mostly transferring a tiny droplet of paint from a small brush onto the plastic model. Half the time, you're just letting the surface tension of the droplet of paint on your brush burst and pour onto the model. Because the model is a 3d object with grooves and ridges, the paint usually actually stays within the region you intended for it to go.
I very rarely actually "brush" paint onto a miniature. When I do use the brush in the sort of paint stroke way you imagine a paintbrush gets used, I feel more like I'm dusting the model, forensic-investigator style. You have a little bit of paint on your brush, and you flick the brush over the surface of your target.
Only on the broadest of surfaces (usually it's armour or a cape or the blade of a broadsword) do I actually brush paint onto the model the way you imagine a famous painter brushing a canvas.
In other words, painting a model is more like a colouring-in book than painting a big blank canvas.
They do. But there's a spectrum, within a certain range of tolerance. As long as you have some disposable income, then you can probably shop around and find miniatures within your entertainment budget. But most importantly, plan out your miniature purchases toward a specific goal.
If you're just interested in painting cool models, then pace yourself according to your budget.
You might be painting miniatures because you need pieces for a game. In that case, choose your game to fit your budget, because the game you're building up to determines what miniatures you need to collect.
Wargames tend to be pretty specific about miniatures, because the miniatures are their abilities. A toy...
]]>Dragonlance Chronicles starts at the end of the 5-year personal quests of the book's heroes. The Preludes series provides some specific stories from the 5 years leading up to Chronicles, and Tanis, the Shadow Years, the sixth and final Preludes book, is about Tanis Half-Elven. In this story, Tanis goes on a quest to rescue a woman named Brandella on the behalf of a mage named Kishpa. His greatest enemy? The mage Kishpa.
The trick to this story is that Tanis is asked to travel back in time to find Brandella and bring her into the present. Except, Tanis isn't actually traveling back in time. Instead, he's traveling into the living memories of the dying mage, Kishpa, to find Brandella and magically rescue her from the mage's mind. He agrees to the task because Kishpa is dying, and he takes pity on the old mage. But the Kishpa of the past doesn't know any of this, and only sees Tanis as a stranger trying to steal his wife.
Krynn is a setting of at least two times: Before the Cataclysm and After the Cataclysm. You feel it during Chronicles because there's always an emphasis on the Cataclysm having happened. The cities and fallen fortresses remind us that there was a world-changing event in the recent past. Even Tasslehoff's maps are pre-Cataclysm. This is brought into reality for us in Legends, which is entirely a time-travel story. For this book to "want" to time travel makes a lot of sense. And it makes sense for it to refrain from actually doing it, because after all time travel ought to feel unique in Legends.
So this book cheats time travel by invoking memory travel, and that's easily the most interesting aspect of the book.
There's another interesting aspect of the book. Krynn is a setting of war, as the latest release has pointed out. The time period that Kishpa's memory encampass is during the human and elf wars. This unfortunate part of Krynn's history is the reason that humans and elves are still wary of one another today (and by "today" I mean during the Chronicles).
This book doesn't give much insight into the wars, or how the different societies reacted to them, but it's interesting nevertheless to experience it through the eyes of a half-elf. Or at least, it would be if the book went into Tanis's feelings about a conflict that should obviously be uncomfortably relevant to him. Tanis does look for his father, and apparently finds him, but it's pretty unremarkable and is overshadowed by the Brandella storyline.
As i've mentioned in my other Preludes reviews, the five years leading up to Chronicles were presented to us as our heroes searching for a sign of the true gods on Krynn. We were told that in the very first chapter of the very first book. There was a lot of time before the Prelueds books were released...
]]>Dragonlance Chronicles starts at the end of the 5-year personal quests of the book's heroes. The Preludes series provides some specific stories from the 5 years leading up to Chronicles, and Flint the King, the fifth book, is about the dwarf Flint Fireforge. Interestingly, we already know what happened to Flint in the years leading up to Chronicles, because he reveals it to Tanis shortly after the Heroes of the Lance join forces, however reluctantly, with the Aghar (Gully Dwarves). Flint says that he spent most of the five years as a captive of Gully Dwarves, which is why he despises them in Chronicles. This book provides a slightly different version of that story.
This book actually begins as a murder mystery. Flint, a hill dwarf, returns to Hillhome, his childhood hometown, only to discover that his brother Aylmar died about a month ago. As is usually the case with small villages, rumours are unavoidable and eventually Flint hears that some folks believe that his brother was murdered by Theiwar dwarves (those are the Derro of Krynn). The murder mystery begins, but just as quickly another surfaces: What are Theiwar dwarves doing in Hillhome?
As we know from the Legends trilogy, the Theiwar dwarves locked themselves in their mountain homes when the Cataclysm struck Krynn. It's been called The Great Betrayal ever since, and the hill dwarves don't consider the mountain dwarves kin, and in fact view them mostly as enemies. But lately, the Theiwar have been on the move for some reason, passing through towns like Hillhome on their way to and from Thorbardin. Nobody knows why, and most business owners in Hillhome view it as a convenient way to overcharge the Theiwar, eager to liberate them of coin as payback for their cowardice 100 years before.
Flint's investigation of course leads him into the den of the devious Derro dwarves, where he meets Pitrick, the hunchback mage and advisor to the thane. Pitrick seeks to destroy the hill dwarves in a crusade meant to prepare the way for (of course) the Dark Queen herself.
While in the Theiwar mountain city, Flint meets Perian Cyprium, the captain of the guard and the disinterested love interest of the evil mage Pitrick. When Pitrick starts torturing Flint within inches of his life, Perian steps forward to defend him. Flint and Perian both end up in a deep monster pit, presumed dead by Pitrick and his guards.
Of course they're not dead, and they do battle with the monster before being found by a clan of Gully Dwarves living in a cave system around the pit. The Gully Dwarves, being Gully Dwarves, decide that Flint and Perian are their new king and queen.
Flint barely endures this at first, but eventually he and Perian become friends and even learn to enjoy living with the Aghar. There's no way three years pass during this time, and I'm pretty sure Flint had said he was captive for...
]]>It's annoying that the Open Gaming License 1.0a is under attack, but it's not actually detrimental. As many people (and in fact possibly most people) recognize, you don't need anybody's permission to play a game at home, nor to write an adventure that happens to work with D&D™ 5th Edition. Don't copy 5e rules verbatim, and you can even write rules that just so happen to work with 5th Edition, and you don't need a license or permission.
Don't feel like reading? You can also watch this article on Youtube.
For instance, say you want to invent a minigame for 5th Edition. You want a quick way to let your players gamble, so you flavour the game as a card game, like Blackjack. Call it Knucklejack. The first draft of the rules go something like this:
Not bad, but there's a lot of 5e lingo in there. Whether or not phrases like "Dungeon Master" and "Sleight of Hand" and "Proficiency Bonus" intrude upon any company's trademarks is debatable, but they definitely lend the appearance that your minigame only works in a specific system. By tying your minigame to D&D™ 5th Edition, you're actually limiting your potential audience. Sure, most Game Masters can translate the code from one system to another, but why introduce that dependency when it's not required? Here's a second draft that's essentially universal:
That's pretty generic. Fully compatible with D&D™ 5th Edition, but also with Pathfinder 2, Project Black Flag, 13th Age, Swords & Wizardry, and a lot more. Heck, you could even go a step further and remove the specifics about the kinds of die you want players to roll. The players don't have to roll a d20, and the goal doesn't have to be 21.
It's a fully universal rules supplement with no dependency on anyone's license.
Suppose you want to write a rule that interacts with a specific subsystem in an existing game. For instance, maybe you're...
]]>Dragonlance Chronicles starts at the end of the 5-year personal quests of the book's heroes. The Preludes series provides some specific stories from the 5 years leading up to Chronicles, and Riverwalk the Plainsman, the fourth book, is about the barbarian Riverwind. In a way, there are few other characters from Chronicles that deserve or need a book all their own than Riverwind. To be fair, he probably got just as much "screen" time as Sturm got in the original trilogy, but he spends much of that time being wholly distrustful of Tanis and the others. And even after he's learned to trust them, he's often overshadowed by Goldmoon's story. I don't mind that, and I wouldn't have minded a book or two just about Goldmoon (she is in later novels, but I'd have loved a book about her doing a bunch of cool clerical magic immediately after Chronicles.) Still, Riverwind's there and so we may as well get to know him a little better.
This Preludes novel starts with a kicker. Riverwind is taking his coming-of-age test, and it ends up being a blurry, disturbing, weird metaphysical experience that nobody should have to endure. It's great to see the Que-Shu culture, though. In fact, it's refreshing to see a version of a D&D world that isn't modelled after the usual vaguely-medieval-village. Don't get me wrong, I love the vaguely-medieval-village setting, and it's really my default setting. It's comforting and nostalgic (not because I ever lived in a medieval village, but because it's kind of the classic fantasy setting). But seeing the "barbaric" (as the "civilized" folks of Ansalon say) culture of the Que-Shu is inspiring. It's different, vaguely-Native-American, and it makes you feel like you've gone exploring beyond that forbidden forest the town elders kept warning you about and stumbled into a completely foreign society.
What I admire about the writing here is that the Que-Shu isn't just a generic native culture dropped onto Krynn. The Que-Shu society is fully integrated into Krynn. The Que-Shu have been affected by the cataclysm just as much the rest of the world's societies. They're having religious and spiritual crises. And of course they're nowhere as near "barbarians" as the townfolk seem to think. Nor is it perfect. They have feuds, outcasts, power struggles, and all the usual things that happen when you gather a bunch of humans together.
To prove his love for the chieftain's daughter (Goldmoon, of course), Riverwind must go on a quest to find proof that the "old gods" have ever existed. Seems like an impossible task, but then again it's a D&D setting where gods have stat blocks. But those same gods abandoned Krynn (or did Krynn abandon them?) so it's still pretty daunting.
Riverwind gains the companionship of an old soothsayer nicknamed Catchflea, and together they travel Krynn to find some sign of an old god. Pretty quickly, though, they end up falling down a hole only to find themselves in a...
]]>Many RPG rulebooks start out speaking in the bizarrely theoretical future tense, addressing the reader as if they were going to build a character: "First, you will choose a race, and then you will choose your skills." Then, over the course of the next few chapters, these player guides describe the options readers have to choose from. It's almost aggressively labyrinthine. First, I pretend to think you can memorize the steps you need to take to end up with a character, then I throw you into the deep end with all the options you have to choose from, and then demand you emerge with a character.
I have some ideas on how building a character can be less of a barrier to entry for new players.
Strike the word "will" from your text. Your reader isn't reading your rulebook to find out what might happen in theory some day. You want your reader to be a player now, so give your reader the gift of the present tense.
Every time you pick up a rulebook to read it, whether it's the first time or the hundredth time, you're reading it now. Books don't happen in the future. They happen now.
When you write instructions on how to build a character, assume your reader is actively building a character. Don't tell your reader what they will do, tell your reader what to do right now. It eliminates confusion about when to proceed, and encourages the reader to break out paper and pencil and to build.
An "imperative" is a verb that commands. We use imperatives all the time in real life when we say things like "Look at that!" and "Hand me that book." and "Roll dice." Those are commands, and when used politely and with friends, they're not considered rude or presumptuous.
In fact, the advantage of imperatives is that they're clear and concise. There's little room for misinterpretation.
If you say "hand me the player's guide," then it's clear to me that you want me to give you the player's guide (probably the one that I'm holding, or the one next to me) now.
If you say "you could hand me the player's guide," then it's a little less clear what you want. Yes, I could hand you the player's guide. Do you want me to? When do you want me to do it? Do you need the player's guide now, or when I'm finished with it?
Use imperatives. Tell your reader exactly what to do, and when to do it. It's not rude, it's not abrupt. It's clear, concise, and efficient.
Building a character is a linear process. No matter how [over?] complex you've made it in your RPG system, it starts somewhere and eventually ends.
Use an ordered list (1, 2, 3, and so on) to guide your reader through each step of the build process. This helps your reader differentiate...
]]>At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast was attempting to unjustly, and probably unlawfully, revoke the Open Gaming License. They've recently agreed to stop that attempt, and as a sign of good faith they've released the System Reference Document (SRD) into Creative Commons. That's a minor victory for D&D publishers, but it doesn't erase what's transpired. By now, it's clear that Wizards of the Coast cannot be trusted, and it's easy enough for many players to stop spending money on D&D™ products because there are plenty of third-party products out there.
Don't feel like reading? You can also watch this article on Youtube.
I use a lot of third-party or independent content, and ironically I mostly bought Wizards of the Coast products in a conscious effort to support the company that maintained the game. Now there's every reason to not support that company, not only because they're seeking to end a longstanding agreement with its community, but also because they're actively working to erode the solidarity of gaming groups around the world.
There are hundreds of games and adventures and supplements and source books out there that were never obligated to use the OGL. They were written from scratch using original language, never borrowing from a System Reference Document in any direct way. Just as there were lots of roleplaying supplements back in the 80s that happened to work with that one game by TSR, these books are independent material that often happen to work with existing systems. But authors chose to use the OGL 1.0a because we recognized that sharing ideas, mechanics, and content was what tabletop roleplaying is all about. It's what it's always been about. Getting together with friends, some old and some new, and inspiring each other. That fellowship extended to the computer screen once digital technology and its infrastructure got good enough to facilitate extended video and voice calls, and to provide emulated tabletops, and so the pool of potential friendships got even bigger. The OGL 1.0a was a document you could copy and paste into your book as a sign that you wanted to collaborate. You were inviting people to your writer's desk and to your gaming table.
For a lot of gamers, the Open Gaming License 1.0a also defined the word "open". Being open is different than what we're used to. There's a lot of implied openness out there. Sure, you're allowed to dress up as your favourite Star Wars character until Disney says otherwise, and maybe you can write some fan fiction based around your favourite TV series as long as you don't sell it.
But the OGL 1.0a tells you exactly what you can use, and reference documents provide rules you can freely copy and paste into your own work, and then other authors can use your content to build up something cool. And nobody's restricted from selling their work, so it literally meant people could turn their hobby into their day job. And nobody could...
]]>Dragonlance Chronicles starts at the end of the 5-year personal quests of the book's heroes. The Preludes series provides some specific stories from the 5 years leading up to Chronicles, and Brothers Majere, the third book, is obviously about Caramon and Raistlin. You might wonder whether Caramon and Raistlin need yet another book all to themselves. After all, they each got their fair share of time in Chronicles and they were the focus of Legends. As surprising as it may seem, this book is a very strong Preludes book, and a very strong addition to their story.
If you've read HP Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, you might be familiar with the cats of Ulthar. These cats are featured in a Lovecraft short story, as well, but if you think they deserve even more time in the spotlight, then Brothers Majere is a book you need to read. It's not strictly about the cats of Ulthar, but if you swap out the city name then really it's about the cats of Ulthar (or, if you're a Kobold Press fan, maybe it's about Bastet).
The premise of the book is simple: the cats are missing from the city of Ulthar (I mean Mereklar), and so Caramon and Raistlin are hired to find them.
Brilliant. And a lot more dangerous than you might expect.
Along for the adventure is a kender named Earwig Lockpicker. He's a good character, perfectly serviceable. He reinforces all the official Dragonlance messaging about kender. The problem is, he's not Tasslehoff.
It's not that I love Tasslehoff so much (I do, though) that I can't bear to have another kender in a story. It's that we're told in Chronicles that Tasslehoff has been adventuring with the twins in the past, and I would have expected that he'd have been on an adventure for at least one year out of the five leading up to Chronicles. I acknowledge that the Preludes books don't cover all five years. But this book is here, and it has a kender, why wouldn't you include the kender who you've told your readers used to adventure with the twins?
It's just seems like a missed opportunity. Heck, all kinds of weird stuff happens in the other books. Takhisis and Tasslehoff have crossed paths before. Sturm and Kitiara have met a good dragon. But Tasslehoff hanging out with two of the people we've been told he hangs out with? Let's not get carried away.
It's not an egregious offense, but I do feel that sometimes the timeline of Dragonlance doesn't always add up. Raistlin and Caramon are pretty young in Chronicles, and (obviously) roughly five years younger in Preludes. When exactly did Tasslehoff and Tanis and Kitiara and Sturm and Flint actually adventure together? How old were the twins, and what on earth did they contribute? When did Raistlin expose the false clerics? It somehow feels compressed.
The answers aren't actually hard to come by....
]]>Before I knew it was supposed to be hard to do it, I converted adventures from one RPG system to another on a regular basis. It started innocently enough. I'd play in someone's Tunnels & Trolls campaign, and then go home and run the same story as a D&D adventure for my friends. It never occurred to me that adventures written for one system weren't considered compatible with another system.
Unsurprisingly, published adventures for D&D do tend to be pretty specific to a version of the game. That's both a great feature and a an annoyance, depending on the use case. When I ran players straight through the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventures, it was great to have all the right stat blocks in exactly the order they were encountered. On the other hand, I usually use modules out of Yawning Portal out of published order, and so I end up swapping out or customizing most monster encounters.
By far the hardest part of adventure conversion, for me, is finding the right monster swap. Most of the time, I don't care whether the player characters encounter a Aboleth or a Yeti, I just don't want them to encounter a Kuo-Toa while roaming the deserts of Zakhara. In other words, it's not the specific monster I care about, it's the appropriateness of the monster in the context of the story.
It's an easy fix when a party is meant to be attacked by, say, a CR 1 goblin boss, but my players are all level 8. No problem, I throw a CR 6 hobgoblin warlord and a few CR ½ hobgoblins at them instead. Different monsters, different lore, but still goblinoids and probably suited well enough for the environment.
When an adventure calls for something less generic, though, it's a little tougher. What's the drop-in replacement for a Hook Horror? You wouldn't want to just select any monster, you'd want something specific to the Underdark. What's the scaled-up version of a Lamia? And so on.
In short, how do you find the different CR monster to stand in for what's written in an adventure?
Well, it turns out that the 5e DMG has exactly the answer. Appendix B on page 302 has a list called Monster by environment, which categorizes monsters as arctic, coastal, desert, forest, grasslands, and so. The monsters are sorted within each category by CR, so you can find the environment of the encounter you're adjusting, locate an appropriate CR level for the average player level (APL), and grab your Monster Manual.
For the same information online, there's the Donjon monster database, which helpfully adds in monsters from Volo's Guide and Mordenkainen's Tome.
Of course, as you get into high levels of play, your options start to dwindle and you're just as likely to desperately thumb through the Monster by Challenge Rating section searching for anything above CR 12.
I wish all publications containing...
]]>Sometimes a game tells you to use a "percentile dice" or a d100. That can be confusing if you're not used to it, so here's how it's done.
Novelty die notwithstanding, there's no such thing as a d100. Instead, you use any one of four methods:
You've gone out and bought exactly one dice set, and so you've got exactly one ten-sided die.
For example, suppose you rolled an 8 and then a 2. You've rolled 82.
If you rolled a 1 and then a 9, then you've rolled 19.
If you rolled a 0 and a 1, then you've rolled a 1.
Here's the weird one: When you roll a 0 and a 0, you have rolled a 100.
If you've got two d10s, each a different colour, then you can use one as the tens die and the other as the ones die. Declare which is which before you roll. Personally, I have a green die that serves as my tens die, and a black die for ones.
For example, suppose you roll a 7 and 5. You've rolled 75.
If you roll a 0 and 2, then you've rolled 2.
If you roll a 1 and 0, then you've rolled 10.
Here's the weird one: When you roll a 0 and a 0, you have rolled a 100.
You can buy a special "percentile" die from your friendly local game store. Instead of single digits, it's got double digits on it. It's a lot like using a different colour die as your tens die, except instead of a different colour it's just got more numbers on it.
For example, suppose you roll a 30 and a 3. You've rolled 33.
If you roll a 00 and then a 3, then you've rolled 3.
If you roll a 10 and a 0, then you've rolled 10. That's tricky, because it looks like 100, but it's not. It's one ten with zero one added on.
So how do you get 100? When you roll a 00 and a 0, you have rolled a 100.
If it helps, consider that the only time it's possible to get 100% of anything on percentile dice is when all digits are "0". When you roll three 0s, you have the only 100% possible, at least visually, on those dice....
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
I have a feeling this episode had a great script. I think I see what they were going for, and I can imagine it being very intriguing in written form, but somehow something got lost in the translation to motion picture.
The plot is about a boy's school under THRUSH's control. No, not the boy's school in Switzerland under THRUSH control, the one in Italy.
The plot is almost comical at points. Ilya and Napoleon get split up, so naturally Ilya goes head-first into a lair of baddies. He's obviously subdued and captured instantly. Why have a team of agents if each agent is going to deliberately go into dangerous situations? The buddy system doesn't work when you leave your buddy behind.
Later, Solo boldly goes to the boy's school, and immediately runs away. No, really. He goes into the building that he suspects is an evil hideout, spots a hidden camera observing him, and so he runs away. What did he expect to find in the evil lair? He was fine with finding evil THRUSH agents there, but poorly concealed cameras were too much for him to stomach?
The episode's companion serves no purpose. She's a nanny who hates kids, but of course actually loves them. She keeps losing the kid under her care, but that's just an excuse to propel her and the UNCLE agents into action. It's hard to keep track of all the kids in this movie, but I'm pretty sure her kid isn't even an evil THRUSH student. He's just a MacGuffin that you forget about for most of the episode, until the end, when Mr. Waverly says that he had given the kid some sweets and everyone inexplicably bursts out laughing.
This is a bizarrely awkward episode.
This episode isn't awkward in its plot alone. Much of the action feels a little off, as well. For instance, UNCLE hires the boy's choir from the THRUSH school to perform at their Secret Agent Conference being held nearby. (Why UNCLE would hire a boy's choir while two agents are investigating a nearby boy's school run by THRUSH is incomprehensible to me.) There's a big THRUSH raid on the conference site while the boy's choir inside sings its way toward the climactic moment when they decide to open fire (you wouldn't open fire on your enemy before little Timmy's big solo, would you?).
I'll bet the writer of the episode had imagined the juxtaposition of a sweet boy's choir to the harsh drama of a ruthless THRUSH raid outside. It was probably meant to be a scene of secret agents firing at secret agents in the yard of a great Alpine castle (are there castles in the Alps?), a grand ballroom with crystal chandeliers, Mr. Waverly's life in imminent danger.
But what ended up on TV was a small chateau with two dinner tables, eight UNCLE dignitaries,...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
A treacherous politician, Robespierre (played by Ronald Long), is capturing brilliant scientists for some nefarious purpose. Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin recruit Albert Dubois, played by Mala Powers, to help bring her (yes, Albert is a woman) father's killer. Emotions are high, though, because Albert has known Robespierre since she was a child, as he was her father's closest friend.
Robespierre, presumably because the available sets encouraged it, is a fan of French history, with a special interest in Napoleon (not Solo, the original one) and of course the guillotine. He's a gentleman, of course, and presents himself as a man of high morals, nobility, and chivalry, he dresses all in white, and naturally he wears a white eye patch. He's the very model of a righteous avenger, ready to guide civilisation to enlightenment.
The B-plot involves Ilya Kuryakin going up against an expert archer. He uses a bow of a new modern design to impress the archer, but of course the archer figures out that Kuryakin is an UNCLE agent and captures him. Kuryakin is delivered to Robespierre and condemned to death by guillotine.
Solo comes to the rescue just before the blade drops, Robespierre is defeated, and good triumphs.
This isn't a bad episode, but it's not particularly spectacular either. Stuff happens, baddies are defeated, world order is preserved. The problem is, it doesn't ever really feel like the main villain is that great a threat. He is a great threat, it's just that it doesn't ever really come across on an emotional level. He's obviously a villain, and he's somebody you want to see get foiled, but only because he's such an obvious villain.
Nothing ever comes from the potential emotional conflict of having Albert Dubois having known Robespierre as a child, and Robespierre having been her father's closest friend. It's a nice attempt at raising the stakes, but Albert barely matters to the plot, and the plot seems to barely matter to Albert.
The UNCLE agents each get captured pretty early in their respective missions. The actual story here is a run-of-the-mill escape, and even that isn't terribly exciting or unique.
Not a terrible episode, but certainly not a great one.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
Building a character for an RPG can be mildly intimidating if you're not used to it. You might think it takes special knowledge, or that it's a chore, or that it's just overwhelming. But I find building characters to be fun and invariably easier than sometimes the rulebooks make it seem. And building a character is also an important part of understanding the game you're about to play. Just what exactly are you getting yourself into when you decide to play this particular RPG? Well, when the character build process consists largely of armour class, dexterity and strength, and weapon specialization, you can predict that you're in for a game that focuses on combat. When the character build process focuses on levels of education, social skills, and sanity, you can expect a game that's about social interaction, deduction, and horror.
Whatever game you're starting, the character build process shouldn't take you any longer than a quarter of an hour, unless you choose to spend longer on it. The Quick Fire Method on page 48 of the Keeper's Rulebook is the fastest way to get playing. However, some steps in that method amount to "go read page 32", so what looks quick could slow you down in the end.
My method uses the Quick Fire Method for guidance, but adds context to the choices you're making, and allows for greater flexibility in the build. This is not, however, an optimised build. The goal isn't to build the most powerful investigator. It's to build an investigator quickly so you can start playing the game. This is how I build characters for the Call of Cthulhu RPG in just 12 minutes.
Roll some dice to determine your stats. There are two kinds of die rolls you need to make. For some, you roll 3d6 and multiply the total by 5. For others, you roll 2d6, add 6, and then multiply the total by 5.
Alternately, just use the standard array: 40, 50, 50, 50, 60, 60, 70, 80.
How fast you move, which is significant when you're being chased or when you're in combat, is affected by your strength and size.
Pick an age. Your age does affect your characteristic stats.
Some allow you to make an improvement check on your EDU score. to make an improvement check, roll 1d100. If you roll above your EDU, then add 1d10 points to EDU.
A unique thing about tabletop roleplaying games is that when you buy them, you're mostly just buying rules. Some rulebooks also describe in-game items, and some even come with a sample adventure tacked on at the end, but the thing you carry from game to game is a book on how to play, not what to play.
This model was created by the world's first roleplaying game, D&D. Historically, you were expected to sketch out your own gameboard, call it a "dungeon", and then apply the rules to it. On the inside cover of the 1st Edition of D&D, there was even a legend of dungeon map symbols so you knew how to annotate your gameboard.
Today, game masters still sketch out their dungeons on dry-erase boards or on virtual tabletop software.
Building your own adventure is one of the most empowering aspects of tabletop RPG. All you really need are rules and maybe some random dungeon tables, and you've got an infinite number of games. In addition to that infinite number, I've got five good reasons you should be designing your own adventure for your favourite RPG.
No exaggeration, building your own adventure requires no preparation. You can build an adventure as you play. Tell your players they're outside of an ancient tomb that they've heard contains untold wealth, or a deep space mine, or a cyberpunk office space, or a post-apocalyptic bunker.
Once they go inside, draw a room on a scrap of paper, add two closed doors, and describe some random items in the room. Repeat this for each room they enter, adding in some interesting items, aggressive monsters, interesting characters, to mix things up.
I do this at least once for every gaming convention I attend, when a game master is suddenly unable to make it to their session, or when there's a group of latecomers with no game to play.
Spontaneous games of D&D are a superpower.
There are many times when I want to play D&D exactly one time. Finding a good gaming group is a little like assembling a rock band. You need the right people, because you're signing up to meet with them every week for a few hours. If you don't get on, that's not going to be fun.
So when a group of strangers get together to play a game, I like to play a short adventure, from start to finish, so that we all have the guilt-free opportunity to opt out of future games if we need to.
Other times, there's a group of players who have no intention of playing together again in the future. An RPG shouldn't require a long-term commitment to play. You don't invite somebody to a game of Monopoly with the subtext that they have to meet with you for a weekly game of Monopoly, until death do you part. Sometimes people just want one game of D&D, and that's OK.
When you build your own spontaneous adventure,...
]]>I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. In this post, I discuss Chapter 5: Draconomicon which, despite the its name, is not actually all about Dragons.
In previous chapters, I felt a little strange that different kinds of Dragons were getting mentioned before they'd actually been "revealed." Because chromatic and metallic Dragons are known entities thanks to the Monster Manual, they seem like fair game, but it felt a little odd to talk about an Amethyst or Sapphire Dragon before the reader even knows what that is. I figured it was building tension, though, hinting at exotic Dragons that would soon be revealed in the big, exciting 80-page chapter called Draconomicon.
This chapter, however, is very noticeably not the big reveal of all the Dragons. It's essentially a continuation of the previous chapters. It provides adventure hooks, personality traits, lair maps and lair actions, and hoard contents. It's frankly puzzling.
The big Dragon reveal actually happens in the next chapter, called Bestiary. That's when you get to see the stat blocks for the Dragons being hinted at in the first ¾ of the book. I feel like that's putting the cart before the horse. Even if you don't think that a stat block is required in order to have "met" a creature, the fact is that for some of the Dragons in Chapter 5, there's no context. If you've never read an earlier edition of the Draconomicon, then you don't know what a Deep Dragon or a Moonstone Dragon is, and you've just barely been introduced to the idea that gem Dragons exist but you don't know that their powers are Psionic or that their alignment is Neutral-based. It seems odd to introduce the homes of these characters before the reader has met the characters themselves.
This chapter is obviously supposed to be Chapter 6. However, it got slotted in as Chapter 5, and because I didn't realize what was happening until I was half way through the chapter, I dutifully read this in the order it was presented.
Ignoring that this chapter is misplaced in the book, I really enjoyed it.
It's one thing to describe lairs, lair actions, and hoards in a generic way, as Chapter 4 did. It's something else to provide, for each and every major Dragon type:
There are 20 Dragon types (OK, some of them don't get a mapped lair, but most do.)
Suprisingly useful, I think, are the personality traits and ideals. For NPCs, these are the defining characteristics, but I found that the tables provide valuable perspective into how to roleplay a Dragon NPC.
I think it's easy to fall into extremes with a Dragon NPC. The chromatic ones are evil with...
]]>I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. In this post, I discuss Chapter 4: Lairs and hoards.
Look, the fact is that in D&D, high level players run the game. After level 10 (Tier 2), the Dungeon Master is no longer in control of the surroundings or combat. By Tier 4, the Dungeon Master is on the run. High level players are forces to be reckoned with, but it's a real trick to find the balance between presenting players with a challenging combat and just declaring that a sinkhole swallows them whole and abruptly ending the game. My point is that the lair action mechanic is a great way to add challenge to a challenge, and this chapter has a bunch of ideas.
Lair actions make the home turf of a monster an additional threat during combat. I don't think anybody needed lair actions to be codified or even called "lair actions," and I have the idea that many, if not most, Dungeon Masters, have utilized environmental threats for decades. But lair actions does codify the idea that when you're in the lair of a powerful and magical beast, there could be other hazards aside from just that monster. Rocks could periodically rain down upon you when your foe strikes out at you. Magical forces that have been collecting in a corner might lash out at you between rounds, or you might step into a puddle of acid when charging at your enemy.
This chapter adds ideas for combative hazards within the lair of a Dragon.
It doesn't just add to combat, though, it also describes how magic affects that region around a lair. Many of those effects have an influence on nearby populations. For instance, draconic traits may be more common among children born in the region around a Dragon's lair, ostensibly because of the magical influence.
The second half of this chapter is about the Dragon's hoard. It discusses why Dragons want and need a hoard, the logistics of keeping a hoard, the magic that becomes suffused on the hoard, what kind of treasures a hoard contains, and so on. There are several tables to calculate the contents and value of a hoard. There are story ideas for how players might interact with a hoard, quests that could involve items from a hoard, and even hints of puzzles (in the sense that players must puzzle over something) around how players intend to deal with a hoard once they've defeated its Draconic owner.
This is the kind of story that just makes me want to run a high fantasy story. Something set in Cormyr, maybe, or Dominaria, or some iteration of Camelot, with King's courts and Dragons and Halfling burglars. The section on the hoard is fun and inspiring, and I can almost hear the ticker tape rolling by as players try to calculate the weight of gold against...
]]>Like all tabletop games, an RPG is a group effort. As long as everyone playing the game is determined to have fun, the game goes as well as it needs to go. You might not get all the rules "right", but the game master makes rulings that work well enough for that game session, and everyone has fun. Pretty standard board game experience. Admit it, you don't play Monopoly or Clue exactly by the book, either. Sometimes you have to make a special ruling for a weird edge case, or for something you don't feel like looking up. And you probably have a house rule or two, just to spice things up.
