Outland Session 3

Last night at Unique Gifts & Games, we had 5 players. Two made it back from the first session, and three were new. Thus, we had the following PCs:

• a 1st-level thief
• a 1st-level magic-user
• 14 zero-level scrubs

The group decided to venture into the caves - the alien caves to be specific. Here are some of the highlights:

• One of the zero-level guys rolled an 18 for intelligence. Sadly, he failed his save against radiation later on, causing his eyeballs to explode for 1 die of damage. He did not survive.
• A swarm of beetles that had the appearance of gold nuggets near the entrance was expertly avoided.
• A trollish-looking child was met and befriended. He was sad because the other kids wouldn't let him play "dodge-rocks" with them. He led the group to a tomb he and his buddies found, but weren't strong enough to open.
• On the way to the tomb, a large crystal egg (very valuable) was found in a hidden hole with a magical darkness spell cast upon it. Thank the gods it wasn't a gnomish hand-getter trap!
• The group went to the tomb, opened the sarcophagus, and awakened a pissed off undead Darth Varaxis. There were a few casualties, between this guy's lightsaber and the radiation unleashed in the room when his sarcophagus was opened, but the group made it out with some new toys - Darth Varaxis' Cloak (+1 AC and Stealth); Darth Varaxis' Helmet (infravision, breathe in any environment, telekinesis); Darth Varaxis' Suit (basically leather armor a mage can wear); Darth Varaxis' Lightsaber (Whoever wants to use it will have to roll on the item complexity chart, possibly killing themselves in the process. Everyone was too scared to try it.)
• The little green guy tried to steal the lightsaber and run, but was overpowered by a cluster of 0-level nobodies. Amazingly, the group didn't even kill him for his transgressions! Perhaps he's PALS4LIFE material...
• Only one PC, the magic-user, caroused. He gained enough XP to reach level 2, but he failed his save and ended up making a drunken foxhole prayer that led to a quest spell from Ishtar.

Good thing they didn't come across this guy...

All in all, I'd say it was a very profitable expedition.

Outland Session 2

On December 23, I was visited by out-of-towner friends Steve from Atlanta and Mason from Milwaukee. We decided to do some gaming, and after being presented with the available rumors of locations to be explored, they went with the haunted house - now dubbed Nagle Manor.

Two players, with 5 PCs each entered the manor, and made use of the map shared by the previous explorers. They explored the majority of the ground level, and found stairs going both down and up, but chose to limit their shenannigans to the first floor.

Here are some highlights from the adventure, in no particular order:

• Animated curtains began to strangle two adventurers, but the curtains were foiled by a well-thrown bear trap and later burned.
• A well-stocked library attended by a powerful yet crazy magician. One of the PCs attacked him, and she was turned to stone for her efforts. The others perused the books and were each allowed to check out a book, being told that they must be returned in 4 weeks. Books checked out were a treatise on all matter of slimes and oozes, a book on fishing, and two tomes dedicated to the accurate valuation of works of art and fine furniture, respectively. Successful study of these books may aid the adventurers in the future...
• A black pudding was encountered, and sent through the floor to the lower level of the manor.
• A ballroom full of dancing ghosts was discovered. The ghosts seemed to pay no mind to the adventurers, but some clumsy navigation of the room led to one of the PCs brushing up against a dancing ghost. The cold chill of death caused the PC to die where he stood.
• A room full of bowling ghouls was discovered. The PCs fled immediately!
• There was a locked door in the northeast quadrant of the manor that the adventurers were unable to gain access to.
• An armory was discovered, but a suit of plate animated and sent an adventurer or two to their graves.
• Some sort of magical painting depicting a great battle was discovered. At some point, a barrage of arrows flew forth from the painting, killing yet another PC.
• Treasure taken from the manor includes a magic sword, a ring of telekinesis, a dragon control potion, a bottle of elvish whimsey wine, and miscellaneous items to the tune of a ~3,000 gp value. An encrypted treasure map was reported to be found as well.

Here are the adventurers that met their demise at the hands of Nagle Manor, illustrated by Mason:

Big Lurch - death by cursed scroll

Dweebal Zappo - bumped into a dancing ghost

Moonbeam Zappo - pissed off the librarian and was turned to stone

Moonshine Bloodgood - killed by arrows fired from a magical painting

Stephan Suxley - killed by animated suit of armor

Ulthon Steelhide - also killed by animated suit of armor

The following adventurers made it home, did some partying, and two of them advanced to level 1 somebodies:

Jim Titanium - advanced to 1st-level Fighting-Man

Jim Titanium action shot

Scarecrow Hooker - advanced to 1st-level Thief

Gordo Murvin - promoted to henchman of Jim Titanium. Hey, it's better than being dead!

