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God Of Paradise posted:Yeah, I learned everything I know about D&D from this Jack Chick comic. You know someone got the film rights to that and is trying to make it into a movie, should be hilarious.
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Apr 29, 2013 03:45
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robziel posted:You know someone got the film rights to that and is trying to make it into a movie, should be hilarious. Awesome. Jack T. Chick comics should become a regular animated series. There's one where a teenage girl gets raped violently, and becomes pregnant. She aborts the baby. Later the doctor tells her she has AIDS. The last panel shows her in hell, for getting an abortion.
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Apr 29, 2013 03:52
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Winson_Paine posted:There is nothing really wrong with adversarial GMing as such if it is what all the players are into. Sometimes a game where you can get killed or whatever at any time if you don't watch out can be kind of fun. The thing is, everyone has to buy into that or somebody is not going to have fun and maybe most importantly the GM who is in the real position of trust there has to not loving cheat to get his drat way. If you are playing a game like that, everyone has to be playing the same game or it is just an exercise in dickish wankery. I took my dudes through Tomb of Horrors the other night. Two characters each, from the list at the back. A smattering of backstory (I printed out mission scrolls to encourage a little backstabbing) and badges for 'first to die', 'first to fall in a pit', 'first treasure collected' and so on. It was, no lie, hilariously good fun. It's actually a much cleverer piece of work than the relentless meat grinder it's normally depicted as. My favourite bit was the guy who jumped through the portal, came out in the oubliette, activated the trapdoor below him, fell down the 100' pit, survived, then died when the next person came through and fell on top of him 20 minutes later. They made it through to the fake lich and retreated in disarray, having only lost three characters. It was the first time I'd played 1e since 1985, and it's interesting how systemless the whole thing was. Stats were largely irrelevant, there was very little combat, it was all 'what do you do next?' sebmojo fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Apr 29, 2013 |
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Apr 29, 2013 05:13
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The Order of Magnitude vs The Vampire, pt 2 So, the rest of the Order decides that they'll take the time to heal Magnus enough for him to repair himself and tell them what the heck he's been doing. Learning that their target is a vampire causes the Order to revise a lot of their assumptions and strategies: stakes are sharpened, garlic is prepared...unfortunately there's not a single silver weapon among the entire team so Magnus decides to start working on a few vials of silversheen as well as some anti-undead scrolls. The Order is now just a day or so behind Lucan, who in turn is just a couple of days from the capital of the gnomish nation of Zilargo (part of the Order's intelligence about Lucan indicates that this city is Lucan's goal and a name: "Krell"). Needless to say the Order makes sure that they'll catch up with Lucan while it is still light out. They catch sight of the carriage and begin gaining on it, Lucan's sister notices them and gets spooked enough to start shooting at them. The Order fires back and manages to break one of the wagon's wheels, bringing it to a halt. At this point it's bright daylight, Lucan is trapped in his carriage and his sister is badly outnumbered...it seems like the adventure might end before it begins. Grilsha (Lucan's sister), hits several of them with a lightning bolt before they close the distance and then panics and turns herself invisible and begins casting defensive spells like Fly. In a desperate bid to defeat his pursuers and save his sister Lucan bursts out of the carriage, tearing into Nolan and Glorin but almost immediately igniting. However, he's still a combat machine so the Order basically can't touch him. Grilsha uses a wand of darkness to drop a globe of shadow on Lucan, who then turns into a bat and the two fly off...just barely escaping. At this point they've left the road, but the Order knows where they're going. They destroy the carriage and bring the horses with them to Zilargo's capital where they begin trying to figure out who or what "Krell" refers to. They eventually learn that the Aundarian ambassador is a human named Neya ir'Krell and that she's hosting a masquerade ball the next evening. With a bit of bribery and finagling Jack manages to acquire a ticket to the ball and takes Shara as his "plus one". Nolan (who is an accomplished cook) gets some of the embassy's staff drunk and manages to get a job as a waiter for the party (and begins liberally spiking the food with garlic). Glorin and Magnus meanwhile are stuck as the drivers of a rented coach for Jack and Shara. So, the party begins and it's not long before the PCs at the ball spot Lucan and Grilsha. Jack takes the opportunity to dance and flirt anonymously with Grilsha while Lucan approaches the ambassador. Shara spies on the two and sees the ambassador slip something into Lucan's pocket. She slips past and successfully picks his pocket, finding that she has given him traveling papers for airship transport from Zilargo to Karnath. The dance ends and Lucan and Grilsha continue to mingle briefly. Unknown to the PCs Neya ir'Krell has become suspicious of Lucan from her close contact with him...something doesn't seem right. She alerts several hidden agents (disguised as servers) to be ready to take Lucan out and then approaches him for another dance, casting Charm Person...only to have it fail due to Lucan's vampiric nature. This pisses off Lucan who uses his Glove of Storage to call the magic sword and attacks. The party grinds to a halt and guests begin panicking. Nolan manages to keep the ambassador from being immediately carved up by tossing a garlic-laced crabcake into Lucan's mouth. Nolan then takes the opportunity to knock Grilsha unconscious and drag her into an adjoining hallway...Jack realizes that almost none of his spells wouldn't cause massive collateral damage...and Shara doesn't have a weapon. Fortunately, the ambassador's ninja-waiters spring into action and surround Lucan. They haven't got a snowball's chance against an angry vampire but they manage to delay him a bit. Glorin and Magnus hear the sound of battle from inside and both charge into the building, taking advantage of the confusion, and engage Lucan. Nolan meanwhile decides to basically make off with Grilsha, hoping to use her as a hostage to keep Lucan from leaving. Glorin and Magnus are attempting to hurt Lucan but their weapons are nearly useless and any damage they do is recovered by Lucan's vampiric healing. However, gnomish guards are starting to arrive and the sword decides that retreat is in order. Lucan is surrounded by foes so he simply leaps from the floor to the ceiling and spider climbs out of a window...disappearing into the night. By this time the ambassador has noticed that Glorin, Magnus, Jack and Shara all seem to know each other and Lucan, so she has them detained and begins to question them, hoping to find out what's up. Remembering that they're on what's supposed to be a secret mission for the Brelish crown they initially try and bluff her, claiming to be vampire hunters on Lucan's trail. However, their lack of any sort of preparation for (or even knowledge of) a vampire's strengthes and weaknesses becomes quickly apparent. They stumble a bit and all but reveal everything. Eventually Jack manages an impressive diplomacy roll and the ambassador, mostly out of pity, decides to let them go and even gives them a book on vampire hunting she happens to own. She also tells them that Lucan was catching an airship scheduled to leave before dawn the next day. Nolan meanwhile has run off into the night with Grilsha wrapped in a carpet and decides the very best thing to do would be to go "ghost". Rather than meet at the Order's room at a nearby inn he hurries across town and purchases a room at a completely different establishment. he proceeds to strip Grilsha of anything vaguely magical looking, binding, gagging and blindfolding her. He figures that Lucan won't leave without his sister and the rest of the Order should be able to find Lucan in the meantime and get in touch with him when they need him. He turns out to be hilarious wrong on both counts. To be continued...
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Apr 29, 2013 06:35
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The Order of Magnitude is one of the best party names I've ever heard. I can't help but hope someone's a Community fan and uses "Pop! Pop!" as a battle cry, though.
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Apr 29, 2013 06:52
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In which a player lampoons religiosity in my WFRP game: ME (the GM, as an NPC dirt-farmer): "Our children are missing, good priest. We think the skaven are behind it. You must help us." My Buddy as Jonas, the WARRIOR PRIEST OF ULRIC THE WOLF GOD, head of a small chapel in the predominately Sigmarite town: (in a booming, mocking voice) "WHERE IS YOUR SIGMAR NOW?!" ME: Uh, this dude is actually one of your faithful, he's in the chapel every Ulric-day, puts up Wolfskins for Ulricmas. My buddy, whithout missing a beat: "Ulric has a plan. His ways are mysterious."