The puzzling thing about an RPG isn't the way it's played, it's how it's packaged. When you buy an RPG, you're just buying the rules. There's no game in the box. There's no box. It's just the rulebook.
Some RPG starter kits do have an adventure included in the box, along with dice and pre-built characters, and a simplified rule set. But the assumption is that you'll play the adventure once or twice, and then need more game. So most game publishers sell the game part of the RPG as separate modules, called "adventures" or, historically, "modules".
The "problem" with these adventures is that they're usually verbose, with a complex story and lots of big ideas that the game master must ingest, internalise, and then convey to players.
The Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure is a module explicitly written as an introductory scenario for a D&D 5th Edition starter set. In its first section, it embeds the first major event (a goblin attack) in a section called "Goblin Arrows". It hides the single most important sentence ("Four goblins are hiding in the woods, two on each side of the road. They wait until someone approaches the bodies and then attack.") after several paragraphs of preamble, and then provides a five-item bullet list of rules to keep in mind. One sends the game master to an appendix for goblin stat blocks, another details how surprise attacks work, then initiative, and then describes goblin tactics.
I don't consider this bad. I think it's very helpful. But it's also verbose and full of information. The expectation is clear: the game master must have read the adventure, possibly several times, prior to an attempt at playing the game. As the game master, you must already know the intent of each scenario before playing it, because you won't have the time to parse all the words during the actual game. In a way, you want two versions of the adventure: One to read beforehand, and then a cheatsheet for during the game. For example, here's a version of the first encounter suitable for play:
Goblin attack
- Road with woods on either side
- 2 dead horses with black-feathered arrows
- 4 goblins hiding in woods
Woods
- DC 10 Wisdom (Survival): goblin trail to Cragmaw hideout
That's it.
A published adventure is an investment. That's not...
]]>Are you thinking about playing D&D or Pathfinder or some other roleplaying game (RPG) like Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or similar? Of course you need players, and one player designated as the person (usually called the "Dungeon Master" or the "game master") to "play" the game world itself. The best way to make an RPG game happen is to volunteer to be the game master yourself.
Playing as the Game Master may seem complex and intimidating at first, but it's easier than you might think. My favourite way to get a new RPG player started as Game Master is to play a simple one-rule system.
However, at some point you're going to graduate to published material, because there are a lot of fun game systems out there to try. Here's how to run an official RPG, for the first time in your life, in three easy steps.
Unlike a board game, a tabletop RPG is usually just a set of rules. Go buy the rulebook or rulebooks for the system you want to play. What book you need varies on the game.
The list goes on, and each game requires a little research to understand what's required to play.
Official D&D, Pathfinder, Starfinder, and Call of Cthulhu each have starter kits that provide simplified rules, pre-built characters, dice, and basically everything you need to play up to a certain level. When you get bored, with the simplified rules, you'll know it's definitely time to invest more time and money on more game books.
As with board games, you must read the rules before playing. If you chose a game with lots of rules, then this process can take days or weeks. But all you have to do is read the rules. You don't need to memorise them. Just get a feel for the system, with a special focus on what kind of dice roll indicates success and what kind of dice roll indicates failure. In D&D and Pathfinder, for instance, rolling a 1 generally means failure and rolling a 20 generally means success.
By this point, you have:
Time for the next step.
Games with big rule systems usually also offer adventures. In a board game analogy, the adventures are the board and the rulebooks you bought are the game. In a video game analogy, the rulebook is the code and the adventure is...
]]>Are you thinking about playing D&D or some other roleplaying game (RPG) like Pathfinder, Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or similar? You might be confused by all the trappings of such a game. For instance, there's a special important-sounding title for one of the players, like "Game Master" or "Dungeon Master". Depending on what you've read online, you might think that this "special" player is supposed to know all the rules, craft their own fantasy world, invent complex stories, and guide other players through an experience that'll change their lives. I promise you, that's misinformation. Playing a tabletop RPG is basically like playing a board game, I can prove it, and it shouldn't cause you any more anxiety or confusion than getting together with friends for a friendly chat over coffee.
Here's how to run an RPG, for the first time in your life, in three easy steps.
Grab a napkin or scrap of paper and draw five shapes on it. This is the "board" of the board game part of your RPG. Each shape represents a room, like in Clue (or Cluedo).
Connect the rooms with lines. These are hallways.
You've designed what's colloquially called a "dungeon", but it doesn't have to be a literal dungeon. You can imagine it's a space station, if you want to play a science fiction game. It imagine it's a castle, or a haunted house, or a school for witches, or a creepy hospital, or an office building overrun by zombies.
As game master, you get to decide on the setting, so think of a setting that appeals to you, and jot that down on your "dungeon" map.
While you're thinking about your setting, populate it with some interesting things. For instance, maybe it's got some antique furniture, or high tech control panels, or medieval torture devices. Maybe there are evil space marines roaming the halls, or scientists at work, or androids, or ghosts, zombies, or skeletons.
Be sure to populate the first room with useful gear so player characters starting the game can grab a sword or laser gun, or whatever would be appropriate in your setting, on their way in.
It's admittedly a little strange to have to create your own board for your game. After all, when you buy Monopoly, it comes with a board. For many game masters, creating the board is part of the fun, but sharing is also part of the fun, and lots of people have shared their dungeons online. You can download a $0 one-page dungeon and use it in future games.
The dirty secret of tabletop roleplaying games is that they're all basically the same. The main game mechanic is rolling dice, and declaring success or failure based on what you rolled. Everything else is decorative.
For your first game, you can play with exactly that one rule. You have to come up with the parameters, though. I suggest this:
At the time of this writing, Wizards of the Coast is continuing their attempt to revoke the Open Gaming License. It doesn't much matter, at this point, whether they succeed. They've made their intent clear. They've made it impossible to trust them as caretakers of the legacy of the world's first roleplaying game.
Worst still, by demonstrating what they want to do, they've demonstrated that there's no stability within their organization. Even once Wizards changes its policy, as they did after 4th Edition, it takes as little as executive re-organization to set things back again. With a new president comes new policies, and there's no protection against a policy that threatens the community.
Of course, by now we know that solutions are being developed by Paizo, Kobold Press, and others. The question is, how did we get to this point? ...again? And what can Wizards of the Coast do to regain the community's trust? ...again?
I have to admit, the monumental mistake that was 4th Edition didn't really affect me. I knew little of licensing back then. I was familiar with the concept through open source software, so I knew enough to recognise that 4th Edition's license was anti-consumer. I played the 4th Edition board games, and enjoyed them (and I still do). But for the roleplaying game, switching to Pathfinder was easy. Like many D&D players, I'd spent the last several years reading Paizo's excellent content in Dungeon, Dragon, and Polyhedron magazines. Honestly, I'm not even sure I fully realised that Pathfinder existed because of 4th Edition. Pathfinder was just sort of Paizo's setting for D&D. I knew 4th Edition existed, and I knew that Pathfinder was a fork, but it never felt like I was "abandoning" D&D. I was just changing venue.
In other words, I had a notion that there was "D Stylized-Ampersand D" and "D and D". Today, I like that the Internet's lack of unicode support has encouraged people to use "dnd" as the name of their favourite roleplaying game. It's like the D&D, except without the corporate trademarked Stylized-Ampersand.
When 5th Edition came out, I was genuinely excited because it had returned to an open license. As with many players, I felt like I'd followed the careers of Mike Mearls and Chris Perkins and James Wyatt and many other content creators for years, both in the Paizo magazines and in books by other publishers like AEG. I was glad to have a reason to delve back into their content. The playtests and newfound transparency of "D&D Next" (5th Edition) was refreshing, and I truly thought that Wizards had learnt its lesson. I played (as I do today) many different game systems, and so I added official D&D back into the mix.
A lot of publishers built up their businesses on 5th Edition. A lot of players came to the hobby because of 5th Edition. During that time, Wizards of the Coast produced (mostly) quality products. But what...
]]>I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. In this post, I discuss Chapter 3: Dragons in play.
This chapter is all about what part Dragons might play in your campaign. In my opinion, the first 2 chapters have set the stage for that quite effectively. Already, this book has provided me with ideas on how to use ancentry, subclasses, spells, items, and gifts to incorporate draconic lore and presence into my game world. What more could chapter 3 provide?
Despite the name of the section ("Roleplaying Dragons"), this doesn't give you stage direction or step-by-step instructions on how to "become" a Dragon while playing your game. What this section does have is a good 18 pages (or 9 two-sided pages, if you prefer) on how, essentially, to build a Dragon NPC. It provides tables for a Dragon's appearance, bonds, flaws, goals, and so on. Any time a topic is discussed in this level of detail, there's evidence of lore. Intentionally or not, a chapter describing how to build a Dragon NPC for D&D also reveals a lot about how D&D "sees" Dragons. Granted, a lot of it reads like someone describing an expanded universe for Tolkien's Middle Earth, but because there are more dragons in D&D than there ever were in Tolkien's worlds, there are significant differences, and those come through in this chapter.
My favourite table in this section is the Dragon name section. It provides parts of names that you can assemble into a cool Dragon name. For instance, I just rolled 4d20 and got Endariyliamguthualin. Sounds like a Dragon to me.
The section on followers betrays yet more lore, and comes up with some fascinating potential relationships a Dragon can have with the world around it. I haven't played nearly as many modules as I want, but I do feel like the most common ways people in D&D worlds interface with Dragons are as targets or as crazed worshippers. It's nice to get some fresh ideas on how a Dragon manipulates the intelligent creatures within their territory.
The rest of the chapter contains ideas for Dragon-themed adventures. This includes story-starters, broad themes, specific plot elements, and all kinds of interesting ideas. These could be interesting seeds to justify side quests, or they could be the kickoff of a major homebrew campaign. I don't personally run custom long-term campaigns, but many of my one-shot games are custom dungeons. These story ideas are great backdrops for a custom dungeon, and I can see them serving as a quick and easy setting for the world around the dungeon my players are delving into. I like when there are bigger stories happening outside the dungeon, because it not only breathes life into the experience, but for new players it also hints at how much bigger the game can be.
This chapter isn't quite as...
]]>In 2009, Friday the 13th was rebooted after 10 or 11 films (depending on how you count Freddy vs. Jason). This retold version of the story is a combination of the first, second, and third movies of the original series, while also being an entirely new and modern take on the story.
As in the original first film, this one starts with a prologue about irresponsible camp counselors being slaughtered by a crazed Mrs. Vorhees. As with the original, it's not entirely clear whether her son actually did drown or whether she was living a split reality, or whether she thought he'd drown but he was hiding in the woods for years without her knowledge or he'd just risen suddenly from the lake as a demonic entity.
The prologue occurs entirely during the opening credits. After that, the movie begins proper.
Or does it?
When we're introduced to the cast of teenagers we're going to watch get slaughtered, they're not new camp counselors. Instead, it's a bunch of annoying young adults on the hunt for the GPS coordinates of a secret crop of marijuana one of them heard about from a friend of a friend. Unlike the gang of the firt few original films, this group of friends are all pretty annoying, although I do suspect that one or two of them are meant to be at least innocuous. We don't spend enough time with them for anyone to endear themselves. Melanie is least annoying and seems relatively sensible, but that's only in contrast to the rest of the group, and because she's feeling guilty about having left the bedside of her sick mother for the weekend to come out on a camping trip.
While exploring the woods in lieu of having sex, Melanie and her boyfriend stumble upon the legendary, and long abandoned, camp at Crystal Lake. They find a shrine to Mrs. Vorhees, complete with her decapitated head. They also find a locket with the photograph of a young Mrs. Vorhees in it, and Melanie's boyfriend comments that "she looks like you." Obviously if you've seen the second movie of the original series, you know exactly the story beat this is setting up.
The first kill of the movie happens at the 12 minutes mark. Yes, within the first 12 minutes of the film, Jason claims his first victim. By 23 minutes, they're all dead.
Or are they?
Well, whatever happens, the title card of the movie appears (yes, not until 23 minutes in), and then we get a new group of annoying young adults. This bunch is even worse than the first. Their self-appointed leader is wealthy, self-absorbed, and rude. And then there are not one but two useless stoners, and two young ladies.
This time it's for real. This is the group we're stuck with for the rest of the movie. These are the irresponsible teens (or early 20s, anyway) we're going to watch die grisly deaths.
In the mean time,...
]]>In a recent leaked document, Wizards of the Coast has apparently threatened to revoke the Open Gaming License version 1.0a by stating that it will become "unauthorized." From what some lawyers are saying on the Internet, because the OGL 1.0a license does not use the magic word "irrevocable," this is actually something that WotC may actually be able to do.
Ryan Dancey, the architect of the OGL, has stated on Enworld that he disagrees that the license is revocable, but until a court makes a ruling (should it ever come to that) we can't really be sure. And now that Wizards of the Coast has threatened to do it, until it does go to court or it's revised to be explicit, the OGL is Schroedinger's license.
It doesn't much matter whether the leaked documents are accurate and whether the threat is possible or not. Through the threat of revocation (or "deauthorization") followed by silence, Wizards of the Coast has demonstrated that neither community nor legal agreements matter to Hasbro. They're willing to let a 20 year old legal license be threatened. If the leaks are false, then from a defender of an open culture, I'd have expected an immediate statement condemning it. Regardless of the extent of this threat, Wizards of the Coast looks less trustworthy today. And unfortunately, the text of the Open Gaming License 1.0a is copyright by Wizards of the Coast, so with their threats even the license suddenly feels less reliable.
Open culture is, despite what business and legal systems assert, our default reality. But the corporate world doesn't operate on handshake agreements and licenses that read "just be cool." The Open Gaming License 1.0a has served the tabletop roleplaying community for 20 years now, but recently Wizards of the Coast has hinted that they intend to assert their ownership of the text of that license by declaring it "unauthorized." What that means is unclear, but one thing that's evident is that, despite the goodwill they've earned during their 5e work, the latest iteration of Wizards of the Coast is not your gaming buddy.
You can also watch this article on Youtube.
Luckily there are other open licenses out there, and I've got extensive experience with two of them. I'm not a lawyer, I've never been to court over licensing, so don't take my thoughts on licensing as legal advice.
Before getting to licenses, consider the meaning of "copyright."
Copyright is the "right to copy." In many countries, copyright is an innate trait you get whenever you create something. When you create a thing, you have copyright over it. As I understand it, some countries don't even let you relinquish that. You created something. It's yours.
Copyright is not a license. Copyright essentially says nobody but you has the right to the content you've created. Obviously in real life we don't live by that rule, because we do things like write blog posts on the Internet. And it's because we're humans and we...
]]>I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. In this post, I discuss Chapter 2: Dragon Magic.
There are just 7 spells in this chapter, which takes up about a third of this 9-page chapter. The rest of the pages are filled with magic items, hoard items (formerly mundane objects that become embued with magic just by lying around in a Dragon's hoard), and "Draconic gifts" (special powers granted to players by Dragons.) I never complain about getting new spells, but I also value diversity, so I very much appreciate that this chapter isn't just a bunch of spells that many players aren't likely to encounter. Spells often have to lie around in books, waiting for the right player to notice them and actually use them. But magic items and powers that are endowed upon player characters can be revealed to players by the Dungeon Master.
The spells that stand out, for me:
The full list includes spells from 2nd to 7th level, with each spell-casting class (including the Artificer from Tasha's Cauldron) having access to at least one.
There's about 2 pages of magic items, and in my opinion it's hard to go wrong with a magic item. Even the ones that seem useless encourage players to try unusual things. In fact, if I had any complaints about the items in this book, it would be that all of them were maybe too useful. There are some very powerful objects here, including a gemstone that grants flight, a belt that replenishes a monk's ki points, a sapphire buckler that deals thunder damage, and not just one item that allows a player character to transform into an adult dragon.
Kind of amazing.
And yet, my favourite item, because it warms my heart to see it in print after so many years, is the dragonlance. A dragonlance, in 5e terms, is a +3 lance or pike, with an additional 3d6 force damage on a successful hit. In addition to that, any dragon you can see within 30 feet can immediately use its reaction to make a melee attack. Assuming you're riding on a Dragon while using the lance, that means that when you hit, your Dragon gets to take a swipe at your target for free.
This is a really interesting rewrite of the original dragonlances. In AD&D Dragonlance, there were two different dragonlances, one for footsoldiers and one for mounted dragon riders. A footman's lance granted +1 to attack, and...
]]>Shadowrun's character build process is explained in the 5th Edition Core Rulebook, but there are a lot of possibilities. This post describes a linear build process for a Shadowrun technomancer, and is designed to help new players.
Note that this post is for Shadowrun 5th Edition, even though at the time of this writing 6th Edition has been out for a few years. I haven't switched to 6th Edition, and I'm just writing for what I play (and more importantly, what people I invite to my games can use.)
The build process I describe in this post is intentionally restrictive. This post is not meant to explain every detail about Shadowrun character creation or its magic or hacking systems, and it's not meant to open every possibility. It's meant to get you through character creation and ready for your first game.
In Shadowrun, a technomancer uses magic to interact with computers. Nobody in the Shadowrun game world really understands how or why it works. In fact, in Shadowrun technology and magic are so incompatible that you lose "essence," and your ability to interact with the forces of magic, when you upgrade your body with cyberware. But technomancers somehow bridge the gap and inexplicably use the Matrix without a computer.
Technomancers call their connection with technology Resonance.
Your "metatype" in Shadowrun is your species. Pick a metatype from the Metatype attribute table on page 66. On your character sheet, add the low number (before the slash) to its corresponding attribute. There are 8 attributes:
There are also two special attributes listed in the table:
Ignore the INI column. For now, leave the Initiative box on your character sheet blank.
Turn to the Priority table on page 65. The Priority table is a sliding scale for your character traits.
It's tricky at first, but it makes sense with a little practise. For each column, you choose one and only one cell from rows A to E.
For example, if you want to be as wealthy as possible, then you'd choose row A for the column labelled Resources to acquire 450,000 nuyen (that's money.) But that means you can't use row A for any other column.
If you don't care about wealth, then you might choose row E instead, acquiring 6,000 nuyen.
The point is (as the table's name suggests), you must prioritize each aspect of your character build, with row A containing the best options and row E containing the worst options, and you can only choose one intersection for each column.
To keep things simple for your first build, I recommend choosing cells that give you the least choice. This means you have less to choose from, but when you're just starting out that can be a good thing. It's hard to choose stuff when you don't yet have any context for what a good or...
]]>When I first got into miniature wargaming and painting, I thought all miniatures were created equal. The only difference, to me, was that some miniatures were for fantasy, others for sci fi, and still others for historical settings. But I've come to realise that miniatures vary greatly in not just concept, but also in quality, design, and implementation. In this article, I'm going to describe five things I've noticed about really good miniatures.
First, I want to clarify that most of my experience with good miniatures has been through Games Workshop. There's a Warhammer store an hour away from where I live, so it's easy to buy Warhammer. I know there are really great models I'm missing out on, but getting miniatures shipped by any other company all the way to New Zealand is pretty cost prohibitive. So my frame of reference is limited, but it's limited to the extremes. I've seen bad and I've seen Games Workshop. Some of the cheap miniatures I've gotten from board games and RPG sets have been one step above dollar store (incidentally, dollar stores don't exist in New Zealand) dinosaurs and toy soldiers. Even people who don't care for what Games Workshop produces usually agree that Games Workshop makes the highest of quality miniatures.
Some miniatures are often indiscriminately cast with no regard for where mold lines are going to end up. A low-quality model is one that's bifurcated into a front half and a back half, with a mold line acting like a sort of equator around the model's body. You probably won't notice it at first, especially if you're just using the miniature for an RPG or when you're just learning to paint. But eventually you notice that having an unnatural plastic rim around your miniature person or creature is working against your paint job. You're trying to create the miniaturized illusion of realism (or hyper-realism, if you prefer) through your paint, but that mold line reminds everybody looking at it that it's just plastic after all.
You can (and should) scrape off and sand down the mold lines, but on a cheap miniature that can be hard to do. It probably covers the entire perimeter of the miniature, so there's a lot to reduce. It's not always conveniently positioned, either. If the model's head is turned, then a mold line probably goes straight through the face, which is hard to file down without, say, filing off your model's nose.
Conclusion: Quality miniatures take mold lines into account, and work to integrate them into the model when possible. Games Workshop, for instance, casts models at whatever angle is required so that the mold line follows, for instance, the seam of a model's trousers, or the line of a cape, or the crease in bones, and so on.
Because you have to assemble the miniature yourself, Games Workshop models can reduce mold lines by casting just part of a model that you'll glue to another part, and these are...
]]>Pathfinder is the D&D 3rd edition rule set copied and pasted (legally permitted by the Open Game License), with a few nominal adjustments, into a book labeled "Pathfinder". Now that D&D is on its 5th edition (and heading toward its next incarnation), and Pathfinder has released a 2nd edition of its own, their paths have diverged substantially, and yet they're both implementing essentially the same game. I'm comparing these implementations from the perspective of building a character. So far I've looked at dwarves, elves, and gnomes. In this blog post, I'm comparing humans.
If you don't have time to read this post right now, you can also view this article on Youtube
At the time of this writing, there's a new edition ("One D&D") on the distant horizon, and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything) has established a "Custom Lineage" option. I'm ignoring exceptions based on custom lineages, and using just the Player's Handbook.
In Pathfinder's Golarion setting, humans began as an unremarkable primitive race. Early on, though, aboleths (yes, the aboleths from your favourite bestiary) started enhancing human abilities, inspiring (or compelling?) them to stop their aimless nomadic lifestyle, and settle into civilisation. For thousands of years, these advanced versions of humans flourished in the form of the Azlanti Empire. But eventually, they began to believe themselves superiour to their aboleth masters. As a result, the aboleths performed a ritual that caused stones to fall from the sky, pummeling Golarion and destroying the Azlanti people. The greatest stone to fall was the Starstone, which remained buried under water until 1 AR, when Aroden caused it to raise from the ocean, forming an island where he founded the great city of Absalom. Even today, the Starstone remains a powerful holy relic, and the object of a deadly test that grants mortals godhood upon completion.
In D&D's Forgotten Realms setting, the early world of Abier-Toril endured a great war between gods and primordials, after which there began the Days of Thunder. During this era, a few different races were born, and they in turn created new races. These so-called "creator races" were the Sarrukh (scalykind, like lizardfolk, Naga, Yuan-ti), the Aerie (birdfolk, such as Kenku and Aarakocra), the Fey (pixies, nymphs), the Batrachi (kuo-toa, bullywugs), and humans (they didn't create anything, as they were still just primitive cavepeople). Humans existed and developed in the background of further world-shaping strife, including a war between giants and dragons, the Crown Wars of the elves. In the wake of this turmoil, there was relative peace and humans started forming tribes and civilisations for themselves. The Imaskar Empire (or Raurin Empire, after the plateau where it formed), was ruled by wizard kings, encompassing Mulhorand, Unther, and Thay. The humans of this empire were the ancestors of the modern Mulan human sub-race, an option in the Player's Handbook. Empires rise and fall, of course, but humanity as a race had come into its own.
The Rogues in Remballo module, published by Frog God Games, is an investigative adventure for characters from level 4-6. I've run it a few times, and this post represents my thoughts about the module and what it's like to run.
First of all, setting expectations is important. Rogues in Remballo is a city adventure. For some Dungeon Masters and players, that's exactly what you're looking for. You can play it up to feel like the Tower of the Elephant, with your Conan-like rogues darting from shadow to shadow, or you can take a Sherlock Holmes or Batman approach and have your players questioning locals, setting up surveillance, infiltrating the criminal lair, and so on. If you're looking for a linear dungeon delve or adventure-movie story, this isn't it.
Rogues in Remballo takes place mostly in a single cul-de-sac, so it's a self-contained adventure, and it's easy to drop it into any city setting. For that same reason, it also works well as a last-minute addition into a larger campaign. When your adventuring party is drawn to a big city, whether it's Magnimar, Baldur's Gate, or even Sigil, there's usually an opportunity to throw in a couple of side quests, either to pad out the game between major plot points or to distract players from the real villain for a while, or just to mix up the play style.
A good side quest in a big city, in fact, emphasizes the size and importance of a city. There's no better way to show that a city is vast and ultimately unknowable by demonstrating that it contains lots of stories unrelated to the campaign's main plot.
I used this module as the logical conclusion to an accidental side quest my players introduced to the campaign. They'd wandered into a temple on their way across town to the next campaign plot, and I needed something to happen in the temple. I decided the temple would be abandoned, hoping my players would move on to the regularly scheduled plot point. Instead, they doubled down and investigated why the temple was abandoned. I had a revenant attack them to buy myself some time, but they eventually defeated it and so as a reward I had them discover a priceless religious relic in a hidden compartment. Then they wanted to know more about the relic.
At this point, I recognized that my players weren't in the mood to get back on track just yet. They were asking me, whether any of us knew it or not, for a side quest. So the religious relic was fake, and led to a quest to find where these fakes were being manufactured, and so began Rogues in Remballo.
The macguffin of the adventure is drugs. I don't tend to address drugs in my games (I prefer a nice polite mix of religious fanatacism, fascist villains, and deadly violence), but the problem can be anything an established or random NPC needs suppressed.
Because mythology comes...
]]>The Tomb of Horrors by Gary Gygax is probably the most famous dungeon in all of D&D. Part of the appeal of D&D for many gamers is the shared experience of playing common adventures, and because The Tomb of Horrors has been around for such a long time and has gained such a reputation for being a real challenge, I think it's well worth playing the module. That said, for players it can be a peculiar module. Modern D&D has largely deviated from the style of play represented by Tomb of Horrors, and in some ways, so has the system itself. For the Dungeon Master, it's often a treacherously confusing module, with an over-complicated map and unclear explanatory text. I've run the Tomb a few times, and I run it as an all-day (about 8 to 9 hours) session. This post isn't a step-by-step guide to running the module, but it contains some notes for a Dungeon Master preparing to run the Tomb, some of the problems you might run into, and how I deal with them.
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS.
For whatever reason, most D&D adventures assume the Dungeon Master is already familiar with the adventure. They're heavy on prose and description, they rarely separate atmosphere from mechanics, and they frequently make vague references to areas of the map without bothering to provide a key. They're impossible to parse at a glance.
For this reason, you must read the Tomb of Horrors in advance, and probably take notes.
I'm still working on perfecting my notation, but here's how I generally take notes (all information has been obfuscated to protect the secrecy of the module):
10. Great hall of goblets [p 193]
* Illusions: DC 20 Int (Investigation)
* If goblet is removed: summon Imp [MM 94]
a. Goblet on pedestal: worth 1000 GP
b. Secret door: DC 20 Wis (Perception)
c Illusion: Blue orb at waist: crawlspace to #18 [p 194]
d. Illusion: Yellow orb conceals secret one-way door from #8 [p 192]. Open with _knock_ or destroy with _disintegrate_.
e. Illusion: Green orb at feet: crawlspace to #10 [p 192]
f. Illusion: White orb overhead: tunnel to #21 [p 194]
g. Archway south, misty: if PC enters, then 1000 GP appears in goblet
Not that unlike most D&D material, I use page numbers.
The 10. Great hall of blah is the name the book provides to the location.
The bullet points immediately under the location are global elements. For instance, all illusions in this location require a DC 20 WIS (Perception) check to overcome. There's also a monster here, but it's triggered only if blah is removed from its pedestal.
It's rare that D&D maps or books provide markers for anything, and even when they do they often treat everything with equal weight, regardless of how vital (or insignificant) an item is to the plot.
If something shouldn't be mentioned to the players until AFTER they've overcome some obstacle, then I "conceal" the...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
A leading scientist returns from somewhere in the Pacific to deliver some footage of volcanoes. He's attacked at the airport, and THRUSH successfully captures a film reel of...a Japanese boy band.
Wait, what?
Yes, there's a mix-up on the site of the assassination, and THRUSH ends up with the footage of filmmaker Cricket Okasada. Solo, for a change, actually gets what he went to the airport to get, and brings back the footage.
The footage reveals that THRUSH has developed a means to cause volcanoes to erept on command.
UNCLE's key to THRUSH is Cricket Okasada, who's making it widely known that her film is missing, and therefore is likely to be contacted by THRUSH under the assumption that she has their footage.
Solo and Kuryakin are up against THRUSH East, with its headquarters in Japan. It's a good episode, with lots of clever little scenarios where the UNCLE agents must either get some MacGuffin to lead them to the next MacGuffin, or escape a strange death trap (they get turned into living marionettes at one point).
There's not enough Cricket Okasada in this episode, in my opinion. She's a unique and fun ally, almost completely dubious and unwilling for most of the time. She is, after all, just a filmmaker. She wants her footage, and the constant assurances of Napoleon Solo don't do a whole lot to allay her fears that she's caught up in something dangerous.
By the end of the episode, I lost track of what exactly the mission is, aside from stop THRUSH. I guess it's good to be agile, and so it's good that the UNCLE agents are able to pivot quickly as the mission changes. I'm not sure this episode was "written" as much as it was "developed", though. It feels almost like a modern D&D setting, with the initial mission being tossed out as soon as something more threatening arises. There's nothing wrong with that, and in fact sometimes it's refreshing to be caught up in a whirlwind of intrigue.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
This one's a very cool political intrigue episode that revolves around a boy genius. For me, the real story in this episode is the glimpse at amateur electronics in the 1960s. Of course, there's the occasional misunderstanding of what a "computer" is ("a computer is never wrong, that's why it's a computer") but more importantly there's a lot of playing around with radio gear. Obviously it's not done in detail, but it's refreshing to see [pretend] cool stuff being done with hardware rather than software.
THRUSH gets word of a genius at a Swiss boy's school, because the dean of the school is an aspiring THRUSH member. They send a high-ranking agent to the school, and kill the boy's father to solidify their claim on the boy. They realize too late that the boy's father had already assigned a backup guardian to the boy: Elfie van Dunck, an eccentric actress played by Angela Landsbury.
For some reason, the writers throw in another leading lady named Joanna, played by Diane McBain. It seems to be a way for Kuryakin to join up with Van Dunck (Joanna offers the services of her hairdresser, Kuryakin, to Elfie van Dunck), and for the rest of the episode she chases Kuryakin around and serves as an unofficial UNCLE agent. It very much works. She and Kuryakin are a great team, and she's as good an unwilling UNCLE agent as any other guest star. I'm just not personally convinced that she belongs in this episode.
This isn't an action episode, and I like that. For the most part, this is a social intrigue episode, with Napoleon Solo trying to convince both the boy and his guardian that THRUSH is an evil organisation that they shouldn't get involved with.
Obviously, problems arise.
Naturally, THRUSH identifies Solo within 2 minutes of meeting him. That's standard stuff, however awkward a plot device it is that our star secret agent is apparently so famous within the criminal underworld that his identity isn't secret.
Elfie van Dunck is strongheaded, too, so she's not easy to convince. She's worked in TV productions for one of the men who, as it turns out, is actually a THRUSH agent, so she remains convinced throughout most of the episode that Solo is a toy salesman.
And finally, the boy himself decides he wants to join THRUSH in order to take them down from the inside, as a way to get revenge for his father's death.
It's an entertaining episode (or two).
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I've written about the RPG metagame debate before, and one contributing factor to what I'll call "metagame anxiety" is familiarity with an adventure. For the record, I don't usually mind the metagame. I believe it can be a fun and valuable part of the game. But some people get concerned that a player might be familiar with an RPG module, and they believe that any level of familiarity renders that module useless. After all, how can a game be fun when the player already knows the plot of the adventure? How can it be a challenge when a player already knows the key plot points? But I find replaying RPG adventures to be a lot of fun, and I think we don't generally do it often enough.
The fear that adventures are single-use is entirely illusory. But people fall for it, even though they themselves may have played through their favourite video game more than once, or watched their favourite movie or read their favourite book more than once. I don't know why we do it, but we do seem to make an exception for RPG adventures. We tell ourselves that, for whatever reason, an RPG adventure just can't work more than once.
I believe there are two reasons we think an adventure is only good for one play-through.
As the DM, do I have to pretend like my players have never heard the description of Alleyway #3? What if I forget to mention the barrel in the corner? Without it, they'll be unable to step up on it to find the key on the ledge. And if they don't find the key, then how will they get into the room?
