helix infestus giganticus

The giant aggressive land snail (helix infestus giganticus) is generally found in communities of between six and thirty in the sort of habitat favoured by their smaller cousins. Unlike the common garden snail, these brutes are a threat to far more than a nicely tended vegetable patch. Although predominantly carrion feeders, they will opportunistically predate upon small mammals as well as unwary travellers. They have no teeth as such, but excrete a thick salivary fluid which causes necrosis in plant and animal cells, breaking them down so they may be more easily consumed. Their slime trails also contain this compound which, with sufficient time, can also dissolve materials made from plant fibres and animal skins, as well as corrode non-magical metals.

The snail thing that started from my blog post last week has led to an entirely unexpected level of interest, spawning a fairly extensive conversation on Facebook, and now an actual miniature to play the part of the alarming gigantic gastropod.

These beauties (?!) were sculpted by George Fairlamb for Tom Pugh of Bolt Thrower Miniatures and will hopefully see release in the near future.

Now I just need to play around with some stats for them for WFB 3rd, and/or Knights' Quest and get ready for a quest to hunt for the key ingredient in the midwinter feast of the French Bretonnian King's court...

Rab

Marian

The life of a noble maiden in times of yore was evidently a rather alarming one, given their propensity for being kidnapped by evil wizards, jealous step-mothers, ogres, trolls, dragons, fallen knights, faeries, etc. Today proved no different! The fair lady Marian had been spirited away and none knew to whither. Acting on rumours that a boy out hunting in the forest had heard the sweet and mournful singing of a young woman, two knights errant and their retainers converged on the ruined and apparently abandoned house in the deep wood from different directions...

Further up and further in

Survivors of the band of raiders in the caves and the patrol in the storerooms will find the castle barracks at the top of the broad spiral staircase. Well-fed and well-equipped, these guards of Sir Reginald the Irredeemably Naughty will prove a stiff challenge, especially as some of them will have crossbows.

The Quest for Branwen the Fair, level 3

I've been playing around with scanner settings (this was drawn with Staedtler fineliners from 0.1 to 0.7 size tip over a pencil sketch) but don't think I've got it sorted quite yet. Stay tuned, folks, the denoument is coming up next episode!

Happy geeking,
Rab

The storerooms

Having defeated, or at least got past, the raiding band of goblins using the caves as a handy base for looting the surrounding farmsteads, our heroes ascend the narrow stone steps carved from the living rock and emerge in.... the distinctly unglamorous surroundings of the storerooms of Sir Reginald's Castle. They can't let their guard drop, however, as there are regular patrols to make sure those pesky goblinoid vermin don't try and sneak off with the wicked knight's favourite wine and sausages!

This time I scanned it in as a 500dpi b&w image with the brightness up slightly to remove the page's dotted grid, cropping and converting it to a .jpg in photoshop. You can tell I was doing this on my knee rather than at the table from the less than straight walls. I'd like to think it gives it a naive charm, or something...

Have fun and roll dice,
Rab

Pen and paper progress

This might sound a bit odd but I love stationery, particularly notebooks. There's something enticing about them, physical objects in an increasingly digital age. No cloud storage, no backup - if they get lost, stolen, or soaked by a spilled drink, they're gone. Full of their owner's handwriting and little sketches or tickets or photos that have been stuck in. Think of the Grail notebook in the Indiana Jones film. Marvellous, eh? all those decisions to make before deflowering that pristine first page: what content, what pen to use, what audience is it ultimately for? Sadly, for me, I think a part of the appeal is the willful self-delusion that I might have anything worth writing down and keeping!

So, with delusion intact, I bought myself a little gift back in December while Christmas shopping.

I'd never come across this manufacturer but the quality is lovely. Even better for my purpose, it has a dotted grid marked page. So, with pen and content chosen, I sketched in the first of the maps from my Goblinquest (still not quite happy with that name) adventure that I gave an AAR for a while back, "The Quest for Branwen the Fair". Scanned in, with shading technique learned from +Michael Wenman's fabulous series of sketching tutorials on his blog Observations of the Fox, here you go. I even managed to do this with the boys while they were busy with their colouring books.