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Apr 29, 2013 18:44
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Echophonic posted:The Order of Magnitude is one of the best party names I've ever heard. Seconding this. Content: I've been running a Rolemaster campaign for two of my friends based on the City State of the Invicible Overlord and the City State of the World Emperor from Judge's Guild. The sourcebooks are pretty hilarious and random with things like Trolls running gambling tables in taverns run by Lawful Good fighters, etc so we play it fast and loose and with tongue embedded firmly in cheek. During one adventure the players are retrieving a MacGuffin for A Guy which takes them into the Seedy Underworld and they end up slaying the Wererat who had usurped control of the Sanitation Guild (the Urban Decay adventure from Dungeon Magazine) in an attempt to bring about a new age of vermin. Instead of finishing the adventure and moving on, the players glom onto the idea of taking over the now leaderless guild and running it. So now that my fledgling high-sorcery campaign has taken a very curious tilt, I go with it and the players are now literally cleaning up the town. While their stated goal is to overthrow the Invincible Overlord, they plan to do it as members of a healthy and vibrant Department of Sanitation. (So help me, they are looking for a tailor to outfit them all with orange vests with a Sanitation Logo embroidered on the back.) Their next adventure takes them into a murderhobo spree in an old manor house that is the base of an upcoming thieves guild, and walking out of it at dawn, battered and cut, bearing two unconscious prisoners they are challenged by a passing patrol of city watch. Instead of trying to flee from them somehow, the players flag them down and turn over the prisoners. "What are you people, some kind of vigilantes?" asks one of the guards. "Nope," a player replies. "We're sanitation workers." I about died laughing. What can you do? The archmage wants to be a streetsweeper. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Apr 29, 2013 |
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Apr 29, 2013 21:55
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Did someone say they were taking out the trash?
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Apr 29, 2013 22:26
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Agrikk posted:Seconding this. This. This is why I roleplay. In our early days playing Rolemaster we came back from some adventure or other and set up a pub, using the enchantment rules and the Mage's 'chill liquid' spell to invent a beer cooler. Though our favourite scene has to be the bit where we turned someone to stone then talked our way into a castle pretending to be statue salesmen. Edit: Hey, Rolemaster too! Way underrated game, particularly skills and combat.
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Apr 30, 2013 01:35
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sebmojo posted:Edit: Hey, Rolemaster too! Way underrated game, particularly skills and combat. Rolemaster was my first fantasy game system after I'd been playing D&D for maybe ten years. The development point system for the plethora of skills and the versatile spell system was like night and day after the regidity of AD&D. Finally you could build a cleric that wasn't just a walking first aid kit,  and could actually be differentiated based on his gods and personality and could be a living, breathing personality. Maybe it was timing or something, but for the first time our characters started developing backgrounds that mattered and that influenced how a character was played and the skills and spells he picked up. My favorite character out of that period was a Runemaster who had a thing for fine wines, and had a bunch of skills (Flora lore, craft - winemaking, agriculture) and spells (cold ball, spell mastery) picked so he could concoct a magical eiswein by casing cold spells onto his vineyard. Completely pointless and impossible to do in the original AD&D (spend proficiency slots on winemaking? My specialization plusses!) but really fun to do in Rolemaster. edit: and the critical tables! Must mention the critical tables. Severed ears everywhere!
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Apr 30, 2013 04:15
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The Order of Magnitude vs itself So...this is where the Order manages to devolve into utter chaos and I very nearly expected things to crash and burn. So, if you recall, Nolan has captured Lucan's sister Grilsha, both as a potential hostage and to keep Lucan from leaving town. He's treating her well but he's immensely paranoid about her spellcasting abilities and so keeps her completely bound and gagged (feeding her soup through a tube) and is too worried about being mind-controlled or fried to even interrogate her. He figures Lucan will have to stick around and try and rescue her and the rest of the Order will be able to hunt him down while he keeps her secure. Well, he does not realize that Lucan is under a compulsion from the magic sword he's carrying and as much as he hates abandoning his sister he doesn't have any choice in the matter. He catches the airship he's scheduled for (using domination to get around his missing paperwork) and leaves town before dawn, headed out of the country. The rest of the Order are also pretty much lost without Nolan's relative sanity to guide them and although they have some info about Lucan they also assume that he won't leave without his sister and decide that tracking down Nolan is their first priority. However, it's very late and the Order is extremely impatient. Magnus and Glorin find the shop of a gnomish diviner, nearly break down his door and then when he answers they demand he perform scrying services for him, using some of Nolan's possessions. The gnome tries to explain that it's illegal to magically spy on someone without proof of wrongdoing, but Magnus and Glorin use intimidation and threats to force him to perform the scrying and to do it at a hefty discount of "whatever we feel like paying you". Well, the gnome successfully scries Nolan, figures out the location and gives the two directions...then as soon as they leave he (understandably upset) decides to contact the authorities and alert them to the two brutes who just threatened him into an illegal scrying and the subject of said scrying who appeared to be holding some young woman captive against her will. The Order decides to send Shara to pick up Nolan while Magnus, Glorin and Jack head to the airship tower to try and find out if Lucan has been around and if he has indeed left already (by this time Lucan has already sailed off). Shara arrives as the gnomish city guards are arriving. She manages to alert Nolan to their presence with some well-thrown rocks at his window, so Nolan grabs Grilsha, knocks her out again and dashes out of the back of the inn. Now, Shara's player tends to make...erratic...decisions sometimes. Not as bad as Magnus, but this one stands out. Although Nolan has already escaped, Shara decides she needs to provide a distraction. The exact method eludes me, but I think it mostly involved her running up to the guards and attempting to convince them that someone had attacked her. However, her bluff roll is terrible and she's quickly recognized as one of the folks involved in the fracas at the ambassador's ball last night (there aren't that many half-elves in the city). Shara is arrested and Nolan goes to ground in another hotel somewhere else in the city. The three remaining members of the Order now have no idea what has happened to either of them. Speaking of them, they're getting up to their own shenanigans. They arrive at the airship docking tower and run right into a trap Lucan has left for them: 6 dominated gnomes who have been instructed to attack them if they show up. Jack, Glorin, and Magnus are ambushed by the hypnotized gnomes in an out of the way section of the tower. Not realizing what's going on they fight back...and 6 dock workers aren't much of a match for them. It's not until they've already killed several of them that they realize what has probably happened and start pulling their punches. By the time the fight is over the three are covered in blood and several gnomish corpses litter the ground...and the sounds of fighting have attracted attention. Jack fortunately manages to pull off a rather brilliant bit of improvisation. He snatches up a sword, casts spider climb, jump and disguise self, changing his form into Lucan himself. Jack begins shouting and attacking Glorin and Magnus. The security in the airship tower arrives and sees some mad human attacking a hapless dwarf and warforged with several gnome corpses at his feet. When they sound the alarm Jack simply leaps off the side of the tower, runs down to the ground and casts another disguise spell, changing to the shape of a young man and blends into the crowd. Glorin and Magnus manage to avoid being detained by guards and meet up with Jack and the three of them high tail it back to the inn. Of course, they were expecting to be met there by Shara and Nolan...who are nowhere to be found. For those keeping score the party is now split three ways (one of them in jail) and their target sailed away on an airship several hours ago. Next time, befriending a vampire...in the worst way possible.
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Apr 30, 2013 04:30
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sebmojo posted:
I ran a two part game once set in the Lies of Locke Lamora universe (a sort of fantasy renaissance Venice, with cat burglars, for those who don't know it.) The party were a group of thieves turning up in town a few months after the events of the book, having been blackmailed into a nigh impossible task: Kidnap Duke Nicovante. What with the assassination attempt and the riots and the like in the book the Duke was now a pretty paranoid man. He never made public appearances, he rarely threw parties for the nobles, and when he did they were insanely high security. Oh, and he lived at the top of an incredibly tall tower made of effectively indestructible magic glass. So it seemed like getting him to would be tricky. What did the party do? They set about faking the existence of a new artistic movement, setting up cover identities as gifted artists, and then spending a few months making the nobles of the town believe these were going to soon be incredibly trendy and valuable. They only actually had one sculpture, but they pretended there was a whole movement, until one noble gave their single sculpture to Duke Nicovante as a gift (having thoroughly checked it for concealed poisons, bombs, etc). Then nothing would do but that the Duke be the first person in town to have one of these custom made, so they get brought into the palace and ordered to do a sculpture of Nicovante himself. They can't actually sculpt is the problem, and they can't bring in anyone else because of needing background checks, so they have to turn up with a series of part sculpted works which they slowly reveal in sequence, making it look like they're working on one. The final state is actually hollow, and after being there a few nights they cosh the duke, shove him in the hollows statue, escape down to the ground, and trigger a riot on the way out to cover their exit. So that's how the party faked a cultural movement and pretended to be sculptors to kidnap the most protected man alive.