It can be equally as confusing for a player. Last time there was a barrel in the corner, and I climbed up onto it to search the ledge, where I found a key. Did the DM forget to mention it, or is this a plot twist to make the game feel different than last time? Was the barrel randomly generated?
Can I ask whether there's a barrel in the corner? Why would I? It would be metagaming to ask about a specific object that the DM didn't mention.
Well, that's not fun for anyone.
The fact is, there are lots of adventures out there. RPG companies publish lots of adventures for their games, and there are usually third-party adventures available on DriveThru. You may as well treat adventures as ephemera, because the more you linger on one, the fewer you'll get to play before your CON score is reduced to 0 by old age.
Those are both valid points, and combined they're really good arguments for not playing the same adventure twice. But I've played adventures more than once, and I find that the bond I form with a module I play more than once is...
]]>I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. In this post, I discuss Chapter 1: Character Creation.
There are three ancestries in Chapter 1, each one an alternative to the Dragonborn ancestry listed in the Player Handbook (PHB). There's the Chromatic Dragonborn, Gem Dragonborn, and Metallic Dragonborn.
Stop the press. Gem dragon?
Yes, if you played previous editions of D&D, you may recall that there were gem dragons. I first encountered them as a schoolboy, when my friend Jason brought his monster compendium to school, bravely ignoring the dangers of the potential punishments imposed by the Satanic Panic. We regularly had debates over which dragon was the most powerful, but because we didn't understand anything about the game, we never really bothered referencing stats in our arguments. The Sapphire Dragon had a baseline -3 AC, which is pretty respectable, but we usually ended up accepting that Silver Dragons (also -3 AC) would beat all others in a fight.
When I started running games, I came to realise that having Neutral Dragons was actually really useful. I feel like players are willing to bargain with orcs, hobgoblins, and even demons, but everybody knows that a Chromatic Dragon is evil and that a Metallic Dragon is good. You don't have to talk to them to find that out. But Gem Dragons truly seem to confuse most players. Are you neutral in a good way, or are you neutral in a could-kill-you-without-a-second-thought way?
Anyway, my point is that Gem Dragons are definitely going to be in this book. It took every fibre of my being, but I did resist just flipping straight to Chapter 5: Draconomicon, and continued dutifully reading Chapter 1.
The Dragonborn ancestries presented in this book give modest boosts to what's provided in the PHB. Breath weapons start with d10 damage instead of d6, Gem Dragonborns can fly for a minute, and Metallic Dragonborn have a special Repulsion Breath weapon that can knock opponents prone.
There's a new subclass each for monks (Way of the Ascendant Dragon) and rangers (Drake Warden).
It's pretty hard to mess up the monk class, and although I haven't yet played it myself, this subclass appears to be a reasonable option. My favourite is the Draconic Strike feature, which allows you to choose the damage type of a successful unarmed strike. At 3rd-level, you can spend an action to make a breath weapon attack in a 20-foot cone or a 30-foot line. The way it's written makes it seem like you get to choose the damage type at the moment you make the attack, which strikes me as overly flexible. At 17th-level, you get the Explosive Fury feature, which damages any number of creatures you can see within 10 feet. Obviously the Way of the Ascendant Dragon adds some nice area of effect (AOE) features to the...
]]>Dragonlance Chronicles starts at the end of the 5-year personal quests of the book's heroes. It's an intriguing start, because you know that the quests happened, but you don't know anything about them, aside from a few hints from Flint Fireforge. The Preludes series provides some specific stories from the 5 years leading up to Chronicles, and the first book is about an adventure experienced by Sturm Brightblade and Kitiara Uth Matar.
Normally, I'm not a fan of prequels. I find that they tend to explain too much, ruining the intrigue and mystery of past events. It's the same principle as an unseen stalker in a slasher film. What you aren't shown, you must invent. And because it's your invention, however vague or lucid it may be, it lives in your mind and you grow fond of it. A prequel can only insist that your idea is wrong, and so it's almost always unwelcome.
Preludes isn't quite like that. In Preludes, you get just a snippet of what happens during those 5 years. There's still plenty of room for other events to have happened, including whatever you imagine.
Preludes does occasionally fall prey to those moments that make the world seem especially small, or very coincidental. There's a moment in Darkness and Light that feels a little suspicious to me, but overall it's a little bit of an invaluable Dragonlance book for the insight it provides on Sturm and Kitiara, and gnomes.
There tend to be a lot of characters in Dragonlance books. In fact, you might argue that there are too many. In the original trilogy, it seems there's an endless barrage of names and subplots right up to the end. Considering how many characters there are, I think it's impressive that you come away from those books feeling like you really know both Sturm and Kitiara. In a way, they're pretty easy to sum up. They're polar opposites, so much so that they clash in the end. Sturm is the quintessential paladin and Kitiara is impulsive and self-serving.
So why not have a story that has them team up?
In Darkness and Light, Sturm and Kitiara have spent time together in Solace, along with Kitiara's brothers, and Tasslehoff and Flint, and Tanis. But Sturm's past still haunts him. He and his mother were forced from his father's estate in his childhood, and so he embarks on this quest to reclaim his birthright. And so Sturm and Kitiara head away from Solace to learn about Sturm's father. Kitiara accompanies Sturm mostly on a whim, out of the desire to travel and possibly to make some money as a mercenary, should anything come up.
Pretty early in their journey, though, they come across a boat that's inexplicably docked on dry land. It turns out that the boat is the invention of a group of Gnomes from Mount Nevermind. It's not primarily intended as a sea vessel, but as a flying one.
Sturm...
]]>I picked up Fizban's Treasury of Dragon and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter.
In true Dragonlance tradition, the first section of this book is a poem. The poem is called Elegy for the first world, and it's the vehicle the book uses to push its theory of a Grand Unification of the Multiverse. It's very much an explicit theme throughout the volume that each dragon in one D&D setting has a version of itself in all (or most, at least) other D&D settings. Because that's the assertion of the book, there are sometimes "glitches" in the text where Paladine and Takhisis, for instance, are referred to as Bahamut and Tiamat. I mean, literally they're sometimes called Bahamut and Tiamat. For instance, on page 44 (which is well into Chapter 3, but it illustrates the point I'm making):
Famously, Bahamut traveled the world of Krynn in the guise of a human wizard named Fizban, guiding the peoples of that world as they prepared for war against the evil forces of Tiamat.
Zoinks, but that reads wrong to a longtime fan of Krynn. Anyone who's read (and re-read, and re-read) Dragonlance knows that it's Paladine who walked among the mortals of Krynn. But according to this new Grand Unified Multiverse theory, of course, Paladine is Bahamut and Bahamut is Paladine, and Takhisis is Tiamat and Tiamat is Takhisis.
On page 80 of AD&D Dragonlance Adventures, Takhisis is described this way:
her favorite form is that of the five-headed chromatic dragon [...] Each head has a different color (white, green, blue, red, and black)
So despite my initial discomfort at seeing the names of Forgotten Realms gods in a paragraph about Dragonlance, I really like this new view of the multiverse. And I love that it's framed through the mythos of Dragons. I love that it takes the "first world" concept, which I think is borrowed from the idea of the Fae in either Celtic mythology or else Tolkien mythology (or maybe both?). As much of a fan as I am of mythology, I'm no expert, but I do know that I've heard the idea of previous iterations of a universe that get replaced as either experiments fail or gods get restless or magic gets abused. Shadowrun, for instance, is the "Sixth World", in the same general tradition.
I like that D&D is bequeathing its most iconic species, the Dragons, with the honour of existing before all else. It's a unique and unexpected way of making Dragons inately godlike, without granting all Dragons godlike abilities. It boosts the mythology around them, and places them on a particularly noble pedastal within the game world. And they deserve it, because the game is half-named for them.
Each of the Player Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide expansions are ostensibly annotated by an in-world author. The margin notes in Xanathar's Guide were entirely useless. I believe they were...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Chapter 4, the final chapter of the Pact Worlds book, contains player options. This includes character archetypes, weapons, armour, and some new playable races. It's 32 pages long with a lot of diverse categories of content, I started my review in a previous article.
A good source book is essentially out-of-game exploration. You get the same sense of discovery and surprise from reading a source book that you do when you're in the game, exploring a forgotten dungeon or forbidden temple.
Similarly, the player options section of Pact Worlds is like out-of-game looting. But there's the added dimension when you're looting that the objects you find also betray the cultures that created them. And that's what you get in this chapter's sections of weapons, armour, tech items, magic items, and hybrid items.
Weapons in D&D and Pathfinder tend to be pretty predictable and purely functional. You have swords, axes and hammers, spears and lances, bows and crossbows. Sometimes the illustrations are fun to look at and contain some surprises, but quite often all you really need or expect is a table listing damage and important attributes.
The weapons in Starfinder are, however, as exciting as magic items are in D&D and Pathfinder. A Starfinder weapon is likely to be high tech, with a unique chassis sometimes designed for a completely different physiology than your own, foreign ammunition, and surprising effects. The Pact Worlds weapons listing spans 4 pages, and features melee weapons, small arms, longarms, heavy weapons, and sniper weapons. Special effects include a lockdown feature, which immobilizes constructs, the ability to ignore underwater penalties, a blinding effect, and electrocution. There's a page of weapon fusions, too, which can add yet further special features to your weapon of choice.
This is a strong 4 pages. It obviously pales in comparison to the Armory source book in terms of volume, but the quality is exactly what you'd hope for.
The armor section is equally as fun to read, because once again the descriptions of the armor are also stories about the Pact Worlds. There's Formian Hide armor, made to emulate the chitinous skins of formians, a hardened resin armor created by the insectile haan of Bretheda, and Hellknight plate armor. There are also some nice upgrades, including a few magical and hybrid upgrades.
Lists of mundane items can be a little dull in D&D and Pathfinder. Sometimes it's fun to read fanciful descriptions of anachronistic items that didn't exist in our real life history but that have been retrofitted into a fantasy world (a ballpoint pen described as a quill with an inbuilt inkwell, for instance), but generally we all know what kinds of items to expect in our fantastic "ancient history" world. In a...
]]>Shadowrun's character build process is explained in the 5th Edition Core Rulebook, but there's a lot to filter out because there are so many possibilities. This post describes a linear build process for a Shadowrun adept, and is designed to help new players.
Note that this post is for Shadowrun 5th Edition, even though at the time of this writing 6th Edition has been out for a few years. I haven't switched to 6th Edition, and I'm writing for what I play (and more importantly, what people I invite to my games can use.)
The build process I describe in this post is intentionally restrictive. This post is not meant to explain every detail about Shadowrun character creation, and it's not meant to open every possibility. It's meant to get you through character creation and ready for your first game.
Shadowrun is a skill-based system. Your character's attributes determine whether you use magic and how you use it, which in turn influences what skills you take during the character build process. Magic can be used in many different ways in the Shadowrun setting. A magician uses magic to cast spells and summon spirits. An adept uses magic to boost their abilities. A mystic adept is an adept who also has the ability to cast spells.
This post demonstrates how to build an adept, not a mystic adept. Once you understand how to build an adept and a magician, you can build a mystic adept yourself.
Your "metatype" in Shadowrun is your species. Pick a metatype from the Metatype attribute table on page 66. On your character sheet, add the low number (before the slash) to its corresponding attribute. There are 8 attributes:
There are also two special attributes listed in the table:
Ignore the INI column. For now, leave the Initiative box on your character sheet blank.
Turn to the Priority table on page 65. This table is tricky at first, but it makes sense after you've used it a few times. The Priority table is a sliding scale for your character traits. For each column, you choose one and only one cell from rows A to E.
If you wanted to be wealthy, then you'd choose row A for the column labelled Resources. But that means you can't use row A for any other column.
A different example: Maybe you don't care about material wealth, but you want to have lots of skills. In that case, you'd choose row A for column Skills and row B (or C or D or E) for Resources.
By the end of the process, you'll have chosen exactly one cell from each row for each column, but never the same row twice.
To keep things simple for your first build, I recommend choosing cells that give you the least choice. This means you have less to choose...
]]>The way I've always played D&D was that when your character was dead with no chance of resurrection, you built a new character and came back into the game at level 1. That's just the way me and my gaming groups have done it. Recently, I've started to pick up on the fact that not all gaming groups play the game that way, and it made me think about what the "goal" of a D&D game. Is the goal to level up? Is the goal to complete a module (or a series of quests, a campaign, or whatever term you use)? Is the goal to tell a good story? Is the goal to get gold? Seriously, what's the game all about, anyway? I'm going to try to convince you that it's about reaching level 20, but first I want to look at some of the other ideas.
First of all, I want to make it clear that D&D doesn't have to have a goal. It's a flexible game, and it's fun to play. That's reason enough for many people.
I should clarify that it's not reason enough for me, though. I've tried playing RPGs with no clear goal, and I invariably lose interest very quickly. It's a little silly, because the goals that do get imposed on a game are make-believe. There's an equal amount of purpose in a game with a goal and a game with no goal. I could "fix" the problem with a game with no clear goal by inventing my own goal and playing toward it. But the group energy is different, I guess, and games without a common goal tend to be less focused than a game with a common goal. I find it more fun to play an RPG with a clear end in sight.
Some players love the RPG experience for the roleplay and storytelling. I love a good story, I love exploration, and I love lore. The more player handouts I get, or independent research I can do, when I'm playing a module, the more invested I become. That's a very real part of the game, for me.
However, it never qualifies as a goal for me. It's not reason enough to play a game. I think it has something to do with the knowledge that I could just learn the lore by reading it. But throw an imaginary monster in front of me, and tell me that I can't read the ancient scroll until I defeat the monster, and I'm hooked.
Completing a module or a specific dungeon is a valid goal for me. But in order to do that, I need a player character. And that can get tricky when practically everything in the game world exists to kill my player character.
Death in D&D can be a common occurrence, depending on your Dungeon Master and gaming group. As a Dungeon Master, I tend to make a best effort first to kill player...
]]>The 5th Edition book for the Dragonlance setting has turned out to be less a setting book and more an adventure with some setting data. In an attempt to make up the difference, I recently purchased two Dragonlance books written by fans from DMs Guild. In this post, I'm reviewing Dragonlance Companion.
From the beginning, 5e source books have consistently been reductionist, boiling down established settings into just the generally important parts. It's a choice the 5e team made, and there's an argument for it. There's a lot of lore in the D&D multiverse, and it just isn't technically important for anybody to know the details. From a certain perspective, it pays for Wizard of the Coast to not give the impression that special knowledge is required to play. The message they're probably trying to send is that you can play D&D without knowing anything about D&D.
In a previous review, I praised Tasslehoff's Pouches of Everything for being a book for the Dragonlance fan. It improves things in the official 5e book, and adds a lot more besides. But it is, admittedly, filled with a lot of detail. You don't just get elves in that book, you get Silvanesti, Qualinesti, Kagonesti, and even Dimernesti (plus half-elven variants). You get two kender types, minotaurs, ogres, half-ogres, and so on. Tasslehoff's Pouches of Everything is all about the minutiae of Dragonlance.
Dragonlance Companion is not.
As it says in the title, Dragonlance Companion is a companion volume for the official 5e book. While Tasslehoff's Pouches includes the stuff you can't even imagine 5e bothering with, each chapter in Companion adds just the obligatory content you can imagine the 5e book left on the cutting room floor due to space issues.
Chapter 1 makes Draconians a playable race, and also provides the half ogre and thanoi races.
Chapter 2 provides sub-class options, including an Artificer Flesh Sculptor, a Rogue Tinkerer, a Monk of the Divine Way, and more. There's one sub-class for each class, so everyone gets something new.
Chapter 3 has backgrounds: a Knight of Neraka and a Seeker Guard. I'm not sure how valuable either of these are. I wouldn't allow my players, at least, to choose these evil backgrounds. Maybe Seeker Guard would be acceptable, but I don't have a great association with Seekers, and definitely not the Dark Knights. Tasslehoff's Pouches included the Dark Knights as a faction, but that's broadly useful for NPCs as well as for the odd evil-aligned campaign. These backgrounds are pretty limited, and they're the only two backgrounds provided.
Chapter 4 includes a bunch of spells. I love new spells, can't get enough of them. This section has spells 19 new spells, including two cantrips and one 9th level spell.
Chapter 5 contains magic items. It's not as good as the Tasslehoff's Pouches magic item section, but you can't really go wrong with magic items. They're fun to read about, fun to give to players,...
]]>The 5th Edition book for the Dragonlance setting has turned out to be less a setting book and more an adventure with some setting data. In an attempt to make up the difference, I recently purchased two Dragonlance books written by fans from DMs Guild. In this post, I'm reviewing Tasslehoff's Pouches of Everything. You can also watch this review on Youtube.
This book, tragically available only as a PDF at the time of my review (it requires "gold status" for DMs Guild to offer it as a hardcover), is by the Dragonlance Nexus community. The Dragonlance Nexus website has been an invaluable source of Dragonlance news since forever (it has origins in websites started in the late 1990s). I like to think that I'm familiar with Dragonlance, having read all the Dragonlance books I've stumbled upon over the years, but these community members are experts. And they wrote this book. I hate to spoil the review for you, but in short, it's unthinkable that this book isn't already a "gold status" seller, and I suspect its greatest weakness is that it hasn't got the word "Dragonlance" in its title.
So the book sacrifices discoverability to play into the "of Everything" template, which is pleasantly cohesive with other 5e books. However, it easily out-does Xanathar's and Tasha's and Fizban's books "of Everything," and makes up for much of the missing content from the official Dragonlance release.
It also suffers from the same design annoyances. This book has "annotations" from Tasslehoff, in the style of the other 5e "Everything" books. The tone of these quips in the official releases have mostly missed the mark, for me, but in this one the notes from "Tasslehoff" are mostly just bland. Whether you enjoy or dismiss the annotations, I consider the fictional annotations in these books to be unfriendly design. Elements that are specially highlighted on every other page offer no substance, and often times take you out of the fiction. I don't get it, I find it distracting, I wish the "Everything" books would do away with that design element.
Shadow of the Dragon Queen acknowledges basically just two races of Krynn: Kender and Draconians. There's a paragraph or two confirming that gnomes and elves exist, and then another paragraph about how all the other races could find their ways to Krynn, too. Anybody who's read even just the Chronicles knows that there's a lot more to Krynn than that, and this book is the solution.
There are only about 20 pages for Krynn races in this book, but for each race there's an overview of lore and sub-races. The dwarf section doesn't just mention that dwarves exist on Krynn. It talks about Calnar, Hylar, Daergar, Daewar, Klar, Neidar, Theiwar, Zhakar, and, yes, Aghar (gully dwarves!) The book includes lore and options for humans, elves, gnomes, tarmak, minotaurs, irda, phaethon, and more.
Starting way back with Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, 5e source books have consistently been...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Chapter 4, the final chapter of the Pact Worlds book, contains player options. This includes character archetypes, weapons, armour, and some new playable races. It's 32 pages long with a lot of diverse categories of content, so I'm going to split my review of it into two separate posts.
At first glance, Starfinder might seem a little overloaded with terminology for building characters. You've got your race and class as usual, but the Core Rulebook also offers themes as well as archetypes. Don't let the fancy terms fool you, though, it's actually pretty simple.
In D&D 5e, an archetype is called a "sub-class". But the really neat thing about archetypes is that, unlike sub-classes in 5e, they're not specific to any class. Archetypes replace your class features, but they can be wildly different than what someone of your class would normally have access to. For instance, the Arcanamirium Sage gains access to the Identify spell. If you've chosen a class that doesn't normally cast spells, that's not a problem. Pathfinder and Starfinder have "spell-like" abilities that act like magic but have no spell slots associated with them. You can justify this any way you like in the game. Maybe your nuts-and-bolts engineer is keen of eye and mind that you have an uncanny ability to identify even magical items, or maybe you studied at a temple and picked up a few tricks while harvesting kaiburr crystals one day.
Archetypes are an excellent reminder that Paizo wants you to be able to play whatever you want to play. They're not in the business of limiting player choices. It's their job to tag the choices, classify them, attach numbers to them, and then release them back out into the wild. It's your job to play what you want to play.
Appropriately, many of the archetypes defined in this book reveal just a little bit more about the lore and general feel of the Pact World system. Specifically, the archetypes are:
There's a lot of overlap between D&D and Pathfinder. Pathfinder was, originally, the D&D 3rd edition rule set copied and pasted, with a few nominal adjustments, into a book labeled "Pathfinder". This was legally permitted by the Open Game License. With D&D on its 5th edition (and heading toward its next incarnation), Pathfinder has released a 2nd edition of its own. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to compare the two from the perspective of building a character. Proceeding alphabetically, the next ancestry (or race in 5e) to cover are gnomes.
At the time of this writing, there's a new edition ("One D&D") on the distant horizon, and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything has established the "Custom Lineage" option that allows you to treat your choice of race a little like a costume. Players can have the flavour of a race without a penalty to speed, with a boost to any ability score, and so on. I'm not going to annotate possible exceptions to the rules in the 5e Player's Handbook.
Gnomes in the Forgotten Realms have no creation myth. They believe gnomes have always existed, and probably always will. Their primary god is Garl Glittergold, a golden-skinned fun-loving god who defeated Kurtulmak, the Kobold god.
While they tend to get along well with halflings, in many ways they have more in common with dwarves. The written gnomish language uses the dwarven alphabet, and gnomes tend to work and dwell underground. Of the two subraces offered in the 5e Player's Handbook, both are related to a subterranean life: rock gnomes and deep gnomes. Unlike the dwarves, however, gnomes view life as equal parts work and play, and one is just as important as the other.
The Dragonlance setting gave gnomes a unique spin that's had a pretty major influence on how gnomes are seen in D&D. Created by the god Reorx during some experiments, the gnomes of Krynn are seen by some as divine mistakes. Krynnish gnomes are tinkerers by default, inventors who believe that magic is just technology not yet understood. They each have a life quest, which they pursue obsessively once they figure out what it is (it's usually an invention.) Most gnomes dwell in Mount Nevermind, a subterranean facility for research and development. Gnomes of Krynn are responsible for inventing a time travel device, a flying ship that goes all the way to the moon Lunitari, the elevator (well, a gnomeflinger, anyway), and much more.
The gnomes of Pathfinder's Golarion are so far removed from the world's creation that they don't even actually belong on the material plane. They're fey creatures by nature, which makes them related to creatures like faeries and pixies and displacer beasts and blink dogs. Given this heritage, gnomes have a little inherent magic to them. A little like Dragonlance Kender, they're driven to explore and experiment and to experience new things. In fact, a gnome losing curiosity and wanderlust risks catching The Bleaching, a draining and withering disease...
]]>The Pathfinder Companion book series are short books of in-depth lore about a single subject. I recently read the Gnomes of Golarion, and now I know everything about gnomes, or at least the gnomes as they appear in the default setting of the Pathfinder roleplaying game.
In the Golarion setting, gnomes are artefacts of the First World. To understand that, you have to understand arcane creation myths of how reality came into being. As far as I know (and I'm no historian or anthropologist, so don't take my word for it), in some pagan traditions, the world that formed initially, or the "first world," was populated by the fair folk, or the fey. The exact details depend on your RPG setting, but generally the first world has either been scrapped by the gods or overrun by humans. In Shadowrun, for instance, there have been five iterations of reality, making this the Sixth World. I'm not sure how many iterations there are meant to have been in Pathfinder's setting (and the scholars of Golarion may not even be sure themselves), but suffice it to say that gnomes were meant to be part of a fey realm that existed early in creation's history.
During a mysterious time known by scholars as the Age of Anguish, gnomes departed the First World and ended up on the material plane. The significance of that can't be overstated when considering gnomes on Golarion. They don't "belong" on the material plane, and as citizens of it they have had to come to grips with the concept of death, disease, and suffering.
Gnomes long for new experiences. That above all else is the driving force in a Gnome's life. They want lots of change, lots of variation, and unique perspectives. This can manifest in a number of ways. For some gnomes, it inspires them to go on adventures. For others, it compels them to tinker with new inventions and technologies. For still others, it might drive them to delve into history books as they strive to become an expert on a given subject, or to explore magic, or to serve as inspiration for other gnomes who aren't sure yet what to explore.
I love this aspect of Golarion's gnomes, in much the same way as I love the idea in Dragonlance kender. As someone with a passion for learning and exploring, I identify with it on a personal level. But I also appreciate the in-game function it serves. Why would somebody go out and risk their lives in a dangerous world like Golarion to explore a dungeon that's sprinkled with death traps and haunts? Well, for some, it's just encoded in their DNA. Your character is an adventurer because they're practically hard-coded to be an adventurer.
For gnomes, though, it's not just that they're born with wanderlust and more than their fair share of curiosity. After coming to the material plane, gnomes found that they were threatened by an affliction they now call...
]]>I usually enjoy environmental effects in D&D. It adds variety to each game session, and it keeps the players on their toes. For instance, when I run games in Barovia, I have players roll a d6 every new day (as long as Strahd is in power.) They get a penalty to the corresponding attribute during that game day. It makes the environment oppressive, it changes up how well their character performs from game session to game session, it makes the monsters more or less powerful, and it gives urgency to the mission. Depose Strahd if you ever want to play your character at full power again.
In AD&D 2nd Edition Dragonlance, there's a similar mechanic for magic.
5th Edition Dragonlance makes an attempt to suggest this mechanic through the Lunar Sorcery subclass.
I sat down with my AD&D Dragonlance Adventures source book and the 5th Edition Shadow of the Dragon Queen and compared the two systems.
In 5th Edition, there's no superclass for magic users, so awkwardly the three moons of Krynn only effects Sorcerers. If you're a wizard or warlock, the moons have no effect on your magic. And even for sorcerers, this is an option. It's a subclass. You don't have to take it, so possibly in some campaigns the moons of Krynn have no effect on anything. I feel like that's a big loss to worldbuilding, because the constellations and the moons are a really big part of Krynn's flavour. The gods literally dwell up in the stars, a little like Nyx in Theros. If you look up into the sky and see a constellation missing, it's because that god is down on Krynn walking around somewhere. The moons are white, red, and black, not coincidentally the colour of the robes of the Wizards of High Sorcery (that's the Mages of High Sorcery in 5th Edition.)
The Lunar Sorcery subclass functions as a hot-swappable group of spells. It's a pretty cool mechanic. When there's a full moon, you get one set of spells. When there's a crescent moon, you get a different set of spells. As a group, depending on your level. So a sorcerer can swap out spells with this subclass, and that seems like a lot of fun to me.
Unfortunately, it's up to the player to decide the phase of the moon on any given day. That seems odd to me, because it can mean that a moon just never changes for a whole campaign. Or a moon could go from full to new to crescent within a matter of just 3 days.
It's also strange that there's no distinction of which moon you're drawing power from. All of the moons provide the same benefit, I guess.
I like the idea of granting groups of spells based on some in-game environmental effect, but what I don't like:
As is often the case, the 5th Edition books for the Dragonlance setting leaves out a lot of detail. In the page it provides for the Kender race, it doesn't mention the culture's fondness for the topknot hairstyle, the use of the hoopak, pouches and pockets, or maps. One of the defining traits of the kender is their love of travel, and along with that comes a passion for maps. If you're going to play a kender, either as a PC or as an NPC, it's important to understand the relationship between a kender and maps.
Before talking about kender maps, I want to define the term "map." This is important because, while it's not exactly discussed in any of the Dragonlance books I've read, I think it supports the way kender view maps. When you hear the word "map," you probably picture something like this:
But you've probably used other forms of maps, as well. For instance, this is a map: "Leave the house and turn right. At the end of the street, take a right. Enter the first green door on the left."
It's not a topographical map. It doesn't identify distance or time. But it describes, probably more efficiently than the product of a cartographer, how to get from a known location to a previously unknown location. It's a map.
There are other kinds of maps, too. In systems administration and programming, the YAML syntax features an entity called a "mapping," which maps a keyword to some significant value. In Java programming, a map or "hash map" helps store and correlate data.
A map isn't just a line drawing produced by a cartographer. A map can take many forms, and sometimes one is better than another, depending on your frame of reference.
What's that got to do with kender?
Everything.
Most kender love maps, probably because it represents travel and exploration. The strange thing about a map obtained from a kender, though, is that it's often as much a record of their travel as it is a representation of the land they've explored. To kender, a map isn't just the topography of land, it's a snapshot of the land's life.
A kender is as likely to cherish a Pre-Cataclysm (PC) map as an After Cataclysm (AC). The fact that the PC map doesn't isn't useful for actual travel is often just a minor inconvenience, and rarely a reason to not use it anyway. The fact that an ocean has appeared over the land in a PC map is a fascination, part of the wonders of discovery. And anyway, that land is still there, even if it is hundreds of meters underwater. Likewise for land masses where the ocean receded after the cataclysm: it's inconvenient that a former port city no longer has an ocean, but probably a lot of fun to explore the new region.
A map, for a kender, is also a record of...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Chapter 3 contains a "supporting cast" of non-player characters. As a frequent GM, I appreciate this enormously, and in fact I could do with a few more than what's provided. As a player, I love reading through the NPC introductions and descriptions, because the details about them says a lot about the Starfinder game universe.
This chapter also mentions factions, and it points out that these 8 factions are by no means all the factions in the game. It seems obvious, if you think about it, but I think because this is a source book, there is a tendency to think that what's provided here is all there is. But Starfinder is a science fantasy game. It's endlessly vast, with planets and ships and asteroid bases and flying citadels (OK, that's AD&D Spelljammer, but don't think I wouldn't put one in my Starfinder game). There must by almost as many factions as there are stars in the sky.
Strangely, the factions mentioned at the start of the chapter have almost no relevance to the NPCs provided. I was sure that each NPC group would represent one of the 8 factions listed, but there's no correlation whatsoever. And the factions aren't discussed in any real detail, either. There are two or three sentences about each one, and then the chapter meanders on to other topics, like how to create an NPC (and the answer is literally to refer to the Alien Archive), how to multi-class an NPC, and generally how to further customize existing NPC examples. Combined with the Alien Archive, I imagine this is very useful information, but without Alien Archive, it's useless data. It's a great reason for me to go order a copy of Alien Archive, however, so I imagine that by next year I won't be complaining about not owning that book.
The NPC section consists of a few character types:
As you can tell, no NPC surpasses the a challenge rating of 10, but there are really nice blocks at the end for building an encounter at higher levels. For instance, for a CR 13 encounter with Hellknights, include six Hellknight armigers, three signifiers, and one commander. Obviously a GM could calculate this pretty easily, but it's always nice to have a quick reference instead. I even wish they'd gone a step farther and provided a table for encounters at every level or maybe every other level up to 20 (it makes you wonder how many people have actually played...
]]>After the original three Dragonlance books, also called Chronicles, comes the Legends trilogy. The Legends books addresses, within a surprisingly narrow scope, life after becoming legendary war heroes. The books focus on Caramon and Raistlin, however, although there's a healthy dose of Tasslehoff. Minor updates on Tanis and Laurana are provided, and Tika plays a minor role.
In my opinion, Legends pales in comparison to Chronicles in terms of the story of our heroes, but mostly makes up for that in lore. Krynn is a world of two times. This is constantly reinforced during several novels, and in a way it defines the setting. There was the Krynn pre-cataclysm (PC) and after the cataclysm (AC). The Legends trilogy takes place pre-cataclysm. And yet it also looks at the lives of the legendary War of the Lance heroes. How does it do this? Time travel.
Yes, Legends is about time travel.
Some people love time travel in fiction, other people hate it. I believe I'm ambivalent. I can't say I'm not a fan, because I watch Doctor Who and I love the Back to the Future trilogy and I enjoyed the original Terminator movie. I'm entrenched in it.
Regardless of how you feel about the trope, I think it's safe to say that time travel in this book is primarily a vehicle for lore. If you want to know what the world was like before the cataclysm, then you can travel back to Krynn (PC) and experience it yourself, through the eyes of Caramon. It works really well, and in some unexpected ways.
You might argue, for instance, that instead of throwing our heroes (or a subset of them, anyway) through time and space just to deliver some lore, the authors could have just written a book set before the cataclysm. However, I do think the world is much more alive in this trilogy because of our familiarity with Caramon. We know Caramon's struggle, and we know what's normal for him. When something happens that's uniquely pre-cataclysm, it's underscored by Caramon's reaction to it. You don't have to rely on your memory of Krynn from Chronicles because Caramon's there to point out the difference for you. It's an effective storytelling trick that's bolstered by the new struggles Caramon is experiencing in this book.