I need to read over some advice on the best way of scanning in maps to get the brightness/contrast levels correct, and I'm considering how to show scale - perhaps I leave the levels such that you can see the dots at the edge of each square? Although I do like how clean it looks without them.

When complete, I'll be posting/publishing the whole adventure as a sample to go with the polished up rules themselves.

What notebooks/pens etc. do you chaps and chapesses use?
Rab

The quest for Branwen the Fair, part 1

After one of the most hectic weeks I can remember for a while (various family members poorly throughout, guests whose three children under five have no English, late night open evening at school...) we stayed in today and I settled down to play Goblinquest with the two little 'uns. I wanted to give them a bit more of a traditional multi-level dungeon to work their way through, partly because the attention span of the youngest (3 and a half) is good enough now, and partly because I wanted to see what the survival rate is like over multiple encounters. In the end we played through three levels in about two and a half hours!

It had all started so well. Duke Lanfaul's daughter, the fair lady Branwen, was to be wed and all the King's court had been invited. So many had come that the guests were fitted in two to a room and in every nook and cranny, others had pitched pavilions outside the castle walls; all were rejoicing for Branwen and her husband to be, Sir Lucan. The late summer evening before the wedding day had been long and filled with dancing and feasting, so none were surprised when the sun was hovering above the horizon when they awoke. Then the panic set in; the sun was in the West. It was almost night. The entire castle and all the guests had slept the whole day through in an enchanted sleep... and Branwen was gone!

I love Burne-Jones. I sometimes think I'd like to live in his Arthurian paintings.

The only clue that could be found was a small flag draped across Branwen's empty bed with the arms of the fearsome Sir Reginald the Blackhearted, a man who was so wicked he was even said to allow goblins and other monsters to live in the caves around his castle and raid his own villages in return for their support in defending him. Furious at his treachery, and concerned for Branwen, the guest knights quickly swore an oath to rescue the lady Branwen from Sir Reginald and whichever sorcerer had helped him enchant them into slumber.

Riding hard, you have reached Sir Reginald's castle before any of the other knights. The gates are locked and barred and you daren't risk alerting him to your presence, so you scout around to find another entrance and you may be in luck: a cave entrance lies just before you...

Well, that was the intro (more or less) that my wannabe chivalric heroes received before they were allowed to pick up their dice and then they went at it with gusto. MiniRab#1 liked the idea of using a secret passage ("like in Wind in the Willows") and led the way with his crossbowman retainer alongside. There was a brief discussion about having enough light ("who will carry the torch") which made the OSR enthusiast in me very proud; they'll be asking for ten foot poles next!

A fairly bloody skirmish around the entrance with the goblin guards had me worried about the outcome of the quest (both knights were two or three dice down their combat scale already) but then things picked up. MiniRab#2 did a canny room entry, bursting through the door and stepping through to give his crossbowman a clear shot, which he took at maximum range rolling a natural 20 against a defence roll of 1 - I awarded an instant kill - and the remaining goblins were quickly sliced and diced. There was even a bit more tactical play from #2 "I want to move around the back of them so I can attack them and the archer can shoot them."

And that was the cave entrance level cleared, only a narrow set of dusty stairs leading upwards remained and our heroes, bloodied but unbowed, hurried aloft in search of the fair maiden...

This took them into the basement of the castle proper and their first encounter with Sir Reginald's footmen - which nearly did for MiniRab#2 who wandered off and got themselves cornered by a very lucky crossbowman that he eventually rushed and slaughtered ("Good, he was nasty"). Down several dice by now, the boys decided they should try and sneak through now to find the "princess" as they kept calling her before something dreadful happened to her - "No more fighting if we don't need to now, we've been hurt too much."

Their desire for speed meant they took the first stairs up they found, leaving half the level unexplored so they didn't find the spiral stairs up to the wizard's tower. Perhaps his foul necromantic deeds will still find a way to threaten their success...

