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Rose Spirit posted:Then our resident swordmage decides to throw a fire spell at it. So I guess you all royally honked your monster knowledge checks? Because that's kind of what they're there for.
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Feb 23, 2012 23:27
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Splicer posted:How does this even make sense as a joke, offensive or otherwise? Who associates Dwarves with amazing raping skills? Yes I know I'm focusing on the wrong thing here but I don't care. It is true what everyone says about dwarves. They don't really love gold. They just say that to get it into bed.
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Mar 15, 2012 20:31
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Colon V posted:Survival works well where it's a core point of the game. Like, if you and your group were playing a STALKER tabletop game, tracking rations and ammo and water and weight would make perfect sense. I really like the system Dungeon World uses for this. Your character can only carry like a dozen things, including weapons, armor, and notable loot, but there's a lot of bundling. 1 weight carries 5 "adventuring gear" - when you need something special, mark off a use. 2 weight carries a bag of books - when you need a reference, mark off a use. Ammo works similarly, but you only mark it off to turn a partial hit into a full hit. Rations are the only way to heal "naturally" in the wilds. It's super stripped-down, and everything serves a clear mechanical purpose.
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Nov 6, 2012 16:58
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LordZoric posted:I really love the idea behind the Deck. I feel like if it were treated as a tapletop RPG equivalent of a bonus stage, with some minor nice things and either funny or inconsequential penalties to be had, it'd be a really fun idea. As is it's just too filled with the design spirit of 3.5. The things it can do pretty much no matter what irrevocably alter the game. Like you said either somebody's character is dead or worse than dead, or somebody else just became a demigod. Good concept, terrible execution. When you draw a card from the Deck of Many Things, draw a face-down card from a Tarot deck and roll +cha. On a 10+, interpret the card the way you want, standard or reversed. On a 6-, the GM interprets the card the way they want. On a 7-9, interpret the card however it's flipped face-up. In any case, take -1 forward to future attempts to draw a card.
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Feb 5, 2013 09:30
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Planarch Heroes AAR Been meaning to write this up for a while. Can't believe it took a power outage to actually motivate me, but there you have it. When I heard this year's Origins theme was "Heroes", I decided to hack a bunch of Dungeon World playbooks to make them more heroic-sounding (the playtest documents are available here), and sketched out an adventure outline set in Dis after the pattern of this post. Executive summary: there's another dimension swallowing yours, you've been tasked with sailing inside it to figure out what's going on and put a stop to it. I only got to run one game of it at Indie Games on Demand, for a mix of newbies and people who'd at least read the book. This is that story. I use these terms throughout the AAR: "miss" for a 2d6 roll of 6-, which lets me make up consequences as I please, "partial hit" for a roll of 7-9, which is success at a cost, "clean hit" for 10+, and "crit" for 12+, which comes into play for certain moves. Character Creation The playbooks that wound up getting chosen after I gave my intro were The Brute, The Showboat, The Field Marshal, The Wallcrawler, and The Wonderworker (cosmic focus: The Clock). This is how I'll be referring to the players from now on. I was excited to bring in the flavor items the Showboat and Wallcrawler start with, so naturally they both missed their setup moves. The Brute also missed his, which promised to be a lot more entertaining, giving me basically two swords of Damocles to drop on him. The Wonderworker got a partial hit, as did the Field Marshal. His question: does this seem like the product of some sort of technological device? I told him the researchers were confident it wasn't; there wasn't enough periodicity in the signal of the tear for it to be purely technological. I asked for volunteers to be communications officer and roll +wis; the Wallcrawler volunteered, and I told her about the system of warning buoys that had been set up in space outside the tear, and to mark six boxes on her character sheet, representing the countdown to a point of no return. She got a partial hit on the player setup roll, so their situation was middling: safely in a traveler's hotel for now, with some basic information about the city (a mishmash of planes and places administered by the Sultana and her Road Wardens), but no obvious way to proceed. Hitting the Streets The Sultana hears all her people's petitions, if they're willing to wait. The line was currently four parishes long, and that countdown timer was pressing, so they went looking for ways around it. The Wallcrawler, investigating, noted a pile of trash on a wagon, knuckling its way along the line and speaking to those petitioners who looked particularly armed or martially inclined. None of them wanted much to do with it, so she approached it. The trash heap (named Marjorie because I can be very uncreative at times) laid things out for them: it knew a back way into the Sultana's palace, an old portal gate, which nobody had a key to anymore. It also knew where the key was - down in the old sewers. And this is why everyone was turning it away. The old sewers were run by automated machinery which had gone homicidally insane some time back, and nobody went down there anymore - the Road Wardens were keeping the place sealed off for everyone's safety. The Wonderworker decided he'd look through time to see how this was going to pan out, and got a partial hit; he'd taken enough moves for this to only have