Gordo enjoying his one true love - fishing!

Barkbeard Woodsack - Scarecrow Hooker's new meatshield

Updated map of the manor (scale and accuracy are questionable)

I was told that zero-level adventures are super awesome fun. The end.

Phantasmal Feces

We got a chance to throw together a quick ad hoc D&D game yesterday, so the PCs entered the amazon caves for a brief expedition.

They got a random encounter of 5 carnivorous flies, so my sister cast Phantasmal Forces to create a giant illusory pile of shit, which occupied most of the flies and turned a potentially difficult fight into a trivial one. She appropriately named it Phantasmal Feces.

I thought it was pretty awesome.

Zero-Level Chainmail-Style Fun

Saturday night we were supposed to have our Pathfinder game which is being run by my brother-in-law, but we were short 2 of the 4 players, so he didn't really want to run it. As luck would have it, I had just gotten my back issues of Fight On #6 and #7 the previous night, and I had read Jeff Rients' excellent article, "Holy Crap! I Need a Dungeon RIGHT NOW!" (in issue #6). It was a very good article that gave some great and easy-to-remember guidelines for creating a decent dungeon in no time flat.

I purposely didn't bring hardly any of my stuff with me, even though I usually do as a "just in case" measure. So all I had was one sheet of graph paper, my copy of Vornheim, a notebook with a few tables I had done up previously, and Labyrinth Lord and my Zero-Level rules on my tablet.

So, I took the opportunity to whip up a quick haunted house with 3 levels, had each of the two players "roll up" 6 0-level noobs, and we had us a nice little adventure!

This was the closest thing to total improvisation I have ever done, and it went really well. I did take about 45 minutes to put everything together, but they only made it through about a third of the content in the several hours we played, so it's safe to say I overprepped. Both commented on how much fun they had, and I think the whole thing did a good job of showing how you can have lots of fun with very few rules or character details.

For combat, they just rolled a d6 for each PC they had, and they would hit on a 6 with a makeshift weapon, or hit on a 5+ with an actual weapon like a sword. They had one room where they "activated" 4 zombies and 5 skeletons, and we were able to manage the combat very quickly and easily this way. Plus, there's just something gratifying about rolling handfuls of dice. I've been spending a lot of time lately reading about how to use Chainmail rules for OD&D combats, and this session showed me that it is something I really ought to pursue.

Once I got into the flow of things, I found it really easy to add little details on the fly that brought the thing to life. Here are some of the highlights:

• Otherwise empty room with a fortune-telling machine ala Zoltar, from the movie Big with Tom Hanks.
• Random encounter with three wolves was turned into three pet wolves with the clever use of a pound of bacon and a good reaction check. Minutes later, when they were sent into combat against ghouls, 2 of the 3 failed their morale checks and fled. Easy come, easy go!
• Illusory place settings on a dining table in an early room had the players examining EVERYTHING they encountered thereafter through a mirror.
• The players located an invisible coffin hanging from the ceiling in a room. The coffin contained a beheaded vampire with a stake in his chest that wasn't bothering anyone. They decided it would be a good idea to douse him in oil and set him on fire (after stealing his cape) inside the house, apparently forgetting that the manor was constructed of wood. It was getting late anyways, and they had gotten a fair amount of treasure despite never making it to the second floor. After getting back to town, they heard tale of a group of villagers that attempted to burn down the place 40 years prior, and found the place standing the next day as if nothing had happened. So, they can probably go back if they want to.

For your pleasure, here are my crappy maps and keys from the session:

top is the ground level, then the 2nd floor, then the "basement"

Loads of Free Fun

A few weeks back, I ran a sort of experiment. I wanted to run a level 1 Pathfinder adventure with level 0 DCC characters. I already had some copies of the free DCC RPG Beta Rules printed up, and I had picked up this free goblin adventure on Free RPG Day.

In order to make it a little more meaningful, I told the players they could each roll up 4 level 0 goblin dudes, and any survivors could become level 1 henchmen of their main characters in our Pathfinder/DCC frankenstein game that has been running for almost a year now. It was easy to fit this in plotwise with our ongoing campaign.

The adventure was a ton of fun. The module needs a little bit of adjustment to run for DCC, but I did it all on the fly without any problem.

The dares were especially fun, and since level 0 DCC characters don't get hardly jack for items, it is very worthwhile for the players to try. I think I killed like 5 PCs from the dares alone.

