What are y'all up to these days?

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
I'm finally getting around to reading my copy of Spire - The City Must Fall RPG. Generally pretty good so far, but one thing really stood out so far is that the game has reputation as a stress mechanic, or rather damage to reputation as a stress mechanic. I thought that was pretty brilliant.
 
Good f'ing God why do some people make a simple thing like ordering pizza an hour long event!?!!?!
 
Bunch said:
Good f'ing God why do some people make a simple thing like ordering pizza an hour long event!?!!?!
Click to expand...

Probably because there is no pizza where they are. It truly only exists in New Haven County, Connecticut.
 
HEPCATS Episode 24: Honor the Harvest, Part One
27-28 Rhino Year
Real Life Date 22 October, 2020, online
Present: Ayu, Baron von Braun, N0-5R, Zera
Suggested Soundtrack: Spotify’s “Ritual Doom” Playlist

Ayu had been off bonding with her Terror-Dactyl and thinking she may have been wrong for idealizing humans. She catches up with the team at the mixer for contestants, which is outdoors on the grounds of the Palace of the Blues. A crowd of contestants, support staff, and various others is there. There are also catering tables piled high, mostly with light snacks, but there are some hoagies as well.

The team sees a woman in a black cloak drawing in the sand. Baron realizes she is drawing a Summoning Circle. He smudges the edge of the circle.

Midnight strikes, and all artificial lighting goes out, leaving only starlight and moonlight (-4 Visibility). Zera fires a Rainbow Burst into the air to create some illumination.

What appeared to be one cloaked woman is in fact two Wyrd Sisters (who may or may not be actual sisters). Their cloaks seem to be made of some sort of dark energy. The women cackle and make strange motions and tell each other,

“Jezikuh, summon the Bone Clones!”
“Jezilduh,” summon the Critters!”

They do. Battle ensues.

Ayu does a lot of laser shooting, N0-5R does a lot of smacking with the big stick and does the sandwich ploy vs. Zera’s Bone Clone, and Baron does Baron-type things.

While the team is occupied with Bone Clones and Critters, Jezikuh manages to redraw the smudged portion of the Summoning Circle and complete her incantation.

The Bone Clones of Baron, N0-5R, and Zera are dispatched with relative ease. Jezilduh initially only manages to summon one Critter, but later summons five more.

Jezilduh taunts the crowd, saying they should be “Honoring the Harvest, rather than profaning the season with this ridiculous contest to find a spouse for the princess.”

Zera steals Jezildu’s cloak and flies into the air, leaving Jezilduh naked. Except she might still be wearing space-witch shoes.

A portal opens to Planet Kelsey’s version of Hell, and a Greater Demon named Skoria comes through. Baron throws sand in Skoria’s eyes. He only had one good eye to begin with, and now finds himself Vulnerable…

To be continued...

XP: Not dealt this session. XP will happen when the battle concludes.

[Mechanically, Episode 24 was just: recap, bring Ayu into the scenario, 4 rounds of combat, cliffhanger]
 
Bill Reich said:
Probably because there is no pizza where they are. It truly only exists in New Haven County, Connecticut.
Click to expand...
The amount of time people will put into saving $2 by optimizing which half pizza to start with/toppings to remove etc is insane. What kills me is the requirement that I give input over and over when my answer is always "I want meat lovers, barring that the most meaty least veggie. All other things I don't care at all about.". I mean it's only been a decade plus you people have been order food with me and it's never changed. Please just let me go deal with the screaming kids and order without me. Agggghhh!
 
Bunch said:
The amount of time people will put into saving $2 by optimizing which half pizza to start with/toppings to remove etc is insane. What kills me is the requirement that I give input over and over when my answer is always "I want meat lovers, barring that the most meaty least veggie. All other things I don't care at all about.". I mean it's only been a decade plus you people have been order food with me and it's never changed. Please just let me go deal with the screaming kids and order without me. Agggghhh!
Click to expand...

You should try deciding where to eat with any two or more members of my family. I should have starved but I never lose any weight.
 
Last edited:
Charlie D said:
Reading about everyone's GMing inspires me. It is a lot of work and it is good to hear exciting stories about great campaigns.

I went back to writing my own adventures and have been running Alien. Like I said, a lot of work. The players are really enjoying the game although running virtual is much more challenging than around a table.

During the first two sessions the PCs didn't meet any xenos. They dealt with explosions, radiation, the Company, a rogue android, cultists, and life on Novgorod Station and on board ship.They also lost Buggsy when his air ran out and they couldn't restart his heart. Last session they started a Halloween haunted ship session and the xenos came out. Not the Xeno (those are true killers) but a slightly less lethal variety. The new former Colonial Marine got his throat cut and nearly bled out and the android had an arm ripped off. And they are only through one of two ships and the friend they are trying to find is still missing. Plus betrayal from in the ranks looms as a real possiblity. We talked about competing agendas and possible PC versus PC conflict. We'll see if things turn violent between shipmates.

I have also found the one PC android to be fascinating. He is the alien among the human crew. He doesn't suffer from Stress yet he has emotions, albeit quite different from human ones. But he is property and can be thrown in the garbage if he becomes non-operational. It is honestly the creepiest part of the game so far and actually makes me uncomfortable. I feel bad for the android who only longs to be accepted by humans. Sometimes humans can be the true monsters.
Click to expand...

This just made me imagine an Alien rpg campaign where all the players are androids.
 
What we thought about is everyone makes an android secretly EXCEPT one player. Then when everything goes down and the Stress is making that PC freak out, all the other PCs reveal themselves as androids. I think the player would actually freak out. That would be amazing. Might be something that could be done at a convention game actually. Especially if the androids end up having hostile intent for the one human. That would be true horror.
 