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Apr 30, 2013 12:42
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Exculpatrix posted:So that's how the party faked a cultural movement and pretended to be sculptors to kidnap the most protected man alive. I love the Gentlemen Bastard books, and that is a phenomenal group of players you've got there.
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Apr 30, 2013 15:16
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Exculpatrix posted:I ran a two part game once set in the Lies of Locke Lamora universe (a sort of fantasy renaissance Venice, with cat burglars, for those who don't know it.) The party were a group of thieves turning up in town a few months after the events of the book, having been blackmailed into a nigh impossible task: Kidnap Duke Nicovante. You should email this to Scott Lynch. I think he'd be proud.
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Apr 30, 2013 22:55
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"First I was holding a beer. Then I was holding a gun. Then I was holding two guns. Then I was holding two beers." -Ricky Chaz DiGornio, Soul of the Band. I finally played Fiasco with the Touring Rock Band playset, and it was my funniest session ever. I played Jackyl Vice, 40 something British Rock God. I was Best Friends with Ricky Chaz, who was a parisitic sidekick to the awesome bassist Brandi Shade. She was a twin sister of Donny Shade, AKA Tommy Rainbows, formerly of the Wiggles. The only one who knew this was Jackyl. Our band was We started off with Jackyl telling Donny to upload his blackmail footage to Youtube, since Jackyl didn't get computers. Donny agreed but secretly destroyed the tape. Chaz tried to convince Brooke of the importance of going to Chadwick, Ohio, the home of Lenny Subwarski, aka Leonard, aka Lenny. Lenny had a junkyard that was a pyrotechnic utopia. Brooke wasn't interested in Chaz, so Chaz bribed the bus driver Tito to make a detour. We flashed back to Donny and Chaz meeting at a lovely tattoo parlor. The owner/operator was mad at Chaz for repeatedly recruiting there, and changing the band name constantly. He accused Chaz of doing it deliberately, so the t-shirts Chaz paid with were useless. Donny, after reading Lenny's blog, got his carebear tattoos turned satanic. It hurt, a lot. We decided to flash forward. Everyone exited the tour bus on the second day in Chadwick, and the barn was on fire. Leonard wasn't home, and his place was closed down. Earlier that day, Brandi found a bloody spear gun in her possession, and hid it under a drunken Jackyl's bed: He'd been a real rear end when she joined the band. For his part, Jackyl worked hard to remember the name of band members before they died. (Although he remembered Randy's; Randy lost a foot in an explosion, and Jackyl had it preserved in his kitchen as a keepsake). We flashed back to before the show; everyone meets Lenny, and he has a polite fascination with Brandi Shade. He also tells Donny that his niece loves Donny's music; when asked how old she is, Lenny says she's eight. The group convinces Lenny to supply the show with as much pyro as he can sell. The town will never forget Gangbang Conception. --- The tilt introduced "A Showdown" and "Magnificent Self Destruction." We cut to Day 1 of Chadwick; Brandi receives a text from Jackyl, inviting her to a party at the mayor's house. There, he surprises her by having a flawless British accent (learned during 3 overseas stints in rehab), a propensity for loquaciousness, and most unlikely of all, by having the gall to apologize. He'd been a right prick and felt awful. The mayor was extremely interested in Brandi, despite her showing up to a fancy party in an off-the-shoulder tanktop. Donny, pissed that he was recognized as a former Wiggle and ditched by Brandi, goes to the liquor store. He tosses hundreds of bucks on the counter and buys not only tons and tons of liquor, but a shopping cart, which he takes to the local high school. There he meets the best NPCs ever, a Yugoslavian 11 year old (who's really 17), a chain smoking jock, and his deaf, Metal-loving girlfriend. Donny gives them liquor in exchange for attending the show. We flashback to the show. Jackyl is killing it, playing an old organ that Leonard found. He cues Brandi for a bass solo (her first of the tour), and she knocks it out of the park. The mayor cuts her a check backstage for 'cultivating the arts'. Lenny brings in a wheelchair full of explosives for the band's breakout hit, Death Support (about Jackyl's hatred of tech support). Jackyl is talking to Lenny between songs, and brings up that Donny was a good singer when the topic is brushing one's teeth. The wasted Donny overhears this and begins slapping Jackyl. Jackyl demands to know if he signed a contract, and when Donny says he hasn't, Jackyl refuses to hit him. Unfortunately, Donny won't stop, so Jackyl hits him with a mic stand, opening a huge gash in Donny's cheek. Donny grabs a speargun, tosses it to his sister...who shoots Lenny. Jackyl runs as a series of drunken crowd members tear up the equipment, setting a fire. --- Back in the present day, Jackyl and Chaz talk about the band's future. Chaz wants to take the band to the next level...and call the band Next Level. Jackyl demands that Chaz get everyone together and leave town, IMMEDIATELY. There's no way he can smooth over burning down a concert venue. Donny gets nabbed by the cops and pinned to Lenny's murder, as well as aiding in the delinquency of minors and arson. He can't talk his way out of it; he's all out of good luck. Chaz is about to do get the bus rolling when Brandi stops him. She'll give him a date if they break her sister out of prison. All he has to do is choose the girl over the band. Chaz calls for the tour bus to STOP!, but Brandi gets caught in the door and badly sprains her arm. In the final scene of the game, Chaz and Brandi break into the police station. They're drawn on by the city's two cops, but Chaz has a trick...he throws a dog kennel at them. Inside the kennel is the mayor. The cops freeze, the band gets the drop on them and they free Donny! Unfortunately, as they get to the street...the tour bus is gone. They see it roll off over the horizon, with only Jackyl aboard. ---- During the aftermath, here's how the rolls went: Brandi: 1. Donny: 2. Jackyl: 10. Chaz: 0. (An 11 is perfect; a 0 is a fate worse than death). Jackyl laughed his way over the horizon, going through Brandi's things and signing the check over to himself. The rest of the band ran through the streets, trying not to get shot by the cops. Donny was badly winged. They reached Leonard's and forced their way inside. The cops fired wildly, setting off all of Leonard's internal pyro (which he was using, with theme music, to make entering his house wicked awesome). Jackyl found a bloody speargun under his bed...and vowed to get rid of it ASAP. The house exploded, with the bang visible from space. Chaz only barely avoids saving Brandi, and is launched through the house, out a window, and into a cop car (totaling it). Donny, Brandi, and much of Chadwick is obliterated. Jackyl stops at a gas station, and finds three teenagers (one deaf) hanging out. He asks them, 'Do You lot Rock?' They bow their heads and threw up the horns. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Sep 25, 2015 |
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May 1, 2013 08:22
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Order of Magnitude: Befriending the Vampire So, the Order has managed to thoroughly screw things up, so I go into damage control trying to come up with something we can do to get things back on track. I decide that the chief of the gnomish police knows Lucan from his history with the Black Lanterns, and doesn't have very fond memories of him. He's heard Lucan is in town from the events at the party and is looking forward to a chance for some payback. So, if Shara can play up that angle then she'd be able to get out of jail and possibly get an ally who can help them catch up to Lucan. Unfortunately, Shara decides to completely clam up and during her interrogation she refuses to give any information, sticking to a story where she's just an ordinary traveler. Even when confronted with her appearance at the party with Lucan she sticks with it, even after several truly awful bluff rolls. So, she's stuck back in her cell and I'm back to square one. Fortunately, the rest of the Order manages to make some progress. They return back to the poor gnomish diviner and, after convincing him that they're not here for payback, they get him to do yet another scrying to locate Nolan's new hideout. They all track him down and reunite. Nolan informs them of Shara's arrest and they tell him that Lucan is long gone. Realizing that Grilsha is useless as a bargaining tool at this point they decide that they'll need to ask her a few questions. Fortunately, Jack has some impressive social skills so with some persuasion he manages to smooth over the last few days of imprisonment and convince her that they've been sent by the Black Lanterns to try and bring Lucan back and help him. So, Grilsha reluctantly agrees to help them catch up and talk with him. However, she doesn't really have much information to help them, just that their final destination was Karnath. At this point I figure this farce has gone on far enough, so I use one of the adventure's NPCs to jumpstart the action. This is a doppleganger named Garrow who's after Lucan for some of those juicy state secrets, and he has an airship. So some mysterious benefactor slips a set of lockpicks into Sharra's cell and she promptly breaks out and sneaks out of the prison, rejoining the others just as they're approached by a half-orc airship captain who claims that he was hired by the Aundarian ambassador to help them capture Lucan. The Order buys it and, desperate for some way to catch up to Lucan, they agree to join up with Garrow and his crew (secretly members of the Order of the Emerald Claw) to catch Lucan. Fortunately, although Lucan has several days head start at this moment his ship is taking a pleasure cruise over Thrane, while the Order and Garrow will take a shorter, riskier route over the Mournlands. They have to fight off an attack from some will-o-wisps in the clouds above the Mournlands but successfully intercept Lucan's ship during the night. The Order and some of Garrow's men get on an air skiff to board the other airship. The Order is already suspicious of Garrow's crew due to some conversations they overheard while on the journey, these suspicions quickly solidify when a hapless