Here were the most memorable:

The very first dare, "Dance with Squealy Nord", where a character has to ride a piglet rodeo-style for three rounds (3 successful Agility checks, roll equal to or under Agility score on a d20). First roll was a fail, and the PC fell off the pig and died.

Hide or Get Clubbed: This is the goblin version of hide and seek. The dare-taker rushes off into the marsh without any weapons and attempts to find a good hiding spot (I allowed the PCs to make two checks - d20+agi mod and d20+int mod and take the better result for their hide check). The other goblins try to find him, and if they do, the finder is allowed to whack the previously hidden goblin with a club. Once the goblins start looking, roll 1d10 to determine how many goblins come close enough to the hiding goblin to attempt –1 Perception checks to notice the hiding goblin. (Rolled a 10 and the first one found him.) If a goblin finds the hidden goblin, the resulting club strike automatically inflicts 1d4–1 points of damage. (BAM! DEAD! HAHAHAHHAA!) If no goblins find the hidden goblin, he wins a loan of the mystical Ring That Lets You Climb Real Good (a ring of  climbing).

After the dares, there's just one encounter on the way to the target. (Note that the adventure references the Pathfinder Bestiary, but you can get the needed stat blocks for free at d20pfsrd.com if you don't have the actual book.) This is a relatively straightforward encounter against a big spider. Probably one or two guys will die depending on initiative. I made certain to explain the obvious trail back to the spider's lair after the fight so the PCs could pick up a few more mundane weapons.

Then, the final part, which really needs to be toned down unless you don't care about having a TPK. There is a wasp swarm trap, which the PCs will find impossible to kill off once triggered using Pathfinder swarm rules, since they are immune to normal weapon damage. Additionally, the druid at the end can summon a swarm (and she should!), which can be very deadly, potentially killing up to 4 PCs per round, but that one only lasts 2 rounds.

By the end, only 2 PCs remained from the 16 we had at the beginning. One of the players took a body part from one of his deceased 0-level dudes that he was particularly fond of, in order to have his main character get him resurrected someday. (Awww, how sweet.)

In summation, this session was a big hit with the players, and we spent most of the session laughing our asses off, which is how it should be. I highly recommend trying this combo, as the silliness of DCC 0-level play and this particular adventure complemented each other perfectly.

Free RPG Day: Pod-Caverns Under DCC RPG Rules

Just got home from Lake Geneva Games where I ran a slightly truncated version of Matt Finch's Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom (great module by the way!) using the DCC RPG Beta rules. It was pretty much awesome, but I'll try to keep this short and sweet (and fail miserably at that as usual). Here are some points about the game, in no particular order.

• The adventure states it's for 6-8 OSRIC (AD&D) characters of 2nd to 4th level. We ended up with 6 players, each running a 3rd level DCC character.
• I generated the characters beforehand, doing everything mostly by the book. To get ability scores, I rolled several series of four sets using 3d6 in order, choosing the best set from each series. This was to replicate the filtering that would have happened at level 0. (I'll post up a downloadable package of all my pregens as soon as I get a chance)
• The PCs started with a single healing potion (one for the whole group, not one each), a magical tent that would allow them to rest once or twice inside the dungeon, and no other magic items.
• I ran the module almost exactly as written, with no changes to monsters aside from converting their AC to ascending and giving them an attack bonus equal to their HD, which was all easily done on the fly.
• I didn't use a screen, and made all rolls in the open. If a player wanted to see my notes or maps, they probably could have easily done so, but it wasn't an issue. I spent about 2/3 of the time sitting and 1/3 on my feet. I really enjoyed running the game this way, and will probably do it this way from now on, unless some player takes advantage of it and sours me on the method.
• I followed Harley's tips as he outlined in this thread. This really helped the flow of the game. It also helped that I got to play in a game run by him, so I was able to learn a lot from that. Harley is an excellent DM, and if you ever get the opportunity to play in a game run by him, I suggest doing so. I did forget to have players roll the damage they took a few times, but no biggie.
• Another thing I did that was very important to the flow was this: When a caster is up, have them make their spell check and then go to the next character's turn while they look up the result. Then go back and let them roll their damage or whatever. This was very effective, as it kept the spell lookups in the hands of the player, but eliminated the issue of everyone else sitting at the table staring at them.
• I used my ref sheets to great effect. They were extremely handy and helped keep things moving. I referenced them on average 2 or 3 times per round, so it made a big difference.
• Funky Dice! I think everyone enjoyed using them. I purchased and brought 3 sets with me, but three of the players already had their own sets! They were the topic of discussion quite a bit as well. I don't care what anyone says, Mr. Goodman made a good move by having DCC use these dice. I think a set was sold that day as well.
• We had a 10-yr-old (my little cousin) playing a warrior to great effect. I didn't even tell him what Mighty Deeds of Arms were, he just did his thing. He often used stuff from his backpack, like a crowbar or chain rather than his weapon, and was doing all sorts of crazy stuff. The MDoA tables were a great way for me to adjudicate the results of his crazy stunts. Big thumbs up to MDoAs, and big thumbs up to giving the imaginative kids the warrior!
• Deaths. There were none. At least not any permanent ones. There were several times where people were knocked to zero, but without fail they were healed back to life by the cleric within the requisite 3 rounds. At the very end, I could have possibly had a TPK against the shroom, but a lucky save turned the tide in the PCs favor, and a high spell check blew the boss to bits. Victory belonged to the PCs.
• I think the adventure would have been a lot harder if the players weren't so good at spellburning and burning luck at the appropriate times. They used this mechanic to great effect.