one downside, and he chose to draw attention. So I gave him a flash-forward: everyone standing in what looked to be a room of the palace, talking to the Sultana, a bit chewed-on-looking but otherwise okay. And then the Sultana looked directly at him. Not future-him. Present-him. And smiled, and said, "Well, this explains much." He also exposited on the nature of portals, and with a clean hit was able to create a little tracking spell that would point the way to the key once they'd gotten below the streets. Now there was just the matter of getting down there past the Road Wardens to begin with. The Brute's heritage moves actually channeled the power of his inner milksop, and he decided to spend one to rig up some kind of distraction. A partial hit drained him of energy, but jammed the Road Wardens' lines of communication just long enough for them to look elsewhere. The Wonderworker tweaked the cosmic clock to turn that into easily enough time to pry open a sewer grating, and with a clean hit they were down into the undercity. A Series Of Tubes Large wire mesh tubes, easily big enough to walk inside, with rail tracks running all around them. These were the sewers of Dis that I dropped them into, lit by moving headlamps in the distance. (I gave the dungeon three themes: clockwork mayhem, preserved algorithm, and biological remnants, and introduced a fourth track for the portkey. That probably doesn't mean a lot if you're not familiar with how the Planarch Codex builds dungeons, but they're basically seeds that can be present in varying amounts as the PCs move through the place.) And, of course, two heading for the new trash that just dropped in. The Brute charged them and got a heat-ray in the chest for his troubles. The Wallcrawler ran up the mesh and speared one of them - a little round drone crawling along the guiderail, with a headlamp/heatray and two poking claws. The Brute jumped up and grabbed the other guiderail, looking to rip it down, and I gave him his first move of Damocles: Bend Bars, Lift Gates (which I called Eye For Destruction on the Weaponmaster's playbook). He got a clean hit on it and chose "make a lot of noise", and I turned that up to eleven, ripping out the guiderail but sending the tube whacking against others in a cascade reaction that was terribly unpleasant to be inside. After the party dealt with that (helped by the Wonderworker aging a lower tube to throw off the cascade) they moved on, the Wallcrawler heading through the hole the Brute had ripped to do a little scouting. She came across a large cubic room, with a large four-armed mechanoid sorting through piles of apparent trash: gears, tubing, biological yuck, and construction materials. She went up to the ceiling to prep for some death from above, but missed her investigation roll, and I revealed an unwelcome truth: these rooms were apparently modular, and she was standing on top of a disused top connector screened by a wire grate, which wasn't rated to hold her weight. She went plummeting down toward a vat full of gears, saved only by a judicious Hangman's Noose to hook a rope around the mesh, but the grate still made enough noise to attract the sorter. Everyone else charged to the rescue, only to realize the sorter was creating little soldiers out of the vats of trash. This slowed them down, but they made enough commotion to distract the sorter, giving the Wallcrawler the chance to drop down on it and slice its body open like a tin can. Less damaging than on a biological creature, but still painful - the thing's innards looked like a full clockwork conversion of biological systems. The Showboat grabbed the Wonderworker and swung the both of them away from the soldiers to setup somewhere clear. The Wonderworker tried to slow down the sorter to stem the tide of smaller things to fight, but missed the roll. The Brute's player, who'd actually run Dungeon World before, said that he'd make that just slow time for everyone, and I grinned, telling the Wallcrawler to mark off one countdown box. The Brute leapt at the sorter, damaging it pretty greatly but getting attacked in return, and it started converting him into a weapon under its control. The Field Marshal healed him up and gave him bonus damage forward, but drew the sorter's attention, sending the Brute down at him like a punch on a stick. The Wallcrawler, still hanging out in front of the hole she'd ripped in the thing, asked me if she could stop it somehow. I told her to roll for it, and with the partial hit gave her a tough choice - she could either divert the blow slightly, or reach her arm deeper into some moving gears and make it miss entirely. She hadn't been hit yet and opted to get mauled. The Showboat concocted a Plan of Action, asking me if there was some mesh netting full of stuff he could try and drop on the sorter, and I told him to roll. The miss saw him ripping it open just fine, but what dropped onto the sorter were some prefabricated combat arms, plugging up the hole the Wallcrawler ripped open and trapping her inside. She asked what she could to do get out, and I asked her for the range tags on her weapon - the spear was Close and Reach, so she at least had some leverage - but then she looked down at the Wire-Fu move she took with the miss at character creation. Any length of wire in her hands was a lethal weapon, and I'd just sealed her inside something full of wires. Forget Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch, this was Poison Ivy in the briar patch. Her attack was a clean hit, and the damage roll was ridiculous, cutting through pretty much all of this thing's motive systems and leaving it and the trash soldiers all just hunks of junk again. While everybody investigated the room, the Brute decided to tear apart the sorter for some catharsis, and I decided to activate his second Move of Damocles, giving him I'm Gonna Wreck It (a hack of the Augury move that had just been added to the Barbarian playbook the day before). The partial hit sent blade-arms flying at everyone else in a destructive fugue, but revealed something important to the little science man inside the Brute - the robots didn't start crazy. They were