Up through the castle they pressed only to be met by a hail of crossbow bolts which required some boldness to get close enough to get stuck in. In the aftermath of the melee which swirled between two rooms quite fluidly and naturally, the sound of hammering and shouting for help (sound effects ably provided by me) broke through the harsh metallic gasping of the knights and their retainers as they got their breath back and tied their wounds in rough bandages. "The princess!" thought MiniRab#1, "No," said MiniRab#2, "the voice was not right, it can't be a women." There then followed about five minutes of both boys doing impressions of men and women. Anyway, they finally decided to open the door to reveal a ragged man who introduced himself (a little bit of in-character stuff from yours truly) as a knight who had been imprisoned by Sir Reginald and offered his help as reward for his release. M-R#1 went straight into character without blinking and gave a persuasive argument to me ("Sir Geraith") to secure his help. Thus reinforced, the merry band smashed through a locked door to get to the next upwards leading staircase...

Playtest thoughts

• Levelling up - accruing Hero Tokens to replace lost combat dice worked really well and smoothly
• Instant kill - I liked this "on the fly" ruling where if you roll a natural maximum and your opponent rolls a one, they die straight out. Maybe this should only apply for baddies, perhaps for redshirts as well?
• Retainer skill - I allowed them to pay double points to regain dice which did keep them in the game
• Action tokens - with little people playing and multi-turn combats it's easy to lose track of the end of one turn and the start of the next. I think using a token to place on your character card at the start of each turn that you cash in so that each turn feels distinct and retainers not in combat don't get forgotten
• It played really well! The boys loved it and wanted to play on so, when I didn't relent because they were getting tired, they ran off to the incomparably fair lady Mrs Rab to give her a blow by blow account.
• The quest held together nicely, despite being at least semi-improvised, so I'll tidy up my rough notes and try and produce a Dyson-esque or Vulpinised map to share

I hope those of you with kids are getting to game with them,

Rab

Colouring in

Much to my wife's bemusement, I have settled down in front of whatever medieval documentary she has chosen over the last week or so (apart from the evening where mini-Rab #2 had to go and get his leg x-rayed after over-exuberant bubble-chasing - don't ask!) complete with painting tray. To be fair, it is quite a while since I did any and am rather in the grip of a painting frenzy. Well, frenzied by my standards: I've painted seven figures in the last ten days! This takes my annual total to.... nine.

I was going to split them between two or three posts, just to make me feel like I'm achieving some blogging as well, but that seemed a bit naff, especially as they're all for my chivalric gaming: SBH, Goblinquest and what I hope will be a workable set of house rules to play Dux Brit but with knights in shining armour and goblins.

So, to the "hastily snapped on my phone up against an impromptu background of polystyrene" pictures! First up, a couple more of the old Citadel, now Foundry Feudal knights I picked up from Meyer over on the LAF.

I was pleased with the face of the green chap and the blue and white quartering looks pretty good in the lead.

Here is a group shot of all my knights completed so far, most of which have appeared on here at some point already:

I also painted up the first four of my Curtey's Miniatures spearmen as retainers for the central knight above, the one with the yellow and blue quartering and red cadence mark:

There are four more of these to come, with mail shirts so they should paint up even quicker. I have to admit I'd already started this quartet, blocking out their gambesons and getting the bloody fiddly spears to stay on. Have a gratuitous close-up at my first attempt to do eyes using a micro pen, just to make you feel better about your own brushwork:

Joking aside, I'm pretty pleased with their faces - I can recommend Curtey's as being really nice to paint.

And then, all ready to be oppressed and witness at first hand the violence inherent in the system, my peasant. I'm actually ludicrously proud of the way he turned out, especially his face, even though it has acquired a rather peculiar orange tinge in the photo. Very odd, considering that the other colours are almost spot on with how they look in Real Life (tm)...

I love this figure. He has a great "Get orf moi laaand" look about him.