In Time of the Twins, the first novel of the Legends trilogy, Caramon has fallen far from grace. He's effectively an abusive husband, or at the very least he's severely negligent. He eats and drinks away his days, having walked away from the half-finished home he was building for himself and Tika. He's a failure, and worse yet he has failed Tika. In this book, he's the enemy.
Calling Caramon the "enemy" might sound harsh. After all, he's just a loser. He had his time in the spotlight, as a war hero, and now he's failed to live up to his potential. Does that make him The...
]]>Sometimes, a story just begs for a double-cross. Somebody hires the player characters to complete a job, everything goes fine, until right at the very end the PCs discover their employer was the baddie all along! Now their employer wants them dead, or refuses to pay, or intends to conquer the world with the device they've just delivered. It's a time-honoured and genuinely compelling trope.
The turnabout employer was a staple of film noir, and it's a common story element in Shadowrun, The D&D movie, at least from the trailers, incorporates it into its storyline. The problem is, this trope can be problematic in real life D&D games, and despite using it myself from time to time, it's something that ultimately most Dungeon Masters ought to avoid, and here's why.
There's an unspoken agreement between the Game Master and the players in an RPG. When the GM presents players with an adventure, they accept it. It's an important agreement, because unlike a board game or a card game, there's no universal goal to an RPG. In one game you're rescuing the princess, and in the other you're looting dungeons for gold, and in another you're robbing a corporation of top secret data files. The goal doesn't come written in the rulebook, it's delivered to you fresh with every game you play. For that to work, players have to accept an adventure proposed by the Game Master through an in-game NPC.
This is pure meta-gaming, by the way. In-game, there's often several reasons a player character might decline a quest. Maybe it's too dangerous, or maybe they just got back from saving the world an hour ago, or maybe the pay's not good enough, or whatever. When an NPC handing out quests betrays their trust, you give your players one new, in-world reason to refuse a story prompt. You train your players to say "no" to an adventure.
This is a problem when you only have 4 hours to play, but your players spend the first hour looking for a different quest from an apparently more trustworthy NPC.
If you've trained players to distrust NPCs, how do you get that trust back? What possible in-game ability would a player character have to tell a trustworthy one from one who's going to betray them in the final act? There's no way easy for them to establish trust after even just one NPC has spoken, for all practical purposes, in the Game Master's voice to lead them on a quest that has turned out to be a trap.
The tragedy is that your players haven't lost trust in an NPC. They've lost trust in you, the Game Master. Your players have recognized that you're trying to trick them into playing a specific kind of game, and because that type of game happens to end in betrayal, they naturally intend to avoid it.
A twist ending of betrayal doesn't usually feel good. Sure, sometimes...
]]>Kender are my favourite variety of halfling, and as a longtime fan of Dragonlance, I have some pretty high expectations for what a Kender plays like in D&D. So how has D&D 5th Edition translated the Kender into a playable ancestry?
If you don't have time to read this post right now, you can also view this article on Youtube.
Gnomes and kender were, more or less, mistakes by Reorx, the god of creation. They were early iterations of humanoids during Reorx's experimental phase. They're so unpredictable that the Wizards of High Sorcery forbids casting certain kinds of magic on them, for fear of disrupting...well, reality. 5th Edition acknowledges this in Shadow of the Dragon Queen, so that's a good start.
Kenders are small humanoid.
A kender's walking speed is 30 feet. That seems to be the new standard for 5th Edition. Kender have smaller legs, so it's not completely unreasonable that they'd walk less far as someone with longer legs. However, the Dragonlance books never mention Tasslehoff, or Flint or Bupu for that matter, having a hard time keeping up with the tallfolk, so it makes some sense that their speed is 30 feet.
From a game design perspective, I usually like variation in player character abilities. I think it's potentially an interesting debate for a party to have, whether somebody moving faster should scout ahead, or whether the party speed should reduce to 25 feet to account for the slowest members.
Then again, does it really matter? If it means that the whole party has to slow down to 25 feet everytime one peerson decides to play an ancestry with the small size trait, then why not just round everybody up to 30 instead? I see the design choice.
One of the most defining traits of kender is that they literally don't know fear. Technically, they're not incapable of the emotion, because in the original Dragonlance novels, Tasslehoff does learn to experience fear sometimes. But generally, it's just not something they experience. Even death, they think of as just another adventure.
In 5th Edition, you get advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the frightened condition on yourself. That strikes me as underpowered for a kender. I want them to be immune to fear. However, as I've said, the novels make it clear that kender can be frightened with enough training, so I see why advantage (which is most often going to succeed) makes sense.
To boost this feature, once a day when you fail a saving throw to avoid or end the frightened condition on yourself, you can choose to succeed instead. This helps, and is probably, to be fair, kinder to the Dungeon Master. In 5e, player characters get really powerful at higher levels, so giving the DM a sliver of a chance to land an effect is probably a good thing.
You gain proficiency with one of the following skills of your choice: Insight,...
]]>The digital edition of the 5e Dragonlance Shadow of the Dragon Queen pre-order has been delivered, and I eagerly read through it in a day. I've been waiting for this book since the start of 5th Edition, but I wasn't sure what its scope would be. Now I know when in Krynn's long history the book is set, and the book gives you plenty to work with, but if you want more context then this post is a whirlwind tour of the main plot points of Dragonlance Chronicles.
Warning: This post contains nothing but spoilers. There's a lot that's not here, though. If you really really want all the lore, read at least Dragonlance Chronicles (the original three books) and then Legends (the sequel trilogy.)
If you don't have time to read this post right now, you can also view this article on Youtube.
The world of Dragonlance is Krynn, and it's impossible to talk about Krynn without acknowledging that in a way it's a world of two times. Krynn itself has a very clear timeline, which is recorded meticulously by the scribe Astinus of Palanthas. However, everyone on Krynn knows that there was a world-changing disaster a few hundred years ago: The true gods of the world were forgotten, their clerics disappeared off the face of the planet, as did the good metallic dragons, the oceans rose, the land shifted, and Krynn would never be the same. It's called the Cataclysm, and basically everything on Krynn is spoken of in terms of "before the Cataclysm" and "after the Cataclysm." Even world maps are still catching up to the changes of the world, and with so many long-lived creatures on Krynn, the memories of pre-Cataclysmic Krynn are often all too fresh.
The 5e Dragonlance product, like the original trilogy, takes place post-Cataclysm, during a terrible war sparked by the invasion of the evil five-headed dragon goddess, Takhisis.
A group of friends reunite in the idyllic treetop town of Solace after 5 years of having gone their separate ways on personal quests. They are:
Except that Kitiara doesn't actually turn up, but sends a note saying that she's busy with her day job as a mercenary.
And Raistlin shows up a full-blown red wizard (not of Thay, that's Forgotten Realms), but with strange golden skin and hourglass eyes.
This fellowship finds the once peaceful region dominated by a religious zealot ("the high theocrat") and strange lizardfolk (Draconians, actually). When two barbarians, Goldmoon and her fiancé Riverwind, are unjustly assaulted by the local authorities, our heroes pledge their aid, becoming instant enemies of the state.
Lots of adventures happen, with the group eventually reaching the ancient city of Xak Tsaroth. A black dragon dwells there now,...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Chapter 2 contains new starships. From the perspective of a sci fi geek who loves to look at starship designs, a bunch of new starships is very exciting. However, there are no deck blueprints, so while the designs are pretty to look at, it's difficult to imagine your character in the ship because you have no concept of what's inside. This is a problem with the starships in the Core Rulebook, too. I admit I'm unfairly comparing Starfinder's ship descriptions with my memories of poring over the official Enterprise deck plans in my parents' old Star Trek (TOS) compendium, but I do think that if you're going to "bond" with a ship, you have to know what it's like in the part where you're meant to imagine your character.
The external designs are fantastic, though. Each ship is as expressive as, say, most of the weapon designs in the Core Rulebook. They fit their faction perfectly. The Hell Knights have black ships with red glowing accents. The Xenowardens have biological hybrid ships that are literally grown, like plants. The luxury cruisers of Verces look like airliners and yachts.
And there's some really inventive stuff in here. The Iomedae Cathedral ship is ridiculous, a huge ship topped by a literal cathedral, referencing the design of, say, a submarine. It's silly and out of place, and yet amazing, brilliant, and totally believable. I think Paizo's ship designs somehow capture the complexity of not just spaceships in a sci fi universe, but the complexity of...everything. Every time you turn the page in Chapter 2, you question the logic of a ship's design. And then you start to justify it. And in justifying it, you come to understand that in Starfinder, the vast majority of people are just living their lives. They're going to work on asteroids, or going to flaunt their religion as they explore the galaxy, or going on a pleasure cruise. There's so much diversity in ship design that it reinforces the idea that the Starfinder universe is as diverse as the ecosystem of our own real world. There are alien concepts out there, and those are expressed in ship design as much as they are in creature design.
The ships in Pact Worlds are really good. They're fun to look at, fun to read about, fun to think about the factions behind them, fun to think about how they fit into the universe. This book is about the worlds of the Pact, and Chapter 2 is only 14 pages long, but if you're hungry for new ships then I feel this book doesn't disappoint.
The biggest problems with ships in Starfinder aren't the ships. It's that I know the ship stats aren't going to actually get used. Starfinder's starship combat system is a fascinating system...
]]>Now that D&D is on its 5th edition (and heading quickly toward its next incarnation), and Pathfinder has released a 2nd edition of its own, the two gaming systems borne of literally the same rule set have diverged substantially. They both still implement essentially the same game, though, so I decided to compare these implementations from the perspective of building a character. I'm comparing each ancestry (or race in 5e) in both systems, to find out how they're similar and how they're different. In this post, I cover the elf.
If you don't have time to read this post right now, you can also view this article on Youtube.
Note that I'm comparing rules provided in the primary rulebooks, with no deference made for additional source books and option. It's all imaginary, so my base assumption is that anything and everything can be changed. I'm looking at original intent.
In 5e, ability scores are determined by dice rolls or by assigning a standard array of numbers (15,14,13,12,10,8). A boost is granted by your choice of race.
In Pathfinder 2, ability scores start at 10 and accumulate boosts and penalties according to the "life" choices you make for your character as you build. For that reason, Pathfinder 2 ability score benefits look generous compared to 5e, so just keep in mind that they're all starting at 10.
30 feet of movement is the modern standard for medium sized creatures in both systems.
5e grants elves dark vision to 60 ft., the same as with dwarves.
Pathfinder 2 grants elves Low-light vision, which is the ability to treat dim light as though it were bright light. Elves cannot see in darkness, unless you select the Cavern Elf heritage.
This is a good example of how Pathfinder 2 uses modular design for its ancestries. A trait that's built in to 5e is just an option in Pathfinder. That theoretically makes Pathfinder a little tougher on the player.
It may also, arguably, go against a trope. I'm not sure whether most people think of elves as being inately perceptive, but I don't feel like anyone questions it when it's given as a default trait in 5e.
Both systems agree that elves ought to seem mystical, but they go about demonstrating it differently. This...
]]>Paizo's Book of the Dead is a source book about both the dead and the undead, describing the ecology, life cycle, ethics, advantages, and dangers of time spent after all your time is spent. I picked up a copy at my game store, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. This post covers chapter 4, "Lands of the Dead."
In the old D&D days (the TSR days, I mean), when you wanted a really unique location, you went out and bought, essentially, a different game. That's a completely valid strategy, and I actually really like it, at least in theory. I love my AD&D Dragonlance source book with its different take on magic use, and the way the cycle of the moons of Krynn affect spellcasting. But in reality, I think you really have to commit to the setting to keep it straight, and that can be difficult. The joy of D&D is the opportunity to explore strange new locations and cultures, to boldly go where no one has gone before. To encase so many great locations in their own line of books, attainable only by a surplus of time and money, seems almost cruel.
So one thing I love about Golarion is that it's a bunch of settings crammed into one. There's a country for high fantasy, a country for Gothic horror, a region for piracy on the high seas, a country for Age of Enlightenment style high society, a high-tech wasteland, and more. And it's all on Golarion. You can change settings just by playing a module set in a different country.
It's easy, efficient, and pretty unbelievable. What keeps the Gothic horror contained within the boundaries of Ustalav? What keeps the undead horrors within the boundaries of Geb? These are oddly obvious questions that nobody bothers answering, but only because nobody is bothering to ask. First of all, we're playing a game where magic exists, so anything's possible. And second of all, it's just too convenient to question. One setting masquerading as all the settings you could ever need? Don't look a gift Pegasus in the mouth.
My point is, this chapter is about 9 regions of Golarion infested with undead.
This is the nation started by the fictional author of The Book of the Dead. Most of its population is undead, but there are "Quick" (the living) there as well. The relationship between the two populations isn't exactly healthy, though. The "rules" for which living people are valid meals for the undead seem a little unclear. If you're alive, the trick seems to be to look like you're supposed to be alive, in hopes that the undead don't eat you.
At 4 pages, this is the region that gets the most coverage. It's written in first person, by a living inhabitant of Geb who works as a trader. This technique provides an interesting picture of the region, from a sociological perspective. If you try to set an adventure here, you're on your...
]]>Growing up, the The Lord of the Rings books was the canonical fantasy epic. It was the standard bedtime story, and all other fantasy was defined by or compared to it. I love the Lord of the Rings. Heck, I went to great length to ensure that I could work on The Hobbit movies. But I also have to admit that as an adult, I never bothered buying the books for myself. When I want to return to familiar fantasy, I turn to Krynn, not to Middle Earth. With the 5e version of Dragonlance coming out in just a few days, I asked myself why that might be, and as a result of that exercise I've got 10 reasons I read and re-read Dragonlance, and why you should read it if you haven't yet.
Dragonlance covers a lot of the same ground as LOTR, which often can be said of any fantasy story. After all, the way we use the term "fantasy" now was largely defined by LOTR. Before LOTR, there was Lord Dunsany and Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, but there are no elves or dwarves in those.
Dragonlance, however, is very much in the LOTR tradition. The Chronicles storyline is even superficially similar to LOTR. There's a dangerous magical object of power in the world, and it's the key to disrupting the power of an emerging evil. Have I just described Dragonlance or LOTR? Exactly.
But in dragonlance, there's lots of dangerous magical objects in the world, and none of them necessarily disrupt the emerging evil. The magical objects are tools for our heroes to attain some goal. Sometimes the goal is selfish, sometimes the goal is noble. Sometimes achieving the goal results in our hero's death, sometimes it grants them power that they must choose to use to save or destroy life.
In LOTR, there's one ill-defined puzzle: The Ring is powerful, but using it is a sin, for some reason, so destroy it instead. In Dragonlance, there are complex moral puzzles, and many are circumstantial.
Somebody's got to say it. LOTR is actually pretty boring. If you've only seen the movies, you might not know that because the movies do a really good job of pacing the books and emphasizing conflict (which is usually what translates into interesting action in a story.) But the books are not written to be exciting. They're mostly a lofty historical account of some political events in a fantasy version of Earth.
Dragonlance is set on Krynn. It starts with a party of wanderers who end up escorting a barbarian couple through occupied lands to protect a magical staff bearing the healing power of a forgotten goddess. Their journey takes them to an abandoned city, to a hidden temple, and into a battle with a black dragon. And that's just the first third of the first book.
I know that Tolkien wrote...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
Like the previous episode, this one's is a little light on plot. It's another strong premise, though. An evil local ruler in a province of India is stealing supplies from a humanitarian group that's trying to assist farmers in the region. Specifically, he's using the stolen insecticide to render the highlands useless, forcing the population to come to him to beg for work in his ruby mines, where he underpays and abuses them. UNCLE decides to investigate on the behalf of the World Congress for Underdeveloped Nations.
They enlist Suzanne de Serre (Jill Ireland) for help. I've seen Jill Ireland in a Star Trek episode and a few Charles Bronson movies, and she gives a good performance here. She even gets to rescue the UNCLE agents, for a change, and her very pragmatic battle tactics on the pier made me laugh out loud.
There are good moments in this episode. Ilya makes several friends among the Indian workers, and it's genuinely sad when a few of the inevitably turn up murdered.
And the evil Prince Panat (Lee Bergere) is properly heartless. He earnestly entreats Suzanne to stop worrying so much about the poor, and to consider the "plight of the wealthy." I don't think he's being sarcastic. He's privileged royalty who sees the "lower classes" as lesser human beings, and really does believe that he's the victim. I know in 2022 it's hard to identify with such opulent callousness, but back in the 60s (and definitely not today) that sort of thing did indeed exist. I'm being sarcastic, of course. This is one of those characters who works just as well as he did then as he does now. Selfish and cruel, Prince Panat is the spoilt rich right-wing politician of today, caring only for industry and wealth, while blaming the crudeness and "laziness" of the "racially inferiour".
All in all, I found the episode's execution to be a little drab. The plot is there, but most of it just feels like our heroes roaming through the jungle, emerging for some banter with the baddies, and then roaming the jungle again.
At one point the UNCLE agents even end up as slave workers in the ruby mine. That's fine. TV shows often put heroes into predicaments that you know they'll escape. But this one happens so late into the story that it feels like a formality more than an actual plot point.
In the end, all the baddies get what's coming to them. There's a really cool explosion when Solo shoots the caustic insecticide stuff from afar. Jill Ireland steps on the fingers of the prince and his henchman as they struggle to get back onto the pier that she's just knocked them off of. Everything works out.
The real star of this episode is the music. The theme, of course, is by Jerry Goldsmith, but this episode's...
]]>In D&D, an interesting thing happens when you cross the threshold from Tier 3 (levels 9 to 13) to Tier 4 (levels 14 to 20). No matter what the DM throws at players, the players have answers. By Tier 4, the players have likely accumulated magic items, astounding feats, powerful spells, multiple attacks, to say nothing of a psychological profile of the DM. Players know how much they can take, they know when to stay and fight, and when to run, when to take a short rest and when they need a long rest, they know how to preserve resources. They've gotten good.
Not only that, but the DM's arsenal diminishes the higher the levels the players attain. At low levels, the DM has 340 pages of monsters that pose actual, real threats to the player characters. But as players level up, low CR monsters become useless. At level 15 and up, there just a handful of monsters that can stand up to the players. Sure, you can throw lots of monsters at the players, but that muddles combat. There aren't many modules written for high level play, either, so there's not a whole lot of guidance or help for a DM running high level games.
What most DMs don't realise is that what's actually happening at high levels is a reversal of power. In the beginning of a campaign, the DM holds all the power. A Level 1 character can be killed by a cellar rat. It's easy, and it's built into the game design. Even an experienced player struggles to survive during Tier 1 play, because there's quite simply a limit to how much defense a low level character can acquire.
And even an experienced player functionally starts life over as a Level 1 character. The world is new to them, the story completely unknown. You might have played through the Tomb of Horrors, but how's that going to help you in The Rise of the Runelords? And even if you survive the first module of, for instance, Runelords, what do you know about the actual plot of the adventure? It's not until module 3 or 4 that the actual end goal becomes clear.
But by Tier 4, the players have acquired the bulk of the power at the table. They know the plot, they have the tools they need to succeed, and they're on a rampage. The DM now has to react to the players. Sure, the world and the monsters are still managed by the DM, but the players are driving the story. The DM still has the key to the plot, but the players are calling the shots. It's up to the players when they trigger events, and they've got the rhythm of the story down well enough to know when to progress.
As a DM, I embrace the high level tier as my opportunity to become a player. Yes, I still have to prep...
]]>The third book in the original Dragonlance trilogy is Dragons of Spring Dawning and it's one of those concluding novels that just doesn't pull any punches. Takhisis is real, Lord Soth is lurking in the shadows, Tanis has ruined the party's chance of success, Laurana is kidnapped, and Raistlin wields a powerful dragon orb and wears black robes. For most of the book, you're reading about best laid plans falling utterly apart. There's really no guarantee that it's all going to work out the way you want it to. And frankly, in some ways it doesn't turn out the way you want it to.
One of the many things I love about the original Chronicles trilogy is its layers of plot pacing. The first part of the first book starts the heroes out on the back foot. They find themselves strangers in their own homeland, and then they're chased away by hordes of occupying forces. It's pretty relentless, with the persistent long plot being the mystery of Goldmoon and Mishakal. Once that mystery is resolved, the plot shifts to bigger problems, including Verminaard of Nidus, and then Kitiara, and ultimately Takhisis herself.
With each book, the threat grows. In this book, it's an unfortunate, humbling, and terrifying foregone conclusion that Krynn is crawling with dark forces. Draconians, dragons, dragonlords, a death knight, and legions of evil humans are preparing Krynn for all out tyranny. For most of this book, like Warhammer's Empire of Man, they've essentially won, it's just a matter of bringing the lands they've conquered into "compliance."
As with previous books, this one has dragons in it. This time, though, there are metallic dragons. I haven't done the research to know whether D&D is the origin of metallic dragons, but I think it is. Either way, Dragonlance was definitely my first encounter with the concept. Metallic dragons aren't just amazing to imagine, but some of the heroes of the lance actually ride dragons in this book.
There's a dragon fight. In the sky.
With a dragon lance.
Admittedly, it focuses on Flint and Tas, so it's got a lot of silliness in it, but it's still an exciting scene.
We all know the relationship tropes to expect in fantasy. Except in Dragonlance. In this series, character relationships don't go the way you think they're going to go. People die when they're not supposed to, sometimes in ways that aren't all that heroic. People who shouldn't fall in love end up falling in love, and people who are supposed to be in love are kept apart. And then it all reverses, and you're not sure about it any more.
Dragonlance isn't a collection of tropes. The closest thing to tropes are the elements of D&D scattered throughout, and those are only tropes because they're mechanical techniques repeated throughout a tabletop game.
The Dragonlance Chronicles story is about a lot of people. Some of them get what they want. Some of them don't. Some...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
This episode is everything, and nothing, I want from the Man from UNCLE. The premise for this episode is great. Thrush is developing a substance that completely vaporizes organic material, most notably humans. They've got a secret base somewhere deep in an Arabian desert, and Ilya Kuryakin is keeping an eye on it from afar. In the mean time, Napoleon Solo has tracked down an elderly paper-pusher, named David Lewin, who works in Thrush's administrative offices but is on the eve of retirement. Solo tells Lewin that Thrush is going to kill him at his retirement dinner because he knows too much, and so he should defect to UNCLE. Lewin does, and agrees to help Solo get into Thrush's offices to get hold of the documents pertaining to the Arabian Project.
The problem is that there's not enough plot to fill a whole hour. Ilya is captured by an Arabian tribe, and way too much time is spent on a wholly uninteresting (and acknowledged by the characters themselves) re-telling of Lawrence of Arabia.
Solo manages to sneak into Thrush's offices (did you ever wonder why buildings in the US don't have a 13th floor? it's because that's where the Thrush offices are). This is the real plot, even though the goal is very unclear (get some papers about the Arabian project). It's tense and secret agenty. I'd play this in a Shadowrun game. I love this stuff.
Unfortunately, Solo as usual keeps screwing things up. He knocks out a guard in the lobby and doesn't bother tying him up or calling for backup to apprehend him or anything, so obviously the guard gets up later and causes problems. The top Thrush official suspects Lewin from the start. Solo gets spotted by a hallway guard almost immediately, so he has to deal with that for a while.
Writing it out like that actually makes scenario seem really good. Lots of obstacles, near misses, and narrow escapes. But it doesn't play out that way. Instead, it's just Solo being an inept secret agent, as the plot sometimes demands, and it ends up being pretty disappointing. Worse still, in the end it doesn't matter. Napoleon doesn't get the papers he says he needs for some reason and hitches a ride to the Arabian desert with the official who decides to take Lewin as a test subject for vaporization.
Solo fights from the inside, Ilya and his new band of Arabian knights fight from the outside, and eventually the baddies get vaporized by an overflowing washing machine and our heroes escape. For comic effect, the Arabian princess who was going to sell Ilya off in exchange for a camel is now smitten by him and wants to marry him.
The credited guest star of the episode is Robert Ellenstein as David Lewin. The actor Ellenstein, at the time of filming, was...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. Chapter 5 is entitled "Rewards and revenge," and it consists of just two adventures, one called "X" and the other "Cain." This is, of course, the final chapter. This is the pay-off of the previous 60 pages. In this adventure, the PCs are to finally meet the enemy of the module, the man who's been pulling the strings all along, the fearless assassin known only as Cain.
One of the PC's bounties has been spotted, and they're sent after it with the orders from Prince Andru himself that they are to take no prisoners. The adventure is very careful to force the PC's hand, here, saying that the Dungeon Master may threaten them with the loss of their letters of marque should they refuse. I don't know why the players would refuse, but I guess the point is that the module really feels that this adventure must precede the grand finale with Cain. I can't figure out why, though. This adventure is entirely unspectacular and has only the barest connection with the next (and final) adventure.
The PCs are given a map of where they can find their target, so they go out into space and fight the pirate ship. Assuming they're losing the fight, the pirates blow their own ship up. That's the end of that.
The repercussion of this is that they "lose any good will" they've earned from Prince Andru from the "Jihad!" adventure. I gather that the PCs are meant to care, but I'd forgotten about it entirely. Prince Andru hasn't been mentioned since "Jihad!" so his good will toward the PCs has been entirely inert. But I guess it's gone now.
As a result of having defeated the pirates in "X," the PCs are now targeted by the local pirate union (that's not a real thing, but I couldn't be bothered to remind myself what the Tenth Pit was...apparently it was mentioned in Chapter 1?) The pirates hire Cain to assassinate the PCs.
You remember Cain. He was the terrifying lich from "Violent Death," cursed by the gods to roam Wildspace forever as an undead pirate.
No wait, that wasn't Cain. No, Cain is the expert assassin who killed a bunch of mind flayers, leaving a rare copper piece as his calling card. This guy's very good at what he does. Famously elusive, and terrifyingly deadly. I mean, he killed a ship full of mind flayers and got away with it.
First problem: The PCs have to find Cain. That's probably not going to be easy. This guy is a trained killer, and has the PCs in his sights.
Oh, no actually it's really easy. He hangs out at a pirate bar.
Next problem: Getting to Cain. It's not like Cain is just...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
An organisation called the Re-Collectors is hunting Nazi war criminilas who have also, incidentally, made off with 17 million dollars in paintings. When the Re-Collectors execute one of the criminals, they often reclaim the stolen art and attempt to return it to the rightful owner. Each time this happens, they report their own act of murder to the police before leaving the scene. On the surface, this looks pretty good. It's vigilantism but UNCLE's been hunting the same war criminals for 20 years with no luck, so the success of the Re-Collectors is in a way impressive.
Come to think of it, maybe it's so successful as to be...suspicious?
The Re-Collectors put Solo through the ringer, Solo and Kuryakin play the Re-Collector for fools, there's fake Italian police, duplicitous informants, and enough confusion to leave the viewer wholly engaged but thoroughly confounded throughout.
Some episodes really want to be movies, and this is one of them. I was hooked from the start, and I'd have happily sat through another 30 minutes of this brilliant script. This is a tight and precise story with a perpetually puzzling plot. And then everything comes together perfectly in the end.
This is one of the showcase episodes.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Aucturn is the thirteenth celestial body (counting the Diaspora) from the sun in the Starfinder version of the Golarion system. It's an accursed and desolate [non-literal] gateway to the horrors of the Old Ones. This planet is where the Lovecraftian gods are closest, and I definitely want to visit.
The Aucturn section, bizarrely, kind of assumes you're already familiar with the factions that exist on the planet. It just starts talking about them as if they'd been introduced in a previous chapter, and it leaves it up to you to figure out their relationship. If you read the section carefully, you figure it out, but I found it pretty abrupt.
And also confusing.
The Cultists worship Nyarlathotep, and the Dominion of the Black revere the Old Ones. The Dominion of the Black drove out most of the cultists, so the planet is mostly Dominion of the Black now. The confusing thing is that Nyarlathotep, at least canonically in the Lovecraft mythos, is an Old One. Maybe the implication is that, because Nyarlathotep is in the pantheon of Starfinder, he's not considered an Old One in this universe. Or maybe the Dominion of Black just didn't appreciate that the cultists were focused on Nyarlathotep alone. Either way, it's confusing and I wish there was a better explanation.
Looking to Paizo's Distant Worlds, it seems that the cultists of Nyarlathotep used to dominate the planet, although the Black Citadel (home of the Dominion of Black) did exist. It seems that the rise of the Dominion of Black is a Starfinder event, and that its leader, Carsai the King, predates even the Gap. How long ago was that? You'll never know, because the Gap is a big plot hole in the middle of the Pathfinder to Starfinder timeline, but I guess it's sufficient to say that it's been "a while."
Look, for me "Lovecraft" is enough. I can work with that. I'll just have tentacles bursting out of every surface, engorged godworms descending from the skies, black blood gushing from the player character's eyes, and cultists rising from the refections of constellations in the pools of coalescing noxious gases. I can cobble together a narrative from Lovecraft's Dreamland (and conveniently there are Gugs on Aucturn.)
However, the Aucturn section is pretty well populated with locations, especially considering that it's a planet with a poisonous atmosphere. There's a encampment of cultist holdouts, and then several sites where the Dominion of Black are doing their best to study and I guess prepare the way for the Old Ones. There's one site where a group is guarding a bulbuous formation in the ground with the belief that the planet is about to give birth to a great and terrible godling that will destroy reality, or whatever. It's...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. Chapter 4 is entitled "Monsters of the void," consisting of just two adventures, one called "Billy Bones" and the other "Parasite!"
Here's a fun idea. An evil magicuser has devised a way to pack a skeleton into a sort of mine. He throws these skeleton mines into Wildspace around his hideout. When a mine collides with the air envelope of a passing ship, it drops to the deck (or underside, depending on its heading), reforms into a undead humanoid, and attacks the crew.
That is, incidentally, the only idea in this adventure. What I've just described is the adventure. A skeleton mine drops onto the PC's deck and attacks. There's nothing else.
In the second and final adventure of Chapter 4, the PCs encounter a ship with a dead crew. Investigation of the ship reveals some kind of space madness was involved. Just as soon as the PCs find this out, they're attacked by the ship's capuchin monkey, which had been hiding in the cargo hold.
This attack allows a monster called a death shade to transfer its energy over to 1 player character. It's not quite a possession, nor is it quite a curse, but it makes the PC prone to fits of rage. What that means and when it strikes is left vague. Mechanically, it's labelled as an infestation, and only a limited wish or wish can remove it.
I love a good curse, honestly, but by "a good curse" I mean something well defined. Were I to use this infestation, I'd assign a roll or a saving throw to it, and define a trigger. When does the PC fly into a rage, and also why is that a bad thing? Barbarian rage is a mechanical benefit.
Also, I don't permit PvP (Player vs. Player) in my games, and I have absolutely no interest in enforcing one PC flying into a murderous rage against the other PCs.
I guess I'd probably institute something about stress or conflict triggering a potential loss of anger management. This could become problematic during a simple shopping trip when you decide to barter for a lower price, or during your disguise or stealth attempt to get past the enemy guards. Roll a DC-something-er-other Wisdom save and see what happens.
This was the penultimate chapter, and I have to admit it was pretty drab. Some nice ideas for some adventure complications, but not really that much of an adventure. What feels like an adventure is either left entirely unexplored (as in the magic user who created the skeleton mines) or feels a heck of a lot like several past adventures (ship with a dead crew.)
Skull & Crossbows cover copyright by Wizards of the Coast, used under the...
With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. Chapter 3 is entitled "Starfaring races," and this post covers the adventures "Time capsule," "The Outpost," and "Jihad!"
Like the previous two adventures, this trilogy is another mini-campaign divided between several adventures. And like the previous story arc, it's strong and inspiring material. The only catch is that it's up to you as the Dungeon Master to structure the components provided into a campaign. You can't run these three adventures one after the other, both because the plot points would just feel too conveniently close to one another and also because the third adventure requires several months to have passed since the first.
Even allowing for the difference in play styles since this book was published over 20 years ago, I feel like this is supremely awkward. It's inconvenient to have these three connected adventures grouped together when they explicitly cannot be run together. This whole book is inconvenient that way, though, so obviously these are building blocks for a campaign, and there's a lot of work required of the DM to figure out the best way to assemble these adventures (along with other adventures not contained in this book, because I don't feel like there's enough for a satisfying campaign.)