proving very capable at handling all the waste that Dis produced, so the Sultana gave them a different problem to solve, but it proved impossible and sent them 'round the bend to boot. The Field Marshal finally tapped his Rolodex, recounting some time spend together with an old codebreaker from the Great War who had been the key to deciphering the communications of the self-replicating mechanical lifeforms that descended on the planet way back in Issue #25, and deciphering the robot's logs, tracking the port key deeper down into some master processing room. He got a clean hit and asked a question - how could they stop the robots from going mad? I told him to find the master runtime and work from there. Down they went, following the Wonderworker's guide spell. To the Master Runtime, and What Heroes Did There I rolled an absolutely crazy number of sixes putting the next location together, thought about it, said to hell with it and made it a grand finale. The heroes descended through scenes of chaos in parallel wire tubes, robots hunting each other down and carving each other up for parts, and came out on a catwalk overlooking an absolutely huge room, on something like the bedrock of Dis. A great computing spire grew out of the center of it all, and at opposite ends were two sorters, digging into bins of parts and building a never-ending stream of soldiers to try and take control of the center spire. And at the far end of the room from them, in a currently unused bin, sat the portkey. The Wallcrawler had taken Shadow Step as a heritage move, and decided to just skip the looming fight and nab the key. I told her that was kind of a dicey proposition in a room where robots with headlamps were just wheeling around all over the place, and asked her to roll Investigate to find a stable pool of shadow. The Wonderworker chimed in, saying he'd try to create one. It wasn't in the Clock's bailiwick, but you can try to improvise magic at -1 so I let him roll for it. He missed. I asked him the name of the guy he'd fought a few issues back who liked animating people's shadows and siccing them on civilians (Boccob, he said), and then told him that was inappropriate to think about when trying to create shadow, because you get the wrong kind. A little darkling formed out of a pool of shadow, grabbed the portkey, stuffed it in its gaping mouth, and ambled toward the massive melee, unconcerned. The Field Marshal decided he was going to use Sow Confusion to get one of the robots to whack the darkling before it got too far. I asked him how. He told me he was whistling modem noises. And if he hadn't missed, it would have been crazy enough to work. As it was, with a cry of "UNRECOGNIZED OPCODE. HACKING ATTEMPT DETECTED" the entire swarm of robots now had a different target. The Wallcrawler decided hell with it, she was going to grab the key anyway so they could run, but missed the Investigate roll and ported over just in time for a stray spotlight-robot to fetch up against the bins in just such a way as to erase her way back. The Wonderworker rusted out part of the ceiling to drop into a barricade to buy them some time, and it worked fairly well but the little heat-ray robots started melting the base of it, to turn it into a ramp up to the catwalk. The Brute gives the Showboat a boost over to the central spire, setting him up to grab the Wallcrawler and take her back over, with the Field Marshal coordinating. The Wallcrawler used a wire lasso to yank the key out of the darkling, but a partial hit meant she got a blob of negamatter along with it. ("Negamatter?" she asks. "It's like regular matter, but nega," I say.) And the Showboat swings over to grab her… but a partial hit means he draws attention on the way back, attention in the form of every ranged unit in the robot army filling the air with a cloud of razor slivers. The Brute has had all he can stands, and he can't stands no more. He leaps off the catwalk, descending to create a massive shockwave to knock all the shards out, and he crits the roll, sending all the little robots flying and buying them a decent amount of time, but he also gets a twist from his anger which I decide means getting stuck in the ground. So things aren't looking too good. Then the Field Marshal gets a brainwave. Maybe, he says, they can connect to the master runtime with that computing spire and get all the robots back to sanity again. I tell them good luck doing it with the sorters building another army. The Wonderworker creates another differential time sphere, getting a clean hit on the attempt. And I tell them, okay, they can all head inside and try to get the robots sane again, but when it comes back down they may have a huge army to deal with. The Wallcrawler tries shaking off her little negamatter guest, but manages the exact opposite, and it absorbs into her for a bit of damage but no apparent ill effects. And then the all go inside. The Brute pries himself free (rolling Eye for Destruction, getting a partial hit, which he decides will make a lot of noise and not leave it reparable, and I tearfully describe the perfect Zen arrangement of the rubble which he callously proceeds to ruin) and everyone goes to set him up for another heritage move to let the science man inside of him fix everything. But the Field Marshal draws attention, and I decide that means the darkling was squished by the shockwave but that didn't really do a whole lot to damage it, and it lunges at him. The Showboat grabs it, to hold it off, and the Wallcrawler unleashes a Brutal Strike on it while the Showboat's grappling with it. Her partial hit leaves her choosing just to frighten the thing off, which I describe as her cutting it in quarters with the wire lasso, spooking it the hell out when it reassembles and scrambles away, out of the time sphere. The Brute has to tap himself for energy again to finish reprogramming the spire (I'm running this as the Artificer's Jury-Rig move, causing damage instead of using up a charge) but it's done, and he's in, and they see the question the Sultana put to them, the one that drove them mad: how can I stop my son from killing any more people? How can I stop my