RPGs and me

10 role-playing games, a rough timeline:

D&D: Moldvay and Advanced
Marvel Super Heroes
RIFTS
Vampire: The Masquerade
GURPS
D&D 3e
Burning Wheel
Dogs in the Vineyard
3:16
Apocalypse World

10's not nearly enough.

Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves...

Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage includes two genies that each have a Disney-esque song they sing, one to harp music the other to ROCK music. So, gauntlet thrown I guess.

FoaBD

"After a short hiatus, Fear of a Black Dragon is back! In the newest episode, Tom McGrenery and I are discussing seafaring adventures and The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh!

Enjoy!"

http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/fear-of-a-black-dragon/the-sinister-secret-of-saltmarsh

w00t!

I wrote an entry for this.

"Would you enjoy a fairytale monster manual, containing 54 creatures and the gorgeous art of HJF? Well, you can have it for free.

I'd like to thank Sébastien d'Abrigeon, Emmy Allen, V. A., HD Atkinson, Jean-Marc CHOSEROT, Dan D, Dat Epic Fish, Goblins Henchman, guillaume jentey, Daniel Lofton, Magimax, ktrey parker, Roger Giner-Sorolla, and James V West for their amazing contributions."

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/258394/Fords-Faeries-A-Bestiary-Inspired-by-Henry-Justice-Ford

A more complete WTF is My DND Character generator...

https://lifehacker.com/use-this-ios-shortcut-to-roll-a-new-dungeons-dragons-1830290340

Soothing

Gaming was cancelled. So I'm sitting on the roof in the cool fall weather, having a beer and reading Barrowmaze.

Brews & Bugbears

Showed up at the brewery to deliver Ben a D&D book for his birthday and there's two randos here talking RPGs. I've overheard the words Gygax, chain-lightning, Steve Jackson, and Shadowrun in about five minutes.

WD: DH

Started running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist last night. Had way more fun role-playing that purple deep gnome than expected. Already drifting from the storyline.

B/X ABQ Wavecrawl

Saturday was B/X wavecrawl day. We played from about 1pm till after 10pm.

Phil Lewis (thief) and Jennifer Lewis (weather witch) hosted; attendees included Ara Winter (magic-user), Geoff McCool (cleric), Matt Bohnhoff (halfling), Nicholas Hopkins (fighter), and me (dwarf).

The game was set in Greyhawk, starting in Irongate in the Free State of Onnwal. We started with the Geoff's cleric bankrolling our sloop (at least I think it was a sloop) and us choosing a captain (my dwarf because he had the highest CHA at 12) and the navigator (Jenn's weather witch, because...weather witch). We shipped out to Hot Springs Island first (Phil running things) almost getting dashed against the coast by a maelstrom, racing some water elementals (the result of which was a strap of movement being gifted upon our win), and Matt's halfling using the strap to swim with and befriend a dolphin. The island excursion was fairly short. We made straight for the bathhouse, encountered some lizardmen who laughed at us but left us alone, tangled briefly with some shadows, and looted nereid paintings that were worth enough that we cut bait and sailed to Longbridge.

Time in port was covered by downtime activities - Trade, Carousing, Pious Service, Research, Thievery, Pit Fighting, or Gambling. After everyone chose and resolved their downtime the party decided to head back out, but to Stonehell so I took over running the game from there. The new captain was Phil's thief, and Nick's fighter joined the party as well.

Another maelstrom was braved and bested along the way to the island. The party searched the gatehouse, killed/captured some goblins, negotiated with more goblins, spent a VERY long time debating about how they could remove the brass hemisphere from the waterfall cave, and finally entered the dungeon. They ran into Snorri Broadshoulders and company pretty quickly, then had to fend off a mess of giant cave spiders that the treacherous goblins had sicced on them. They parted with the dwarfs on good terms and headed back to their ship to rest for the night, thinking they might ship back to Longbridge but discovering that their current loot would put them in the hole if they went back then. So back into Stonehell it was. This time they used the weather witch's sense strangeness to make a sort of speedrun down to level 4A, destroying some dwarf artifacts to loot some gems. The went back to 3A from that dead end and made their way to the shaft trying to get to level 5 somehow. From that point they ran from gargoyles, charmed a kobold, defeated a mess of ogres, and finally decided they had enough loot to make the excursion profitable. Another maelstrom and a sea serpent (lesser) were braved on the voyage back to Irongate, resulting in the loss of one crew member (poor ol' Craig) to the sea serpent. They made it back with one day of rations to spare.

It was a great day of gaming. And very meaningful since STRICT TIME RECORDS WERE KEPT.

(pic yoinked from Ara)

Return of the Gorf

Gorf Pushcart, unlikely captain of the Blood Echo. #wavecrawl

Troika!/Punjar

Troika!/Escape from Planet Punjar:

• Tiberious - Lansquenet (Ara Winter)
• Krrs - Poorly Made Dwarf (Jennifer Lewis)
• Aldus Morrison - Wizard of the Academy of Doors (Phil Lewis)

Was a rollicking good time. Kevorkian Memorial Park wad fled, Doom prophet's bomb avoided but their escape route was cut off, Tiberious let loose with his pistolet on many a mutant while his lustrous hair blew in the wind, Aldus failed to teleport but managed to get some z0rphine from a med kiosk before it self-destructed, and Krrs wrestle-stole a hoverbike and made it to the garbage ejector cannon just at Tiberious and Aldus were cut down by Black Helga and her Blood Nuns. Krrs launched itself onto the Pleasure Yacht, barely survived prying an airlock door open as the Yacht left orbit, and talked itself on-board as the Yacht fled as the Doom Planet descended on Punjar. IN THE YEAR 50,000!