Here were a few of the awesome moments from the game:

• The chaotic wizard had an awesome mercurial result with his scorching ray spell, allowing him to roll a d30 instead of a d20 for spell checks using this spell. Of course, on his first roll, he rolled a 1, and earned himself some elephant ears. Even still, he kept using this spell almost exclusively (who wouldn't!), and it basically smoked the shit out of a lot of encounters.
• When they got to the phosphorescent pool, they promptly filled their waterskins with it, poured it all over themselves, rubbed in on their gums, drank it and peed it out later - you name it. I'm guessing many groups would have avoided this pool like the plague. Basically this is a good example of how I had a great group for enjoying this game and trying silly things.
• At one point a stirge inserted his proboscis (a body part I had to repeatedly ask one of the players what it was called) into the warrior's eye. Another stirge had his proboscis in the wizard's knee, and was sucking the marrow out of his bone.
• The dwarf's "smell gold" ability led them up the ledge to a fun encounter they would have probably otherwise skipped. This ability is awesome for leading PCs to those cool areas or treasures that they have a tendency to miss.
• The thief did a good job with negotiating a backstab attempt with me just about every single round. Lots of failed thief skill attempts, but a few were made when it really counted. I was afraid the thief would be totally lame, but he was run by a good player, so he was pretty effective. However, I'd still like to see something more flashy given to the thief. Something that gives him another viable combat option besides backstab.
• The lawful wizard failed a magic missile attempt and earned himself a pustule-covered face and a permanent -1 Personality score.
• The "stuff you do to spellburn" table was a source of great amusement. We had a wizard brand himself with an image of a tadpole, rip out one of his fingernails and burn it, and the other wizard offered up his firstborn son to an unnamed demi-god. Good stuff, and I look forward to fan versions of this table.
• Probably close to a dozen crits in the session. They were a good source of entertainment for us all.
• Found magic arrow that happened to be black was named Rick James by our 10-year-old warrior, and there were many times it was fired to the tune of "I'm Rick James _____" (The one drawback to playing in public - not nearly enough swearing. This games goes well with lots of colorful language at the table.)
• The last fight could have gone very badly for the group, as I had the chaotic wizard charmed under my complete control, with 3 of the PCs on the floor already. If I would have taken a moment to think about it, I could have probably killed the cleric with the wizard, but I was caught in the moment and tried to have the wizard blow his own head off with a scorching ray, which afforded him another save - a difficult one - but one he was able to make with some smart luck burning. He immediately roasted the boss after that.

Other observations about the game:

• Luck burning and Spellburn played much differently than I anticipated when reading about them. I would have expected them to barely be used, but it seemed the casters were using these roughly every other turn. They were obviously metagaming the fact that this was a one shot. I am curious to see how players manage these resources in campaign play. In future one-shots, I will likely amp up the difficulty of the adventure and make this use an expected tactic, or I will place limits on the use of these abilities. They were just playing within the rules, but something about it didn't feel right, and it had the stink of munchkin-style gaming. 
• Taking the above into account, I think there should be some advice in the rules for one-shot beer and pretzels style play versus campaign play. I think the general impression of the game is that it is primarily for one-shot convention play, and that it is overall an unserious, gonzo game. However, it seems the luck and spellburn stuff is more geared for campaign play. I still have high hopes for the game as being a viable system for campaign play, but I would be welcoming of some advice about how to do it. If it just intended for beer and pretzels fun, that's cool too, but let's just come out and say that explicitly if that is the case.
• I know it's already been addressed and is going to be fixed in the final release, but we got some further confirmation in the game today that the multiple chained "as above" statements in the spell tables are cumbersome.
• Taking this module as an example, 1E content seems to work great for this game. If the PCs have any magic items, my best guess would be that a DCC group could tackle content 1 or 2 levels higher than their AD&D counterpart PCs.