city from killing any more people? They delete the question, debate for a bit on whether to pose a new question to the robots (a Defy Danger +int turns up a partial hit, which I say will mean I can tell them whether the robots can answer a question or whether it will drive them mad again, not both) and decide just to leave things be. And the time sphere drops, revealing… a bunch of robots, going about what apparently are normal trash collection procedures, not paying them much mind. A couple of the little spotlight robots are running the darkling off with heat rays. Meeting the Sultana Of course, even if they can get back up to the surface unmolested, they still have to get out again, past the Road Wardens. The Wallcrawler pokes her head up to see if she can spot Marjorie, but a partial hit on the roll means she'll attract attention if she stays up long enough, and decides not to. The Showboat concocts another Plan of Action: is there an easily spooked herd of livestock up another sewer grate? Why, yes, I tell him. Camel spiders. Not actual camel spiders, camels with eight jointed legs. His roll to send them stampeding off to draw attention is a partial hit, and they certainly do grab attention, but gosh, where are they headed? Wouldn't you know it's directly to the portal? The Field Marshal pulls out his Rolodex, talking about an old xenobiologist friend of his who studied creatures just like these extensively. To get them to calm down, she used a particular mix of easy-to-obtain chemicals which mimicked their herding pheromones. A quick concoction later, the Wallcrawler free-runs to get ahead of the stampede and drops the scent-bomb perfectly, pacifying them again and leaving the passage to the portal clear. The key activates it, and they step into basically the Sultana's break room - they can see the court through an open door, and the Sultana leaves off holding court to come back and refresh herself. I tell the Wonderworker he gets a little preja vu - the sensation you are about to experience something you have seen before - as the Sultana looks them over, and then up at a point in space, and smiles. "Well, this explains much," she says. The heroes lay out their case, and the Sultana, regretful, says she cannot stop what her city, her son, is doing. But for calming the chaos beneath her city, she is prepared to make them all Road Wardens, and with her power they may be able to save many more people from their home dimension that Dis, in its hunger, would devour. As long as they do something about that other person from their dimension, who is trying to poison Dis and consequently kill all its people, in an attempt to save said home dimension. The Wallcrawler wonders if they have time for all this, given that they're only five buoys away from the inevitable ("Four," I tell her. "FOUR," she says.) but it seems to be the best option currently in front of them, so they take it, and the Sultana opens a portal to that natural environment of heroes, an abandoned warehouse. Finally, a Boss Fight I ask the heroes who that guy was they all fought about a dozen issues back, who they thought they saw the last of when they threw him into his own Dimension Ray. "Dr. Flatland," says the Wallcrawler, and I roll with that, whipping up a mad scientist ordering a bunch of multi-colored aliens to pour a tank of explosive deadly cancer poison into some kind of injector. Then he spots them, and starts expositing, as you do: the explosion actually landed him here, and may have connected Dis to their home dimension in the first place, but never fear, he found this cyst full of material Dis couldn't absorb so he decided to kill the whole place because dammit, it's his universe to conquer. And if everyone will just step back, he'll finish murdering it in plenty of time for everyone to get back to the rip home and the victory parade. The Showboat, of course, stands up and starts counter-posturing. As he does so, I turn to one of the other heroes, and say, still in-character as the mad doctor: "You know, after all this time alone, I actually thought I would miss his speeches? But it turns out I don't!" And the Showboat, having taken the move that lets him challenge people who have offended his honor to a duel they cannot refuse, decides that his honor has been impugned, leaving the doctor his selection of weapons. This is actually a pretty brilliant move, because the doctor's choice of weapons is "EVERYTHING! Minions, ATTACK!" and that leaves the tank of poison unattended. The Brute uses Strongest One There Is to grab the attention of the minions, and a clean hit gets him the doctor's attention to. He mostly shrugs off the handheld dimension ray, being only a little bit flattened-out. At the Wonderworker's request, the Showboat picks him up and runs on top the aliens' heads over to the poison tank, getting a bit fire-breathed on because of the partial hit, but otherwise okay. The Wonderworker tries to use time magic to amplify the effects of the antitoxin he started the game with, neutralizing the poison somewhat. He misses, wasting one vial. The Field Marshal tries to Sow Confusion, getting the doctor mauled by his own minions, as you do, and manages a partial hit, which I decide means that one of the bulkier minions actually picks the doctor up and flings him at the Field Marshal. He misses an attempt to dodge and winds up pinned underneath the doctor. The Wallcrawler goes to change that, lashing out with a wire whip, but a miss leaves her stumbling trying to catch the doctor's Flatlander Glove for leverage. It's only two-dimensional after all, and drat if it doesn't sting on the counterattack. The Brute gets ready for some clobbering, and he crits the roll, procing Smash!, which sees him just bodily pick up one of the aliens and knock the others down like bowling pins. The Wonderworker tries again to neutralize the poison, and misses again. There go the other two vials. The Wallcrawler tries to whip the doctor off the Field Marshal again, and the clean hit picks him up and tosses him, she decides, at the Brute. The Brute's immediate followup attack is another crit, and the physical thing he decides