So, there you go. More recruits for my medieval-themed madness. Oh, and I also received a luvverly, heavy box of resin buildings from PMC Games, full of thatched huts, a blacksmith, a church and other stuff. They're still in their bubblewrap but will form the basis of my next post. Also in the near future, I've got involved in playtesting "Blood on the Sands", a Roman gladiator game by Furt over on the LAF which, on a first readthrough, looks excellent.

Happy geeking,
Rab

Mistrelry of the highest order

In the real world I'm moving house in a week, writing reports for four classes of year 11 students, and the vomiting bug has struck down mini-Rab #1, so my time for the fun stuff is rather limited to say the least!

Fortunately for Goblinquest, two geek-dads in particular have been doing stirling work as Minstrels in guiding their offspring through dark places to succeed in dangerous quests. Step forward Erny and Thantsants - is it a coincidence that they are both enthusiastic Oldhammerers?

Ayway, links to their game reports:

Erny's report

Teaser picture of Erny's game

Thantsant's report

Teaser picture from Thantsant's blog

I hope you are all enjoying your gaming, geeking and parenting as much as those fine two dads!

Rab

Initial Goblinquest feedback

First off, hello to all the new readers of this blog; thaaaasands of 'em! And thank you to those of you who've mentioned Gobinquest on your own blogs, LAF, TMP, Google+, Facebook... I've had emails and even an invitation to be involved in a podcast. It's a giddy existence, this game-writing lark...

I've had some really useful feedback from a couple of folk already (thanks Erny and Bart), which led to some interesting discussion on LAF about the wisdom (or otherwise) of player-character death in a game that is meant, at least in part, to be a way of geek-parents to introduce their offspring into gaming at a young age. I'm going to have to ponder that one quite carefully. On the one hand, it's been really useful for my lad to learn to treat the two imposters of triumph and disaster just the same, on the other I don't really want to cause any 'Platoon moments', as it was put by Erny:

"Nooooo! I don't want my character to die!"

So, a quandary. On suggestion (thanks, Scurv!) was that defeated knights would be captured and have to be rescued. Another (quick thinking, Erny!) was that on successful completion of the quest, "dead" knights could be taken off to the healers and brought back to health and further questing.

I've got a longer list of mechanics questions to consider (although fixed movement distances to speed up the game has been mentioned by everyone who has given feedback, so that looks like a given), especially around character progression (I'm giving it some proper thought, Bart), but that's going to take longer, and this weekend I shall be mainly hitting people with swords at Leeds Armoury for this year's SWASH

Thanks for all your feedback so far, and I look forward to hearing from anyone else who gives it a go.

Happy geeking,
Rab

Draft quest for Goblinquest

Ok, when I said "this weekend" I had hoped to have this ready for anyone interested so you'd be able to actually use it "this weekend", so I've met the letter, if not the spirit, of my promise.

Check out the old-school blue grid!

Mild grovelling to one side, here's a sample quest similar to the sort I've been playing with my son using Goblinquest. I've kept it really simple, but feel free to make it more complex/interesting by locking doors, giving some of the goblins bows, etc. I hope you enjoy it!

The tile shapes are based on the really very marvellous printable pdf from the marvellous Billiam Babble.

Download link: Sample Quest

Happy geeking,
Rab

Goblinquest ready for playtesting!

EDIT 12/12/2015 - This game has developed into Knights' Quest.

Click here for more info.

With a young king intoxicated by the ideals of chivalry, brave knights undertake daring adventures throughout the darker places of the kingdom. Knights seek to bring glory to their king and their lady. Sharp swords and well-forged armour protect them, and solemn vows keep them dedicated to their goal. Dare you take up the challenge of such a quest?


Goblinquest is intended for 2-6 players (one of whom runs the quest which the others must attempt to complete). A bright eight-year old can probably run a quest, but an interested five year old can easily play as an adventurer. Play takes place on standard 'dungeon tiles' split into evenly sized spaces which can be occupied by one character at a time.