civilian passenger comes up on deck to smoke a pipe and has his skull crushed by one of the Emerald Claw's flails. Although they're just a couple of steps shy of murderhobos the Order does have some scruples so they quickly turn on Garrow's men, killing them and hurling them overboard. However, a second air-skiff full of emerald claw soldiers begin firing on the airship with crossbows. Glorin, Nolan and Magnus decide to stay on deck to help fend off the Emerald Claw while Jack, Shara and Grilsha go belowdecks to try and find Lucan before he hears the commotion and escapes. Unfortunately Lucan is drat tough to find: the captain of the airship has been dominated by the vampire and has hidden him in a secret extradimensional storage locker in the hold. Fortunately, they have Grilsha who starts calling out for her brother, which manages to get his attention. Lucan emerges from the locker and a tense standoff ensues. Grilsha and Jack are trying to convince Lucan to let them try and help him...but unknown to them the compulsion from the magic sword is overriding his free will and he simply can't come back with them. Up above, the Order is frankly...not well equipped for ranged combat. Glorin has a crossbow and Nolan has a sling but that's about it. So they manage to take down a claw soldier or two but the air skiff successfully grapples with the larger ship and begins drawing close to board. Unfortunately this makes them close enough for Nolan to leap on board and begin kicking butt. Seeing his men taken down by the Order makes Garrow a bit desperate and he decides to just ram his airship into the other. There's a tremendous crash as the two airships collide, their elementals begin duking it out and both begin to fall. The emerald claw commander aboard the air skiff simply leaps into the sky, trusing in his feather fall ring to see him to the ground. Nolan leaps after him, grappling with the man mid-air and knocking him out, and riding his unconscious body all the way down to the ground. Magnus leaps off, using a feather fall token and Glorin attempts to jump on board the now-empty air skiff. He fails...badly. I give him a climb roll to grab the side...he fails that too. I give him one last roll and he still doesn't do very well...but it's enough for him to end up hanging from the grappling line still attached to the skiff...upside down by his leg. Meanwhile, below decks Grilsha makes one more appeal to Lucan to come with them, but Lucan simply cannot overcome the influence of the blade and transforms into mist, sifting through the cracks in the ceiling to make his escape. This is when Jack takes the adventure off the rails. You see, during the airship journey Magnus completed several of his anti-vampire preparations: a few vials of silversheen and some scrolls. He's given Jack one of these: a scroll of command undead. Well, this is when Jack pulls it out and casts it...and remember that terrible Will save of Lucan's? Lucan reverses his transformation, re-materializing in front of his new friend, Jack. He looks back and forth between Jack and Grilsha, on board a now-crashing airship. He finally says to Jack, "there's not much time, I can save us both...do you trust me?" After some worried glances Jack agrees...so Lucan grabs him and hurls him out of a window, jumping out after him and catching him just as he transforms into a giant bat. Grilsha is understandably hurt, casts fly on herself and follows after them. Shara is left by herself in the crashing ship but fortunately has a feather-fall token she uses to see herself safely to the ground. After a few minutes the airships crash, Glorin manages to climb aboard the air skiff which is slowly losing propulsion (there's no actual rules for how these work so I make them reliant on short duration enchantments) and get to land safely. The other order members join them, except for Jack who has flown off into the night somewhere with Lucan. So, now Jack is alone, in the company of a vampire under three distinct and competing compulsions (the commands of his creator, the magic sword, and Jack's spell). Which is good news, because now I get to be creepy at him...I'm good at creepy.
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May 6, 2013 00:31
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Freaky Friday, Continuity, and an Arrow Up The Rhino's Arse There's nothing better way to beleaguer a group than with continuity. Everything about today's session was based on almost entirely player-created prior action, and it was perfect. The session began with the party, in the woods, being accused of the murder of Desmond Yarborough. To catch up: Five sessions ago, the party heard about the Duke of Ballywick's death. Watson (the artificer) said that the Ballywick lands contained his hometown, Stonecrest. Four sessions ago, party went to a fancy-dress ball among the nobility. The party was thrown by nobles, all trying to convince the king they should become the next Duke of Ballywick. which was attacked by two groups of assassins. The first wore white, a false-flag attack by evil trade baron Agemmemnon Bloom of the Pathmakers. The second were soldiers dressed up as orcs, who had earlier raided a Museum of Orcish War and stolen the Chest of Kalthak(described by Oria, the Markswoman) that was granted orcs extreme strength and endurance. The party stopped both murders and defended the Duke's 10-year-old-daughter, Azalia•. They suggested that the duchy should be hers when she turns 18; and before then, should be in the custody of retired admiral Desmond Yarborough. Three sessions ago, the group journeyed through Stonecrest, Watson's home town. There he was menaced by a bunch of punks, but blasted them with his steam-emitter-wand. They vowed revenge. During the tournament, they found out their rivals** had a shape-changing cleric in their retinue, and would do anything to win. --- Which all led to the following things happening^: *The party realizing their murder accusation was a ploy, confusing their opponents, and stealing their tournament points; *The party lying to a 10 year old girl about if/how her evil stepdad died, with the ranger staying and vowing to be her bodyguard; *Watson and the thief, Silk, touching a Freaky Friday gem due to their blatant mutual jealousy *The heroes returning to Stonecrest, only to find it covered in wanted posters from The Pathmakers; *The heroes finding out that the thugs Watson dealt with were now burning down his house; *Watson-as-Silk being unable to utilize his criminal network since he was acting way too kindly. The punks had one ace up their sleeve; a white, magic rhino given to them by Bloom. Watson and Silk eventually coordinated their evasion worldlessly, returning to their old bodies. As the creature passed, Oria took an opportunity to stop firefighting. She drew a bead and nocked a stun arrow, aiming for the rhino's most dangerous point: its arse. The party was barely able to escape (using an old friend's ship); Watson's arm was shattered trying to put a clockwork obedience saddle on the rhino. With his arm broken and his childhood house burnt down, the crew set sail back to Thessalia. It was time to end the Pathmakers forever. •Azalia's bodyguard, Brien, disappeared in the confusion. In a sub adventure (3 sessions ago) it turned out he was caught in an unstable time loop, caused by the mage changing character sheets and declaring her previous character never existed . **Some of recurring from earlier adventures! ^As well as other things, like the Marksman shooting the thief in the chest because she was wearing a ring of anger and he winked at her. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Sep 4, 2015 |
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May 6, 2013 01:10
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The revenge on a player that became a gay joke that turned into a pretty decent npc (who betrayed the whole party). We're in the process of wrapping up the second act of our now almost two year long Pathfinder game. Along the way, the PCs met Aleph, elven gusband. It started as a way for me as the DM to mess with a PC. The PCs had just arrived in the elven lands and were in a library where they were ambushed by assassins. The PCs won, and the Alchemist pointed to the corpse of the assassin's mage and told a guard who arrived on the scene afterwards that he wanted "Everything that guy has." Improvising, the guard replied "Oh? You wish to invoke the Right of Conquest?" and the Alchemist agreed. We ended the session shortly after for the night. I had no idea what the hell I meant by 'Right of Conquest,' but it sounded good and I was slightly irritated that the PC was being a bit greedy. So I created some payback in the form of Aleph, elven husband to the slain mage/assassin. At our next session, I unveiled the Alchemist's new husband, and we all had a bit of a laugh. It's not everyday you kill someone and end up betrothed. I fleshed out some backstory for Aleph and decided that he would be a bit withdrawn and slowly come out of his shell as the party spent more time with him. After a while Aleph became a party fixture, and the source of the new house rule "If you make a gay joke, you have to drink." I ended up drinking a lot. The Alchemist reveled in it, playing up Aleph as a tired follower on their adventures, but also as someone who his character came to care about and gave a certain levity and depth to their gameplay. The Alchemist even asked if his wife could play as Aleph when she began joining our weekly sessions. I told him no, I had plans for Aleph. Initially, I thought about killing him off. Either in the throes of a heated battle with a hated villain or sorrowfully as a cost to be paid by on their road to victory. Instead I decided that Aleph had been deceiving them all along. Eventually, the PCs made their way back to the elf lands again, and the guards that greeted them addressed Aleph as "Prince," and knelt to him. The Alchemist cast (drank?) detect thoughts and asked to read Aleph's thoughts, I described them as embarrassed and remorseful. The Alchemist replied "Good. Then I won't have to kill him." Aleph told the PCs later that he was a Prince, and that an elven woman had come to him weeping and grief-stricken. These foreigners, these barbarians had slain her husband, and now invoked an archaic right that would require her to go with these murderers. She begged him for an exception from their laws. Aleph decided that he could not force one of his subjects to bear a burden that he himself would not take up, and went in her stead. I don't think they'll forgive me for it anytime soon.