The story is good, though, and I'll summarise here.
In the "Time capsule" adventure, the player characters, by chance (that's the only way anything happens in this book, so no surprise there) stumble upon a stone statue floating around in the phlogiston (Wildspace, in 5e.) Assuming they bring it aboard, they eventually discover that it's not a stone statue at all, but a thri-keen who's been preserved by the phlogiston for thousands of years. Once the thri-keen thaws, the player characters can chat with him and learn about his past.
The thri-keen's name is Tiktitik, and he was a holy warrior from centuries ago. Apparently, the thri-keen of a millennia ago believed that their god, the Celestial Mantis, wanted them to spread their faith all over the universe. So Tiktitik was essentially a crusader out to convince any society he encountered that the Celestial Mantis was lord of all, and that the thri-keen were the only enlightened species.
After he dumps a bunch of lore, the player character vessel is attacked by several Ephemerals (these are specific to 2e, but in 5e they'd essentially be ghosts or some wicked creature from Ravenloft, maybe, just as long as they can possess player characters.) These Ephemerals are the spirits of some humans the thri-keen crusaders slaughtered (because they wouldn't accept the Celestial Mantis as their personal saviour) and are still pretty mad about that. Assuming an Ephemeral is able to possess a player character, it immediately targets Tiktitik.
Assuming Tiktitik survives the encounter, he asks the player characters to...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. Chapter 3 is entitled "Starfaring races," and the second and third adventures are "Void elves" and "Monarch armada."
By now it's clear that this book has basically two hooks. Player characters hear rumours about piracy, or player characters are in Wildspace and encounter a ship. That's the setup for these adventures, as well.
These two adventures are directly related to one another, taking up about 9 pages in the book. That makes this the longest contiguous adventure in the book, and I as such I think it does raise speculation about how you might make it the main quest of a campaign. There's not that much to go on, but then again it's more direction than any other quest so far, and that's what intrigues me about it. I don't like meandering campaigns. Some people thrive on it, and I've had game masters who manage a "sandbox" or "open world" adventure really well. Personally though, both as a game master and a player, I lose interest and focus quickly if there's not an obvious goal within view.
The "Void Elves" adventure is an encounter with a modified Wasp ship that turns out to be crewed by drow. Drow aren't terribly common in Wildspace, but there are some prominent houses that have managed to venture out of their home crystal sphere. The Nation of the Eternal Twilight is one of them, and they have a small armada. This Wasp vessel is nowhere near the armada, luckily, and is actually a sort of diplomatic ship. It turns out that the drow (they identify as "void elves") are forming an alliance with the (appropriately enough) spider-like neogi.
That seems like the beginnings of a campaign to me. It's a little fuzzy, but it's a better start than "here's a list of pirates, have fun finding them in the entirety of Wildspace." I haven't gotten to the end of this book yet, so I can't say yet what the big finale is going to be (apparently there is one involving the assassin Cain), but I have a feeling that this is the adventure I'd structure a campaign around. Maybe "Small package trade" and "Flying colours" could be combined, with the package being some relic significant to the void elves. This reveals to the player characters that the drow have come to Wildspace. The elven navy wants to know why, and so the player characters are hired to find out more. Insert a few random encounters and side quests, until something connects the drow and the neogi (maybe a variation of "The brain trade," with a void elf representative rather than a mind flayer.) This leads the player characters to "Void elves." Insert a few more random encounters. Then continue on to "Monarch armada," and...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
Not one bit of this episode is ever quite what you expect. The plot ends up bouncing around like a pinball, and I honestly can't even remember the point in the end, but I loved it anyway. Here's what I remember: There's an apartment building that's conveniently adjacent to UNCLE headquarters. Surprisingly, UNCLE has taken precautions and they own and manage the buildings. But they have actual tenants in the building, and they've recently had to make upgrades to the building. And now Sandy Wyler, an aspiring actress, is complaining about the increase in rent.
Napoleon Solo is tasked with appeasing Sandy Wyler.
That's the setup. A highly trained UNCLE agent has to play building supervisor.
If that sounds boring, you can rest assured that the guest star, Judi West as Sandy Wyler, makes this episode quirky and supremely clever. Or at least, she does for the first half.
As it turns out, Thrush posed as the builders performing the upgrades to UNCLE's building, and they planted a super-powered listening device in the wall of Sandy's sewing room. It requires magnetic paint (or something) to help the listening device operate, but the paint is bulkhead gray so Sandy strips it and redecorates. To get her out of the apartment (I think?), Thrush hires Sandy as a dancer for a discotheque they own.
Of course, UNCLE has already brought Sandy onto their payroll, so she agrees to "help" Thrush, all the while keeping UNCLE informed. Ilya Kuryakin plays upright contrabass in the band (impressively, they even drop the bass line when he stops playing for a moment to converse with Sandy.)
Thrush agents get up to no good. UNCLE counters their every move.
The rest of the episode is fine, but let's be honest, the best part of this episode is the first half with Sandy Wyler as the lead character. I feel sometimes that this show fails to understand just how important the guest characters are, which is fair. After all, you're tuning in to see Ilya and Napoleon, so you don't want to spend too much time on the guest star, but this setup was really clever and Sandy is a real "character." She's an aspiring actress who can barely make rent, hasn't paid her butcher's bill in 18 months, and is being courted by Freddy the pizza stand owner in Monterey County (that's in California, and UNCLE's headquarters is in New York.) But don't worry, Sandy's going to pay everybody's kindness back once she's a star (and she believes a star can have a happy home life in addition to a successful career, by the way.)
This is a fun one.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Apostae is the twelfth celestial body (counting the Diaspora) from the sun in the Starfinder version of the Golarion system. There's no use in beating around the bush. Apostae is pretty much the Underdark. The planet has no atmosphere, so its surface is devoid of life and structures. Underground, though, is a network of constructed tunnels and caverns and cities.
Who else would you expect to find in the Underdark? Drow. Dark elves. That's the predominant race on Apostae.
I'm a big fan of Drow, thanks to RA Salvatore's Crystal Shard prequels. Honestly, I think an adventure in Drow society sort of just generates itself. Combine a little intrigue between opposing houses with a MacGuffin and you've got an instant heist or spy adventure. It's just such a rich story environment, I think this section could have been a page long and it still would have worked. Drow and futuristic underground city. Done.
And if that's not enough, then there are lots of excellent Drow adventures out there, including Rise of the Drow to Out of the Abyss. Sure, those are both for ancient D&D settings, but I'll bet it would be trivial to update them with sci fi weaponry.
Even so, this section does provide some key locations.
Crater Town is the half-orc colony. As far as I can tell, it's half shanty town, half military encampment. It consists of temporary pressurised shelters and mobile shelters, and I can imagine a few old spacecrafts positioned on the surface as functioning but flightless insta-cities. This all exists within a great crater on the surface of the planet, which as far as I can tell makes it exceptional in two ways. It's owned and managed by half-orcs, and it's on the surface and not underground.
Everything else exists underground.
Nightarch is the largest and most powerful city, with several Drow houses maintaining businesses and strongholds there. It's the major spaceport of the planet, so it's likely the first stop for player characters visiting Apostae. It's a sealed city, so you can walk around the streets without pressure suits, although House Zeizerer runs the Air services so how you go out at night largely depends on whether or not you trust them to maintain atmosphere.
Karkaken Test Ground is an area owned by House Arabani and is, as its name suggests, a test ground for the latest weapon tech.
Null Tracts is a stretch of tunnel that's entirely devoid of magic. No spell, magic item, or arcane effect functions within this region.
There's a university here, and a junkyard, dangerous crevaces and craters, factories, and encampments. Your players can explore this area for ages, and as long as you feel at home in the Underdark you'll have no trouble coming up with an...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. Chapter 3 is entitled "Starfaring races," and the first adventure is "The brain trade."
There are a few suggested hooks into this adventure. The first is essentially the same hook provided for the past 30 pages: Rumours of piracy! The second hook is a new one, though: A ship is overdue at its destination, and so the player characters are hired to investigate.
On their ways to investigate, the player characters come across a neogi Mindspider ship. Assuming they go to battle or otherwise investigate this nefarious vessel, they uncover a trade deal between the ilithid (Mind Flayers) and neogi and a race known as The Arcane. The mind flayers hire the neogi to bring them sentient beings, so the mind flayers get easy access to fresh brains to eat. In turn, the mind flayers buy technology from The Arcane (who won't deal with low lifeforms like the neogi.) It's a pretty good deal for everyone involved, except the people's whose brains are being devoured.
Personally, I don't tend to love D&D adventures that present puzzles of morality. It's fine that some people do, but it's not what I'm looking for in the games I play. This adventure, though, has just the right amount for me.
The baddies directly involved in this plot are aboard the vessel. There's a mind flayer, and a bunch of neogi. They're evil beings, they're attacking people for nonconsenual brain consumption. Kill them all without remorse, no question about it. However, there are charmed human slaves aboard the vessel, as well. These humans fight to defend the ship, but only because they're charmed.
That's a nice touch of moral dilemma, but nothing so serious that the game has to grind to a stop for a full-scale ethical debate.
The 5e Nightspider is a suitable Mindspider, so no problem there.
The 5e Neogi are CR 3 or 4, but the Nightspider is a big ship so what the neogi lack in challenge rating, you can make up for in sheer number. Neogi officers have umber hulk body guards, so that's more diversity in a battle.
A mind flayer is still a mind flayer in 5e, so no conversion required there.
The Arcane have been changed to the Mercane in 5e. As written, the Arcane play no real part in the adventure. In 2e, they're so solitary that the people who even know they exist often believe that when you meet an Arcane, you've just met an aspect of a singular entity. In 5e, the Mercane are a little less mysterious, but they aren't exactly staffing their own shops even on the Rock of Bral. Instead, they use intermediaries for sales. The Arcane (and the Mercane) mostly build and sell Spelljamming helms, so they're dealing...
]]>There's a lot of overlap between D&D and Pathfinder. Originally, of course, Pathfinder was the D&D 3rd edition rule set copied and pasted (legally permitted by the Open Game License), with a few nominal adjustments, into a book labeled "Pathfinder". Now that D&D is on its 5th edition (and heading toward its next incarnation), and Pathfinder has released a 2nd edition of its own, their paths have diverged substantially, and yet they're both implementing essentially the same game. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to do a comparative build, creating ostensibly the same character in the two different systems. I decided to start with a halfling rogue, because it's an archetype I enjoy, and anyway most of us know what that's supposed to look like.
It's Bilbo Baggins. It looks like Bilbo Baggins.
This isn't a very scientific process, but I tried to keep a few principles in mind:
Halflings are very broadly similar in both systems. They're both small creatures with a speed of 25 feet.
In 5e, several traits are written into the race. A few additional traits are earned by selecting a subrace.
In Pathfinder 2, your ancestry determines ability score boosts and flaws, and vision. Everything else, you take as a heritage and an ancestry feat.
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
Sometimes the authors of this show confuse me. The teaser and first act of this episode are fine, but the second act would have been an amazing start of to the episode.
Here's the setup of Act 2 (really the end of Act 1 and start of Act2 ): Napoleon Solo returns from vacation and, as he has since the very beginning of the series, walks into Del Floria's. He pulls on the coat hanger in the dressing room, and nothing happens. The tailor claims not to recognize or know Solo. He wanders back out onto the street, confused.
Meanwhile, two high ranking Thrush officials are in town, and they're at each other's throats over an upcoming promotion that they both want.
A taxi cab drives up and takes Solo to the airport, where the Thrush agents have also converged. The cabby rushes in and demands payment for the ride, and a woman disembarking from the plane makes a scene as she accuses Solo of trying to steal her luggage. What the heck is going on??
This is a fine episode, it could just use a re-edit.
What actually happens is that it opens up introducing an exciting new Elecrtronic Thought Translator MacGuffin. Napoleon Solo, we're told, is on holiday, so Kuryakin and a generic UNCLE agent are here to pick up the MacGuffin.
Kuryakin and a generic UNCLE agent manage to get ahold of the machine, but Thrush agents are in hot pursuit. Kuryakin ends up back in New York and the generic UNCLE agent is en route with the MacGuffin.
Waverly decides to use Napoleon Solo's ignorance of the situation to UNCLE's advantage. What better decoy to send in than someone who actually doesn't have anything to hide?
That's when Act 2 begins, and Solo starts wandering around New York in confusion, getting abducted by Thrush for unknown reasons, getting interrogated for information that he, for once, actually doesn't have.
What a great premise, and honestly it's great execution too. It could have been better with one more revision, but I imagine the authors had deadlines, and anyway it's better than I could have done.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. The ninth adventure in the book is called "Sojourn among the stars," and it start out so similar to the previous two adventures that I was compelled to investigate. It didn't take long to clear away my confusion. The adventures "Violent death," "Forgotten but not gone," and "Sojourn among the stars" are all in Chapter 2, which is very clearly titled "Relics & hulks." So yes, there is a theme here, and I take most of the blame for not understanding the structure of the book until page 30!
Well, being in a chapter about relics and hulks, this adventure starts with the player characters discovering an apparently abandoned ship. Should they investigate, they'll detect some small indications of life aboard the vessel.
They can board the ship, of course, and investigate. What they find there is so clever, I'm not going to spoil it here. It's just too good for me to reveal here. Go read it or play it yourself. It's worth it.
There's no problem with this encounter, but if I had to say there was a problem, I'd say it was that there's no encounter here. There's a super clever kernel of an idea, with a ship around it. I think the best you could do with this, maybe, is to make this ship a homebase away from Bral for the player characters. They could get quests from the inhabitants of the ship, they could go out and do some stuff, then come back for a reward, maybe. Or the inhabitants of the ship could be useful NPCs for sagely advice and lore dumps.
Otherwise, this is a quirky and flavourful encounter, but there's almost nothing to work with, here. It's essentially an NPC with some player characters sprinkled around on top.
But that's not really a complaint. Sure, it's something that I'd expect more from a setting book than an adventure, but this is exactly why I buy RPG books. I buy these books for adventure content, but also for world building. And this one delivers.
Now that I've realised this book actually has chapters in it, I see that the next adventure is Chapter 3, "Starfaring races." I don't know what to expect, but probably lots of "aliens" (whatever that means in a world where there are hundreds of different species.) (Then again, the first adventure in Chapter 3 is called "Brain trade," so I definitely have some expectation.)
Skulls & Crossbows cover copyright by Wizards of the Coast, used under the fan content policy.
I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Bretheda is the eleventh celestial body (counting the Diaspora) from the sun in the Starfinder version of the Golarion system. Like its neighbor Liavara, it's a gas giant with lots of satellite moons. Its governing body, called the Confluence, manages both Bretheda and Liavara, and the native barathu control much of the biotech industry, so this is actually a pretty powerful pocket of space.
Bretheda's native inhabitants are the barathu, which are "a hybrid between a blimp and a jellyfish". They aren't listed in Alien Archive 2 (which is the monster manual I own) so I assume they're detailed in Alien Archive. From their description, though, they sound like less psychically-inclined and more socially-inclined Dreamers (or rather, Dreamers are the psychic versions of barathus).
The barathu aren't the only inhabitants of Bretheda, though. Oma and nuru worms, and other floating creatures, are also sometimes found wandering the gas giant, and the barathu cultivate relationships with many other alien races. They've helped to build floating cities in the skies of Bretheda, and seem to actively encourage collaboration. Part of this is cultural. The barathu dislike direct confrontation and it doesn't seem like they're a warlike race by any means. They do maintain corporate interests in Bretheda's resources, though, so I do wonder their policies are inspired by goodwill or by efficient greed.
There are floating cities and moons all around Bretheda. Kalo-Mahoi is a water world locked beneath a shell of ice, and features underwater cities that are home to a trend-setting fashion scene. Marata is home to the seven-gendered maraquoi. Dykon is a volcanic world and host to some silicon-based life forms. Thyst is a radioactive wasteland.
There are lots more, and the amount of detail varies on each one. I don't think it tends to matter, in the long run. You get the idea that Bretheda, like Liavara, is more like the Diaspora than, say, Castrovel or Triaxus. It's a blank slate, with a little detail here and there, but largely it's meant as a setting for the GM to define. Maybe there's an adventure path out there that locks in some locations, but from what the Pact Worlds provides, I think it's a place you're allowed to explore and define for yourself.
The powers at play are the Confluence, which is the governing body for Bretheda and Liavara, a few different biotech corporations, and a smattering of independent colonies.
Combined, Liavara and Bretheda form a coherent whole that's a dichotomy of a rough-and-ready frontier and prosperous metropolis. There's definitely a feeling that there's both too much to cover in 20 pages and not enough to cover in a paragraph. The authors could probably have benefited from narrowing focus a little, the way Guildmasters of Ravnica did. When the authors...
]]>When Curse of Strahd was released for 5e, I didn't buy it because I already owned owned Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, a perfectly serviceable Strahd adventure. The Expedition to Castle Ravenloft adventure, released for D&D 3rd Edition, was itself a re-release of sorts, of the original Ravenloft adventure. It's a non-linear adventure, with the same kind of flexibility and unpredictability of the original. Strahd could have different (secondary) goals and motivations each game, items of power could be hidden in different locations, the NPCs you encountered could be different, and so on. I've found that Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is still a great resource for running a game in Ravenloft.
For a while, I just ran it in Pathfinder 1e, but lately I've been gaming with players who happen to own the 5e Player's Handbook, so I've been adapting the adventure to 5e. Mostly, you can do the conversion as you play. Instead of using stats in the book, you just open up the 5e Monster Manual, find the monster by the same name, and use those stats. Sometimes, you adjust DC numbers based on feel, experience, and whatever logic you use for DCs in any unscripted situation.
For Strahd and other major NPCs, though, a little extra effort is required. A standard vampire stat block doesn't suit a legendary creature like Strahd.
The Strahd of 5e's Curse of Strahd is different than the Strahd of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. They're minor differences and probably don't really matter much, but I like the 3rd Edition Strahd better, and honestly I find him scarier. So I've converted Strahd from 3e to 5e.
Medium undead, lawful evil
Armor Class 19
Hit Points 144 (17d8 + 68)
Speed 30 ft., climb 20 ft.
Saving Throws Dex +9, Wis +7, Cha +9
Skills Arcana +15, Deception +9, Perception +12, Religion +10, Stealth +14
Damage Resistances acid, cold, electricity, fire, sonic, necrotic; bludgeoning, piercing, slashing from nonmagical attacks
Damage Immunities As long as the Dayheart remains intact, Strahd suffers no ill effects from sunlight.
Condition Immunities Strahd is able to enter any building in Ravenloft as if he had been invited.
Senses darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 22
Languages Common, Draconic, Elven, Giant, Infernal
Challenge Rating 15 (13,000) Proficiency Bonus +5
Spellcasting. Strahd is an 18th-level Spellcaster. His Spellcasting ability is Intelligence (spell save DC 17, +9 to hit with spell attacks). Strahd has the following Wizard Spells prepared:
I don't own Curse of Strahd, arguably one of the most famous D&D 5e modules. I love that module, partly because I'm a sucker for horror and also because it's a really good module, and I do own Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. However, I'm the happy owner of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, the 3rd Edition module upon which Curse of Strahd is based.
This wasn't a philosophical or even artistic choice I made, it's just that the 3e version already existed by the time the 5e version came out, and I just didn't see the point in doubling up on essentially the same adventure. (It's not really the same, so read on.)
I'm comfortable converting 3.5 adventures to 5e, and 5e adventures to 3.5. I can usually do the conversion as the game is played, with little to no special preparation aside from reading the module in advance, as usual.
There's a little bonus provided by the old version of the Strahd story that I hadn't anticipated when making the decision not to buy the new book. The setting is the same, of course. And the stories are very similar. But Curse of Strahd gets a lot of attention, from actual play podcasts and streams to one-shot adaptations. It's probably the best known module of modern D&D. I've met people who've never played D&D but are interested in trying it because they want to play Curse of Strahd on Halloween.
So it's pretty nice to have an adventure that mirrors the Curse of Strahd in practically every way, but deviates from it just enough to throw players off guard. Many of the plot points appear to be the same, and yet in the end the goal or the reason behind the quest is different. The Sunsword is still of vital importance, as are some other key artifacts that I won't spoil here, but if a player dives into the 3rd Edition module and immediately goes to seek out the three items from Curse of Strahd, they'll miss out on some of the most important ways of further crippling the famous villain.
Many of the NPCs are also the same-but-different. Instead of Ezmerelda d'Avenir, for instance, there's Ashlyn of the Lightbringers. There are hags in both modules, but their motives and identities differ. Madame Eva and Ireena and Van Richten are constants, but maybe not exactly the same in every way.
It's all familiar enough to lull you into a sense of secturity, and yet it also feels like it exists in a parallel universe. And I can't think of a more fitting, and possibly unsettling, tone for a game in Ravenloft.
Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and Curse of Strahd both feature suggested story hooks for why the player characters end up in Ravenloft. Maybe Strahd summons them himself, or maybe an NPC within Barovia needs their assistance, or maybe they just get lost in the mists one...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. The eighth adventure in the book is called "Violent death." No, wait, that's wrong, it's called "Forgotten but not gone." Or is it? I'm confused. Read on to find out why!
This adventure deviates from the formulæ so far. While it does start with the same vague story hook that the PCs "find out about some piracy in some region of Wildspace", the actual hook is a shipwreck, and most of the adventure is essentially a dungeon crawl through an abandoned...
If this is sounding exactly like the previous adventure, that's because it's exactly like the previous adventure. Well, technically not exactly like it. Instead of a Tradesman (a Flying Fish Ship in 5e), it's a Nautiloid. That's the only difference.
I don't really know what to write about this one that I haven't already written about the previous adventure. Player characters board the abandoned Nautiloid. Some rooms are empty, so those are skipped in the adventure, but the Nautiloid of 2e is the same as the Nautiloid of 5e, so there's really no conversion to be done. There aren't many actual threats on the abandoned ship, so you don't even have to look up that many monsters, and the ones you do are in the standard Monster Manual.
The mystery of the ship is the driving force in this adventure. Your players are going to try to piece together how the ship came to be in such a state, and while not many clues are officially provided, there is one specific clue that you must ensure the characters find. They aren't likely to know anything about the clue itself, but there are NPCs on the Rock of Bral who can help. I also think I'd let anyone with a Spelljammer-specific background (Astral Drifter or Wildspacer) attempt a History (Int) check themselves. The clue item establishes the big bad of the book, so it's pretty significant, and you're going to want to ensure your players find it, and ideally not forget about it. I'm not saying the clue is essential to the success of the book, I just get sad when players miss something that unlocks story and lore. I've run so many games where the descriptions of places and events never get revealed to players because they miss a detail or because they never bother to do a perception check in the right place, or because I mean to reveal something to them but then get distracted by some fool halfling throwing pebbles down a well. So I want players to find the clues that let me tell them the cool backstories and lore that's driving the story around them!
This adventure is good, I guess, but you couldn't run it right after...
]]>There's a lot of overlap between D&D and Pathfinder. Originally, of course, Pathfinder was the D&D 3rd edition rule set copied and pasted (legally permitted by the Open Game License), with a few nominal adjustments, into a book labeled "Pathfinder". Now that D&D is on its 5th edition (and heading toward its next incarnation), and Pathfinder has released a 2nd edition of its own, their paths have diverged substantially, and yet they're both implementing essentially the same game. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to compare these implementations from the perspective of building a character. Proceeding alphabetically, the first ancestry (or race in 5e) are the dwarves.
If you don't have time to read this post right now, you can also view this article on Youtube
At the time of this writing, there's a new edition ("One D&D") on the distant horizon, and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything) has established the "Custom Lineage" option that allows you to treat your choice of race a little like a costume. Players can have the flavour of, for instance, a dwarf, without the penalty to speed, with a boost to any ability score, and so on. I'm not going to annotate possible exceptions to a rule from the Player's Handbook. It's all imaginary, so my base assumption is that anything and everything can be changed.
In 5e, ability scores are determined by dice rolls or by assigning a standard array of numbers (15,14,13,12,10,8). A boost is granted by your choice of race.
In Pathfinder 2, ability scores start at 10 and accumulate boosts and penalties according to the "life" choices you make for your character as you build. For that reason, Pathfinder 2 ability score benefits look generous compared to 5e, so just keep in mind that they're all starting at 10.
Both systems account for the presumed length of your stride as a dwarf.
5e and Pathfinder 2 both grant dwarves dark vision.
Although vision ranges are expressed differently in the two systems, they are functionally identical.
In Pathfinder 2, when there's a light source boosting the efficacy of your vision within a specific range, then that effect persists within that range. Once that light effect gives way to darkness, though, your using darkvision again.
The wording is a little awkward in 5e, but the rules essentially say that a dim light placed within 60 feet of you makes your vision normal until the end of the dim light's effect. Once the effect of the dim light has given way to darkness, you fall back on darkvision.
When you're in the hobby of roleplaying games, you tend to eventually amass a collection of curiosity games. Sometimes these are big, persistent game franchises, and other times they're momentary publications from a smalltime press that never saw wide distribution and probably faded from memory. Today, many of these come from drivethrurpg.com, but before that they often came in the form of a photocopied, sometimes spiral-bound, book of somebody's typewritten manuscript. One such game is Stalking the Night Fantastic, an RPG set in modern day (meaning the 1980s, at the time of publication) USA. I don't remember how I came to own a copy, but it's on my shelf, and I've played it both as GM and player.
If you're reading this post in January of 2023, then it may seem like this post is one of those recommendations of other systems, in the event that you're migrating away from Wizards of the Coast's D&D. While I do encourage migrating away from Wizards of the Coast, because they've made it abundantly clear (for the second time) that they cannot be trusted with a fantasy roleplaying game, this post was written months ago. This game isn't an alternative to fantasy roleplaying games, or even a game I think you should play. It's a look back at an old game, with no sub-text intended.
Published in 1984 by Tri-Tac Games as an orange spiral-bound book. This is the inside art:
And here's the sales pitch on the back of the book:
The history of the human race is filled with evidence of eerie and unexplained occurrences. Our myths,legends and fairy tales consistently reaffirm that the supernatural exists.
The public has come to believe that magic and the supernatural are the stuff of childrens' dreams and nightmares. They are wrong.
In the early 1860's, the United States established a secret supernatural investigative agency under the cover of the Civil War. Only a few top officials knew of its existence. It became known simply as Bureau 13.
In the year 1983, Bureau 13 is an ultramodern force, more secretive than ever before. It fights to stem the growth of ancient magic and the supernatural that threatens the innocent. Wherever the supernatural awaits, the agents of Bureau 13 will be there, but...
Evil is growing.
So you're with Bureau 13, a secretive government agency dedicated to solving paranormal crimes. You have access to the latest tech to help you with the job. Depending on how you rolled while creating a character, you may even have access to psionics (powers of the mind) or magic (powers of the universe).
When I played it, it did result in some fun games, but to be honest this was in spite of the system's mechanics. Most rolls that matter are performed with a d100, which seems really intuitive in theory. What's simpler than straight percentages? We talk in percents all the time, so rolling a d100 and getting a result of 75%...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. The seventh adventure in the book is called "Violent death."
This adventure deviates from the formulæ so far, in a few ways. First, it's recommended for players level 7-10. Secondly, while it does start with the same vague story hook that the PCs "find out about some piracy in some region of Wildspace", the actual hook is a shipwreck, and most of the adventure is essentially a dungeon crawl through an abandoned tradesman (that's a Flying Fish Ship in 5e.) It's spooky, mysterious, and completely unlike anything they've done before.
The abandoned ship is the Sculpin, and the adventure provides something for most of the rooms on the map. Some rooms are empty, so those are skipped. The Flying Fish Ship of 5e and the Tradesman of 2e are identical ship designs, so there's really no conversion to be done. There aren't many actual threats on the abandoned ship, so you don't even have to look up that many monsters, and the ones you do are in the standard Monster Manual.
The mystery of the ship is the driving force in this adventure. Your players are going to try to piece together how the ship came to be in such a state, and while not many clues are officially provided, I was constantly coming up with ideas as I re-read the adventure.
As written, the cause of the wreckage returns to the scene of the crime. There are reasons for it, but frankly I didn't buy it. I think in my game, I'll probably try to influence my players to follow some clues and hunt down the enemy, instead of just having the enemy show up. Should they decide not to, then the enemy can return to initiate battle.
The enemy is called Manara, and I won't describe her to avoid spoilers. Even in 2e, Manara is too high a CR for a level 7-10 party. The adventure doesn't assume that the players are going to defeat Manara, and in fact if anything it seems to suggest that it's more likely that smart players will run away. A player could possibly die from this fight, but it usually only takes one death or near-death for the party to get the message.
You could nerf Manara by swapping her out for something with a lower CR. I can think of a few good Kobold Press stand-ins, and at level 7-10 a standard vampire is also a reasonable option. The "problem" with Manara escaping, though, is that you're then left with an outstanding powerful foe who your players are likely to believe is the big bad. That could be fine, depending on how you run your game, but it could also be an inconvenient red herring.
I...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Liavara is the tenth celestial body (counting the Diaspora as one) from the sun in the Starfinder version of the Golarion system. It's a gas giant, but it's got several satellite moons (such as Arkanen and Osoro) and the Upwell satellite station in orbit around it, so it's a busier place than you might expect from a planet that's got very little substance. Interestingly, Liavara itself is not a Pact World, largely because it's just a bunch of gas. Many of its moons, however, are designated collectively as a Pact World protectorate.
Liavara is home to a species called Dreamers. They're not native to the world, and actually migrated to Liavara from its neighboring planet Bretheda.
I don't own the Alien Archive (my local bookstore only had Alien Archive 2, so that's what I have), but it just so happens that Dreamers appear in Alien Archive 2, so for a change I was able to turn to the appropriate page and do a little extra reading. Dreamers a sort of large-sized jellyfish creatures with no recognisable society, although they do "sing" in what is often described in the same way you might describe whale songs. Their songs are psychically powerful, and they seem to thrive in the Liavaran environment.
Research of Dreamers is mostly forbidden, with most organizations (including the barathus, of Bretheda, who are considered the protectors of Dreamers) encouraging a live-and-let-live policy toward them. However, there are some by-products of Dreamers that have been exploited. Alien Archive 2 doesn't go into great detail of what form these by-products take (it may just be that people have reverse-engineered what Dreamers do in their songs) but there are stats for two things derived from the psychic powers of Dreamers.
There are lots of satellites and moons around Liavara, and I think the subtext is that this is functionally a miniature Diaspora. Unlike the Diaspora, though, there's a focus to all the disparate space stations and colonies, which is Liavara itself. I struggled for a few days trying to differentiate Liavara and Bretheda, because they're really similar: lots of little satellites around a big useless gas giant. I've settled on this: Liavara, to me, is Stargate Atlantis or SeaQuest.
Liavara is a big ocean of gas that draws both scientific study and economic exploration. It's not self-governed, and most of the territory is controlled by an organisation on Bretheda, called the Confluence. The moons that are detailed (however briefly) in the book are populated with miners, scientists, and even bacteria farmers (for food production). If...
]]>The second book in the original Dragonlance trilogy is Dragons of Winter Night and it's exactly what you might expect from a middle book. The party is split, new enemies are revealed, there's betrayal and strife, and portents of a dismal future. But there are also some important discoveries in this book, too, and there are glimmers of hope.
As with the first book, this book opens with a teaser that's a little outside the narrative. It involves Tanis, Sturm, and Elistan bringing the legendary Hammer of Kharas to the Hylar dwarves in the Hall of Hornfel. If you've got no idea who the Hylar dwarves are or that there even was a Hammer of Kharas, then you're in good company. Nobody knew, at least not at the time. Or maybe somebody did know. I haven't cross-referenced publication dates of the novels and the RPG source books, but taking the novels on their own, this is brand new information that amounts to nothing. The dwarves aren't really mentioned again, they don't show up at the last minute in the big Battle of the Five Armies at the end (that's the wrong franchise, anyway). It's just a teaser.
So why have a teaser that has no real connection to the story?
Maybe the teaser was one of those pre-publication pre-releases in a magazine, written to pique the interest of the public well before the final book was outlined and written. Maybe it's to appeal to the bookstore browser who opens the book and reads the first couple of pages.