I did it! The draft version of Goblinquest that I've been banging on about for the last however long is now available for all you lovely people to download and play. I hope you all enjoy it. Either way, please please please give me some feedback about it, good or bad, fundamental or petty, typo or gameplay. Oh, and share it with your friends.

Download links:
Draft rulebook
Draft quest
Character cards

I hope to get a sample quest uploaded over the weekend. Until then, happy geeking (and play my game!)

Rab

EDIT - download links updated 06/05/2014

Goblinquest - first proper playtest

With Mrs Rab and both Rablings away for the night I took the chance to head over to roll some dice and chew the fat with my mate Chris (antipixi, for any Blood Bowl types reading this). He was happy to give Goblinquest a go; great news because (in his own words) he's an "awkward, devious bastard" when it come to exploiting loopholes in rules. If he couldn't 'break' Goblinquest, I was going to be pretty satisfied... and he didn't, so I was :)

First, a few snapshots of the quest to rescue the damsel from the necromancer and his goblinoid allies. Check out the Hello Kitty cloth on Chris' table; it is even pinker in real life! Oh, and I'd misplaced the joining pieces between sections so you'll have to imagine entrances rather than the solid walls between rooms.

After carefully keeping the welcome party of goblins at bay, filling them full of crossbow bolts... "They have a troll"

Cunning use of a spear around a doorframe allows the good guys to pigstick the troll

 

... but round the corner are the first hints of the necromancer's foul deeds

 

... and there's the rest of the bony beggars...

"Stand fast, men, we hold the corner"

The princess is safe, the necromancer slain and his minions dispelled. Time for tea and cake!

So, game-wise, what was learnt? Well, movement, missile combat, and single combat work just as I want them to and provide a fun game. We tried a couple of different ways of organising multiple combats when each side has more than one combatant and picked the one that worked best (thanks, Chris!) although wording it is going to be pesky - three or four illustrations and a couple of sentences should see to it, though. Magic works well, with the right balance between risk to magician, and damage it can inflict.

It really was a great relief that Chris enjoyed the game as I was starting to worry that, having spent such a long amount of time, calendar-wise, squeezed into twenty minute chunks here and there, that it wasn't ever going to appeal to anyone else. Phew!

Whatever else happens, I'm setting myself the target of sending the draft rules out to anyone interested in doing some playtesting by the 1st of March. Definitely.

Toodle-pip,
Rab

A close run thing!

After a dreadfully busy half term of teaching, I finally made it to the holidays - and that wasn't the only close run thing today! Mini-Rab #1 asked if we could play with "knights on an adventure in a dungeon". But of course, my little man; grab your dice and let's have at it!

So, out came the ready-to-share-as-soon-as-I've-got-the-multiple-combat-rules-properly-explained version of Goblinquest and we were off. This time, our gallant heroes (one knight, one spear-armed retainer and one retainer with a crossbow) had tracked down to their fortress the goblins who had kidnapped the king's youngest daughter. Time for some chivalric deeds of arms...

Heading in to the fortress, our heroes were instantly ambushed by four goblins. Sadly, the keenness of the crossbow fellow to push to the front for a clear shot (which he stuffed up badly) left him exposed to the wicked blades of the gobbos and unprotected by the knight [marching order does matter!]. His death was swiftly avenged by his more melee-oriented fellows. Tears were very nearly shed by Mini-Rab #1, but he stiffened his sinews; after all, there was still a princess to rescue!

A short encounter with a troll (who was brutally double-teamed by our still-grieving duo) later and the discovery of a strangely glowing key, and the princess was found and released from her shackles upon which the key melted away. Now for escape, but the way was blocked by a further gang of gobbos...

Can you spot the revised character sheet, top-middle? Worked really well.

 Two of the goblins promptly cut down, the other two ran off into a side room (where the key had been found earlier, for those of you who need absolute completeness). Keeping the princess behind them [marching order lessons learned], the fighters hemmed them in.. but what's this? They're behind us!
 