In summation, this was a great session. I am lucky in that a had an awesome group of players, and this system is simply built for action-packed adventures. This was my first public game I've ever run, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was a very rewarding experience.

Please post any questions you have about the session or the game itself. I'd be happy to answer!

Hvaen't played DCC yet? Get off your ass and get to it!

The Sandpoint Sandbox, Sessions 6 & 7

Sessions  6 and 7 of our Pathfinder game happened on May 14th and 21st, respectively. As alluded to in a previous post, I have shifted my approach to running this game dramatically. The campaign started out with book 1 of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, but I've set that content aside in favor of a more open-ended, player-driven, sandboxy style.

First, I have to give a lot of credit to Paizo. Sandpoint is an excellent little town with enough going on in it to keep the players engaged at all times. Here is one of the 50 entries for the town, contained in the adventure path book:

8. Sage
The sole occupant of this ancient building is a cantankerous old man named Brodert Quink (NG male human expert 7), a balding expert on Varisian history and engineering. Brodert claims to have spent two decades of his youth studying with dwarven engineers at Janderhoff and three decades as a cataloger at the Great Library of Magnimar, and is continually baffled and enraged that his learning and obvious intelligence haven’t afforded him more prestige. Brodert has been studying ancient Thassilonian ruins for the past several years and has  recently become obsessed with the Old Light. No one believes his theories that the tower was once a war machine capable of spewing fire to a range of more than a mile.

There are some much more flavorful entries, such as the one for the Pixie's Kitten brothel, but this one is a good example of how the seeds of adventure are sprinkled throughout the town. Having already played 5 sessions, the group was already familiar with a number of NPCs, and a number of events had already taken place that were easy to build upon.

So basically, these two sessions added up to about 15 hours of play. As far as prep, I did very little. I created two encounter tables - one for the surrounding wilderness, and one for dungeons. One of the encounters I put on the table was "rival adventuring party", so I statted those up. I grabbed a few dungeon maps from Paratime Designs and tossed them into my binder, but I didn't even bother populating them, and probably won't until I know for sure where the party is going. I wrote down a short list of things that were happening around the town, some interesting, some not so much. I did do a great deal of thinking about the game in the two weeks leading up to it, but I wrote very little down, and to be perfectly honest, I was pretty scared about how it was going to turn out.

One thing I did do was read a lot of fiction during the time I'm normally spending reading the next adventure path book. I can't stress enough how well this paid off in play. I had just finished reading a REH book of stories, and I have been reading the Clark Ashton Smith book you see pictured over to the right. When we got down to playing, I was astounded at my ability to give vivid descriptions of events and roleplay a wide variety of NPCs. I am not an imaginative person - at least I've never fancied myself as being so. Yet, all the reading I had been doing awakened a long-dormant part of my brain, and contributed to what turned out to be some really great gaming.

I usually put in a metric shit ton of prep time whenever we play this game, so this was all like a wonderful brand-new world for me. I no longer had a personal investment in steering the party in a certain direction, and was able to achieve a level of indifference and impartiality previously unknown to me. As an added benefit, the levels of anxiety and stress I normally experience when actively running a game were lowered almost to the point of non-existence. It was like I had reached a state of Dungeon Master zen. In a word, it was fucking awesome!

This is definitely the lazy man's way to play, and furthermore, it was a lot more fun for me as well. This was because I had just as little idea what was going to happen in the game as the players did, and I was very interested in seeing how it all played out.

One unexpected thing that happened is the roleplaying went WAY up. There were only two combats across these two sessions, with the second session lasting 10 hours and being completely devoid of combat. What can I say? There were eight random encounter checks with an encounter happening on a 1 or 2, and it just never came up. I don't think anyone minded though, with the notable exception of our powergamer half-ogre barbarian. He was just squirming and itching to roll that d20 the whole time. Oh well, he will get his chance soon enough.

So right now, the party has explored the first few rooms of the shrine from Death Frost Doom, in search of a powerful sword they learned about from the local fortune-teller. They've had about a million hints that going there would be a bad idea, and still they press on. The barbarian even walked a mile with Zeke Duncaster hanging on his back screaming, "NO NO NO! YOU'RE ALL DOOOOOMED!" I read the adventure several weeks ago, so I was a little foggy on some of the details, but I didn't find it difficult to run at all by simply glancing at it while we were playing. Now that I know they intend to see things through in there, I can read the rest of it over again before the next time we play.