For me, the teaser has two effects:
Dragonlance does this, and I mentioned it in my review of the first book. There are parts of the Dragonlance story that the reader doesn't get to experience "first hand." We don't even get to experience it second hand. We're just told that it happened. A thing happened, but it's over now, and here are the results.
It's admittedly an unusual writing technique. Then again, how many times did Gandalf disappear without explanation in The Lord of the Rings? How far into Mordor did Frodo and Sam progress without us following along? Things happen "off screen," and when they do it makes us understand that this isn't a straight shot. Our heroes don't get to identify the singular threat and then go knock on its door to invite it to a duel.
And most importantly, our heroes aren't the only ones fighting this battle. This point, for me, is one of the most significant in the way Dragonlance is written. I said in my first post that I'm not overly fond of the lone hero mythos, where the fate of the entire world hinges on the actions and success of one person. Through sheer force of will, this lone hero perseveres, against literally impossible odds....
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. The sixth adventure in the book is called "Fire and ice."
The player characters have heard reports that shipping in some sector of Wildspace has been suffering lately. Rumour has it that piracy is to blame and incidentally the ship that gets named is one of the ships on the player character's bounty hunter list. Presumably, the players hurry to the troubled region of Wildspace. when they arrive, they witness a ship of the Astral Elves' navy being bombarded by a squid-ship.
It turns out that the squid-ship has been taken over by a trio of giants (two fire giants and one frost giant), and they've been plundering whatever they please. What's that mean? That's right, it's another ship battle.
Giants aboard a squid-ship is ultimately neither here nor there. It doesn't lead to a bigger story (or if it does, that's not revealed here.)
I gather that the actual purpose of this encounter is to establish the true alignment of the player characters. There's an elven naval vessel in need of assistance, and the PC reputation with the elven navy depends on their actions.
Squid-ship stats are provided in Astral Adventurer's Guide, and obviously giants are giants from the Monster Manual.
The elves are in a man-o-war, which is secretly included in 5e as the Star Moth (page 50 of Astral Adventurer's Guide.)
Pretty easy.
The next section of the book is for levels 7-10, starting with an adventure named "Violent Death." That bodes well!
Skulls & Crossbows cover copyright by Wizards of the Coast, used under the fan content policy.
Paizo's Book of the Dead is a source book about both the dead and the undead, describing the ecology, lifecycle, ethics, advantages, and dangers of time spent after all your time is spent. I picked up a copy at my game store, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. This post covers chapter 3, "The Grim Crypt."
It somehow never occurred to me that The Book of the Dead would include a bestiary. I should have known better. This is a Paizo product, after all. But actually even if I'd anticipated a bestiary, I wouldn't have guessed it would have been quite as good as it, in fact, is.
Chapter 3 is 100 pages of monsters, making it nearly half the book, so to say that this book "includes" a bestiary undersells it. This book is arguably a bestiary, with some player options and lore added on.
Bestiaries feature monsters, and that's what you get in this chapter. That's the obvious part. Rather than going on and on about the obvious, I'll provide some of my thoughts as I was reading the chapter.
Once you've seen one zombie, you've seen 'em all. Never has a player been more wrong.
There's nothing more satisfying as a Game Master than watching the faces of your players when a monster they think they know does something they don't expect. There are several sections in chapter 3 that present some pretty standard monsters that you already have in your Pathfinder Bestiary, but with a twist. This isn't that ghoul, this is a Priest of Kabriri. This isn't that skeleton, this is a Gallowdead, or a Gashadokuro, or Cadaverous Rake. And so on.
There's lots of variety provided in this chapter, so surprise your players.
In addition to offering new varieties of old familiars (both literally and figuratively), there are several modular options for customizing the standard variety of existing Bestiary monsters.
For instance, suppose you don't want to use a variant Lich from this book. You want to use the standard Lich, because it fits the game and party level, but you want to change it up a little without effecting the power level. This chapter provides swappable abilities.
It seems to happen with each chapter, but the more time I spent in chapter 3 the more I realised that there was some seriously disturbing stuff here. Maybe I have a medium or high tolerance for horror, because it does creep up on me, building and strengthening only after pages and pages of reading. It might affect other readers earlier. Whatever your comfort level, be warned: The Book of the Dead contains horror. Many of the monsters in this chapter began as evil beings who carried their malice into undeath. Others were innocent, and have been unjustly cursed with undeath and corrupted by negative energy.
It can be disturbing. If you avoid horror movies, approach this book with caution....
]]>Years ago, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) published a few "splatbooks" for 3rd Edition D&D, and one of these books was titled Undead (with Mike Mearls as a credited writer). I've been reading it lately, because I play Pathfinder and I love player options. This is my fifth post about the book, covering the chapter "Secrets of undeath."
Chapter 6 is titled "Secrets of undeath," and it's basically a short story. This is, in a way, the content I value the most out of this book, because it's so dedicated to its own lore. It's done in an overly-analytical style that, when I'm not forgetting that this is actually just fiction, makes me chuckle. It's a little bit like Brahm Stoker, with the author of the chapter academically discussing the Book of Undying Life by legendary researcher Malik Sejul. And I'm not kidding: the tone of this chapter is so analytical that you'll sometimes forget that there is no Malik Sejul, and there is no Book of Undying Life, and that there's no reason for anybody to ever pretend like they're analyzing it for historical perspective. But that's what this chapter is, and I love it.
I sent excerpts of this chapter to one of my players, whose current character's mission it is to help his previous dead character to achieve lichdom. His current character stumbled upon the Book of Undying Life in a wizard's library, and happily I had amazing content to share.
This chapter is about half excerpts from the Book of the Undying Life and half analysis. The great thing about the "excerpts" is that they're in-world writing. There are paragraphs detailing the ceremony involved in creating a lich, with step-by-step instructions. The "cult of Lochai" is the central power throughout this chapter, which I love because nobody's heard of the cult of Lochai. It's not Forgotten Realms lore or Golarion lore, it's ancient and forgotten lore. It's stuff players and player characters don't know about because it's dangerous and forbidden knowledge.
It feels that way, reading this chapter. You feel like you've gotten your hands on something truly rare. You've discovered the ceremonies and techniques for creating immortal beings. You feel as if you shouldn't be reading it, but you want more when it's over.
And then you remember that both the ancient text and the scholarly text analyzing it in "retrospect" are equally fake. But ultimately you don't care, because it's just too cool.
I'd recommend this book, but it's well out of print and you won't likely be able to find it. But this book is the kind of "excess" I love. It's by no means an essential supplement for D&D or for the old d20 system. Nobody needs this book now, and probably nobody needed it when it was published. The 3rd edition rules and Monster Manual had plenty of material to feed into the imaginations of players and game masters. But the open license emboldened...
]]>There's always been a fascinating link between wargames and RPGs. Pragmatically, though, there's a significant intersection. While RPGs normally feature small skirmishes between 6 to maybe 12 creatures, sometimes the combats get significantly larger. Strangely, the world's first RPG was created specifically to scale down the wargame experience, and yet sometimes the RPG battlefield starts to get pretty crowded. Here are X tips
== 1. Wargame minigame
At the time of this writing, nobody outside of Wizards of the Coast has seen the upcoming 5e Dragonlance product. I have mine on pre-order, so I'm meant to get an early-ish copy (although shipping to New Zealand could affect that in some interesting ways.) There's a literal board game included with it, though, so from the looks of it, there's essentially a wargame included with the book.
Even if that's not the nature of the product and the board game is just a board game (admittedly, it doesn't look like there are near enough miniatures for it to be a wargame), the idea could be an intriguing one, at least if your gaming group is interested in wargaming. Not all are, and as with spaceship combat in Starfinder, it can be dangerous to impose a shift in your game system when everyone at the table thought they were signing up for a regular old RPG.
However, if your group is keen, then there are lots of great indie wargame rulesets out there. When the big battle breaks out, you could have a minigame in which players go up against the Dungeon Master in a literal wargame.
== 2. Source books
I haven't read them yet so I can't definitively recommend them, but there are a few books out there that contain rulesets for mimicking large-scale battles within D&D.
== 3. Hide the battle
First of all, a "big" battle never starts with the boss. Don't drop the player characters into the boss's office for the final showdown, make them fight their way there. It doesn't always have to be combat. There can be stealthy ways to "fight" their way to the boss's lair, or social intrigue ways to be escorted there under false pretenses. But that final journey toward the boss should feel like a deadman's walk. Complications, anxiety, or just regular combat against hordes of minions, make the players earn their way into an audience with their target.
The battle must be big, because it took a long time to get to the actual battle.
== 4. Add complexity
A "big" battle doesn't necessarily have to by "physically" larger than any other battle to feel big. It's all imaginary, so sometimes the important thing is to give the impression that there's a big battle raging on around the player characters, even though the players themselves are focusing on just the boss battle. Movies have done this for ages. We follow the hero to subdue the boss, and once the boss is vanquished, the whole army scatters (and usually the castle...
]]>Spelljammer has been around for a while, and it's amassed a bunch of Olias-of-Sunhillow style ships over the years. The 5e edition of Spelljammer adapted or converted 15 or so, but that leaves over 30 ships lost in the shuffle. Luckily, a resourceful fan called ffwydriadd has converted a bunch of ships and posted a free PDF online.
One ship that I thought hadn't been converted was the man-o-war, an elven ship from the 2e Lorebook of the Void source book. As it turns out, it actually was included in Spelljammer 5e, but under a different name, so I didn't discover it until ffwydriadd pointed it out to me. It's interesting to ponder how the official conversion was done, though, and what's involved in doing a conversion, so I'm posting my process nevertheless.
A 2e man-o-war is a big ship, and there's no reason to change that for 5e, so the keel and beam stay the same.
It's got 2 medium ballistae requiring 2 crew members, a catapult requiring 3, and a jettison requiring 3. That's a lot of weaponry, but then again it's called a man-o-war. The problem is, 5e's weapon stats differ from 2e weapon stats. Either the crew required for each battle station is going to be different, or else there will be fewer battle stations.
I think keeping the battle stations the same is best. After all, it's a man-o-war and should be well suited to attack from any position.
A ballista is a ballista, so no change is required there except that 5e ballistae tend to require 3 crew members while the 2e medium ballistae required 2.
A mangonel is a catapult, so that translates easily, aside from the increase in crew requirements (from 3 to 5.)
Finally, a jettison is a ship-to-ship Spelljammer technique of basically dumping rubbish onto an enemy deck in hopes of injuring crew members. There's no such weapon in 5e, but in my mind this is potentially more a trap than a weapon. I can imagine imposing a DEX saving throw for players to avoid the rubbish thrown at your vessel, rather than making a targeted attack roll. I'd scale damage depending on level. For tier 1 and 2 players, the enemy just threw some rocks. For tier 3 and up, the ammunition is caltrops, scrap metal, glass, and so on.
The weapons:
The 2e man-o-war has an armor rating of 7, which translates roughly to a 14 or 15 in 5e.
This may be a little off, due to materials. The man-o-war has a ceramic hull, while other ships have wood or metal or crystal hulls. I'm not sure what effect, if any, that has on AC. I'm working under the assumption that the material has no effect on hardness and, if anything, affects resistance and immunity (a metal hull is likely immune to fire damage, while...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Triaxus is the ninth celestial body from the sun in Golarion's solar system. As I recall, it was the first planet in the Pathfinder game setting that I learned about. I wasn's exactly surprised to find that there were other planets in the setting. I knew Spelljammer enough to know that D&D was not confined to just one world, but the only function I knew for planet hopping was to change game settings. If a game started on Toril, you visit Krynn. If you start on Krynn, you visit Toril. What other reason could there possibly be to travel the stars?
To discover that Triaxus existed and that there was no D&D setting associated with it was actually very intriguing to me. I'd been to other planes of existence, I'd been to Sigil, I'd been to a citadel in the Astral Plane. It just never occurred to me that you could also travel to planets (except the ones that were bound to a setting.)
Because I was so intrigued by it, I was ended up being pretty familiar with Triaxus before reading this section, so it's no surprise to me that Triaxus is legitamately one of the most exciting planets in the system.
Triaxus is a world of dragons, dragonkin, and a humanoid race that resemble elves and were, as I'd always understood it, known as Triaxians. Starfinder refers to Triaxians as "ryphorians," which confused me at first because I thought it was a new race. It's not, it's the same people, but it fairly recognises that dragons and dragonkin of Triaxus are also "Triaxians." I don't yet own the Alien Archive book (all my local bookstore had was Alien Archive 2, so that's my main monster manual) so I'm still not sure what a ryphorian is, but I assume it's the elf-like humanoid described in Paizo's Distant Worlds Pathfinder source book.
The different nations of Triaxus used to be busy either starting wars with each other, or else making alliances with one another so a new configuration of war could be started. After space travel became common, and specifically after Drift engines were invented, opening the entire universe for exploration, warfare at home became less interesting. In the time of Starfinder, Triaxus is still divided into a few different nations, but each nation has plenty of interests offworld to keep them busy. The way this manifests, of course, are mega-corporations, many of which are run by dragons.
Now I don't know what your TTRPG background is, but along with D&D I'm a big fan of Shadowrun, an urban fantasy cyberpunk game in which corporations often have a dragon as CEO. And I am more than happy to get this flavour in my science fantasy Starfinder game.
Oh but wait, it gets better.
I recently ran "Trouble in Red Larch," the introductory adventure to Princes of the Apocalypse, and I accidentally fell in love with the titular village. I grew to appreciate it so much, in fact, that I'm very likely to swap whatever generic town is inevitably written future one-shots I run for Red Larch.
My default starting location tends to be Baldur's Gate. I know it pretty well, because I've played a lot in it. I've played tabletop games there, I've played video games there, I've read books and comics, and setting books. I'm comfortable in Baldur's Gate, and when players want to buy, fence, repair, craft, research, hire, learn, steal, worship, or travel the planes, I know where to take them. It's a big enough setting to have whatever plot device you need it to contain.
But it's big. And it's not exactly the nicest city. On one hand, Baldur's Gate sets the tone pretty accurately for games I run, but on the other hand it can be overwhelming for short adventures.
In my regular game, my players have explored a lot of Baldur's Gate. They the different districts, the levels and the gate, they know where to go for gar, and so on. The setting serves the adventure.
But in a quick one-off game where you're only in town to get a quest and to buy supplies, there's no time to get to know the city. And if the only location you know to exist in a big city in a store and a temple, then what's the point of making it a big city?
There's a reason the Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate games (to name a few) starts you out in a small village. There are obvious mechanical benefits. You spend a little time in your little hometown learning the basics of the game. It's a relatively safe space, so even though you're killing rats in the cellar or clearing giant spiders out of the forest, there's a familiar temple or family doctor to run back to.
Because a small setting doesn't have that much to explore, you're usually compelled to move on pretty early. You don't spend half the game in the small village of your youth. You learn the basics, and then you move on to bigger adventure.
This reflects your character's development, too. You start small, naïve, insular. Your world is small and your idea of a threat is limited to ROUS (rodents of unusual size.) But eventually you move on to bigger things, both literal and figurative.
Starting characters out in a big bustling city is exciting sometimes. But sometimes marrying the literal to the figurative is an easy way to inspire and reward your players. There's a certain sense of accomplishment and growth you feel, as a player, when you return home to your childhood village after months of adventuring, only to realize how tiny a...
]]>Paizo's Book of the Dead is a source book about both the dead and the undead, describing the ecology, lifecycle, ethics, advantages, and dangers of time spent after all your time is spent. I picked up a copy at my game store, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. This post covers the chapter 2, "Hymns for the Dead."
For the most part, this chapter presents options for playing, and playing with, undead. By page count, this is mostly achieved through archetypes. I think that's a great way of handling character customization in general, but especially when it's a change of life status.
Suppose your character dies, and your GM gives you the option of rising again in an undead state. In another game system, you'd have to rip up your character sheet and roll a new character (except, it's meant to be the same character) with a new class or race.
That's not what you want, though. What you really want is to apply an overlay to an existing character. By making undead character options archetypes, Paizo lets you just swap out your page of feats. It's really good design, which is no surprise because Pathfinder 2 has possibly the best and most consistent data schemata of any RPG I've read.
The exception to this is the skeleton, which is its own ancestry. I find this puzzling, and I don't see any reason for it. I haven't tried it, but I don't see any reason you couldn't just treat the Skeleton ancestry feats as archetype feats. Then again, Paizo usually knows what they're doing, so maybe there's a good reason for making the skeleton its own ancestry. It's work, but a player could convert their character (aside from their ancestry) to a skeleton, and maybe Paizo considers the skeleton ancestry unique enough to require a little extra work to acquire.
I love mythology, so the Deities of the Undead section is a nice touch. There are five gods (Urgathoa, Charon, Kabriri, Orcus, Zura) across two pages. There's not a whole lot of lore on each one, but it's enough to go on, should you require a quick basis for a death (on undeath) cult during a game. Of course, once invoking one of these gods, you'd probably have to go hunt down a different source book to find out more information, and I do wish the authors cited some extra resources.
I'm not sure why, but the last section of this chapter is directed solely at the game master. Maybe there was an extra charge for chapter headings at the printer? This is clearly a new chapter. It has nothing to do with player options, and it's not meant for player consumption.
That complaint aside, the Haunts section is excellent. I've always enjoyed haunts in Pathfinder, because they present a kind of a puzzle to players. They give the players and the GM a chance to collaborate. Players have to investigate, and...
]]>Years ago, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) published a few "splatbooks" for 3rd Edition D&D, and one of these books was titled Undead (with Mike Mearls as a credited writer). I've been reading it lately, because I play Pathfinder and I love player options. This is my fourth post about the book, covering the chapters "More than flesh" and "Beyond the pale."
Chapter 4, called "More than flesh", is about undead player characters in a game. It's exclusively about roleplay, discussing motivations and sensibilities.
In a way, chapter 4 is a cultural guide to undead societies, much in the same way that a book like Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes discusses the history and cultures of fiends, elves, dwarves and duergar, the gith, halflings, and gnomes. There's a certain amount of implied domain here, though, because the undead of this book, however universal, are nevertheless of this book. Luckily, most fantasy worlds are vast enough to allow for exceptions and customization, so I doubt you'd be violating anything too precious by utilizing the undead traits in this book.
And mostly, Undead uses broad and time-honoured traditions. Ghouls are pack animals. Vampires are suave and charismatic but also secretly savage and compulsive. Zombies are stupid and plodding.
There are no surprises in this chapter, but there's a lot of inspiration for both game master and player. If you don't sit around and think about what a wraith might be feeling at any given moment, don't worry because this book has done that for you. This chapter is full of casual, maybe even obvious to some, ideas for roleplaying an undead character or creature. And it's really useful, and makes for engrossing reading.
Chapter 5 is, presumably, chapter 4 for the game masters (except, arguably, chapter 4 is chapter 4 for game masters.) "Beyond the pale" is the chapter about "undead campaigns," meant to help a game master meditate on how to run a campaign that prominently features the undead.
What "prominently features" means, exactly, is part of this chapter. Maybe you want to adjust your a game to accommodate that one player who's really keen on playing an undead character. Or maybe the whole party is undead. Maybe the party's undead but they don't know it yet. What if the whole world is undead?
This chapter has all the ideas. They're just ideas. They're sparks of inspiration to help you invent or adapt an adventure so that the undead play a prominent role.
I love all the ideas in this chapter, and I want to run or play every single one. However, I have to admit that while all the ideas are exciting, I don't feel confident that any of them have been thought out for actual play. It seems really great to have your party continue playing as undead creatures, but then again how does their undeath affect the mechanics of the game? I feel like it would take a lot of mechanical reworking to make sure...
]]>As many players in my D&D games could tell you, my default halfling NPCs are almost always misplaced kender (they do tend to travel an awful lot). Dragon orbs are my default MacGuffin for one shots. Krynn feels like home to me, and while I can't claim to have read all Dragonlance books (there are lots), I think I've read most. I'm no scholar, though, and I don't have the best memory without lots of repetition, so I'm re-reading as many Dragonlance books as I can before the upcoming release of the 5e release of the setting. I love Dragonlance, and I think you should too, so I'm going to review the books as I read them, in hopes of convincing you, dear reader, to become an honourary citizen of Krynn.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight is the first Dragonlance book. It's the first book in the original trilogy. Aside from its teaser intro, the story starts five years after the previous trilogy. Except there is no previous trilogy. This was the first book, and we meet Flint Fireforge and Tanis Half-Elven, and the rest of our heroes, upon their reunion after long, separate quests.
I love that opening. Like a good game of D&D, the party is already tried, true, and ardently loyal to one another. We don't have to endure the obligatory introductions and building of trust. The party exists, it has always existed, so begins the adventure.
And you have to get used to that. Dragonlance is about stories untold just as much as it is about the stories that you "witness" on the page. There are things in the books that you don't get to see, and sometimes they sound like pretty major events. But they aren't for you, maybe because you can't be at two places at once, or maybe because they'll get told in a later volume, or maybe because there are things unknowable by anyone but those who experienced the events (and of course Astinus the Chronicler.)
Something you catch onto pretty quickly in this book is that you're not getting a hero in this story. At one point in the book, your heroes include Flint, Tanis, Tas, Sturm, Tika, Laurana, Goldmoon, Riverwind, Caramon, Raistlin, and Gilthanas. And amazingly, all of them add to the story.
Could one or two have been combined and condensed into a single character? Probably. But that's not how Dragonlance's story works. You don't get the iconic hero who can do it all. There's no heroic force of will defying all odds. Nobody is the hero of this story, and instead many are the heroes. Like in real life.
Of course, this is fantasy. It doesn't have to be like real life. It's acceptable to have a hero who can do everything. We readers are used to that, and I think we'd have bought it in Dragonlance.
And I'm so glad that that's not what we get from this book. The assortment of everyday heroes, with doubts...
]]>My favourite Shadowrun Fifth Edition supplement is the Run Faster source book. Run Faster is easily an essential general purpose book, not only because it expands player options but also because it makes character creation easier and, in many ways, a little more fun.
Note that this post is for Shadowrun 5th Edition, even though at the time of this writing 6th Edition has been out for a few years. I haven't switched to 6th Edition, and I'm just writing for what I play (and more importantly, what people I invite to my games can use.)
Run Faster offers two new methods of building characters. The Sum to Ten method is a variation of the standard Core Rulebook method, which I discussed in a previous post. This post covers the point buy method, a drastically different character build process that uses a lump sum of karma points you can spend on character "packs." It's a lot of fun, and I probably won't be able to encapsulate it just by talking about it, but I'm certainly going to give it my best shot.
You know how you get 25 karma to spend during character creation? In the point buy system, you get 800. The catch is, of course, that everything costs karma. There is no Priority table, so you don't get points to spend on special attributes, attributes, or skills. Instead, you buy your metatype on page 64, and then you buy "life modules."
A life module is a bundle of skills derived from your character's lineage (whether you were born and raised in UCAS, CAS, NAN, or Tairngire), formative years (maybe you spent your life in an arcology, or a rural area, or as a street urchin, or in a military school). They grant you attributes and skills and qualities based on archetypal assumptions about your character's life experiences.
Next, you choose what kind of further education your character received. There are life modules for community college, trade school, university, and military school, or none of the above. Then it's on to the rest of your life: maybe you spent time as a corporate drone, a combat correspondent, a drifter, celebrity, political activist, private dick, soldier, merc, ganger, or something else. All of these life experiences add to your skills and attributes, and it all costs karma.
Significantly, Magic/Resonance isn't allotted by any life module, so a magic user build must spend karma on that special attribute, as described on page 107 of the Core Rulebook.
With whatever karma you have left, you can buy contacts and purchase gear. There are over 25 pregenerated contacts starting on page 182. You can use them, or modify them to suit.
Equipment kits start on page 228, and it's a chapter that's easily worth the price of the book. Spend 5 karma, for instance, and get a basic runner pack valued at 10,000 nuyen, containing everything a new-ish Shadowrunner needs. This makes the...
]]>Until I read Paizo's Starfinder source book Pact Worlds, I'd honestly, kind of, forgotten that the Pathfinder gods are still relevant in Starfinder. It's easy to forget. There's no Cleric class in the game, there's no differentiation between arcane and divine magic in the Core Rulebook, so you can fall into assuming that the gods aren't in the game. They are though, and there's even a whole section in Chapter 12 of the Core Rulebook about gods.
I admit that my understanding of fantasy space is entirely defined by Spelljammer, so in my mind the Crystal Spheres apply, at least to an extent, to Pathfinder and Starfinder as much as Forgotten Realms, Krynn, and so on. Each solar system exists within a great (metaphysical) crystal sphere. A pantheon of gods has power within its crystal sphere, and no influence outside. When you leave one crystal sphere and enter another, it's time to find a new god. It makes sense because that's what my Spelljammer books told me.
In traditional D&D, gods are significant in part because they help define the alignment, and explain the divine magic, of certain societies. You know you're dealing with really bad people because they worship Rovagug or Urgathoa, or whatever. In Starfinder, though, you don't expect to travel through the Drift, emerge in a previously unknown planet, and find that the inhabitants there just so happen to worship the exact same god as you did back home. For whatever reason, that just doesn't feel alien. Strictly speaking, I don't see why in a science fantasy game that's not something we can accept, but I agree that for some reason it just feels unlikely (but the Drift and alien life and gods and magic? totally believable.)
I thought, initially, that Triune was meant as an allowance for religion in a science fantasy setting. There's evidence of this because Triune's broadcast of the recipe for Drift travel was received by every planet in the Pact World system, plus the Kasath and Shirren (both of which are well outside Golarion's system). So Triune is obviously a universal god, and I was ready to accept that for the sake of simplicity.
However, upon re-reading the section Faith and Religion in Chapter 12 of the Core Rulebook, it's clear that the Pathfinder gods, plus a few new ones from core planets, are very much spread through the Pact Worlds, and Triune is but one of them.
So I think the shortcut is this: Triune can be a universal god to save you from having to invent a whole new pantheon for every single planet your players visit, and for Pact Worlds the gods of the Core Rulebook also apply.
That's a nice quick fix to have, but what about a universal evil god? Personally,
In other words, having a universal god is handy when expanding the game board to include the entire universe. I do feel like a universal evil god is missing, but...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. The fifth adventure in the book is called "Bloody vikings..."
This adventure gets the PCs back on the track of collecting bounties. Unfortunately, the setup is the same as everything else that's happened so far. Player characters happen to be sailing along in Wildspace when their quary comes to them. With bounty hunting this easy, I don't know why everybody isn't in the business. You don't have to follow clues or go to particular locations to investigate, you just go for a walk and your prey walks up to practically asking to be brought in.
Well, luckily Erik Bloodaxe doesn't ask to be brought to justice. In fact, he fights to the death, so that's something.
As with all the encounters in the book so far, I think what this one needs is just a little pretense. The saving grace of this particular one is that Erik has a really rich backstory, and uncovering all that lore could be the avenue to hunting him down.
You could deliver the lore in whatever way is convenient, and in fact I think I'd probably let the players themselves write the premise. Whatever the players think is the first logical step to find information about Erik's location could reveal a great mystery around his history. Maybe players interview some people who've been attacked by, but escaped from, Erik. Surveillance footage—oh wait, this isn't that kind of space game. OK, some eye-witness sketches or descriptions of Erik's ship could suggest something of its origins. There could be a rumour, or even a pattern in what Erik has attacked lately, suggesting his next target.
The point is, there's some hefty lore about the origin of Erik, his crew and his ship, and of the encounter that's the most interesting component. (And I say "hefty" not to indicate that the lore is to my liking or disliking, just that it's big with lots of implications.) The fight is just another spelljammer fight. The value to this adventure is the lore, so find a way to impart it to your players.
Next chapter is "Fire and ice."
Skulls & Crossbows cover copyright by Wizards of the Coast, used under the fan content policy.
The Princes of the Apocalypse 5th edition hardcover is a re-telling of the classic Temple of Elemental Evil adventure. I recently ran the "introductory" adventure "Trouble in Red Larch" with three friends, and this post is my review of it, and tips for running it.
Like several of the major 5e adventures, Princes of the Apocalypse doesn't start characters at level 1. Instead, it leaves it up to the Dungeon Master to either tell players to skip a few levels, or else to run some introductory material until everyone's leveled up a few times. As I often observe, 5th Edition is nothing if not "organizationally inventive", so it's no surprise that adventures to get characters up to level 3 are found not in chapter 1, not in chapter 2, not in chapter 3, not in chapter 4, (I'm getting there, I promise), not in chapter 5, but in chapter 6, "Alarums and Excursions."
Just to be clear: it's not in chapter 1. Not in a section labelled "Introduction." Not in an appendix called "Level 1 adventure." It's in "Alarums and Excursions," chapter 6 out of 7.
Anyway, the adventure is referred to as "Trouble in Red Larch," after the small town it begins in.
The town of Red Larch has about 22 locations, and I kinda think it's one of the best towns in any 5e adventure yet. I don't mean it's necessarily the most unique or the most fun, it's just exactly the right size, it's clearly mapped out, it has plenty of mundane locations that make it easy for the Dungeon Master to manage.
Every proprietor and resident in Red Larch has just enough personality and backstory to give you a foundation to build upon. Named NPCs can provide rumours and quests for players, and many of them have some interesting secrets related to the start of the main storyline. I loved running an adventure in Red Larch, and I anticipate using it as the starting town for future adventures.
I was a little surprised by the lack of structure of Chapter 6. As it turns out, "Trouble in Red Larch" isn't really an introductory adventure at all, but a collection of story hooks for minor adventures, and two small dungeons, you can send players on to level them up.
It's mostly useful stuff, but a lot of it's pretty minimal. For instance, there's a haunted tomb near the village that turns out to be haunted. That's one of the adventures: there's a haunted tomb near the village.
That's not an adventure, that's almost a requirement for a D&D town. Heck, you're not a village in the Forgotten Realms if you don't have a nearby haunted tomb. What's next? There's a necromancer camped out in a nearby cave? (Actually, yes, that's one of the quests, as well.)
There's also some needlessly confusing plot points that lightly interfere with one another. There are two dungeons in Chapter 6...
]]>What RPG nerd doesn't want their very own copy of the Necronomicon? Paizo's Book of the Dead doesn't go so far as to claim that it's exactly the Necronomicon, but if you've ever wondered what the Necronomicon would contain, you can easily imagine this being dangerously close to it. I've sequestered myself safely within a circle of salt, I've cast the hallowed spell, and I'm reading through the Book of the Dead. Over the course of five posts, I'll review it chapter by chapter. This post covers the preface and chapter 1, "Prayers for the Living."
Well, I say a "preface" (singular) but actually there's a preface to that preface, so I mean "prefaces." The flavour preface is titled "A New Acquisition," and it's written by a fictional scholar who has discovered a set of scrolls by an ancient necromancer. This book ostensibly contains the contents of those scrolls.
The actual preface is (fictionally) written by Geb, and it sets up the perspective of the rest of the book. This is more important than you realise, and it's subtle messaging from Paizo that this book is written from a unique perspective. This isn't a 5e book with a bunch of "witty" quips from a character in a voice you barely recognise, it's a book written from the perspective of a specific NPC with useful sidebars from the Paizo authors.
Chapter 1 starts off by discussing the different kinds of undead you're likely to encounter out there in the fantasy world. It seems like it would be standard stuff, and I guess in a way it is. There are mummies, ghouls, zombies, vampires. They're the "consummate undead", the "hungry undead", and the "formless undead." Sometimes they're defined by what drives them (hunger, hatred, and so on), and other times by how they came to be undead (by choice, by intentional magic, by spiritual unrest, and so on.)
The one thing they all have in common is that they are undead because of negative energy. It's negative energy that causes an undead creature to persist beyond life. This is, of course, why channeling positive energy harms the undead and it's why holy water universally is an effective weapon against them. It's also why some regions of the world are prone to the rising dead. A place "polluted" by negative energy is obviously more likely to have its dead rise again in undeath, animated by negative energy, and driven by hatred for the living.
Most significantly, it's negative energy that compels the undead toward "a profound antipathy toward living creatures." In fact, the undead you meet that aren't actively malicious toward the living are only kind by force of will. They're achieving the near-impossible by resisting their own undead nature.
For many of us, half the fun of roleplaying games is the systematization of fiction. The few times I did connect with people socially as a child, it was through conversations about the hierarchy of popular fiction....
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Eox is the eighth celestial body from the sun in Golarion's solar system. Unlike the two previous entries, Eox is actually a planet. Admittedly, it's a dead planet, but it's at least in tact.