Smash! will remove is the doctor's lack of presence in a vat of explosive deadly cancer poison. He was out of hit points anyway, so I decide what the hell. In he goes, his electronics blink out, and the aliens get their bearings and scatter. The Moment of Truth A Road Warden enters the warehouse, opening up another portal back to the Sultana. It's getting down to the end of the session, so I lay the options out for the heroes: use Dr. Flatland's poison anyway to kill Dis and save their home dimension, or take the Sultana up on her offer to become Road Wardens and save as much of their home dimension as they can from the inevitability of Dis. They don't like either of these options. The Wonderworker looks at the vat of poison and thinks: what if we could inject this into our dimension? It might not kill us, and Dis would spit us out. Opening a connection to your native space-time through yourself? I ask. Sounds interesting, but with the Road Warden here you've only got one shot. Roll for it. The Field Marshal coordinates the aid roll, and drat if he doesn't need to. The Wonderworker gets a 3, +2 from his Int bonus, +2 from the improved aid, which is barely enough for a partial hit, and with a bit of brain pain, the Wonderworker pulls it off. It feels like the entire universe is throwing up, I say, and the heroes are spit back out into space where they entered the rift (and they're heroes, so they can breathe in space). Dis has stopped eating their universe, but it's also suffused on a metaphysical level with an explosive deadly cancer poison from a different reality, and the dissolved remains of Dr. Flatland. So, you know, typical Thursday. And they've got a universe of heroes to deal with the fallout. And that is where we wrapped the session. We had a 4-hour block to use, and used up all of it, save for a snack break and a denouement. I found out after the fact I was running for a bunch of other Origins GMs, taking a break after a con of running games for other people, so I don't know how representative this experience would be of running the hack. They definitely were willing to improvise, and the Dungeon World system certainly helped with that. I suppose time and future cons will tell.
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Jul 17, 2013 13:08
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Zereth posted:In 3.x being a god is a specific thing which has an ECL on it, basically. I forget what divine rank you get absolute power over life and death but it's like 5 or something. A god can just straight-up kill any mortal they want at that point.
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Jan 3, 2014 02:40
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It's a pretty great take on an old classic, and you just know Thorin would pull that poo poo if somebody else appropriated a dwarven dungeon.
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Jan 4, 2014 00:02
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Nietzschean posted:with a comment like "I hope this doesn't bring down the entire building". So this is a bad experience because the critical failure didn't bring down the entire building. I mean, c'mon.
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Dec 21, 2014 10:26
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Sworder posted:In one game, Thokk ran a failing little general store near the center of town. Nobody ever bought anything, because he was 7 feet tall and wore his jet-black spiked fullplate all the time. Okay, I was sold on this and then it only got better. That was wonderful.
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Feb 5, 2015 01:25
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Evilreaver posted:My gang are not the brightest, goodness no. I don't think it even came up (though they did make a point to say "I'm stealing iron rations from their general stores") Well, okay cool. Run with it. If these guys are supposed to be a shield from the gods, have the gods show up and commend the players for what they did and shower them with rewards and stuff. At least one of these should be some kind of channel to the gods, maybe unreliable or whatever. And then the gods come down on them. Well, the world, but they'll certainly notice it. Maybe it's different gods from the ones who gave the reward, like the God of Famine and Want rampages in the night and all food in three days' march is rotten, and the players call the gods up and they never get any help because the gods don't mess with each other like that. And then someone else calls on the god-phone, from a divine prison. Or something like that.
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Mar 21, 2015 02:36
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This year at Origins Con was another year of Indie Games on Demand. I had two games on offer: the Colonial Marines hack of Torchbearer, and a couple of space stages of my own invention for the Fate World of Adventure Save Game. Con theme was "space", you see, so I came prepared. Thursday, morning slot I run the Colonial Marines game for some other Games on Demand GMs. It's a scenario about The Company crashing a training ground asteroid-ship into a deep-space research station and loosing synthetic soldiers and synthetic aliens to track down whoever's been using it to spy on corporate communications. It turns into basically the platonic ideal of Aliens, as the marines clear space for their civilian adjunct to MacGyver the poo poo out of the situation (including disabling a synthetic's remote-wipe functions once I told them a Disarm could do that) and shut down the asteroid ship's mother computer, ARES. Thursday, afternoon slot I play in a game of Swords Without Master. We get a selection of Weird Tales covers to make rogues from and I decide to see what I can do with this guy. Litharge comes to mind, and thus is born Iksar the Ancient, of the Cerement People, for so many things in this world need to be buried. Aside from the first, every roll I make comes up Glum, which y'know is only fitting. I end up burying the last victim of a reincarnating evil right out of his aggregate body, and as the other