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Showing posts with label actual play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label actual play. Show all posts

Thursday, October 21, 2021

The Joesky Tax: A Game Anecdote

After a lot of lead-up, I'm finally running DA2: Temple of the Frog for the Sunday night crew. In an ideal world, I'd run the original version, but it requires so much work to bend it into shape that I might as well write my own adventure.

To explain the lead-up: the classic Crux of Eternity crew ran through a modified version of S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and informed the local university about it. Since then, the university has been running a research program to fully investigate the crashed spaceship, and have subsequently learned that there are other pieces that were scattered across the Sorrowfell Plains when the thing passed through the atmosphere. The Sunday night crew has since been tasked with researching the other pieces. One such piece landed in the foothills of the Hoarfrost Ridge and allowed me to run Lost Laboratory of Kwalish. Another landed in the Bogbeast Fens and was discovered by cultists of Bobugbubilz, who proceeded to call it, "The Egg," and ascribed religious significance to it. Five years ago, this minor frog temple proceeded to become more organized and militarized, and is now proving to be a notable nuisance in the region with ties to slavers in the big city up north. (Which, if you know the adventure, you'll recognize as the basic setup of DA2: Temple of the Frog. Astute observers will recognize a couple of differences — like the whole thing about The Egg — which will likely be revealed with the fullness of time.)

In addition to the original goal from DA2 (rescue a high-value prisoner), the university has tasked the player characters with capturing any extraterrestrial technology they can find. The PCs decide to sneak into the City of the Frog — ignoring the original adventure's infiltration hook, assuming (probably correctly) that they probably won't be able to pass themselves off as slavers or wannabe frog-cultists — and they prioritize rescuing the prisoner because she and her men are skilled fighters, so they can outfit her and her men and double their party's fighting force.

The plan goes to shit pretty much instantly.

They sneak up the canals using a combination of water walk and control water and are almost instantly spotted. They switch from stealth to speed, and their main asset is that it's foggy and the middle of the night, so there's a lot of confusion, so they don't get murdered by crossbow bolts. They make their way to the middle of the town so they can cast locate creature on their quarry, hoping to find her in the warehouses and barracks.

She's in the basement of the Temple of the Frog, of course. The precise place they didn't want to go.

They cut west, get pelted by some crossbow bolts, use control water again to get over the wall, and are now in the courtyard of the temple. On the plus side, they neutralize the guards and the alarm is sounded, so no more guards can easily approach from the City of the Frog. The bad news is that they don't have a control ring to actually enter the temple, so they're just. Stuck there. With a temple full of cultists at their backs.

Their current gambit is to hopefully trick one of the cultists in the City of the Frog into approaching, then stealing a control ring to enter the temple. We'll find out how that works on Halloween!

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Anniversary

I provide occasional updates for my long-running D&D game on the blog, so here's this one:

Crux of Eternity turns ten-years-old today. (The blog itself doesn't turn ten until August 9.)


What started because one of Nicole's co-workers asked if she played Dungeons & Dragons (neither of us did at the time, but we were very aware of it) has since sprawled into something both wonderful and strange. The request hit at the perfect time: I had just picked up the fourth edition books and I had just discovered the OSR blogging scene. The game has since spiraled out into at least eight other games (across at least five separate rule systems!) with the eternal possibility of more in the future.

The game started with just a handful of prompts, including:
I think the experiment has been successful, although only the players can say for certain. We switched to fifth edition partway through the campaign, which helped streamline some things while making other things more complicated. (Most notably, 4e games are very linear, but 5e is a little more forgiving of sandboxes, so we've had more improvised and sandbox-y game stuff since the switch. Honestly, it's my preferred mode.)

Back on May 1, the players finally faced the ultimate evil of the campaign after almost a decade of play: the Esteemed and Omniscient Peacock Lord, the aforementioned beholder ultimate tyrant and mastermind of many of the miseries that have infected this particular campaign. (Ironically, due to COVID and social distancing, I never got to use the actual ultimate tyrant miniature; we ran the battle using digital tokens over Roll20. So it goes.)

(The campaign isn't quite over yet, though; I introduced content from Coliseum Morpheuon several sessions ago, and the PCs decided that they hate the Khan of Nightmares and want to kill him as a coda.)

As always, if you're into Actual Play and session writeups, you can read the whole shebang at Obsidian Portal.

While I expect I'll be dealing with this setting and the fallout from its many campaigns for years to come, I'm sure I'll move onto some other long-form obsessive campaign for the 2020s. If the 2000s were dominated by World of Darkness and the 2010s were dominated by D&D and OSR stuff, what do the 2020s hold? (Potential predictions: my long-running Unknown Armies game, Tip the World Over on Its Side, turned five-years-old on May 2, so the idea of running a sprawling, inter-connected series of Unknown Armies games is very much on the table. Additionally, I'm leaning towards using Forged in the Dark stuff for the official follow-up to Crux of Eternity.)

If you want to see what happens next, watch this space...

Monday, June 10, 2019

Old School vs. New School: A Visual Representation

A short blog post, but I keep thinking about it.

About two and a half weeks ago, Critical Role released a one-on-one game between Matthew Mercer and Stephen Colbert for Red Nose Day.

Watch closely: people made all sorts of comments, but the most striking thing I noticed is the clear line of demarcation between old-school and new-school play.  Mercer is all about heavy description and relying on die rolls, whereas Colbert is all about careful, tactical decision-making.  The old OSR debate about player skill vs. character skill in microcosm.

There are probably a few circumstances where Mercer ought to have let Colbert's preparations stand without a die roll, but it's still a sweet little piece of dungeon burlesque.  Check it out if you have an hour to kill.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Into This House We're Born

Hey, over at the Unknown Armies Fan Club, we ran a one shot game on Discord and recorded it!  It's been described as being, "Like Noises Off, but with significantly more cannibalism."  If you still want to listen to it, you'll find it after the jump:

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