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May 8, 2013 05:13
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I'm not quite sure where the betrayal is here. "Sorry guys, I could have given you some woman as chattel, but the prince decided he was too wise for that stuff"
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May 8, 2013 12:46
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Yeah, deception isn't really the same as betrayal - and in this case, the deception was awesome.
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May 8, 2013 13:05
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And now, additional Ghostbusting adventures! Much thanks to Zemyla for scrounging up their transcripts of the session with which I could refresh my memory. A couple days had passed since the last big misadventure. For those of you just tuning in: the Fairfield Ghostbusters were chasing after the ghosts of the Fairfield Five, a team of hotshot FBI agents (and a psychic investigator) out to finish the one job they never quite finished: bagging the people behind the Slouch Hat murders. Lenore Greunebaum, the psychic investigator, managed to keep her wits about her on the transition to ghosthood and volunteered to help. There were a couple days of downtime as our heroes pieced together what exactly they were going to do and how to definitively prove that Daniel "Deadeye" Dalton's conjecture--that Angela Whittaker was behind the grisly murders. Specifically, the victims were found torn apart with surgical precision using assorted on-site sharp objects--with no fingerprints on any weapons, no footprints, no nothin'. Sometimes the murders were conducted in tiny rooms where there was no possible way someone else could have discretely entered, done some crazy-rear end murder, and gotten back out without leaving so much as a footprint in the copious amounts of blood left around. This was what clued Dalton to the idea that it might have in fact been supernatural, thus why he brought in Lenore. This was what Lenore relayed to the team while Vernon, the inventor and gun nut, was busy inventing an improved set of ectogoggles that would also protect his eyes from his lemegetonite flares. They work! But the ghost die reveals that, in modifying the ectogoggles, the automated tighteners for the headband are a little too... vigorous. They absolutely refuse to detach. I tell him that he won't be able to take the ectogoggles off until the batteries run out... which they should after five or so days of continuous wearing. Despite repeatedly assuring him that nothing else bad was going to happen he (or, rather, the player) promptly freaked out and tried to cut them off before they "suffocated his brain." He tied some heavy rubber bands to the strap loops instead and just kept them on like that. In the meanwhile, the team sussed out how Whittaker could have called up something nasty: pour out some black slime from the Slor-Bile Jar, allow the slime to eat a portal in the dimensional membrane, call up a specific entity using the Boite Diabolique, and then converse with the specter via the Amulet of Thur'Kurak. The Fairfield Five could not in good faith demonstrate this for the court because they had 1) no way of cleaning up the spilled black slime, 2) no way to contain what would come out of the portal, and 3) no way of closing the portal that opened. And obviously Whittaker--who could do all three via ~magic~--was a little too busy pleading the Fifth and being highly amused by their abject failure. Of course, that was in 1932. This was 2012! While some of the team was helping Lenore adjust to life in the 21st century--and specifically trying to figure out if she had any civil rights as an intelligent specter--the others cleared out an unused lab in their part of the college, set up a camera, and performed a demonstration of how Whittaker could have used the three components to get a murderer on their hands. While they were setting it up--telekineticaly popping open the Slor-Bile Jar and VERY CAREFULLY pouring out a measure was part of it--Vernon and Devin (the man-mountain and kind of an idiot) have a brief discussion about H.P. Lovecraft. Devin hasn't heard of the guy; Lenore notes he was an occult scholar and writer of weird fiction. Note that first thing, it's going to be important... eventually. Everybody covers their ears. Lenore plays a few choice notes on the Boite Diaolique, summoning up a hideous specter of black slime, wielding a pair of rusty sickles on chains. Chelsea steps forward; equipped with the Amulet of Thur'Kurak, she can speak with the thing perfectly well. "Are you a god?" she asks. "...No?" the specter responds. "Then--die!" she says, and everybody opens fire. After a brisk and intense fight the ghost's in the box, and the black slime's been neutralized, and it only ate a few centimeters into the concrete! A slam dunk for all involved. At this point I realize that this was the end of session A and the start of session B next week, which was weirding me out because I could've sworn this and the next session were part of the same session. Must've blended together in my mind. I knew something was up because Vernon invented a new weapon in between hither and thither in addition to the anti-glare ectogoggles. His new thing was the Gravefiller, a quasi-haunted shotgun rigged with assorted extra science gribblies and a hookup to the proton pack that would allow it to fire stripped dark matter particles... in addition, he stressed, to regular shotgun shells. I'm just going to take a pause here and tell an amusing anecdote. Before the first session, me and some of my players chatted a bit about Vernon's player. He called "mad scientist" right off the bat and I was counting on it, because there were rules for it and I expected the players to be as toyetic as the cartoon. It would also put him to good use because he is... fond, let's say, of guns. As a player, he always played a British or vaguely-Britsh gunslinger with a propensity for dropping the C-word and/or antique racial slurs. In Kerberos Club literally the only skill he rolled was a Firearms skill, and when he failed a roll I mentioned fate points and aspects and he just froze up completely bewildered. As a GM, he tended to shower us with new guns to use, regardless of if our characters used guns or if the guns could do something our characters could handle on their own. In a game of Spirit of the Century he's running, he handed out a gun that added +3 to attack rolls just by shooting it--which stemmed from a misunderstanding of the rules (it's not a FATE version with weapon damage), but still. In a game of All Flesh Must Be Eaten, we were pinned down by an armored madman swinging around an antique machine gun. I opened fire on the thing, rolled very well, and the result was "putting a bullet in the stock, giving it -2 to hit until it gets repaired." I told him I was trying to destroy the thing so it wouldn't kill us. He said I should've been more specific. So we mentioned that at least in Ghostbusters he wouldn't try to bring a shotgun to bust ghosts. He hops onto the chat, says hey, and then asks if it's possible to bust ghosts with a (completely ordinary) shotgun. This was not an ironic inquiry. Anyhow: I mention in an aside to him that people are going to react accordingly if he goes around waving a shotgun, since even if proton packs are much, much more dangerous than a shotgun, they don't look like firearms. Keep a note of that. Anyhow, after he shows off his fancy invention, Officer Bradley calls! He's got them some evidence that "Deadeye" didn't go for when he stormed the station last time--namely, Dalton's notes on the murders, mailed to the station for safekeeping shortly before his death. He'd charted the movement of the Slouch Hat Killer, including murders that weren't connected to the murderer in question. The very last one was not too far from Fairfield--in a small town called Alderville. Everybody piles into the Ectovan, Lenore included, and the team rides off, Vernon blaring Rush over the speakers the entire way! Alderville is a shithole. The skies are overcast, the place smells like the inside of a textile mill, the people all look vaguely sick, the kids have legendary thousand-yard stares, and it's a dry county. It's all very disconcerting. They drop by the public library in search of old newspapers they can use to gather information, and the second Lenore steps out of the van she starts keeling over feeling all kinds of ghost-sick. The team hypothesizes it's a psychic dead zone, and Danielle likewise hypothesizes that Lenore's double-not-feeling-well because of the waves of apathy interfering with the psychomagnetheric slime keeping her inside the mannequin. Lucky, Danny's got a plan: get her some headphones that they obviously have inside and play Lenny some happy music on her cell phone. The team splits up. Vernon and Devin go after 314 Park Street, the site of the last murder, and Chel, Danny, and Lenny duck into the library to get Lenny some good vibes and more information about what's going on in this here town. Vernon and Devin drive off for a few minutes before realizing that, no, they have absolutely no idea where anything is in town, so they pull by the curb and ask someone for directions. That someone is a woman cheerfully and obliviously pushing a baby carriage. It seems that the murder site is now a huge church. She gives 'em directions, ending with: "It'll be the big thing on the right. It has a bell~" Then she decides that her baby needs feeding. At this point they notice the baby is fully covered by the blanket in the stroller. The mother pulls the blanket down, and I quote: "She pulls the blanket down revealing that it is, in fact, not a baby, but what appears to be a baby-sized abstract taxidermy chimera, assorted stuffed animal parts sewn into what is roughly a baby shape." Vernon and Devin, naturally, both scream like little girls and speed back to the library. And we will continue this story next time, right from there. Next time: the miracles of science, the miracles of boss fights, and letters of commendation. TombsGrave fucked around with this message at 22:53 on May 8, 2013 |
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May 8, 2013 22:41
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TombsGrave posted:Ghostbusters I would unironically pay money for a comic book or novel adaptation of this campaign.