rogues become the bound guardian of an ancient forest and the trees that once filled it, the last rogue, who took a prop bag of money for an icon, has a nice Just As Planned moment. And then sticks me with the bill for the drinks. Oh well, all these dead mind-controlled knights don't really need their coinpurses anymore anyway. Thursday, evening slot I get into a five-player game of Dungeon World and make a little halfling fighter with a spiked ball in a sling as her weapon. I don't get much of a chance to fight but I do bounce off the other party members pretty well. Sometimes literally, like when I body-check the bard away from mind control. At least from my perspective, five players spread the GM a little thin. Keep that in mind for later. Friday, morning slot, I get three people interested in Save Game and we do some character gen together, ending up with Dr. Pharaoh, a boss character from his game who was only playable in the optional duel mode and had a terrible translation, a motorcyclist Simon Belmont character whose sprite was of a piece with his motorcycle so he can't leave it, and Buzz and Shelly, a cyborg boy and his robot dinosaur from a licensed cash-in game for Kazap Cola. Collect the Cans(tm)! Dr. Pharaoh takes Hax +2 and Palette Swap and Unused Code, so boss fights are a lot of fun. Let me run down the scenario. Back in video game days, Grandfather Soul and his Groove Pirates tried to turn the entire galaxy into their own personal dance party, but were stopped at every turn by a noble space-fighter code-named Star Hawk, heir to an ancient civilization and their surprisingly spaceworthy robot battlesuit. In later games he saved and was joined by Miss Trick, a dinosaur shaman from a primitive planet who quickly came to understand and loathe the powers of funk. But, you know, the Glitch came for Star Hawk, way out in space, and over time he stole Grandfather Soul's Funknosphere and used it to beam power down to a factory built from his home planet, which is spitting jack-filled asteroids down onto Tendoria, where "looking up" animations are in short supply. The game is a two-stage affair, with Miss Trick or Grandfather Soul as the boss of the first stage, depending on player choice, and Star Hawk the boss of the second. This first group is the only one that will get to the second stage, and like all the groups they opt not to fight Grandfather Soul but instead reclaim the Funknosphere from Miss Trick, who is now glitched out and terminally square... until Unused Code cancels out the aspect that's the source of her Glitch, and the remaining corruption within her is purified by a precious, precious can of Kazap Cola. I lift something from Phil Lewis's still-in-development Wrath of the Autarch here, and give the players lists of obstacles to overcome, with two stress boxes and a random difficulty. My favorite of this session is putting "Incongruous Lava" up on the station and then "Perfectly Congruous Lava" down on the planet in Stage 2. Star Hawk wrecks people up with his alien battlesuit, but Dr. Pharaoh steals his Space Jump ability and then uses Unused Code to turn the suit into a giant poisonous bazooka giant. The players rally Star Hawk and set him up to deliver the final blow. It only seems fitting. Friday afternoon I play in a four-player preview game of Project: Dark with pregen characters. Starlyng, the face of the group, refuses to raid tombs for things like a sensible thief who's worried about attracting attention, so we pull a small job to steal a medicinal tonic from a bar and frame the thugs from a different bar, then stage a robbery to cover up a burglary, slipping in a fake for an outstandingly valuable necklace in the middle of a smash-and-grab job. We were able to mix social stealth with actual stealth and a little bit of brazen action in the right place, so I think that bodes well for the game. Friday night I play a three-player game in somebody's reflavor hack of Apocalypse World, 0xCRUNCH, where "weird" is just "wired" spelled weird. The other two players pick up the Angel and the Operator, so I decide to bring an arsenal to the table as a Gunlugger. And the look options kind of make me think.... I pick the statline with +2 Weird and thus is born Chaplain, who came into possession of a 9-foot suit of crusader-style armor somebody made as a pilot project for a new metal technology. And never leaves it. It's even got a big-rear end sword (knife). When we do Hx I get high numbers from both players and they dump low numbers on each other. As the MC pulls their sordid history out of them I interject "Oh boy, Chaplain's friends know each other!" and now I am basically a demented 8-year-old. Nobody trusts me enough to tell me anything so when a local crime boss presses me to betray the group by offering up information I don't have, I go aggro with the sword and get him to back down. As the plan to infiltrate a war zone to recover data from a lab facility progresses, I sit there marking experience, mostly from reading a sitch or acting under fire since Chaplain's friends don't want Chaplain to use the guns and Chaplain listens to friends. When I hit 5 I remember wanting to play a Savvyhead before thinking erroneously we'd need some weapons all up ins, so I pull the Savvyhead playbook out of the GM's reserve pile while another scene is going on with other characters, and Things Speak is staring right up at me. I take it, mostly because I really want to meet a horrible genetic abomination, seize it by force, and then ask "what's wrong with you, and how can I fix it"? But we come to a big locked blast door with a keypad, and Chaplain's friends realize it's finally Chaplain Time so they say "Chaplain, take care of the door." And then the nine-foot metal monster reaches out with his enormous metal gauntlets... and gently cradles the keypad, and says "Hello! Will you be Chaplain's friend?" The entire table just stares at me, which is about when I realize that nobody saw me gaffle the sheet from the GM's pile and has absolutely no idea what the hell I'm pulling. One quick explanation later and I hit the roll and the keypad shows me the last thing done with