The Troll Job — Episode #03

http://mojobob.com/roleplay/campaign/eyeless03_theTrollJob.html#session03

Hey! I know! Let's all

SPLIT THE PARTY!

What's the worst that could happen?

The Troll Job - Episode #2

The terrifying bulette!
This is the cheap plastic toy the original bulette was based on.

http://mojobob.com/roleplay/campaign/eyeless03_theTrollJob.html#session02

Lots of travel, an unsuccessful encounter (though not as disastrous as it could have been) with an ox-stealing bulette, and far fewer grimlocks than I originally intended.

I had forgotten just how fragile AD&D-ish characters could be, after years and years of playing WotC superhero games, so I had to make some quick decisions about encounter numbers for my team to have any hope at all of surviving to get to the main job. Which, in itself, may be a larger bite than they can reasonably chew.... we shall have to see.

Haven't got mush room on board this boat...

Tonight, Our Heroes got to paddle through a bayou and across a lake in coracles made of giant mushrooms.

I am happy that this hardly even rates on the Weird Shit RPG Characters Get Up To scale.

Wave Echo Cave

Here's the map of Wave Echo Cave I gave my players after they cleared out Cragmaw Castle, failed to save the dwarf from having his throat cut or find the dastardly evil-doer they were actually looking for, and got 25% killed by an enraged owlbear which saved the rest of them from being butchered by the remains of a depleted century of hobgoblins.

Whether or not they'll ever actually get to Wave Echo Cave is now doubtful. I seem to have gone a bit off-piste with that adventure, and now they're in Neverwinter trying to find out what's going on behind a nasty plague of zombies and things, and people not staying decently dead as they should do.

I should note that I'm not actually using Faerûn as my campaign setting, I'm using my own world that I've been playing with for a bit more than thirty years now. I've just inserted Neverwinter's bit of the Sword Coast in the north-west of my main continent where it can't do too much harm.

...paved with good intentions...

Drawing by Dylan Horrocks

Tonight, Ash the paladin died because she put herself between an owlbear and its escape route, under the impression that she was protecting her friends. Alas, a tragic and fatal mistake. Jay-Zee (the bard) had previously done it entirely by accident, but was better at making life/death saves, and so survived the whole horrible affair.

One good outcome though — the escaping owlbear scattered the approaching hobgoblin warband which would almost certainly have killed everyone else.

Tee-Bee-Ay (wizard) was surprised and badly chewed up by a grick, before dual-longsword-wielding Bea sliced it up in a trice with max-damage critical hits from both attacks in the very first round of combat.

Jay-Zee was surprised and stabbed in the face by the single remaining goblin (hiding fearfully under the altar) which then ran away and hid, and amazingly, got clean away. Jay-Zee is disgruntled at the pathetic level of treasure to be found, in spite of having scored ten year's wages worth of coin and other loot.

There appears to be an issue with killed things refusing to stay lying respectably still; they insist on getting back up after a while and shambling about moaning. It's a disgrace, and most inconvenient.

None so blind as those who will not see

Tonight's game revolved around the party playing hide-and-seek with a green dragon.

Success was made possible by the fact that they were dealing with maybe the least observant dragon in the whole history of dragoning. Over the course of the evening, it got to make maybe twenty perception rolls of various sorts; none of them scored more than a seven. And whenever its very respectable passive perception might have been relevant, the party were happily rolling natural twenties for their stealth skill as if there was no other number scribed on the die. (There was, I checked.)

All that was to the good of course, from the players' point of view, since if the dragon had actually found them it would very probably have made pretty short work of the whole lot of them. As it is, they nicked its loot, torched its lair, and got away unscathed.

I have the worst luck with dragons.

P.S.  Annette was most aggrieved that I didn't mention that they were clever too. So then, they were clever too.

Time for some more thrilling heroics...

Our heroes are getting SICK of these motherfuckin' ZOMBIES on these motherfuckin' PLAINS!

The zombie dogs were dangerous, and not in the least bit waggy...

...but the poor old zombie cow was just pathetic. And stinky. Very stinky. Especially when JZ stuck a sword right into its bloated, distended, gas-and-slime-filled belly.