#weallliveonpunjar

Well, here's a thing...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/9f01qq/star_wars_5e_players_handbook_final/

Tunnels & Tonsils

We cooked a birthday dinner for Bomb Rain and after dinner Owen braved his tonsillectomy recovery to run his homebrew D&D game. He modified it to include food boxes (the thing in the box on the character sheet is a chicken leg) that we erased as we spent time in the dungeon. We fought a wood guardian and two wood warriors (smaller than wood guardians). Grimble Mossneck the halfling distracted the woodmen while Razer the thief and Sasha the warrior snuck around behind them. Sasha failed her attack and the wood guardian used it's rose guns to tattoo a smiley face and "I love crazy people" on her butt. Razer attacked with his knife and whittled all of the wood warriors' legs off and most of the wood guardian's. Grimble head-butted the wood guardian in the butt, knocking it down then shot snakes all over it with his snake scopes. Then Razer carved "I'm a vegetarian" in its butt as revenge for Sasha. The pcs retrieved a snake amulet that lets Grimble shoot multiple snakes at a time from his snake scopes. Then Grimble fixed some pirahnas for dinner so they could get their food box back and they returned to town. P great dungeoneering.

Soothing

If I was at GenCon I'd be playing games instead of reading games. But this ain't the worst!

The Ghost Ship of Sezrekan the Mad

The Ghost Ship of Sezrekan the Mad

Here's a basic rundown of what I've got, partly because David Jenks asked, and partly because I need to write this down.

So Sezrekan, back before his apotheosis, traveled around looking for stuff to make that happen. That took him to some pretty weird places, both in and outside this reality. The ship he took to these places sucked up the weirdness in various ways. Here's some of those ways:

The ship is possessed by some alien intelligence from BEYOND. The ship's all rotted and torn up, but the possession by this thing keeps it from falling apart. It also keep the ship sailing, on some enigmatic route. Partly this thing either (depending on campaign needs, and I haven't really decided yet myself) either hates Sezrekan and is traveling to places that could facilitate destroying him, or it is drawn to/loves him and travels to places that could better bring his attention. Probably both.

There's a hole in the bottom of the hold, straight out into the water. Water doesn't flood the ship though, the alien possession keeps it out. If somebody dives through the hole they get stuff to help them underwater: gills, webbed hands/feet, nictating membranes on their eyes. Coming back up through the hole into the ship reverses it. The more someone does this the more likely this stuff is to become permanent.

The captain's quarters is haunted by the sadistic ghost of Grokkus Brell. If someone sleeps in the cabin they wake up having been tortured, and the ship coughs up one of a number of magic items tied to it. The torture gets worse the more nights someone has slept in the cabin. I have some tables written up for this one, but the items bit is unfinished. Each of the items corresponds directly to some kind of ship's business, some of them interacting with other places on the ship, or being required to make certain effects work. Most of them are in the good/bad vein of magic items. Ex: Bos'n's Pipe - a whistle that allows you to command people. Commanded people (npcs) get increasingly pissed off by this and will eventually snap and attack the user.

The crow's nest pokes up out of reality to a space in-between (the phlogiston?). Arcane magic works crazy well there, although there are also automatic corruption effects and mercurial magic is rerolled each time a spell is cast (caster keeps the last mercurial magic effect rolled for the spell). Getting up the mast to crow's nest is a little wonky as you have to climb up out of reality and that can make one dizzy. Clerical magic only works on a critical, and automatically incurs disapproval.

The boy's cabin is a little closet off the main cargo hold and requires the key from the captain's quarters to get in. There are a slew of small portals embedded into walls and ceiling, each leading to a seemingly idyllic pocket dimension that turns out to be a nightmare realm. Should probably come up with some kind of multiple column random table for this one. These pocket dimensions are also centered around objects of power the ship's boy pilfered during the ship's journeys and squirreled away.

There are four rune-inscribed barrels secured around the mizzen mast that contain the pickled, quartered remains of one of Sezrekan's old rivals, Gor-Mal the Butcher. Each quarter of the body has a magic item on it but opening the barrels is dangerous and could end up resurrecting the crazed wizard, who's been conscious since Sezrekan 'killed' him.

That's most of the detail I've got so far. I've got some other ideas too. Something about potentially killing yourself to contact the alien possessing the ship and then gaining some limited control over it. Also, there's probably a skeleton tied to the bowsprit that talks and lies a lot.

If I statted this thing up fully I think I would probably dual stat it for DCC and LotFP.

Scoutbooks

Digging the shit out of the Scoutbook format the DW extras are printed on. Perfect for, hypothetically, slipping into one's back pocket to unobtrusively read in the bathroom at work. Also hits on a small format kick I've been on for a while.

Dungeons & Dragons Classics - Every edition available again

http://www.dndclassics.com/

Random Character Drawings

Beneath the Ruins

Print format seems kind of weird.  Laser guns and yeast monsters!
http://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/review/beneath-the-ruins/

DCC

All this DCC talk has me wondering, how are the DCC products beyond the core book? And by that I guess I mean...modules?