In addition, the party has been short on cash, so they have already exchanged three future favors for goods and services. Between those future favors being called in, and all the stuff happening in Sandpoint they don't even know about, this party won't be found "wondering what to do next" for some time.

D is for...

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG: Playtest Report

I've been holding off posting this, trying to find my character sheet from the game, but to no avail. If you would like to see what the character sheet looks like, Jeff Rients has a scan of his here. (But mine was way cooler, being that I was a berserker named Francis Baconator... just sayin')

The other weekend at GaryCon, I got the opportunity to play in a game of Goodman Games' upcoming Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. I had more fun in this game than any other (though none of the games I played in were by any means bad), and the game hasn't been released yet, so I figured it deserved a play report.

First off, the players:

• Me (berserker)
• My sister (wizard/sorcerer type)
• My brother-in-law (cleric)
• A guy I know from work and his wife (a thief and shit, I don't remember)
• Jeff Sparks and his wife (berserker and i-don't-remember what class, but she was having a terrible time with the dice, which made for some good fun!)
• A younger guy that I regrettably cannot recall his name (wizard guy)

Next, the game mechanics:

• The stats were slightly different than your standard D&D array, but still quite similar and nothing I hadn't seen in other games before: Strength, Agility, Fortitude, Intelligence, Personality, and Luck. I am personally a big fan of the Luck stat, and have often considered house-ruling it into my own D&D games, but never had the time or inclination to actually do so.
• The spell system is awesome. No limit on the number of spells per day, but every time you cast, you have to make an intelligence-based check (or personality for clerics). Failure means that you no longer have access to that spell for the day. Critical failure means some terrible shit happens to you. This happened to my sister when she rolled two 1's in a row when trying to cast. First, her ears fell off, then her head turned into a serpent head. The spells have different effects depending on the degree of success, so a high roll can result in a bigger explosion, more damage, or whatever. It was a very neat system. The only drawback I can see is that each spell requires a table of different results. When getting to higher levels (provided your character can survive that long), I could see the need for a caster to literally have a "spell book" at the table in order to be able to look up all the varying results.
• The cleric spell system was similar, but there were a few differences in the way successes and failures were measured, if I recall correctly.
• The fighter-types get an additional attack die that they add the result of to their attack and damage, rather than a flat base attack bonus as in d20, or improved THAC0 in older games. The size of the die advances as the fighter advances in level. At level 1 it's a d3, at level 3 it's a d5, and at level 5 it's a d7. Unsure of how it progresses beyond that. I liked the idea, and thought it added a nice touch.
• Saving Throws were standard d20-style fortitude, reflex, and will. I like these three categories for saves, but I prefer the older way saves work where you have a target number rather than a bonus and a variable DC. As a DM, the variable DCs are just another thing to have to keep track of.
• As a berserker, my guy would crit on a 19 or 20 (another d20-ism). Whenever I'd crit, I'd roll a d16 and the DM would look up what happened on a table - sometimes extra damage, sometimes a nice maiming. I was getting a lot of crits, but my dice were just on fire. At one point, after rolling like the third or fourth crit in a row, Harley Stroh (amazing DM by the way) turned to me and gave me double middle fingers and said "FSCK YOU!" It was pretty awesome to be just slaughtering guys left and right. When I got crit early in the game, the result was that by nose got smashed up into my frontal lobe, and my character suffered a permanent loss of 3 INT points. Ouch!

Basically, this game is fun as shit. I'm not sure how it will hold up in long-term campaign play, but my group is eager to find out. I will be first in line on Free RPG Day to get all the stuff Goodman Games is putting out for DCC RPG.

C is for...

Chaotic Caves of Weirdness!

I initially posted my first (and so far only) edit of the B2 Chaves of Chaos a few weeks back (here). Tonight we finally got to play it out.

It was largely a playtest of some of the new classes I've added to my Outland Player's Handbook, a supplement for B/X D&D that I am creating and using to tailor the game to my group's tastes. As such, we spent a good deal of time putzing around at the beginning while everyone figured out what they wanted to roll up. We had 3 players, and each player controls 2 PCs that each have 2,800 XP (a nice number I got from Hill Cantons Compendium). I let them trade one of their PCs from the last game to make a new one with one of the classes or races I had that were not available before.

Greg traded his Half-Fiend "Master" in for a Jotunn (Human?) Berserker "Fozzy Kill Face". Managed to find the most imbalanced character, as ususal. He kept his Orc "Quasimoto".
Jen traded her Cleric "Larry the Demon Hunter" for "Malice", a Redcap Black Mage (Magic-User Subclass). She kept her Half-Fiend "Half-Not-Fiend".
Nicholas traded his Human Fighting-Man "Sauce" for a Redcap Berserker "Red Sauce", and kept his Half-Fiend "Alfredo".