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May 9, 2013 02:13
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TombsGrave posted:"Are you a god?" she asks. It's incredibly cheesy and yet I laughed. 
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May 9, 2013 12:16
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Well, it's been a while since I posted anything about the Fallout PnP I'm in (click the ? next to this post to learn more!), so here goes. After the hospital job and the subsequent rest in a local hotel, we get another job offer. Apparently, there's supposed to be an exchange with another local group, who have something our employers want. It's supposed to be a straightforward cash for the thing deal, but they need someone trustworthy to actually do the deal. So, they give is the job. We accept, obviously, and, after three hours' worth of shopping in the nearby market (and one of our players trying to flirt with the owner of the local food/liquor store getting cockblocked by our psychic Native American who might or might not be autistic), we pile into the provided car and set off to the agreed meeting point. The journey goes uneventfully, and we finally get there. The whole thing seems a bit shady, so the Native American, Thunder, arms the explosives he's got in his jacket, our smooth talky gunslinger goes to do the deal, and my character and our driver hang back, hands on their pistols. The exchange goes smoothly - they get the cash, we get the briefcase with the item (which turns out to be a hard drive) inside. Suddenly, a shot rings out, and we get surrounded by five enemies, including a sniper. They start shooting at us - not only the party, but also the guys we were doing the deal with. A ton of things happen at once. Renaldo - the gunslinger - and Tom - a mafioso and my character - book it to the car, Renaldo holding the briefcase in one hand. Thunder takes off his jacket, with the armed explosives inside, throws it on the ground and runs away. Our driver jumps into the car and turns on the engine, ready to make a quick getaway. The explosives go boom, kicking up a large cloud of dust and smoke, punching a hole all the way to the sewers, and hurting literally no one. The dust helps the guys we were doing the deal with escape, though, so there's that. Our driver kicks the car into gear, and tries to do a fancy maneuver where he does a 180, opening the doors to let us jump inside, and then does another 180 and drives away. He fucks it up and drives into a wall. Anyway, we finally all make it to the car, get in and hold on tight, when Schnitzel decides to run down the enemies instead. He ploughs through the two guys wielding melee weapons, and drives into another wall. We start shooting from the windows. Tom nails one of the assailants with a .45 straight to the head, blowing it apart - and revealing that the enemies aren't human, but cyborgs! Renaldo puts a round through the sniper's eye (critical hits, man), finishing the fight. While we're looting the place, a man in a sharp suit appears. He's accompanied by a large, bodyguardish type. The suit starts talking with us. Turns out he's with the Commonwealth, a faction specializing in robotics, the androids we just finished mopping up were theirs, his bodyguard is a robot too, and he really wants the disk we just exchanged a ton of money for. After a long chat, where he offers us a job, my character decides he's had enough and shoots the bodyguard in the face. Well, tries to, anyway, because the android dodges the shot and tries to punch me in the face. He fails the roll, and Renaldo tells us all to calm down, which we do. A bit of talking later, Renaldo and Tom decide they've got enough, and try to quickdraw the android again. We fail the rolls again, and the robot fails his roll to punch us. We start unloading on the robot's face, while the suit decides he's had enough and tries to run away, only to be cut down by a hurricane of 5mm bullets from our combat robot (B.O.R.I.S)'s minigun. The robot tries to punch Tom twice more and fails. Finally, he rolls a hit... but also a critical failure in the same roll. His arm falls off and hits Tom in the face. A few more shots and the tin can is done for. The suited man is actually somehow still alive, which is something us murderhobos can't deal with, so Thunder tries to beat him to death (and fails). Finally, he just dies from his wounds. In one of his pockets we find a drawing of someone with EXTREMELY DANGEROUS warnings written around it. That someone is recognized by my character as Uncle Sergio Blanco, the person Tom actually came to New York for in the first place. Anyway, we get back, turn in the hard drive, get paid, and learn a few things. First, the Commonwealth are trying to take over the Big Apple. Second, our former employees, who as we learn call themselves the Freedom Fighters, want to prevent that. And third, they can't do that alone, so they want to form an alliance with the Blanco family. The problem is, they don't know where to find the Blancos in the first place. We get another job - to contact them and talk it over with them. Since it's parallel with our interests, we take it, and, after an another round of shopping (Schnitz buys himself a MP38, Tom gets some .45 ACP Armor Piercing just in case and a new, better kevlar vest, and Renaldo buys some ammo for his revolver and an armored beret) and loss of Thunder (the player dropped out of the campaign), we hit up the bar, searching for pinstripe suited, fedora wearing figures with Tommy Guns. We chat up the bartender, and reveal who we're looking for. We get asked to describe Sergio (as a proof of our trustworthiness - after all, not many people ever saw the Don, and certainly not the ones he didn't want to be seen by), Tom does that, and the bartender leads us down to the cellar. The cellar's full of cigar smoke, whiskey, fancy suits, hats, Thompsons and Italian mobsters. Turns out that's the place. Tom goes forward and introduces himself - nobody recognizes him at first, seeing as the last time they saw him, if at all, he still had skin, but a while (and a tense moment where Schnitzel racks his MP38's bolt and all the guns in the room get pointed at us) later a friendly man with only one arm and visible burn scars in the place the other one should be calls out to Tom. Turns out it's Tony, mentioned by me in a throwaway comment in the first session ("Man, I never trusted Flamer Pistols. Tony tried to use one once, blew 'is drat arm off!"), an old friend. We reminisce about old times and chat about the Freedom Fighters' proposition. Tony tells us that Don Sergio wouldn't have anything against it, but he doesn't have enough equipment, and doesn't want to lose more men after what happened in Chicago. We agree that we'll go check out a camp apparently set up on the Brooklyn Bridge by the androids and search for extra weapons and armor, and then take a few hours to unwind, playing poker and just having fun. A few Gambling rolls later, we're in the black for 220 caps, it's been a few hours, and we really need to go, so we say our goodbyes, get into our Highwayman car, and drive to the Brooklyn Bridge. On the way, Schnitzel notices a car in our rearview mirror. It's a former police cruiser, Mad Maxed up (tons of spikes and a head on the radio antenna) and full of Raiders. Renaldo tries to snipe the driver with his revolver, Tom takes a more practical route and just empties the mag of his 1911 in the pursuers' windshield. Renaldo manages to scare the driver with a close miss. Tom somehow scores five hits out of seven fired (from a moving car. Into another moving car. With a pistol.) including one critical, ending the driver's life and massacring the rest. The cruiser slowly rolls to a stop. We loot them, obviously, who wouldn't? After pulling some low-end gear out of the car (an M14, an UZI, some ammo, some stimpaks and a few throwing knives), and ditching the bodies on the side of the road, we debate on how we take the car itself with us. Sadly, only our driver can actually drive (well, technically, everyone can, but with Pilot skill in low 20s you wouldn't really get far), so, for kicks, our mechanic tries to make a towing line out of some surgical tubing he's got. He scores a perfect success... and somehow manages to pull it off. We're thinking of painting the car red (cuz da red ones go fasta) and selling it to our friendly neighborhood weapons dealer, the owner of the aptly named Guns End Bullets, who's pretty much a WH40K Ork.