The knight slammed the door shut on the two they'd been chasing, while the spearman stepped round the princess to deal with the new threat. Unfortunately, the knight wasn't able to hold the door closed and had to get his blade bloody once more. The spearman was not faring so well, being wounded greivously and near unto death...

 Not to fear, though, the knight rescued his valiant retainer just in time [the spearman managed to hold off the combined score of a pair of d8s with only a single d6 for three rounds of combat, and actually slew one of them - definitely man of the match], and guarded the rear as he and the princess made it out of the fort and back to safety, pursued by the fortunately slow-moving brother of the slain troll.

All in all, a grand outing with ultimate triumph tempered by sorrow and loss - gloriously chivalric. I was impressed that the lad held his obvious upset at the death of his crossbowman in check and played though the rest of the hour-long session. He was pretty inventive, too, with some of his tactical planning after the initial error and I'll be encouraging that for future OSR-type roleplaying in a few years time. He is only five, after all.

I hope your geeking is proving as pleasurable and sociable,
Rab


EDIT - I forgot to welcome my latest 'followers', Dreamfish and The Convenient Skill: welcome aboard, chaps.

Game design advice needed

Righto, gaming parents (and any other readers, of course), I need a spot of advice.

In the game I'm writing and probably known as Goblinquest, characters start with a d20 as their combat dice and then, as they lose combats, this is reduced through d12, d10, d8, d6 and then d4 before ultimate glorious and heroic death (or victory, of course).

Now, the question is this. Should I keep my original plan and allow heroes to increase their Combat Dice by one (eg d8 to d10) if they kill a foe, or should I go for a more traditional RPG approach and have each foe worth a certain number of points which can then be traded for the equivalent poly-dice (eg collect eight points and you can buy back your d8 if you're down to a d6)?

As I see it, the advantage of 'original' is that it is simple enough for the introductory, parent and child game I intend it to be. The advantage of 'traditional' is that it gives more weight to slaying a dragon than a goblin, and it would allow the finding of treasure to have an in-game effect.

Help!
Rab

Goblinquest continues

No sooner do I think I've settled on a name, when eldest son comes up with his own name for our rapidly evolving game - "Knights and Dice". Well, whatever it ends up being called, the action was about to start again. When we left our heroes last time they had split into two groups, one having had a nasty scare fro a skeleton almost literally in a closet and the other facing down a gang of sneaky goblins. Lumbering in between them was a particularly disgruntled troll. What would happen next.....


First off, Sir E's crossbowman stuck a bolt straight into the lead goblin, wounding him slightly and making him easy meat for Sir E himself. A good job too because the troll was soon upon them, trapping the valiant band.

Sir E swung his trusty blade left and right, while his spearman rushed to the aid of the rather outmatched crossbow chappy. Meanwhile, supremely confident in the ability of Sir E to look after both himself and his retainers, Sir C and his merry band had opened another door to reveal another skeleton warrior.

They had learned from their previous encounter, however, and withdrew to allow the crossbowman to shoot his bolt; an incredible shot that shattered the skull of the foul revenant and returned him to the sleep of the grave.

Free to come to the aid of their fellows, they'd left it almost too late.

The troll had slain Sir E's crossbowman and the spearman was hard pressed, all the while Sir E's arm was aching from cutting down the horde of gobbos from whom he could not disengage.

Sir C's arbalist tried to even the odds by shooting bolt after bolt into the back of the creature but to no avail - Sir E's spearman was crushed before Sir C could smite the brute.

All that remained was for Sir E to finally eradicate the goblin menace and all was still.

Actually, Sir E's mourning his loyal fellows rather disrupted the board (clumsy child!), but the survivors withdrew, honour intact and the kingdom safer than before. Time for tea and cake....

[This was a really successful playtest of the almost-ready-for-sharing rules, confirming the missile rules nicely and the change in Combat dice reclamation that I've instituted. I'll post more thoughts on that early in the week, but suffice to say Playtesters Wanted Soon!]

Geek well,
Rab