The inhabitants of Eox are mostly undead, and have been since Pathfinder times. How long ago is that? I have no idea, because there's the Gap that disrupts any understanding of the game world's timeline. I assume that this means Eox isn't a very technilogical society, or at least what tech they do have must have been developed or purchased in the few hundred years after the Gap. It's difficult to judge how far Eoxian society progressed from what we knew of it in the Paizo Distant Worlds source book, so it's up to the GM must theme the world.
Eox was featured heavily in one of the modules in the Dead Suns adventure path, luckily, so I felt pretty familiar with the world before reading this section. I do feel that I got some extra ideas about specific locations and factions, though, so like Castrovel I feel like this one does a good job of covering an entire planet while still managing to impart useful game information.
The Eoxians make up most of the population on Eox. Before Pathfinder's time, the planet suffered a cataclysm that wiped out the entire planet's ecosystem and population. However, the Eoxians saw it coming, so the bone sages (I'm not sure whether they were called bone sages then, but that's what they would become, anyway) transformed most everybody into undead.
Aside from Eoxians, there are some androids who live on the planet, which is possible because androids can survive without an atmosphere.
Between the material in Dead Suns and this section, there's plenty of data to work with when planning for an adventure on Eox.
The planet is a radioactive wasteland, and has been for a long time, so I doubt there's much of the old world left. I think you could argue that there are some undiscovered remnants underground or in the sides of cliffs or mountains, but canonically there's no suggestion of that.
Eox society is structured around self-contained regions, each ruled by a bone sage. How the bone sage rose to power varies. The Festrog Queen, bone sage of Karus, earned her city through politics. The Painted Lady, bone sage of the Necroforge, simply has a great industrial research complex and probably always (for all practical purposes) has. Tzurrtk, the bone sage and founder of Exantius, built a city. The Soulless One, of city Thanox, siezed power after the Gap because, I guess, the Gap caused there to be a power vacuum there. It's not at all clear how or why the Gap caused a power vacuum in...
]]>Recently updated for 5e, Spelljammer has been around a long time, and the D&D team used to release a lot of material during previous editions. One source for new adventures was Dungeon magazine, which contained adventure after adventure for various AD&D settings. In issue 36, published in 1992, there was a Spelljammer adventure called Sea of Sorrows. I have not run this adventure, but I've unearthed the issue in an attempt to find more Spelljammer material for an upcoming campaign. This post is my review of that module, and contains minor spoilers. Because I'm reviewing this content for use in 5e, I use 5e terminology ("Wildspace system" instead of "Crystal sphere", "Mercane" instead of "The Arcane", and so on.)
To over-simplify, Sea of Sorrows is Moby Dick in space. Player characters are hired to hunt and slay an evil radiant dragon called Blacklight.
The adventure starts on Refuge, which is a base on a moon by the same name in a Wildspace system near Realmspace. Refuge is run by the Mercane. They use the base to build and repair ships, and the moon is protected by a ring of 24 stone golems. These are actually giant mechs, operated by hired human spacers, and they act exactly like you'd expect a golem to act, hitting and grappling intruder vessels as needed. The Mercane themselves make themselves sparse on the base, with most outward activity being merchants and labourers of various races. Ed Greenwood wrote a gazetteer, of sorts, for Refuge in Dragon issue 159, so you can find out all about it if you want, but you don't need to know much for this particular adventure and in fact once the player characters leave Refuge it doesn't really come back into the story. I think it's just used as a starting point based on the assumption that player characters in a level 7-9 Spelljammer adventure are already Spelljamming, and therefore are likely to be somewhere out in space rather than in a specific Wildspace system.
There are rumours on Refuge about a ghost ship roaming the region, way out there in space. It's hard to tell whether it's just a tall tale used to scare landlubbers or whether it's actually happening. It's very possible that your players could suspect that it's the plot, depending on how you present the information.
As the player characters do whatever they do on Refuge (shop, eat, sleep, repair their ship), they're secretly observed by the base's highly telepathic and Psionic elven chief of secret police. No reason. He's the chief of police. It's what he does.
Later, when a badly damaged hammerhead ship is towed back to base and reports its two sister ships destroyed, everyone on Refuge is understandably upset. The player characters are summoned to the mansion of the Mercane mayor of Refuge.
The mayor reveals that the Mercane have lost several ships in a dangerous Wildspace system known as Pirtelspace. A story about a ghost ship has sprung up around thees...
]]>Years ago, Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) published a few "splatbooks" for 3rd Edition D&D, and one of these books was titled Undead (with Mike Mearls as a credited writer). I've been reading it lately, because I play Pathfinder and I love player options. This is my third post about the book, covering the chapter "Beyond the flesh."
I said that some of my favourite elements of Undead are the lore sections, the fiction belonging to who-knows-what-setting. The start of Chapter 3 starts out with more of that, under the guise of describing the worship of Death.
There's stellar material here about Gehenna, which in this setting is a kind of limbo plane where souls go for final judgement. A dead soul appears on the far side of the river Styx and must cross The Last Bridge to get into Gehenna. The trip is long and perilous, and usually takes about three weeks. Here's the brilliant part: if you can rescue that soul, either with a resurrection spell or by manually infiltrating the land of the dead and extracting the soul from its journey, then that person doesn't die. But if you miss that three week window, the person is dead forever.
I love this idea. I love that the metaphysical journey of a soul progressing into the land of the undead can be bound to a countdown timer for living player characters. Three weeks is a pretty long time, and it's hard to imagine a situation in which players wouldn't be able to find a solution to death within that time. However, I just like that there's a number. The limit itself adds anxiety, even if the limit is set so high so that it can't fail. Then again, maybe it can fail. What if the cleric doesn't have the material components required for the resurrection spell? What if the only cleric in the region with the powers of resurrection has gone missing and must be rescued? Suddenly that three week window that's impossible to miss really is a race to the finish line.
In addition to Gehenna lore, there's discussion of Lochai the Reaper, Shofayt the judge, Necury the Guide, Selina the Lady of Spirits, Demortus (lord of the undead), Gnawbone (king of ghouls), and Necronius (the vampire king). These are undead dieties, and each one has an alignment and a set of domains, so players can actually use them for a cleric build.
I've often said there's no such thing as too many spells, and I stand by that. There's a handful of new spells in this chapter, including Acid blood, Mass animation, Wall of bone, and more.
I like all of these spells, and as with so much in this book, some are great for players and others are great for NPCs.
There are a few pages of magic items, too. My technical favourite is Rod of corporeality, which causes incorporeal beings to suddently have the traits of...
]]>Today I had the chance to sit down with the Light of Xaryxis module included in the 5e Spelljammer boxed set. I enjoyed the Astral Adventurer's Guide, but I didn't love the old 2nd Edition module Skull and Crossbows, so I was eager to see what kind of precedence the 5e authors were setting for adventuring in fantasy space. This review contains minor spoilers.
The module is explicitly designed for 2-3 hour sessions, with the excpectation that the story can be completed within 12 sessions. That is exactly my kind of adventure. For me, a standard D&D session is 2 hours. I feel like anything longer encourages people to squander the time, but 2 hours means there's pressure to actually achieve something during the session. My regular gaming group plays for 2 hours, and any short term game I run is usually a 2 hour session. An adventure with exactly that pace in mind is perfect for me.
I also love clearly defined goals in my games. I know not everyone does, and some people love just hanging out in their RPG world, wandering aimlessly around, stumbling upon adventure. That's not my style either as a Dungeon Master or when running a player character. I want objectives, and I want a way to measure progress after each session, I think partly because there are too many modules out there yet to be played, so I want the comfort of knowing that the current adventure will end.
What I've described, and the way Light of Xaryxis is designed, is essentially league play. Light of Xaryxis could easily have been released as a series of Adventurer's League sessions. And like a typical league game, Light of Xaryxis is largely on rails.
Each session gives you exactly one objective.
You accomplish the objective.
Session over.
There's no allowance, at least as written, for wandering around the vastness of Wildspace or the Astral Sea, poking around for clues or unexpected solutions. At the start of the session, you learn (usually from an overly helpful NPC) what new NPC you have to go talk to so they can tell you the next NPC to go talk to. Each NPC you talk to gives you a mini-quest before they'll help you.
It gets pretty predictable after a few sessions. I think maybe one of the middle parts, the equivalent of Act 2 in the usual three-act structure, could have been a little more open with its objectives. There's a whole part (that's three chapters) of the storyline where you're told to find the wizard in the tower, who tells you to go find the vampirate captain with a fleet, who ends up not having a fleet so tells you to go to the Mercane merchant with lots of connections. I can't quite imagine putting my players through that. I think instead, I send them out into space to find a fleet, and depending on their own curiousity and theories, I'd let them either...
]]>My favourite Shadowrun Fifth Edition supplement is the Run Faster source book. I love it so much, in fact, that I almost believe it should be the "Player's Handbook" of Shadowrun, relegating the Core Rulebook to the game master. I say almost because the division isn't really that clean, but Run Faster is easily an essential general purpose source book, not only because it expands player options but because it makes character creation easier and, maybe, a little more fun.
Note that this post is for Shadowrun 5th Edition, even though at the time of this writing 6th Edition has been out for a few years. I haven't switched to 6th Edition, and I'm just writing for what I play (and more importantly, what people I invite to my games can use.)
Run Faster offers two new methods of building characters. One is just a variation of the standard Core Rulebook method, while the other is drastically different and takes up the bulk of the character generation chapter. This blog post covers the first, and I'll cover the second method in a later post.
The "Sum to Ten" build method is a variation on the standard build process. This method assigns number values to the A to E rows in the old familiar Priority table from page 65 of the Core Rulebook:
You have 10 points to spend, so choose wisely.
You can have 2 A priorities, but you use up 8 (4+4=8) of your points to get them. That means you have 2 more points to spend, so you get either 2 D priorities or 1 C priority, and the rest are E. Alternately, you can take 3 B priorities and 1 D priority (3+3+3+1=10)
Whatever combination you want, you can have, as long as it costs no more than 10 points.
The rest of the build process is the same as described in the Core Rulebook and in my posts on building magic users and building characters in Shadowrun.
A modified way to select build priorities is nice, but it doesn't appear until page 63. The 60+ pages prior to that are chock full of Shadowrun lore as it applies to your nascent character concept.
There's a section about ethics and codes, covering the ideals of White Hat Hackers, the Omerta code of silence, the path of the Samurai, Bushido, and many more. In the game system, these are all considered negative qualities because they're expressions of the Code of Honor quality from the Core Rulebook (page 79), so you get a reimbursement of Karma for taking a code.
There's a section about potential odd jobs in the Sixth World. This is one of those beautifully written little chapters that can inspire players and game...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
The Diaspora is an asteroid field between the planets Verces (and the generation ship Idari) and Eox. It's existed for a long time, but it wasn't always an asteroid field. From the Paizo Pathfinder publication Distant Worlds:
Azlanti scholars reference two more worlds: the Twins, Damiar and Iovo, orbiting at a point between Verces and Eox. Damiar and Iovo were close enough that the planets spun around each other in the course of their orbits, and their residents were likely the first sentient races in the system to achieve interplanetary communication and trade.
Pathfinder's playable timeline started well after the Lost Ones got supplanted by an asteroid field. Because this is Starfinder and I've become annoyed by The Gap, I may as well mention now that nobody remembers, even in Distant Worlds, what happened, and that's fine. No mysticism is required, there's no bright neon sign announcing a gap in the timeline. We're just told that history is unclear about what happened, and it seems perfectly natural. I quite appreciate that (although to be fair, it's less of a significant event in the sense that no Pathfinder adventure expects or cares whether the GM understands differences in architecture and technology of pre-Diaspora and post-Diaspora.)
Like in any good sci fi universe multiverse, this asteroid field isn't just an asteroid field.
It's well populated by NPCs and monsters alike.
The major NPC faction are the Free Captains, a group of space pirates that take advantage of the Diaspora for the free-for-all frontier that it is.
They maintain a base there, called Broken Rock, and it's presumably the Mos Eisley or Tortuga or Port Royal of space piracy.
There's also a smattering of several other factions.
The Diaspora is fertile ground to plant whatever you need, whether it's pirates, scientists, cults, monsters, treasure hunts, abandoned ships, shipwrecks, and so on.
There's no shortage of story seeds in this section.
There's an old Corpse Fleet outpost called Cairn. The book makes it seem like there's a big signpost out front advertising that it's an abandoned and possibly haunted munitions dump, but that everything of value was looted long ago. Personally, if I take my players to the Cairn, they're definitely going to find cool loot (but not after navigating their way through a few deadly traps).
There's a timeloop trap on EC-40, a comet that was a little too close do Damiar at the moment of the planet's destruction (or transcendence, or whatever happened.)
An old ysoki ship, the Farabarrium, now serves as a trade center.
The Forgotten King is an asteroid that looks like a 12-mile in diameter human skull. The interiour of the asteroid is inscribed with thousands of lines of poetry that have, so far, defied even magical translation....
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. The fourth adventure in the book is called "Pirate-wyrm."
Less an adventure than an encounter, this is a scenario designed to happen at any time during a larger campaign. The story, such as it is, involves a radiant dragon attacking the PC's ship. That's the story.
As with Flying colours, this kind of scenario is actually really useful for two reasons:
Should the PCs defeat but not kill their foe, there's a possibility that the dragon attempts to buy her life with promises of treasure from her lair. Her lair is in an asteroid, which I think could make for a really interesting exploration side quest. For instance, what if this lair was something that this dragon found but did not make, and there turns out to be a secret door into a dungeon delve?
For conversion purposes, it's important to know that there is no such thing as a radiant dragon in any official 5e material, not even Fizban's Treasury. I have a few thoughts on replacements.
The most obvious replacement is any dragon you please, with the special Unusual nature trait applied. This trait makes any terrestrial creature Wildspace-compatible.
You could alternately refer to Boo's Astral Menagerie for a creature. The fact that this dragon burrowed a lair into an asteroid and is clearly evil makes me think that a Lunar Dragon is a reasonable replacement. Lunar Dragons burrow through rock quickly, and they dwell in Wildspace, so it makes sense.
However, the Solar Dragon from Boo's Astral Menagerie is also a strong candidate. These are neutral-aligned dragons and they're immune to radiant damage, and dwell in Wildspace.
A young Lunar or Solar dragon is CR 7 or 8, and this encounter is proposed for levels 6-8, so that's spot on. The encounter takes place within an asteroid field (or at least the dragon can lead them into an asteroid field if they're giving chase) so there's potential for some very important manouever checks in order to avoid flying rock damage. Of course, Spelljammer 5e embarrassingly has no manouever mechanic for its ships (no, that's seriously true). In my ship combat rules, I impose manoeuver checks against a DC equal to a ship's beam. I have no idea how much a ship's beam influences manoeuverability in real life, but if I believe that ships can fly in outer space then I can believe that the ship's beam is the single most significant factor in how quickly it can dodge an asteroid....
]]>In my initial review of the D&D 5e version of Spelljammer, I praised the boxed set for everything but its DM screen. Since that review, there's been widespread disappointment in its sparse rules about ship combat and in the Hadozee race. Recently, I finally had the chance to sit down with the books to read them cover to cover, and to judge whether my initial excitement over the product was correct or premature. This post covers just the Astral Adventurer's Guide, and I'll cover the other two books in future posts.
Before delving into Spelljammer 5e, I want to describe how I view the 5e line of products as a whole. A few years ago, Wizards of the Coast sanctioned some online-only products called Plane Shift. There were a few of them, all by James Wyatt, and they took established settings from Magic the Gathering (MTG) and described how you might run a D&D adventure in those worlds. It was exciting mostly because it was an official cross-over of two games that many people loved equally. A typical Plane Shift booklet was "only" 40 pages, so it relied heavily on prior knowledge of the setting, which was fair because its primary audience was MTG fans who also played D&D.
I purchased Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica upon release, and it's one of my favourite 5e books and settings. However, it occurred to me that even though it was over 200 pages, it only contained about as much lore as one of the old Plane Shift booklets. There's so much more to Ravnica than the quick summary paragraphs provided in the single chapter about the Tenth District, but you wouldn't know any of it without reading the MTG stories, or buying some card sets and cleaning lore from the flavour text and art.
Personally, this is how I view the 5e product line in general. Every book released is a Plane Shift booklet summarizing a greater story. It's been this way from the start. The Adventurer's Guide to the Sword Coast is largely overlooked by most 5e fans, probably because it contains so little lore that it barely equips the DM to run a game in the Forgotten Realms. Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft similarly takes 30 domains of dread, formerly covered across several books back in 2nd and 3rd Editions, and reduces a few to 3 pages each and others to a single paragraph.
Each 5e setting book is a conversion guide.
And that's not necessarily a bad a thing.
There's a lot of great material about Spelljammer from ages past. You can still buy those books, through print-on-demand, from drivethrurpg.com. Frankly, I'd rather buy those books plus a 5e conversion guide than have to essentially re-purchase a bunch of books that I already owned since 2e or 3e.
The misstep, I think, is that the D&D authors don't point 5e readers to the historic books so they know where to...
]]>When the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide DMG came out back in 2014, I read it from cover to cover. I've decided to re-read the 5e DMG to re-discover anything I impatiently overlooked on my first read-through, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. In this post, I'm covering Chapter 5, "Adventure environments."
Something about the way 5e books are organised has never felt right to me. I list some specific complaints in my table reference for DMG post so I won't reiterate them here. However, I found a lot of new things to complain about in Chapter 5, and so I consider that fair game.
The start of Chapter 5 is about dungeons. I've been using the DMG for years, and I had no idea this section was here, because there's an entire Appendix A titled Random dungeons, which is what I use. I can't imagine what logic the editors of the DMG used to conclude that the location and purpose of a dungeon should appear in Chapter 5, but everything else about a dungeon should be put into Appendix A. It's just plain confusing, and to make matters worse there's no reference to one in the other. Appendix A doesn't start by telling you to flip back to Chapter 5, and Chapter 5 doesn't tell you to hurry over to Appendix A to continue building a dungeon. I'm sure I read the dungeon content in Chapter 5 when I first read through the DMG, but I definitely forgot that it existed, and it never occurred to me to look for it because in my mind, I thought I knew that the dungeon content was in Appendix A.
It's also confusing to me that molds and webs, the DCs to avoid them, and the penalties for failing, are hidden away in this chapter. Luckily, most references to these hazards actually do reference "Chapter 5 of the DMG," so I've never had trouble finding them when directed to the look them up. However, I can think of several times when I've thought to look up how a specific mold works, and find myself flipping around the Monster Manual and the traps section of the DMG in the vain hope of finding information that's tacked on at the end of a casual discussion of how dungeons are mapped.
Those are my complaints. They shouldn't take away from the value of this chapter, though, because the content, however poorly it's organised, is great.
I love mapping dungeons. I have a hardcover book of graph paper, and I've spent many a lazy afternoon drawing out dungeons, populating them with an odd assortment of traps and monsters, and building a little story around them. To me, that's the design part of being a Dungeon Master. I don't personally care about telling big epic campaign stories, but I love telling snapshot stories of dungeons and lairs and forgotten tombs.
The section on creating a dungeon has...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
Word on the street is that Thrush has commissioned a super computer to help them...be evil, I guess. Obviously UNCLE hears about this development, and decides that they need to destroy the computer, because in TV shows once you destroy a prototype it can never ever be reimplemented.
The exact function of the computer isn't entirely clear. Napoleon Solo explains it like this: "A mechanical brain with a memory bank that has every tidbit of knowledge Thrush will ever need against us. So if all Thrush has to do is push a little button to have their policiies copmuted and their battle tactics perfectly planned..." Waverly finishes: "Thrush will be nearly infallible."
I detect technobabble, and the common problem of TV writers not understanding the science part of the fiction they're delivering.
Anyway, the computer's a good enough MacGuffin, so Kuryakin and Solo launch a campaign to get Ilya imprisoned. Ilya is sent to the South American compound where the computer is being built (it's not entirely clear why the computer is being developed in or near a prison, but I think it's meant to convey generic totalitarianism), and Solo finds a human rights worker to team up with.
The story of this one isn't exactly stellar. It's not terrible, it's just not amazing. But as is often the case with Man from UNCLE, the guest stars and the character writing makes up for the rote spy story.
Charlie Buggles plays the elderly and verifiably creepy rich American who's decided to appoint himself the governor of the region. He's the venture capitalist funding the computer, he owns the prison, he finances the local police, and he walks around his mansion with two "nurses" who apparently monitor his health. He's the worst, and sadly he comes across as a pretty accurate portrayal of an overly wealthy narcissist who's desperately diversifying his investments in the worst possible causes. I can't imagine this show knew that it was being prescient with this character.
Roger Carmel, who any Star Trek (TOS) fan will recognise as Harry Mudd, is the corrupt police chief. He's a proper rogue, changing allegiances and hedging bets throughout the episode.
The human rights advocate is played by Judy Carne, and she teams up with Napoleon Solo by allowing him to pose as her newly wedded husband.
Her story arc is what you might expect from an average UNCLE storyline: She starts out mostly opposed to spy work, but eventually falls for Napoleon's irritable charms. Aside from that, though, she's an interesting character who'd been working hard to fight for the rights of prisoners before she got roped into helping UNCLE, and then continues to fight a noble cause with UNCLE.
The character's name is Salty Oliver. Salty Oliver, for crying out loud, and she lives up to her name. Ms. Oliver isn't, by any means, fearless. She's in over...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Idari is the fifth celestial body from the sun in the Golarian system. It's not a planet, but the generation ship that brought the Kasatha from their desert homeworld of Kasath. They were destined for Akiton, another desert planet. Due to monumentally poor project management, once they got to the system they were surprised to find that Akiton was already inhabited. After some good diplomacy rolls, the Pact Worlds managed to avert incursion by signing the ship up as a Pact World itself.
The population of the Idari is mostly Kasatha, and the interiour of the ship is largely designed to mimic the conditions of their homeworld. There are cities, industrial complexes, and parks (essential, I imagine, for oxygen production), but also stretches of desert. To help maintain the ship, they have imported androids (particularly good in places without atmosphere) and ysoki (particularly good in tight spaces).
There are a few good spots your players might find adventure on Idari. There's Delimar Gallery, an art gallery that basically is begging to have something stolen or counterfeited or fenced. There's the Hub Station 3, the space port that manages imports and exports, and is probably subject to its fair share of smuggling activity. Hydroponic towers is usually busy producing food for its population, and it sure would be a pity for something to happen to it. There's a monastery and a place called Paradise Village, and Outland Markets. Plenty of places to visit, people to meet, factions to clash with.
As I've noticed by now, the places that are small and confined tend to get stronger write-ups than the actual functioning planets. I feel like I could run a game on Idari today, even though I'd never given any thought to it before reading this section.
In a departure from science fantasy, the central cylinder of the Idari rotates to provide actual gravity. There's a transport tube running through the center of the ship, sort of a people-highway to help you get from one spot to another. This is especially helpful when you want to get from a city that's located several miles across your "sky". You go up an elevator, transition to zero gravity, get onto a different elevator, and end up on the ground that used to be over your head.
You have to think about it for a moment to grasp this. I was confused after reading it because it didn't occur to me that the tube itself (along with its elevator shafts that extend to the ground) also rotates. It's only because the tub is dead center that it lacks gravity. I imagine they must have a rail or plank, or something that doesn't spin, running through the tube to help people gain...
]]>In a previous post, I demonstrated how to do a quick D&D 5e character build with new players. The advantage to this idea is that you get a new player into the game within a quarter of an hour. They might not understand everything about the process, but a quick build gives them a taste of what's possible, and then gets them into the part that feels like a game. In the future, after falling in love with the game, a new player can read the rules, appreciate the character build process, and eventually recognize that "downtime" is just as much part of the game as sitting around the table with friends.
I use a similar technique when introducing people to Pathfinder, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pathfinder 2nd Edition makes it even easier to do a quick build.
Here's how I have new players create their first character.
The character build process is ABC: Ancestry, Background, and Class. In that order.
Start on page 23. It's got a chart with a one-sentence summary of each ancestry ("race" in old terminology), in case someone's never heard of an elf or isn't sure what a friendly goblin might be like. It also gives them a good overview of the classes. This establishes for the new player who they're going to be and what they're going to be doing in the game.
Here are the steps:
Ancestries start on page 34, and each ancestry has a side bar on the right side of the right page with the information you need for your character sheet. Say you want to play an elf. That's a pretty common ancestry for new players. According to the side bar, elves hav 6 hit points. That'll go up later, based on class, but for now jot down 6. Size is Medium, and speed is 30.
You don't have to roll for attribute scores in Pathfinder 2e. Instead, everything starts at 10, and then you get ability boosts and ability flaws as you build. Boosts are worth 2 points, and flaws are worth -2 points.
Elves, for example, get a boost to Dexterity and Intelligence, and a boost to any attribute of your choice. Their ability flaw is Constitution, so adjust the Constitution score from 10 to 8.
Elves also get low-light vision. Write that under Perception.
Each ancestry has a heritage option that grants a special feature. For example, the Arctic Elf grants cold resistance equal to half your level with a minimum of 1.
Next, choose a 1st level ancestry feat.
Backgrounds are listed on page 60. They're only a paragraph each, so choose one. A background provides an adjustment to your ability scores boost, and training in some skills. Adjust your ability scores, and then find the skills on the character sheet and fill in T for "trained." When you have training in a skill, you get a proficiency bonus of +2 to that skill....
]]>When the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide DMG came out back in 2014, I read it from cover to cover. I've decided to re-read the 5e DMG to re-discover anything I impatiently overlooked on my first read-through, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. In this post, I'm covering Chapter 3 and 4, "Creating adventures" and "Nonplayer characters."
There's a lot to be said for teaching by example, and that's largely what the previous chapters did. It explained the base assumptions of a D&D-compatible world, and then described, in detail, the extraplanar structure that's been established in the game so far. And they did this so that you can create your own version of such a world.
In the next two chapters, the focus isn't the world but the story. Amazingly, this chapter manages to be both a creative writing class and a wholly modular pre-written adventure. You could read this chapter with no knowledge of the D&D game or its fiction, and I truly believe you'd get as much out of it as you might from any book about creative writing. I'm not saying this is a complete guide to writing a novel, but it's for plot development it's brilliant, and Chapter 4 even has tips for developing characters insofar as it relates to NPCs and villains.
Better still, there's a roll table along with every invaluable lesson this book imparts, so you essentially get an interactive writing course. At the very least, you get a workbench to enable you to create your very own 5e adventure that mostly hits the same kinds of beats that 5e adventure books do.
On one hand, I feel like these chapters are entirely optional even within the context of the DMG. When I think of the DMG, I mostly think of a rules and loot reference. I don't think of writing tips. So even as I read Chapters 3 and 4, I had to fight the feeling that this was just "filler," something to pad out the book and make it seem more substantial.
I felt that way because for me, D&D has always been about stories. Long before I played the game properly, I read D&D novels. When I started playing, I played the modules. In my mind, D&D is a board game. The core rulebooks are the game, and the modules are the board. I don't actually have that much of an interest in building my own world and writing my own stories, in part because so many great adventure books already exist, and it's just as much fun for me as the DM to discover those stories as it is for me to slowly re-tell them to my players.
But I recognise that D&D for many people is the perfect platform for telling their own stories. It's immediate and yet iterative, it's got development time but happens live, it's original and yet collaborative. Some of the best stories I've heard...
]]>If you've ever played the Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun Dragonfall, or Shadowrun Hong Kong video games, then you may have developed an interest in the Sixth World.
Building an RPG character is complex. While Shadowrun's character build process is explained well in the 5th Edition Core Rulebook, there's a lot to filter out because there are so many possibilities. This post describes a linear build process for a Shadowrun character, and is designed to help new players.
If you don't have time to read this post right now, you can also view this article on Youtube.
Note that this post is for Shadowrun 5th Edition, even though at the time of this writing 6th Edition has been out for a few years. I haven't switched to 6th Edition, and I'm just writing for what I play (and more importantly, what people I invite to my games can use.)
The build process I describe in this post is intentionally restrictive. It's not meant to explain every detail, and it's not meant to open every possibility. It's meant to get you through character creation and ready for your first game.
Shadowrun isn't a class-based system. You build your character by selecting skills, and your character's "job" in the game is more or less determined by those skills. You do what you're good at.
Still, like a good heist movie, there are a few different roles typical for a group of shadowrunners working together:
Most of these are considered archetypes and pregenerated builds for these (and more) are on page 112. I sometimes look at these for ideas, and sometimes I just copy one over to a character sheet and start playing. However, I think there's value in distilling the Core Rulebook down in case for when you want to build your own, so grab your rulebook for reference and a blank character sheet.
Your "metatype" in Shadowrun is your species. Pick a metatype from the Metatype attribute table on page 66. On your character sheet, add the low number (before the slash) to its corresponding attribute. There are 8 attributes:
There are also two special attributes listed in the table:
Ignore the INI column. For now, leave the Initiative box on your character sheet blank.
Turn to the Priority table on page 65. This table is tricky at first, but it makes sense after you've used it a few times. The Priority table is a sliding scale for character your traits. For each column, you...
]]>When the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide DMG came out back in 2014, I read it from cover to cover. I've decided to re-read the 5e DMG, though, to re-discover anything I impatiently overlooked on my first read-through, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is titled "Creating a multiverse."
Did I say this chapter was called "Creating a multiverse"? What I meant was that it ought to be called "A Planescape Primer," and I mean that in the very best of ways. I'm a longtime Planescape fan, I think partly because among the many landmarks I've experienced in my long strange journey to playing D&D, it was a Planescape book that made me understand that this D&D thing was an actual game and not just a collection of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels. So when chapter 2 casually mentioned the Infinite Staircase, my heart skipped a beat as I had sudden flashbacks of temples of Selûne, Glabrezu, the mysterious Shavanistra, and so many more scenes of planes-hopping.
This chapter, of course, doesn't attempt to get anywhere near the original Planescape boxed set's coverage of the multitude of planes out there. It ultimately boils down to this, as simple as it may seem: There is no physical model for where planes exist, and all cosmologies are merely the creation of mortals in a feeble attempt to conceptualise the ineffable.
I feel like this chapter could do more to explicitly explain the relationship between planes and magic. It mentions Plane Shift and Astral Projection specifically a few times, but it's a complex subject that can generate a lot of confusion during a game, and I wish there were a single place in a 5e book (or any edition, for that matter) that spelt it out. Does Dimension Door cause you to cross into another plane? Does any spell that causes you to teleport cause you to travel through the Astral Plane, or do some use different methods?
Ultimately, questions about how extradimensional spaces and planes and plane shifts function is up to the Dungeon Master's understanding of fantasy quantum physics, and probably the simpler that understanding the better. That usually works well enough. But it does get tricky, especially when you start interacting with planes in the heat of battle or the tension of a dangerous dungeon crawl, and I think it would be nice if there was a section in the DMG to lay it all out in clear terms.
For me, one of the most fascinating things about planar travel has always been that certain planes impose a slightly different version of reality on players. In Planescape, going to a different plane often meant that you experienced a bonus or penalty to certain skills or magical abilities, based on the plane's alignment or general nature. The same goes for traveling to another setting, too. When a cleric from the Forgotten Realms visits Krynn, for instance, they lose their divine powers unless they...
]]>As players level up in an RPG, they expect increased challenge. They want bigger monsters that are harder to kill and that threaten to kill them first, faster.
The formula seems like it would be simple: As player characters level-up and gain hit points, you make the monsters deal more damage. In other words:
You may see the problem already. The player characters have ostensibly increased their power by leveling up, so they're ready to face greater threats. But how is a level 17 character more powerful than a level 1 character if both can be killed in the same number of hits? Flavour goes a long way, but when the dynamics of combat doesn't change, people eventually start to figure out that this "bigger" monster is actually the same level 1 monster but with bigger numbers.
What if you change the monster's damage from 50 to, say, 25? Now it would take the monster 5 hits to kill the level 17 character. But wait, that means a level 1 monster is actually more efficient than the level 17 monster. The scarier monster has to hit twice as much to kill a character, so actually the level 1 monster seems like it was the greater threat.
It's counterintuitive, but in game design levels only go so high. Not literally, of course numbers are indeed infinite, but there's a "ceiling," after which all high numbers are essentially the same.