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May 12, 2013 06:41
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We come up with wonderful shenanigans in our Pathfinder campaign. This time: on discovering three cockatrices, we decide our plan of attack is to have our druid use her Summon Nature's Ally IV to summon a celestial dire rooster. Our halfling, having been trying to ride something pretty much the entire game, wants to try to ride it. We figured we'd at least let him try and if he turned to stone, so be it. Instead, he succeeds his ride check and rides the rooster in, causing all three of the cockatrices to flee into the hallway. Ensuing attacks of opportunity from the rest of the party killed them all handily. We also had our bard/sorcerer yell "Yiff in hell, furfags!" at a group of bugbears just before dropping a fireball on them.
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May 13, 2013 05:07
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taiyoko posted:We also had our bard/sorcerer yell "Yiff in hell, furfags!" at a group of bugbears just before dropping a fireball on them. For some reason this is hysterical to me. I think you need a furry sub quest now.
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May 13, 2013 12:07
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Savage Worlds - Lego Pirates Of The Spanish Main Let's just say that Legos are still a ton of fun. I've got some new pictures for you.  The party! From left to right: Brother Brendan, an enormous irish monk turned into a rowdy alcoholic wanderer. Uses a heirloom greatsword we robbed from a Dutch governor. Marius Cloutier, one-eyed french navigator. Smart, but all too aware of it. Captain Jean-Luc Morrison of the USS... well, no, currently of the spanish privateer navy. Old, lame and mean, but a great shot. Nana, native caribbean scout. Despite being schizophrenic, she's probably the closest thing to a sane human being on board. Roy, young and naive son of a merchant. Rapidly finding out how dangerous a pirate's life can be. Jonkheer van Capellan, minor dutch nobleman looking for adventure. Found it. A bit too much of it. The candy represents Nana's dog. Arguably one of the most useful crew members.  The rest of the crew! Having been forced to leave the island of Cozumel in a hurry earlier, to fight the pirate lord Mad Angel, we decided to return because we still hadn't found the island's rumored treasure. As we entered the ancient Mayan ruins on the island, we discovered they were being guarded by pirates we had left stranded on the island earlier... after promising we'd come back for them. Aaawkward. Well, if we had taken them with us, they'd just have starved to death anyway. They didn't see it that way, and refused to listen to reason. They lobbed grenades at us. We lobbed Brendan at them. The results were similar. The pirates had been living on the island, intending to form a permanent settlement along with the Mad Angel's prisoners: Women and children that were captured to be human sacrifices. We offered to save them, but first... finding the treasure! One of the kids had been exploring the surrounding area and showed us a "wicked cool" cave he'd found. Within, we discovered a secret passage that led to a trap-filled dungeon.    After dodging spears and collapsing floors and dropsnakes, we discovered a flooded passage. As the best swimmer, Marius was charged with exploring it. Good thing, too, as anyone else would have drowned. From this point on, it became something of a solo mission: Marius swimming and crawling in the dark. The passage led to a treasure room, but there was no apparent way out, except through the water... a route that led to a pond filled with alligators.  Long story short, we did find another way into the treasure room. A tunnel filled with enormous crabs. And I mean huge, like maneatingly huge. We later smoked them and ate crabmeat for a week. Karma!   What Marius had failed to notice in the dark was that the corpses littering the treasure room were actually haunted pirate skeletons guarding the treasure. What followed would have made Harryhausen proud, except we blew most of them up with a well-placed grenade.
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May 13, 2013 13:32
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Personal favorite Heroes Unlimited game experience- I gave my friends about half an hour to construct characters using a few copies of the book, total random rolls, and my personal one free reroll rule (mostly to get out of having to play Palladium's ancient old mutant animals). The only other instruction was "patriotic American heroes" for a one-shot game. They ended up with: Religious Right - Mutant with Mega-Wings, Godlike Aura, Energy Projection: Electricity. He was a southern baptist preacher turned angelic superhero that strove to uphold the all-american ideals of the bible. Team leader. Stealth Bombshell - Magic Weapon: Sword. Her sword gave her Supersonic Flight and Invisibility. A former Air Force officer who discovered that she could magically transform any sword held by a statue of Blind Justice into a magic blade that left glowing stars and stripes in the air as it passed. Rolling Blackout - Experiment with Power Absorption, Enhanced Physical Prowess, other stuff. A secret experiment by California power industry officials, Rolling Blackout could cause shutdowns in power grids but had gone rogue. Hawaiian Punch - Karate Master. Owner of the oldest dojo in the Hawaiian Islands, survivor of Pearl Harbor, and 96 years young. They were all members of a secret governmental superpowered security agency, known colloquially as The Moral Minority. Led by the reanimated zombie body of General Douglas MacArthur (brought back in death by an ancient Hukbalahap ritual and an errant bolt of lightning, he has returned), they fought against the evil influence of communists, foreigners, and the excessively liberal. For the one-shot they had to defeat a secret plot by the Prime Minister of Canada (who had redubbed himself "Minister PRIME") to activate his army of superpowered sleeper agents (all Canadian celebrities) and take over the USA. So they fought Shatner with slow-motion control, Trebek with a prehensile moustache, Dion with sonic screams, etc. It was the best game ever, despite a relatively weak system. theironjef fucked around with this message at 21:16 on May 14, 2013 |
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May 14, 2013 18:40
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Oh my god, that sounds incredible. I would play the hell out of a game like that.