The party have finally made it, at long last, to the ruins of Thundertree, where no doubt they will either succeed in their aim, or fail. I think that's a reasonably safe prediction.

Children of the Night of the Living Dead Go Mad in Dorset

Well, the party managed to survive its first encounter with a roving band of zombies, and with only one near-death experience. They learned two things:

1. Zombies in 5e are MUCH SCARIER than they used to be, and
2. Critters that stop to munch on you when you go down instead of moving on to another (moving) target are MUCH SCARIER than intelligent, tactically-savvy critters.

Having waded through years of game "development" in which player-characters have steadily become more and more unstoppably invulnerable superheroes, able to wade through oceans of mook-blood with impunity, it's rather refreshing to have them have to think twice about whether they should fight or run.

Traveller

Tonight's game: Zombie Apocalypse in SPAAAAACE!!!

It was all fun and games until somebody foolishly alerted the authorities to the situation, so now we've been declared Plague Ships and have SDBs in-bound to make sure we don't go infecting their precious system. Spoilsports!

Borodino 2012

This weekend, over two days, the Christchurch Cavaliers (a local wargaming club) staged a massive re-fight of the Battle of Borodino in 28mm, using a somewhat modified version of the Black Powder rules.

I only saw part of the last couple of hours. The photos here (taken with my camera, so not great quality) really don't do justice to the awesome splendour of this game.

By the time I left, things were looking decidedly dicey for the Russians, with the almost total collapse of the centre-left and the loss of the Grand redoubt.

There are a couple of much better reports at Craig's Wargaming Blog and Rebel Barracks, with much more information and better pictures.

A Tragic Death in the Party

Alas, poor Pansy died of STENCH after being sprayed by a hideous mutant garbage-skunk and then failing more than six saving throws in a row. They left most of her in a cast-iron bathtub, surrounded by great hills of trash, a  few goblin corpses and lots of giant cockroaches.

Now the survivors are riding in the hopper of a biomechanical elephant-mantis — to where? They don't know. Away from here, and that's good enough for now.

Finest Hot-Pressed Soylent Bond

Last night, in the course of our semi-regular game, the party wanted to get some paper, pens and ink for mapping (to replace the scrap of oilcloth and bar of red sealing wax they had been using).

I told them that the stuff they got was like parchment, but very light and slightly translucent. Their first thought — from more than one of them simultaneously, I might add — was "Omigod! It's made out of OLD PEOPLE!"

I sometimes worry about them. It wasn't even Call of Cthulhu or anything.

Dear oh dear oh dear

After a false start last week, I re-started my S&W campaign last night. Oh deary deary me.

I totally sucked. The suckage was immense. I stand in awe at my own suckitude.

I was really not on my game at all; I forgot to take all my maps and other prep stuff for a start — we were playing at Andrew's place, not mine, so instead of just going to another room to get the stuff I'd forgotten I had to go home again. Then, once we got going I found that I was really just not feeling the vibe, and my descriptive powers were bland and lacklustre to say the least. I managed to kill one of the party more or less accidentally in the set-up to the campaign start, and then killed half the party with trolls later on due to woolly-headed thinking about the nature of the battlefield* (it was on board a small ship). I may have to go back to using miniatures and tabletop battle-maps so that people can make meaningful tactical decisions without having to rely on my worthless brain-meats to keep track of everything.

Now, I don't actually mind too much killing characters, but I really do prefer it if it's their fault (or at least, the fault of an uncaring universe via random probability variations) and not mine. Annette really takes it personally, but then she seems to think that the GM should actually be benevolently on the side of the characters, poor naïve trusting soul that she is. I don't think that, but I don't think the GM's incompetence should have to be one of the challenges the characters have to work against.

D. Must try harder. See me after class.

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* In my own defence, nobody except Andrew actually asked any questions about the battlefield or attempted any sort of tactical action, so the combat just boiled down to a dice-rolling competition — three 5th-level characters against five critters, each roughly the combat-equivalent of a 9th-level fighter. I'd say they got off lightly, really.