Leveling up is more than handing out more numbers to players and monster stats. In fact, that's why the Challenge Rating (CR) system of D&D is so imprecise. If it were pure numbers, it would be relatively easy to design, as long as you allow for the randomness of dice.
There are a lot more to monsters than just damage, but I wonder whether it really comes across to players.
D&D has a tier structure, with player levels being divided into 4 tiers of 5. I think the key to creating a believable threat to resilience ratio isn't about the kind of damage a monster does, but instead everything else a montster can do. And I think monsters ought to be designed in a way that monster abilities are regimented, and increase according to player tier levels.
As a caveat: I haven't playtested or even designed any of this. These are just thoughts, half reverse-engineering what D&D already does, and half searching for structure behind how I plan adventures for my group.
Here's my idea for monster design over the course of a player character's career:
I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
It's interesting, for me, to see how TV handled two-part episodes throughout the years. This is the conclusion to a two-part episode, but instead of doing a "Previously on..." segment up front to catch the viewer up the plot, this episode starts almost as if this is a stand-alone episode. It opens with Waverly trying in vain to get ahold of Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuryakin. They aren't answering their radios, though, and he can't figure out why.
Cut to Solo bound to a stone slab, about to be cut in two, and Kuryakin suspended over a pit, about to plunge to his death.
Honestly, you almost don't even need to see the first episode. It's brilliantly done, and it demonstrates exactly the right relationship between a prequel and a sequel. I wish modern movies could manage their storylines this well. Interestingly, modern RPG modules do tend to manage their storylines this well. The D&D (or Pathfinder) adventures written by Paizo, especially, tend to be sold in 30 page booklets, and they're written such that the story is independent even if your first adventure is the third book in a series. It's a pretty easy trick. They just tell you the important stuff from past books, with the explanation that all of these important plot points have happened because "some other adventurers" did them.
Similarly, to understand this episode you need only know that Solo and Kuryakin have gotten themselves into a life or death situation again, and that they aim to bring the person who put them there to justice. The details are superfluous, and starting the story in media res works just as well whether there's a part 1 or not.
The first episode spent a lot of time establishing who Alexander was, but it didn't do much to explain what his actual plan was. In this episode, we learn that he actually does have a plan, and it's actually not a bad one. It doesn't exactly get him to world domination, but I guess it's a good first step. I'm probably going to steal it for my next D&D adventure plot.
Alexander is working with a military group in some eastern nation. To help them stage a coup, he's giving them the bioweapon he stole in part 1. They're going to go do the coup while Alexander goes to present a reward to their (soon to be ex) president, as he's visits the US. However, instead of presenting the reward, he's going to stab the president. On stage. In front of everyone. The catch is, this is going to happen in an embassy, which will be under the rule of the military group. Instead of persecuting him, they'll immediately laud him as a hero and a liberator.
I assume this is just one step in a larger plan, but you have to admit that it's pretty...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out the second AD&D Spelljammer module Skulls & Crossbows. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness. The third adventure in the book is called "Small package trade."
This adventure starts practically the same way the previous adventure did. Players are summoned to a tavern by an unfamiliar host, where they're hired for a space-faring quest. I think in my game, I'd just have the man hiring them (Torgan Betz) drive up in a boat alongside them as they're traveling back to the Rock of Bral from their first adventure, just to cut out the tedium of another tavern. Then again, if the players are cashing in the previous bounty, I guess maybe they'll want to be on Bral all the same.
However you manage introductions, Torgan Betz is a trader and he's been hired to get an art object from a collector to a buyer. He wants to outsource the job because he's too busy wheeling and dealing to actually do the work himself, but he does want to send along his trusted Giff associate to monitor the art object's safety. He pays well, he's got a reputation that suggests he can probably be trusted, and it's a pretty simple job. Why wouldn't the players accept it?
In the IT industry, we have the term of "white hat" and "black hat" hacking. The former hacks for the benefit of all, while the latter hacks in an attempt to destroy. "Gray hat" hackers are somewhere in the middle, which isn't a very exact description. Does "gray" in this context mean that you hack for good, even when sometimes that requires being destructive? Or doe "gray" mean that you hack for one or the other, depending on the pay or the cause?
Well, in Spelljammer there are "gray traders," which isn't a very specific description either. It's enough to tell you that they're not entirely bound by moral absolutes, though, and Torgan Betz is a gray trader.
I won't say any more than that, except that the adventure turns out to be a little more complicated than what Betz conveys to the player characters when hiring them. To some degree, the nature of the complications depend on what the players do. For instance, Betz tells the players not to open the package that he wants delivered, and his Giff associate is eager to enforce that. The buyer isn't exactly what Betz promised, either, so there are potential surprises there. Heck, even the Giff isn't exactly what you may think.
This is, on one hand, a straight-forward adventure. It's a delivery quest. But there's enough gray haze around it that players are likely to have questions, and they're equally as likely to take matters into their own hands eventually.
I do feel it's a little awkward that this adventure is outwardly...
]]>Building an RPG character is complex. While Shadowrun's character build process is explained well in the 5th Edition Core Rulebook, there's a lot to filter out because there are so many possibilities. This post describes a linear build process for a Shadowrun magic user character, and is designed to help new players.
If you don't have time to read this post right now, you can also view this article on Youtube.
Note that this post is for Shadowrun 5th Edition, even though at the time of this writing 6th Edition has been out for a few years. I haven't switched to 6th Edition, and I'm just writing for what I play (and more importantly, what people I invite to my games can use.)
The build process I describe in this post is intentionally restrictive. Some magic users only have access to specific kinds of spells, but this post demonstrates how to build a Magician, which is a general-purpose magic user. As a Magician, you have no restrictions on what form of magic you have access to.
This post is not meant to explain every detail about Shadowrun character creation or its magic system, and it's not meant to open every possibility. It's meant to get you through character creation and ready for your first game.
Shadowrun isn't a class-based system, but there are nevertheless general categories that characters usually fall into, especially when it comes to magic. In Shadowrun 5e, there are four different expressions of magic users:
Unlike my quick D&D and Pathfinder 2e builds, I don't have the Shadowrun build process down to 12-15 minutes. However, I think there's value in distilling the Core Rulebook down, so grab your rulebook for reference and a blank character sheet.
Your "metatype" in Shadowrun is your species. Pick a metatype from the Metatype attribute table on page 66. On your character sheet, add the low number (before the slash) to its corresponding attribute. There are 8 attributes:
There are also two special attributes listed in the table:
Ignore the INI column. For now, leave the Initiative box on your character sheet blank.
Turn to the Priority table on page 65. This table is tricky at first, but it makes sense after you've used it a few times. The Priority table is a sliding scale for your character traits. For each column, you choose one and only one cell from rows A to E.
For example, if you want to be really really rich,...
]]>As a hobbyist game designer, I have the distinct advantages of making lots of mistakes. Mistakes are great, because you learn from them, but as a bonus you learn to see the mistakes you made in other people's designs.
Lately, the mistake I've been hyper-focused on is the lack of tags in games. By "tags," I mean labels or metadata. Too often, games hand you a bunch of game pieces and expect you to understand how they fit into the imaginary game world. For instance, imagine I'm introducing you to a new game, and I give a card, telling you that it's only effective against Officials. I take my turn and throw a card down on the table, and it's a powerful-looking Steward card. Can your card combat mine?
It's an imaginary scenario in a game that doesn't exist, but you can imagine the answer might be no because the label "Steward" sounds pretty official. Then again, maybe "Steward" is just the card's faction, and this particular member of the Stewards is just a foot soldier. Obviously, an official requires an official title, such as Steward Captain. Worse yet, maybe you're just supposed to look at the art on the card. Obviously, an official wears a hat and has a badge.
How could you not have known that? Well, keep playing for a few years. It eventually becomes second nature.
I made exactly this mistake while designing a new card game. I'm keeping the game simple. It only has 12 distinct cards (repeated throughout the deck), and there's really only one mechanic. It's a rapid-fire game meant to be quick to learn and quick to play.
Playtests went well, and in fact they went so well that I thought of several interesting mods. However, I don't want to complicate the game, and besides I only have the 12 art pieces. I had the idea of designing an "expansion" set that would add in 8 new card types and one or two new mechanics. Players can choose to play just the base game, or to add in the other cards.
When I started designing the expansion, though, I realised that my ideas for new mechanics were hampered by the fact that I had no way of distinguishing any of my initial 12 cards from one another. According to the cards themselves, they were essentially all the same: they were each one a card. The only way to refer to one was by describing it. There wasn't even enough consistency in the art to make the artwork a defining factor.
I had to go back and add to the initial design to add metadata to the cards.
Metadata is important in games, because game assets are meant to represent things in a game world for which the players have no context. It may seem obvious to you that the knight-shaped meeple represents a knight and that a normal-looking meeple represents a peasant, but...
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out an old Spelljammer book for some adventuring material. The second Spelljammer adventure book to be released was Skulls & Crossbows. I'm reading through it as prep for an upcoming Spelljammer campaign, so I figured I'd give my thoughts about it over the span of a few posts. I'm looking at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness.
The first proper adventure in the book is, conveniently, the hunt for the first name on the list of wanted pirates that's been provided to the PCs in the introductory adventure. As I said in my previous post about this book, there is some flexibility in how you deliver the adventures. Particularly, you could spring Flying colours on your players before they have the letters of marque from Prince Andru. They're well within their rights to defend themselves against a marauding pirate, and you could have them learn of his notoriety at the end of the battle. When they bring his corpse in to collect a reward (or when someone on the Rock of Bral sees some signature item of loot they've taken off his body, or whatever), they could attract the attention of the Pragmatic Order of Thought representatives.
Whatever order you place the first few adventures, this one is first in the book, and it's pretty straight-forward and therefore pretty easy to run. There's an elf pirate, and he likes to attack ships and steal their cargo. He attacks the PC's ship, and so they must defend themselves.
That's the adventure.
It's short, simple. You might even argue it's not so much an adventure, but an ecounter. Which is exactly what the book advertises: adventures you can use to create a complete story, or as drop-in diversions.
But there's a metagame to this adventure, too. An early simple encounter like this one has the added benefit of establishing in-game tone and setting expectations. From this encounter, depending on how the DM delivers it, the players get to learn what a Spelljammer swashbuckler is like, how his crew interacts with him, what a common tactic of a pirate in the Astral sea might be, and so on. Sure, by now your players have probably already gotten familiar with the Astral sea through the Light of Xaryxis but this introduces them to the setting without an urgent threat directing their moves. They have all the time in the multiverse to find their bounties, so there are important cultural lessons to be learnt from this encounter, as well as from a few of the other early adventures in this book. Be ready to mix it up a little bit, to give your players just enough direction to prevent them from feeling like you've lost the plot, but enough freedom that their bounties don't just pop out of the æther as if they were each lined up waiting to be...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
This is a pretty strong opener for Season 2, and it's got a bunch of 1960s spy tropes. Season 2 is also in colour, which was surprising to me because I honestly don't remember any of the episodes I used to watch on Nick At Night (or whatever it was) being in colour. I guess they must have been, but my memory of the show is that it's black-and-white, and I nearly desaturated my display so I could watch the show without colour (it actually wouldn't have been uncommon for many TV viewers to have black-and-white sets all the way up until the early 80s). I might do that for a future episode, but I did watch this one and the next one in colour.
The villain is a guy played buy Rip Torn, who happens to have the surname of Alexander. He also happens to identify strongly with Alexander the Great, and he's somehow gotten it into his head that he needs to out-do his historical idol and actually conquer the world.
I love this as a premise, because it seems just silly enough to be completely realistic. Sure, some villains have big philosophical reasons for wanting to dominate civilization, and others just want to destroy it, but Alexander just needs to be Great.
The first step in his plan happened years before we know him.
He married into money.
To be fair, he's done a lot with that seed fund and is currently a successful money launderer business owner, but by the time we meet Alexander, his wife Tracey (Dorothy Provine) is in the process of divorcing him.
They must have had no prenuptials, because he's got the bulk of her money in his name and won't sign the divorce papers or give her any money.
This is awfully convenient for UNCLE, because they need a woman on the inside to help take down Alexander.
This is a true two-part episode and may as well have been a movie, but the adventure kicks off, deceptively, as the old tried-and-true UNCLE plot about a villain stealing a dangerous prototypical bioweapon. When it happened, I thought it we were in for another The Finny Foot Affair or The Strigas Affair or The Girls of Nazarone Affair. Nope, it's a fake out, and it works well. The theft that opens the episode gets Alexander on the UNCLE watchlist, and it serves as the driving force behind their investigation, but the chemical compound he steals is never used and it's not even Alexander's main plan. It's incidental, in fact, and for Alexander it's just sort of a personal challenge. He wanted to see whether he could steal from the US Army and, as it turns out, he can. Job done.
Another quirky thing about Alexander is that he's decided that ruling the world is too easy....
]]>With the release of Spelljammer for D&D 5th Edition, I decided to break out an old Spelljammer book for some adventuring material. The second Spelljammer adventure book to be released was Skulls & Crossbows, a collection of adventures that, in the style of Infinite Staircase or Ghosts of Saltmarsh, are connected loosely enough that they can be run as a campaign, one after another, or used individually as side quests or diversions.
I'm reading through it as prep for an upcoming Spelljammer campaign, so I figured I'd give my thoughts about it over the span of a few posts. I'm going to look at it particularly with quick conversion in mind, but also for story and general usefulness.
The adventures start at AD&D level 6, under the assumption that players will have played the first Spelljammer adventure (SJA1) already.
The first Spelljammer 5e adventure, Light of Xaryxis, starts at level 5 under the assumption that players have played an Phandelver or Icespire Peak.
So either way, you have to get your players up to speed with Spelljamming, and get them into Wildspace, preferably with a usable ship. How you get them there is up to you, whether you run the introductory AD&D adventure or any old 5e adventure that happens to end with players stumbling upon a ship and a Spelljammer helm, or else they get hired as part of a Spelljamming crew.
Then you can play Light of Xaryxis. End that adventure with players on the Rock of Bral to rest and recover.
And then you can pick up Skulls & Crossbows and run it. The gap between AD&D level 6 and 5e level 8 is pretty minor, so it's a pretty safe bet.
The introduction includes just a little bit of clarification about naval terminology, which is really helpful. I don't know much about ships, and so I enjoy the way Spelljammer books, both from 2e and 5e, sprinkle in little bits of terminology across several books. They never inundate you, and instead give you a new term here and there at a pace that makes it easy to retain the information.
The new terms for this book are bearing and heading.
Bearing indicates the location of an object external of your ship, and has nothing to do with movement. Using your own ship's bow as the 0° marker, you approximate the bearing of another ship by degrees. For example, "There's a ship, bearing 45°."
Heading indicates the path of an object. Again, using your own bow as a 0° marker, you estimate where an object is heading based on its destination. If a ship bearing 45° is moving toward you at that same angle, then it is heading 225° (0° is your bow, 180° is your stern, and 45° more is 225°.)
There are illustrations in the book that help make this even clearer, so you don't have to visualize it yourself.
It's a great little introduction to the...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
Every now and again, I see an episode of a TV show and think it would have made a really great little movie all its own, if only the obligatory trappings of the "host" TV show weren't hanging around. Sometimes that feeling is spot on, as was the case with Assignment Earth from Star Trek, which essentially was the failed pilot script shoehorned (requiring time travel, no less) Star Trek episode. I get the same feeling about this episode, and even if its script wasn't literally intended for something else, I think ultimately this is only accidentally a Man from UNCLE episode. What it actually wants to be is a bittersweet story of an aging spy diving back into espionage for one last great adventure. Napoleon and Ilya are along for the ride, although Napoleon gets dispatched pretty quickly and Ilya is just an accessory to one of the spies.
Albert Sully and Bryn Watson aren't exactly ex-spies, but they fought in the resistance in the war together. Now they're both past their prime (I guess; actually they look fine to me, but then again I've never been into the mythos of age), living boring lives apart as accountants or something. Conveniently, UNCLE needs somebody who knew a mysterious master of disguise called Ramón. Sully claims to have known Ramón, and Watson actually did know him, so they band together one last time to help UNCLE mess with an evil organization.
Ramón died in a mid-air plane accident, so Sully has to not only act like a man he never actually met, but also convince people that he didn't die and has, as a master of disguise, changed his face yet again. As usual, UNCLE spends no time or money in training or rehearsing, and so Sully's cover is blown almost immediately. Solo and Kuryakin manage to detain the people who catch on to the act, though, and Sully and Watson continue to the super secret villain meeting. On the way, Solo gets shot ('tis but a flesh wound, of course, but just bad enough to get him out of the picture), and Ilya tags along so we don't forget what show we're watching.
Sully does his job, Watson gets into trouble, Ilya pops in every now and again to do secret spy stuff. In the end, the main villain accidentally kills himself with a trap intended for Sully. It's honestly pretty brilliant, and very satisfying to witness. It's such a simple and elegant way to resolve the story, and I love that UNCLE's attempt to counter an evil plot actually just works with no last minute surprises. Well, there is a surprise, but it's that it works, and is it ever satisfying.
In the end, Sully decides to continue his crimefighting career as Ramón, bizarrely without Watson. I think that's supposed to be the bittersweet part, but I didn't...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Verces is the fifth planet from the sun in the Golarian system, and it's tidelocked. I didn't know what tidelocked meant, but I guess it means that, like the Earth's moon, Verces doesn't spin on an axis. One half of the planet is permanently day, and the other half is eternally night. What an amazing and weird concept for an inhabited world. But wait, it gets weirder.
The only habitable portion of Verces, due to the extreme conditions on ⅞s of the planet, is the ring around the middle where day and night meet. It's a planet, so that area is pretty big, of course, but that's all the inhabitants of Verces has to work with.
Verce is home to the verthani, 8-foot humanoids with black eyes and skin that can change colour. Common aliens on the planet include the kasatha and sherrin, both of which are core Starfinder races.
Cybernetic enhancement is a hot topic on Verce. Some cultures are really really into it (for some, it's even a religious ritual to go out and get your limbs destroyed by frostbite and then to be wired up to ships as a limbless pilot), and others are vehemently against it. This is the cause of some friction, but overall the planet is considered internally a peaceful one.
There are a number of useful locations described on Verces.
Camshaft is a Mad Max or Rage style junk town, the destination for scavengers of the Dustlands (the sunny scorched wasteland half of Verces). Five different (unnamed, sadly) factions run the town, and frequently compete for the ancient tech buried in the wastelands. Easy adventuring material, obviously.
The Cruori Caves are rumoured to hold blood-drinking beasts (called bloodbrothers, apparently, but the book provides no explanation of what those are, so I assume they're in the Alien Archive), and so they're quarantined. Again, an easy destination for adventure, and probably any dungeon every created could easily be adapted to work here.
Mafentra is home to barbarian Ysbo Clans, who ride around on eshars (big sand serpents) and raid stuff. There's a graveyard in the region, so arguably there could be proper tombs, so the players could raid the raiders.
And finally, the Skydock is a space station that's tethered to the surface. "Space elevators" regularly travel between the planet's surface up to the station. Not much detail's given on the station itself, but it's a quarter of a million inhabitants, so it's not small, and it pre-dates the Gap. Unfortunately, the Gap is such an ill-defined story element that calling Skydock "ancient tech" could mean pretty much anything, so you have to decide what exactly Skydock looks like.
I happen to know from Paizo's Distant Worlds Pathfinder source book that Skydock existed "way back" in...
]]>When the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide DMG came out back in 2014, I read it from cover to cover. I knew I'd be running games, so I needed to know about the rules of the world. That is, of course, what the DMG is. It contains the rules for things that aren't the player characters themselves, but that inherently effect player characters. I was a little underwhelmed when I first read through the book. I was there for useful tables, secret magic items, and those are the sections I use today, but my memory of the rest of the book is section after section of advice on how to build a D&D-compliant world and design adventures. I've decided to re-read the 5e DMG, though, to re-discover anything I impatiently overlooked on my first read-through, and I'm going to review it chapter by chapter.
It identifies the actual purpose of the book early:
This book, the Player's Handbook, and the Monster Manual present the default assumptions for how the worlds of D&D work.
Yes, this is a book that "reverse engineers" how a D&D setting is built.
The first chapter covers gods, settlements, magic, calendar systems, currency, and finally the campaign. It's full of context for existing adventures, and even more ideas for creating your own.
What stands out the most for me are the details. There are so many minor details you might throw in to your game world that you may not have thought about otherwise. For instance, I almost always refer to gold pieces as gold pieces. Who doesn't? Well, how easy is it to acclimate your players to terminology like "nobles" for gold pieces and "ravens" for silver? You don't even have to tell players what it means. They'll catch on when an NPC says "I'll give you 50 nobles to go fetch the MacGuffin" and then hands them a bag of 50 gold pieces. It's trivially easy immersion. And this chapter is full of little tricks and tips like that.
There are a few tables hidden away in the chapter, including a really nice Starting equipment table you'll never find when you need it.
This section of the DMG hints, I think, at the way the 5e designers thought the game would work. For instance, there's a section on Factions, and as I read it, I had the smallest notion that Factions maybe were expected to be integrated into forthcoming adventures more than maybe they were in the end. This is all speculation, but in the early adventure Princes of the Apocalypse, Factions are mentioned a lot, and several NPCs in the town of Red Larch are identified by the factions they belong to. I haven't read all the 5e adventures (yet!) but I don't see (or at least, I don't recall) that emphasis on factions in, for instance, Out of the Abyss or Tomb of Annihilation.
Pathfinder has used factions since its beginning. In...
]]>I mentioned in my first look at Spelljammer that ship combat appears to largely be missing from the Astral Adventurer's Guide. I've fixed that with some custom rules, adapted from my well-worn Starfinder ship combat ruleset.
I didn't have high hopes for ship combat rules, honestly, because I've played Starfinder and I've read Of Ships and Seas from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Ship combat in a tabletop RPG is hard. Actually, it's not just hard, it goes against everything a tabletop RPG is about. People play an RPG to roleplay an individual character. Putting lots of characters into a boat removes autonomy. Instead of roleplaying one character, the player now has to coordinate with other characters in an attempt to keep an imaginary machine running. It can work (as it does in Starfinder) but at best it's boring for some and at worst frustrating for all.
But I've played a lot of Starfinder, and over the years I've developed rules for simplified starship combat. I've used these rules in my games, and I've never gotten complaints about ship combat. The same can't be said of the rules as written in the Core Rulebook, which invariably cause players to consider leaving the game at the threat of every having to do ship combat every again.
Spelljammer's Astral Adevnturer's Guide strongly implies that ship combat is not something you should do:
Personally, I'd have written into Spelljammer that due to whatever fantasy space law, ranged attacks receive a boost within Wildspace. Maybe it's the air envelopes, or the magical influence of a Spelljammer helm, or just the unpredictability of Wildspace, but somehow ranged attacks use line-of-sight instead of feet. I'm sure that rule could be abused, so I guess you could constrain it with something: Ranged attacks are line-of-sight unless an object's air envelope is greater than 180 feet, or whatever.
In Starfinder, that's how I use magic in ship combat. If you see it on a ship screen, then you can cast magic on...
]]>I picked up a copy of Spelljammer, the latest release from Wizards of the Coast, and I've spent the past couple of days reading over the three books in the boxed set. This is a quick cursory review of the new setting.
When Spelljammer was first announced, I was excited about it. I've already played Planescape in 5e, including some adventures from the AD&D Infinite Staircase adventure book, but I was eager to see an "official" version of traveling the multiverse. I really wanted Planescape (which conveniently was recently announced), but I was happy to settle for Spelljammer. I pre-ordered the Spelljammer boxed set, dusted off a few old Spelljammer modules, and prepared myself for a game set in space.
And then Wizards released Spelljammer Academy, a series of level 1 to 4 modules designed to introduce players to Spelljamming. And I have to admit, I hated it. It's not Wizard's fault, really, but I have a strong aversion to any fiction having to do with school, academics, academies, and so on. Upgrade that to a violent aversion to anything quasi-military. I find the school trope uninteresting, I don't love institutional structure in real life, and in the context of Spelljamming it just seems a little too convenient. I can believe in magic and a multiverse of gods, but I just cannot bring myself to believe there would be an academy dedicated to Spelljamming. Spelljamming should be, at least in my opinion, surprising. It should be something players discover, not something they sign up for and take classes in.
I disliked the introductory adventure so much, in fact, that I cancelled my pre-order under the assumption that the material would be a continuation of this module.
Lucky for me, my "local" game store (hours away, as I live in a small town) didn't process my cancellation before they processed my order. The book arrived on my doorstep the day after I tried cancelling the order, and so I colloquially chalked it up to fate that I should have the books and started reading. I was pleased to find that Spelljammer doesn't mention the introductory adventure at all, and in fact suggests either Phandelver or Icespire Peak (the adventures from the beginner boxes) as material to get players from level 1 to level 4 or 5 to start the Light of Xaryxis Spelljammer adventure.
Cutting to the chase: Spelljammer 5e preserves all the good parts of AD&D Spelljammer. Even in what it omits it betrays none of the original spirit of the setting, where the "original setting" was:
The 5e version drops technical complications. For instance, the wizard piloting the spelljamming ship isn't otherwise incapacitated. If you're the party's wizard and you find a ship with a spelljamming helm, you can operate the ship but still cast spells and play your character...
]]>I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
In my initial read of the Aballon section, I expressed some dismay with the lack of explicit descriptions of the races, cities, and culture of Aballon. I stand by that. I think not just a few of the sections in Pact Worlds could have clearer details. Chapter 12 of the Core Rulebook provides an overview of each planet in the Golarian system, so it's fair to expect the Pact Worlds book to give a few solid facts about what you can expect to find on each one.
The reason I want hard facts isn't because I need somebody else to dictate to me what the Starfinder universe is like, it's because I want consistency in the world. I want to make sure that when players go back to a location, it still has the same obvious features it had the first time they visited the place.
In an RPG, places need things. Otherwise, there's no point to ever go to a place. If there aren't things to look at on Aballon or Aballon, then players may as well just stay home and explore their own kitchen pantry on Absalom Station.
This is the general flow of exploration in an RPG:
Absalom Station has Fardock, Swordlight Cathedral, Lorespire, the Starstone, and a bunch of other things to look at. Castrovel has ancient temples with lore about the 12 suns, and ruins, and old-world munition dumps and really big dinosaurs. The Burning Archipelago has temples and factions and secret artefacts.
It's important, and for me it's a big part of the value of a source book.
Then again, a source book is also about themes and story ideas. Magic: The Gathering has one major theme per plane: Innistrad is gothic horror world, Zendikar is Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones world, Amonkhet is ancient Egypt world, and so on.
Looking at Starfinder planets as Magic planes, I realised that Aballon was wild west world.
Given what the source book provides on Aballon, I'm extrapolating that it's a Factorio or OpenTTD. Highly automated, highly mechanised. But it's not devoid of personality, so there's a hint of Portal there, too.
Should you venture into the cities of the First Ones, though, you step into Machinarium world (with varying levels of clutter, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing.)
I think the dangerous thing about playing on Aballon is the threat of its inhabitants being...
]]>Building a character in Shadowrun is a lot of fun. It's not quite the roller coaster that Traveler or Dead Earth are (for instance, you can't die during character creation in Shadowrun), but it's a detailed system in which you map out your character's life and education prior to running the shadows.
Shadowrun is a skill-based system, though, so unlike D&D it has no class system, no quick template to apply based on your character's anticipated role in the game. Every player character in Shadowrun starts out with nothing aside from maybe a few traits specific to their species (their "metatype"). It's up to you to configure their attributes, choose their skills and qualities to formulate their character. It can, to be honest, be a little overwhelming at first.
You can spend hours poring over the character build section of Shadowrun 5th Edition, and you might end up assembling something that makes sense, or you might end up with a smattering of skills and qualities that feel like they've been taken out of a lucky dip. There are lots of choices, and nobody wants to be a jack-of-all-trades. You want your RPG character to be very good at something.
I used to look online for pregenerated characters (pregen) so I could hand them out to my new players. I got mixed results with this tactic, though, and as it turns out the Shadowrun rulebook already provides pregens. I'd overlooked them for years, or more likely I saw them early on and then forgot they were there. The pregenerated characters in the rulebook are called archetypes, indicating that the builds followed several of the common build paths that have emerged over the years, such as tank, street samurai, street shaman, combat mage, face, decker, and so on.
The archetypes start on page 112. It's up to you to transcribe the stat block onto a character sheet (or you can just read off the stat block, I guess.)
The archetypes are useful in a pinch, especially provided that you already understand the Shadowrun system. For those unfamiliar with the system, I find pregenerated characters can be confusing because there's no context for what the values mean, or how good or bad they are. So when you use archetypes, be sure to read them over in advance, read up on the skills and spells, and be ready to explain the fine details to the player.
For that very reason, it's also best to start out simple. If you're bringing an archetype build for just one new player, offer just two choices: one fighter, one magician. This way, you only have to read and remember two builds. If you're bringing archetypes for the whole table, only offer one more build than required. The person last to choose still gets a choice of what to play, but a limited choice.
It's also important to understand that Shadowrun character building is something...
]]>I'm rewatching every episode of the Man from UNCLE series from start to finish. This review may contain spoilers.
This episode features an intriguing crime sydicate consisting entirely of women, most notably a race car driver named Nazarone. They are, predictably, as beautiful as they are deadly. And they really are deadly. At times, brutal even.
This episode has several twists and turns before you figure out what it's all about. By the time you witness the girl gang gunning down one of their own members, you're thoroughly confused. You pick up the plot about half way through, though.
Generally speaking, this episode falls into the category of UNCLE against a prototype high-risk secret weapon, a little like the aging gas in The Finny Foot Affair or The Strigas Affair. There's a really bad prototypical weapon, and it's fallen into the hands of a moderately ineffective criminal organization, so UNCLE must recover it.
The final twist is that this isn't a dangerous weapon, but a miracle drug that actually saves lives. The problem is, this gang is using it to save the wrong lives, and that concerns UNCLE.
This one didn't hold my attention, for some reason. The plot is a little too linear, maybe. There's an investigation, but everything works out pretty quickly so that UNCLE can fight the bad guys head on. Unfortunately, the fight isn't all that exciting, and the baddies aren't all that interesting.
I did appreciate that in the end, the prototypical miracle substance that would change the entire world of the show is proven to be, ultimately, ineffective.
Not a bad episode, but not one that stood out as anything special.
Lead image by Anthony DELANOIX under the terms of the Unsplash License. Modified by Seth in Inkscape.
I've been reading through the Starfinder source book, Pact Worlds. It's a small book, but fits a lot of information into it, so I'm going to post about sections as I finish them.
Akiton is the fourth planet planet from the Sun in the Golarian solar system, and I have vague memories of it appearing in one of the modules of the Dead Suns adventure path.
Upon my initial read of this section, I felt like the authors had returned to the lacklustre presentation style they'd used for Aballon. There isn't a whole lot of detail in this section, and you're left mostly with a vague impression of the planet. Akiton is basically post-colonial Mars. Outside the cities, it's either desert or ice wastelands. The only concept of what kind of city to expect is from the painting at the start of the section. The rest of the section gives generic descriptions to go along with city names.
I think what I'm missing from the Aballon and Akiton type of sections are significant landmarks. There's a world of difference (so to speak) between Absalom Station and the tales of the Starstone, the arch of the Fardock, and the Swordlight Cathedral and Akiton's list of cities. Imagine a travel agent offering tours of a country by just listing cities with no specific sight-seeing destinations.
However, admitting that Castrovel probably only felt as well developed as it did because I'd already been there in an adventure, I tried searching for the Magic: The Gathering style impression that Akiton was trying to convey. Admittedly, a lot of it reads a lot like the authors were just saying the same thing over and over:
I get it. It's a windy dirt planet.
Then it I started seeing the puzzle pieces.
Akiton is the wild, weird west. Take all of your science fiction cowboy fantasies, and set them on Akiton.
A dusty "western" town with a vibrant nightlife? Maro is New Vegas.
Bounty is Vault 22 from Fallout: New Vegas or the greenhouse level from Wasteland.
A series of abandoned old mining towns? The Company Towns are ghost towns. Delve into mines for an instant dungeon crawl with ancient loot.
This is western world, plain and simple, and that's good enough for me.
Header photo by Seth Kenlon, Creative Commons cc0.