We spent a bit of time updating saving throws to the new Fort/Ref/Will tables I made, rolling hp, and all that boring stuff. They chose weapons, but for regular equipment I told them to just write it down if they wanted it in the middle of play, so we could move on.

So as far as how the Caves went...

The Good

• One alteration I made since we were together celebrating Nicholas' birthday, was to put a laser gun in the pile of rocks immediately inside the cave. As luck would have it, he even searched and found it! You should have seen the look on his face when I drew a picture of what he found and showed it to him. He even role-played it a little too well, to the extent of looking down the barrel and wiggling the trigger. A green ray scorched his face, causing 5 damage, but he survived and now knew how it worked.
• The cannibal kobold babies thing worked out really well. They didn't know what the hell to think. Jen charmed one and kept it as a pet. The rest were laser gunned or set on fire with flaming oil. The look on their faces when they asked one of the remaining kobolds what was up with the babies after they had all surrendered was priceless. "They were just hungry", she said. The players all looked at each other like, "What did we just do?!?!" They felt so bad, they let all the surrendered kobolds go without cutting off their left ears, which was their initial plan.
• Quasimoto sent the kobolds back to the keep with a note he wrote, saying how the kobolds were okay and to treat them nicely. LOL! No one at the keep knows who Quasimoto is or gives a shit about him. I am thinking the party will probably arrive back at the keep next session to find some guys cleaning up kobold guts at the entrance to the keep. I'll have to give this one some thought, though.
• Fozzy Kill Face died in one round after charging blindly around the corner into room 1 and taking two spears to the face for 9 damage. This wasn't really a good thing on it's own, but the lesson the group learned was an important one. This isn't a video game. If you abandon caution for no apparent reason, even against kobolds, it can end badly.
• The sorcerer fight went pretty decently. They sent a lackey into the room, and he came out, screaming in horror and running down the hall, as a beholder came into view. A quick shot from Red Sauce's laser gun dispelled the illusion. They proceeded into the room to finish the job, met a little resistance with a sleep spell that put down two of them, but prevented the sorcerer's escape and got the loot. They also mowed down his harem as they tried to flee.
• Jen did a great job with her character. She wanted a trident for a weapon, so I said, "Sure, why not?" She captured a rat for later sacrifice, but eventually fed it to her new charmed pet baby kobold instead.

The Bad

• Got off to a slow start. I could see their eyes glazing over as they dealt with the first two combat encounters, which were pretty generic fights against giant rats and kobolds in play. I should have done a better job setting more of a weird tone straight away.
• No one tried going into the rat tunnel. I hate it when they don't explore the things I create. But such is the nature of the beast; I'll just have to get over it and recycle the poop tunnel for something else.
• I need to figure out a way to spark their creativity. The players seemed stuck in a rut of moving or attacking, and not much else. I'm not sure how I can encourage the more creative and explorative style of B/X D&D. To their credit, they did break out the oil flasks a few times at least. Yet no one used the d30, which still hasn't been rolled in two sessions now. Not much creative use of equipment, no one tried a single combat maneuver, etc. Is there a tutorial out there for how to be a good old-school D&D player? Not that they are bad, or weren't having fun, but I just feel like they could be getting so much more out of it. Maybe I am just under the illusion that they are "doing it wrong" because they aren't doing it like I would. /shrug
• The Exceptional Strength table is horribly broken. Fozzy Kill Face (18/92 STR) was one-shotting everything and I don't think he missed once. He managed to stack the +4 attack/damage bonus with the standard +2 base attack bonus with the +1 favored weapon bonus with the +1 dual-wield bonus. That's a fucking +8 to attack rolls (equivalent of THAC0 11) as a level 2 guy. I'll probably scrap the exceptional strength table and the fighter's favored weapon bonus. They get enough attack bonus just from the base attack bonus, which is equal to their level.
• Had to stop before they went to explore Old Jedd's cave. One of them needs to get mutated!!!!!
• A number of things I didn't have ready, like the death and dismemberment table. I need to get to work!
• I think I over compensated for them only having 3 players. They had 2 level 2 characters each and 2 hirelings each (total of 2 archers, 2 shield-bearers, a cook, and a porter. I think I need to get them back onto one character each, or make their alternate characters level 0 or something. Not sure, but it was awful crowded in them caves, and it depersonalized their characters a lot by them having 2 each.

More work to be done!