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May 14, 2013 20:44
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A new player that's joined my game has inadvertantly taught me what it's like to have someone who cares about story immersion and letting the characters do the action instead of waiting for the plot to come to them. This new player is, in fact, new to RPG's all together, but she's proven herself to be possibly the best member of our group when it comes to straight-up role playing. In the games I run, when a player makes a new character, I run that character through a solo mini-adventure I call their "Prologue". It's almost like playing through the last part of a backstory. It lets the player get used to being the character, lets them get a plot hook drawing them to the main party, and gets them a bit more advanced than "starting character" before they're in the main group. The game is a homebrew system based extremely loosely on GURPS with a Post-apocalyptic setting that occurred due to supernatural conspiracies and a second "Cold War" type scenario that ended up having government scientists breaking the boundaries of Earth as a realm. That's putting it simply, at least. The new player's character was a Centaur woman named Lorelle. Her horse lower body resembled a zebra. In the past, her lover and father of her children had gone insane with power and run off with the kids. Lorelle is a bit unhinged, seeing as how when she finds out where any people that harm children in any way, such as abusive parents, pedophiles, people who trade kids as slaves, are located, she brutally murders them with a flamethrower and burns down their homes and belongings. When dealing with anyone else, though, she seems perfectly sweet and caring. She had contacts with the mysterious entity "The Grinning Man" that helped her locate those people, along with actively help her track down the man that stole her children. In exchange she does missions for him, usually strange things she never learns the benefit of. He's like a slightly less Sci-Fi version of The Shadow Broker from the Mass Effect world. I was loving the character concepts before the Prologue, but the way the player handled it made me have some of the most fun sessions I've had in my life of playing RPGs. In the "Prologue" for Lorelle, she would uncover a political conspiracy by mistake and eventually learn of a powerful leader's plans for turning the entire planet into an endless purgatory. Of course, I always want to take into account player choice, so I left a lot of the how's, when's, and why's up to how the player would steer the story. She started the game with a single travelling companion, a longtime friend named Connor. I did the typical GM thing of having strange NPC's scattered around for her to talk to, get information about the town, etc. What I didn't expect, though, was for the player to decide "I like these people, I want them to come with me!" After she had detailed in-character conversations with NPC's I had originally intended to just be one-shot one-not ccharacters, she managed to convince all three to come with her for various reasons. Vernnie the Satyr Samurai just wanted to get laid, at least at first. Hai-olog, the Troll that used Divine Magic given to him by the God of Werewolves did it because he just generally thought Lorelle seemed like a good person and wanted to help her with her "Assassins being sent after her" problem. And Angelus, an steampunk robot from Ancient Rome brought back by the world ending went because his prime directive is to protect people. This began a chain of incredible moment after incredible moment. The player really took a liking to the characters. I made up personalities for them on the fly, gave them motivations, backstories. Hai-olog was shunned from his people due to his unconventional faith, Angelus was shown to do his very best to be "human" even though, try as he might, he just can't break out of the main routines set by his AI when the Gods created him. Vernnie was shown to be lacking confidence, but generally just a good guy that wants to help out. All of these traits began showing up because the player truly LOVED to talk to NPC's and get to know each and every character. She loved having Lorelle go through detailed conversations, never once breaking character. I'm really thankful I can do so many weird voices! The very thought of one of her companions in-game dying left her almost too nervous to go into the final boss battles. When I had a lengthy in-character discussion between her party and a minor villain was extremely tense. I heard the player somehow make an audible version of "!!!!" when the villain made the reveal that he was someone up to no good when he let slip a phrase: "Loose lips sink ships" Something that two assassins sent after her toward the beginning of the story had said as a signal to attack. The tension in the room during that conversation would've made someone watching it out of context think that there was something serious going on in real life. After the final boss battle, a climactic scene against a corrupt political leader, a Dwarf named Quidel, she was ecstatic that they had all won. She learned quickly, though, that while the villains had been killed before they could escape, and the kidnapped children had been kept safe, Vernnie the Satyr had gotten his arm and leg torn off by the monstrosity that Quidel had released to distract the group while he made his escape. The player, in real life, had tears streaming down her cheeks as she had Lorelle tell the others that Vernnie died keeping them safe and making sure that the city didn't get destroyed. The thing that makes all these moments Notable Gaming Experiences, is I've never had such a rich, full role playing experience as the one that this player gave me. As a GM that has worked hard to develop lore for almost every aspect of the world the game takes place in, the player truly showed an appreciation for role playing, character development, epic plots, and everything you could ever hope for in a player. The few times that combat sprung up, she took to it quickly and thought strategically, yet quickly. I could post more about the game if people are interested, but I just really wanted to share this. I've never felt so immersed in a role playing game story before. If these sessions are what it's like to truly role play in a tabletop RPG, then I have a lot to look forward to in the coming months.
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May 16, 2013 05:16
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MissMarple posted:So, our group plays Deathwatch; the RPG for people who like being genetically engineered superhumans in the Warhammer 40k universe and generally splatting the hell out of a tonne of stuff. We did that mission too but we managed to bring back two of these big dinosaur monsters(where most of their warriors manage to cut off some scales for a rip out a tooth) Now our Kill-team has custom-made tabards made from the dinosaur's skin and acquired a new recruiting planet. Also, we used a Tomb Spiders big gently caress-off gun to destroy the main necron building's power core.
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May 16, 2013 08:23
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Cartoon Violence posted:A new player that's joined my game has inadvertantly taught me what it's like to have someone who cares about story immersion and letting the characters do the action instead of waiting for the plot to come to them. This new player is, in fact, new to RPG's all together, but she's proven herself to be possibly the best member of our group when it comes to straight-up role playing. It is my opinion new players are the very best players.
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May 16, 2013 15:30
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EVIR Gibson posted:It is my opinion new players are the very best players. Reading through this thread has shown me that, as well! I think it's because most new players don't have some arbitrary learned "standard" to go by. If they weren't part of a tabletop RPG community before and didn't have a GM or group that hammered in "this way is right", then they play with whatever comes to mind and heart first. Of course there's bound to be bad new players as well, but overall let's be thankful for those that just come into it bright eyed and bushy tailed and bring something brand new to the table.
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May 16, 2013 16:42
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Cartoon Violence posted:Reading through this thread has shown me that, as well! I think it's because most new players don't have some arbitrary learned "standard" to go by. If they weren't part of a tabletop RPG community before and didn't have a GM or group that hammered in "this way is right", then they play with whatever comes to mind and heart first. Of course there's bound to be bad new players as well, but overall let's be thankful for those that just come into it bright eyed and bushy tailed and bring something brand new to the table. Eh. New players have the potential to be a lot of fun without all that baggage but... I played in a LARP once with a guy who insisted on playing Nathan Explosion with the name filed off. I ignored it at first. But he could not end a sentence without the word 'brutal'. It was like he decided spoken verbiage required punctuation, and the aural equivalent of a period was 'brutal.' He was a new player and he could not stop hitting things with a fire ax. Eventually I quite playing with him. Or in another case, I had a new player in a vampire game who pretty much tried to play Gir from Invader Zim. New players can be great, but take care with your generalizations.
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May 16, 2013 16:50
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Mendrian posted:Eh. Perhaps you have something there, but I don't like people who try to break the system even more than Nathan Explosion. Just have good times!
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May 16, 2013 16:58
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EVIR Gibson posted:Perhaps you have something there, but I don't like people who try to break the system even more than Nathan Explosion. I don't want to come across as snarky or anything, but honest to god nothing about this post makes any sort of sense.
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May 16, 2013 17:28
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PantsOptional posted:I don't want to come across as snarky or anything, but honest to god nothing about this post makes any sort of sense. He dislikes poopsockers more then funny names / gimmicks. As long as people are having fun, he's happy.
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May 16, 2013 17:45
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EVIR Gibson posted:Perhaps you have something there, but I don't like people who try to break the system even more than Nathan Explosion. I agree completely! While some character concepts can be strange, or occasionally what a player does can be bothersome, what's most important is that everybody's having fun. And if a new player is doing something that's a bit bothersome, there's a good chance they don't realize it's not cool to do that particular thing, so the best thing is to talk to that person about it, not write off new players as a group.
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May 16, 2013 18:23
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Cartoon Violence posted:I agree completely! While some character concepts can be strange, or occasionally what a player does can be bothersome, what's most important is that everybody's having fun. And if a new player is doing something that's a bit bothersome, there's a good chance they don't realize it's not cool to do that particular thing, so the best thing is to talk to that person about it, not write off new players as a group. I don't think anyone is 'writing off' new players. I was saying you shouldn't generalize about them at all - that saying 'all new players are good' is as problematic as 'all new players are jackasses'. Everyone having fun is very important. It's just that sometimes, when you're playing a serious mystery game, and one guy shows up as a gray alien who thinks that he's a potato, that causes a certain level of disharmony among the group. Basically everybody can be great, or a problem. My experience tells me new players aren't special one way or the other. Different, maybe.
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May 16, 2013 18:26
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| # ? May 21, 2024 22:29 |
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Cartoon Violence posted:I agree completely! While some character concepts can be strange, or occasionally what a player does can be bothersome, what's most important is that everybody's having fun. And if a new player is doing something that's a bit bothersome, there's a good chance they don't realize it's not cool to do that particular thing, so the best thing is to talk to that person about it, not write off new players as a group. One of the best games I've ever played was a campaign where one of the players decided his human fighter needed to behave like Napa from DBZ Abridged. He even did the voice and mannerisms. It was briefly amusing in a nonsensical way, and then quickly became grating; but, in time the ongoing tribute to the trope, "Big Stupid Fighter," became a lot more hilarious for everyone involved than the initial bevy of (unfunny) catchphrases and references he initially thought would be so amusing.
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May 16, 2013 18:39
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