it, so I punch in the code and say "thank you" as the doors open. The session moves from there, and we do the job under extreme time pressure and get arbitrary amounts of dosh, mostly in the service of an epilogue. And this is Chaplain's epilogue: when the war dies down and a recovery team from the corp hits the facility, absolutely every electronic device is gone, and there's a microwave satellite beaming stupid amounts of power to an aggressively de-charted island in the South Pacific. Saturday morning is Save Game... with five people. Told you to remember that. So the players come up with: Don Penguioxte and Sanchogator, who operate about as advertised; a vampire ferret prison escapee; Scroll Rocker, who plays a dead knight's last will and testament and rises to stardom; Cat Tut, Cat King of Cat Egypt, who has a crown full of playing cards and must collect cookies for some reason; and Wizzotron, a skateboarding robot wizard with guns who is painfully 90s. 3 hours in we finally get near the end of Stage 1 (favorite element of the stage: I nail a difficulty roll and call the obstacle Ten Tons Of Gold, then honk the next one, so the obstacle is Ten Tons Of Feathers) and I realize the normal boss isn't going to cut it... and so many players mentioned a nemesis as their trouble. A giant knock-down drag-out fight ensues, with three polar bears in a windmill mecha, Warden Cross, the Grave Knight, Djaqi Jackal ("that annoying jackal who's always jacking your cookies"), and leading them all, Safety Officer Craegl. There is ABSOLUTELY NO SKATEBOARDING ALLOWED in the boss room. Cat Tut was kind of the star of the show, using Create an Advantage to pull out playing cards. A 10 of Clubs to give everybody weapons to fight the jack-meteors with, a 4 of Diamonds to make a reflective shield to bounce a target lock back to its original spaceship, a 5 of Spades to dig through the ten tons of gold... and a 5 of hearts to connect them all together in their final obstacle, navigating an impenetrable shroud of darkness. But I hope I gave everybody a fair shake. Saturday afternoon is an emergency session by request, for a bunch of people who really wanted to play Torchbearer. Two interested in Colonial Marines, two who wanted to experience the original game because they bought it but need to see how to run it. We do original fantasy and I run the scenario out of the back of the book, but there's definitely some improv outside the box, like a Carpenter roll to shore up some trapped stairs and a combination of Scout and Criminal to jury-rig an ambush for some guard kobolds. Saturday night I play The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, a two-player game about a serial killer and an obsessed detective facilitated by the writer. It's a little like My Life With Master in that there are a variety of scenes to play and attribute conflicts to resolve, but both the killer and the detective are trying to win. The detective can't make a roll to save his life and my socially maladjusted little rage killer is by virtue of his resultant stats supposed to be operating as some classy mastermind -- so we come to a neat little realization. Since the world changes to reflect the stats of the detective and killer, and is supposed to be kind of a proxy for them... bureaucracy, crime, and corruption are opposing the detective in those scenes where I'm supposed to be destroying evidence or messing with his head. We kind of run overtime since it is the first game and we're exploring the mechanics so I propose a compromise: I give the detective one final scene to Cross the Line and come after me. If he can make it, he'll arrest me. If not, he'll kill me, but because I'll have perfect stats at that point I'll have "won", because the entire city up to the highest levels is just as rotten as me. He doesn't make it. Sunday morning is one last session of Save Game, with four players: a badass space marine in an early first-person shooter... which is Hexen, a pizza delivery boy with a transforming robot truck (and the previous game's mascot, Don Coneyxote, popping up at weird intervals), a character from a company's last desperate game which is full of bugs, who is normally a rat with giant throwing axes but can glitch into various enemy and boss characters, and a character from a licensed monster truck game who's fed up with playing second banana to Bigfoot. There's a little time left after the fight with Miss Trick but not enough for a full stage, so I adapt the diplomacy mechanic from Wrath of the Autarch and turn it into a shootout with Star Hawk and his lieutenants (Lightning Hare, Spotless Frog, and Frozen Wolf) and their giant glitch armada, in which there's a giant number of ships but a flagship exploding will take down certain numbers of them. All in all I think I had a good con. If any of my players are on this board and want to enthuse or vent, feel free. Feedback only makes me stronger.
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Jun 9, 2015 05:53
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Golden Bee posted:Never thought the first gaming story I'd hear two sides of would be about fuckin' Cat Tut. drat, small world. Hope it was an entertaining other side, at least.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:41
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The Grammar Aryan posted:1: A scrimshawed hammerhead shark skull (which doesn't make a ton of sense, unless you can petrify cartilage, or I'm just wrong about shark anatomy), worth around 500 gp. Shark skulls are pretty sollid stuff, actually. A shark "skeleton" looks kind of like a very mean snake, because its skull, jaw, and spine are heavily reinforced. You could definitely scrimshaw it.
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Jul 21, 2015 13:04
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Jenny Angel posted:the second Argo is his surly but loyal lieutenant and body double, a doppleganger named Margot (which, contrary to Argo's belief, is not short for Margothrax). I imagine that when you're a doppleganger you quickly disabuse yourself of the habit of correcting someone who gets your name wrong.