Here's a pair of the awesome PCs:

Fozzy Kill Face - Berserker

Malice - Redcap Black Mage

Playtest Report: Humanspace Empires

This report is a player's point of view in response to the referee's report, which can be found here. You may want to read that post first in order to get the proper context for this response.

First, let me start by saying that I don't know jack about EPT/Tekumel. I understand it is very popular amongst the old school crowd. However, this turned out to be a bonus with regard to this particular game, since I was able to come to the table free of any preconceived notions about what I was getting myself into. I was introduced to the world through play, and as far as I could tell, the referee was well-grounded in the setting. He did a very nice job explaining the state of the world, and illustrating all of it's weird little qualities.

The referee was well-prepared with copies of the rules for everyone. However, he did not have premade characters, so character creation along with a late start ate a significant chunk into the time we might have otherwise spent playing.

As far as rolling abilities 3d6 in order - fine by me. Minimum ability requirements for weird alien races - fine with me. I didn't qualify for any of the non-human races based on my rolls, but even if I did, I probably still would have played a human, since I didn't know what any of the other races were (no pictures of them in the rules), and I couldn't pronounce their names. I went and looked at the rules afterwards, and they are described, but it would have been impractical to sit there and read them all at a con game.

Then we got to the skills. I don't really like skill systems in the first place, so honestly, I was relieved at rolling the lowest possible number of skills, so that the guessing game of trying to anticipate what skills might be useful was minimized. Again, sitting there and reading through all the skills would have been impractical.

I did go back and take a look at the skills afterwards, and my concerns were reinforced by the text. There are skills that seem reasonable, like brawler (better at hand-to-hand fighting), air pilot (can pilot aircraft), and survivalist (wilderness survival stuff). Then there are others that bother me, like driver. Really? I need to spend skill points to know how to drive? Can't we just assume characters know how to drive in a sci-fi rpg set 60,000 years in the future? Maybe there is some setting thing that I'm unaware of that makes this logical, but it wasn't apparent to me. There is also some overlap in skills, as in the case of thief and spy, which are nearly identical in their descriptions.

There was a situation that came up in play where we were on our ship approaching an asteroid and we wanted to scan for lifeforms to try to get a clue as to whether or not the guy we were looking for was there or not. Basically, we weren't able to do it because no one had the use computer skill or whatever it would be called. This kind of bugged me. We were on a ship that we supposedly owned for some time before the adventure began, so it would seem to me that we should have been able to do that simple task. Even if the answer was "no, your ship doesn't have any equipment like that" I would have been totally cool with that. But the fact that we couldn't because of a lack of a skill selection really bothered me.

There are two pieces to this. Part of this is in the referee's hands, as far as figuring out how to adjudicate these sort of requests, and it can be a matter of style that is different from one referee to the next. The other part is the responsibility of the designer - to give the referee the information he needs in order to make the skill system something that enhances play rather than being a roadblock to players' performance of mundane tasks. I would be happy to see a paragraph or two added to the beginning of the skills section that addresses this.

I can't really comment on combat mechanics, since I had to leave before we got to fight anything. In fact, I had to leave right as we were entering the "dungeon," which is kind of like participating in foreplay with no sex. (Did I just draw an analogy between D&D and sex? I really need to have my head checked...) This made me sad, since I had purchased a space sword and a Z-ray rifle... no idea what either are, but they sounded fucking cool! I really had an itch to jam my SPACE SWORD in someone's left eye.

So, in looking back and reading this thing over, my comments on the skills kind of took over the post, but I want to make it clear that I had a lot of fun in the short time I got to play. The referee clearly had a love for the world, and it showed in his rich descriptions and in-character NPC representations he gave. I would definitely play again.

Now, as a complete neophyte when it comes to EPT/Tekumel, I'm not sure I would be able to run this game for my friends. I have almost no experience with sci-fi games to start with, and I think it's aimed at the EPT enthusiast that already has a lot of knowledge about the world this game is set in. The game mechanics do seem simple enough to use in any homebrew setting without much trouble, but I'm pretty sure it was the designer's intent to marry the game with the setting.

Summary
3-1/2 of 5 big fucking space swords. Would play again!
Pros: Simple rules, pretty much a sci-fi skinned OD&D. Made me want to learn more about the setting and explore it some more.
Cons: clunky skill system (note that the author of this review is predisposed to dislike skill systems of any sort)
Other notes: As presented, the game is tied heavily to the setting. This may be a feature for some, and a bug for others. To play as it is presented, it seems advisable for the referee to have strong knowledge of EPT/Tekumel, but setting knowledge is not required of the players, unless they want to have some basis of understanding the alien PC races that are available.