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Mar 18, 2018 18:51
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Robindaybird posted:Welp had a heroes game, and I made basically a crime boss that's a jovial old man that is perfectly willing to shoot a man dead, in that 'Charming like a snake' fashion with the full intention of making him the BBEG of the campaign. So, uh, what was he planning to do as a BBEG? Why can't he just keep doing that? Heck, why was he doing it in the first place, and how do those motivations interact with friendly heroes? The heroes can find out about it, which may or may not be harder because their broker put them on the trail of a killodyne dealer three states over, and things will proceed accordingly. Really, a crime boss is just someone who's broken the state monopoly on violence to its own citizens, which last I checked is probably what the players are doing anyway.
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May 11, 2019 00:43
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CountryMatters posted:That does help actually, I was looking at some of the "moves" each class has (thinking in terms of various pbta books which I've run once or twice) and I was seeing them as basically a joke. Like "you can always: shrug" wow ok thanks, great. But from what you're saying I guess I could explain to players that the 'you can always' moves could be more ' you can always do it and it's always appropriate for the situation'? So the firelight being able to always shrug maybe indicates that they can declare a situation isn't as big a deal as it seems and it's ok to ignore it and then that becomes true. I'm still not sure why I would ever need to fidget as a moth tender Some of the stuff in "you can always" is just there to be "your idle animation". The moth-tender jots down notes, full of nervous energy. The shepherd takes a moment to ease their burden and pets a bumble.
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Aug 10, 2022 04:02
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Golden Bee posted:I had another session with three new players, including one who it was the first game ever. Oh hey, somebody else picked up Spirit of the Season. It's a pretty good book for villains for exactly this purpose!
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Dec 27, 2022 17:58
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, there’s no such spell as Power Word: Funkadelic. Naturally. You can't just unilaterally invoke Funkadelic, you need to convene a parliament.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:40
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Where are you adapting from, into Spirit of the Century? Delta Green? Love that you can pull off a social end boss, though.
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Apr 29, 2023 22:03
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Golden Bee posted:Devika got out her newspaper cuttings book. She told the despairing typewriter-warriors that aliens were definitely real, and magic too, but nobody really cared. People wanted funny movies about Amazons playing beach volleyball. This, combined with peer pressure, and the promise of food, were enough to be convincing. "Humanity is completely connected to ancient aliens, but nobody cares because there's more money in CELEBRITY NIP SLIP" is a perfect blend between entirely too goofy and existentially depressing.
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Jun 27, 2023 22:11
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Hundreds of years old... I wonder if that was the baton writing the diary, and not the man.
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Aug 1, 2023 12:56
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Railing Kill posted:Who is the antagonist? Describe him or her. I mean, wrap that up in an aggrieved spirit and it's not too far off from some Aang-era plot developments.
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Dec 17, 2023 07:11
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An evil platypus bear with an army of turtle ducks
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Golden Bee posted:Pros and CONFERENCE! Well, dang. Congratulations on an entire year of pickups. Well done.
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Dec 31, 2023 03:05
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Golden Bee posted:Translation TERROR! ...her parents' death, right? Otherwise this is possibly the greatest act-clean-up of all time.
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Jan 8, 2024 14:48
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Golden Bee posted:What Ivanova was to overland travel and intimidation, the professor was to clue-solving. Latin abounded at every step of the adventure, from DC, to Egypt, from rural France to Iceland. Meanwhile, Florence used her charm to prevent one ambush (Using her Cairo contacts to run an endgame around a traitorous Bedouin), and stopped another when she convinced a Bloodthirsty Templar of the group's honorable intentions. This is probably the original adventure talking, but IIRC an Academics-leaning character starts out with a bunch of languages and can stunt for more or even infinity, letting you rotate clues a whole bunch without keeping them out of their strike zone. I always forget exactly what engine you're running this is, if it's original Spirit of the Century or just a regular Fate drift that checks most of the same boxes.
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Feb 20, 2024 15:10
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I always find it a little bit heartening to read stories of pulp heroes breaking up occult nonsense by doing what they do best.
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Apr 1, 2024 18:36
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, there is no such spell as Summon Candleja Well, yeah, you don't need a spell for him to show up, you just have to say candleja
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Apr 9, 2024 18:10
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Golden Bee posted:The Flower Of Death! Yeah, having a high exposition-tagged skill in Fate is like having a high Encyclopedia in Disco Elysium. The GM will tell you so many things!
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Apr 17, 2024 01:36
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Golden Bee posted:Many of the modules I read about pulp adventure made it seem like a trifle, a two-dimensional interlude between serious games about vampires or airlocks. But I started reading a lot of stories on archive.org: old western magazines, Black Mask, Adventure, Colliers....Got into the Shadow radio show, “Let George Do it!”, even the weirdo comedy shows like Rocky Fortune (starring Frank Sinatra as a detective who gets a new odd job every episode). The thing I think most about pulp adventure is not that it's shallow but that it's easy. Nobody has high expectations for intricate politicking or hard-edged scientific realism, so you just go with whatever makes sense at the time, and if it seems a bit goofy that's just how the genre works.
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Apr 30, 2024 22:33
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