Bill Reich said:
You should try deciding where to eat with any two or more members of my family. I should have starved but I never lose any weight.
Click to expand...
I've come to the conclusion there is a special place in he'll for people who say "Not X I had that Yday for Meal Z".

There is no f'ing way in hell I'm going to play 20 question about what and where you are all week. Tell me where you want to eat and if you say anything be prepared to eat bugs.
 
Adventure Seed: The Adventures of Spider Jack in the Cotton Candy Forest
Halloween is just around the corner, and the kids are telling stories of Spider Jack, the man who lives in the woods and decorates the trees with cotton candy. They are fun stories, until children begin going missing. Join us for some wicked fun, and uncover the mystery of Spider Jack.
housedok.com

The Adventures of Spider Jack in the Cotton Candy Forest - House Dok Productions

Suitable Campaign Age: Golden, Bronze, Dark, or Cinematic Adventure Tone: Macabre Action Recommended Power Level: Low or Classic Content Warning: The following adventure contains elements of the macabre and grotesque. This adventure places children in danger. GM’s are encouraged to read...
housedok.com

Patrons get access to bonus content like, more on Elder Speech, an alternative to fighting Spider Jack, and new options for defeating him. Also, ways to cure Jacklings.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Metahumans

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HouseDokPro

Website: http://housedok.com/

Print: https://studio2publishing.com/products/metahumans-rising?_pos=2&_sid=145b3fa95&_ss=r\

PDF: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/277614/Metahumans-Rising

#Metahumans #MetahumansRising #Superheroes #RPG #TTRPG #Halloween
 
So the teens had requested something Halloween-ish for yesterday's Basic Fantasy game. The vibe I was shooting for was mainly inspired by the old Hammer and American International Corman-Poe films, with a healthy dollop of HPL and a little bit of slasher films thrown in for good measure.

Wandering into a village just looking for a place to stay the night and get some rest, they find there's a lot of tension between the local clerical temple and the druidic circle of the village, due to a number of recent gruesome deaths, with the followers of the two faiths suspecting that the other is somehow responsible. A bit of investigations reveal that the killer is a hideously ugly woman, and that all the victims were either family, friends, or enemies of a girl who was once a wizard's apprentice, decades ago, but was killed along with another apprentice by their master when he went mad, before killing himself.

They set out of the wizard's tower, long considered haunted, a few miles outside the village. After entering the tower and encountering the ghost of one of the slain apprentices, they learn that 1) the wizard had indeed went mad and killed the other apprentice (the ghost), but the female apprentice survived, and the wizard was in fact killed by a demon he had summoned, 2) the girl still lives, inside the tower, now mad, horribly twisted and mutated, and given completely to evil, and 3) the tower was built on 'angles outside of normal space', which not only allowed allowed quick travel between various rooms and levels for those who know how to, but also allowed travel from other dimensions by being of those planes, making summoning spells easier than usual.

They eventually confront the former apprentice, now a Hag, who is aided by a summoned Invisible Stalker and a trio of Vrock demons. The battle is pretty bloody, and several of the PCs are reduced to negative HP before the last of the dark forces are slain or banished. After the requisite healing, the M-U contemplates claiming the tower for her own purposes, but the idea of some extradimensional creature showing up uninvited, and the possibility of the non-Euclidian nature of the tower mutating her the way it did the Hag, convinces her that it probably wouldn't be a good idea. Using some of the properties of the tower against itself, aided by their own magic and some of their high-tech explosives, they manage to destroy the tower, finally laying the ghost of the other slain apprentice to rest.

Returning to the village, they decide to stay a while as the locals metaphorically mend fences, resting up and hoping to learn some more about the local area before moving on.
 
Later that evening, our 5e group playing through a pretty classic set-up of 'vampire terrorizing the local villagers'. Fortunately, it was just a a Vampire Spawn, and not a full-on Vampire, albeit a reasonably intelligent one who had some pretty nasty traps set up in his lair.
 
I showed up to run session 1 of Carcosa an hour late with a massive hangover. I don't know how I pulled this one off but the players had a great time.


The party crossed the Road of Tombs leading from the Realm of Man to The Keep, the last bastion of mankind overlooking the expanse of jungle, swamp, badlands and radioactive desert called the Terror Zone. After swearing an oath to oppose the Great Old Ones and a quick test to determine they were free of mutation the party was allowed to enter. Hearing about the generous bounty on mutants, they went straight to the Inn, hired some mercenaries, and headed into the Tchlotep Jungle in search of the Caves of Chaos.



I was worried the low power of B/X would be a huge turn off but I heard the words "meaningful" "fun" and "exciting" being trotted out. I was especially pleased that the casters got into it by chucking jars of alchemist's fire* from behind the fighters and experiencing the joy that comes with casting a single well-timed spell that turns the tide of battle.

  • Caves of Chaos are incredibly combat heavy consisting of rooms filled to the brim with humanoids who attack on sight and not much else. I am glad my players had fun despite that.
  • A player found a cursed -1 sword. It somehow manages to be boring and annoying at the same time but I was too hung over to come up with something more interesting on the fly. Why would someone bother crafting a worthless item like that in the first place?
  • Old school Charm Person is a really fun and powerful spell!
*It always annoyed me that 1 gp flasks of lamp oil would somehow ignite like Greek Fire, napalm, or white phosphorus so I upped the price to 25 gp and call it "alchemist's fire". It's still a great bargain because it is almost guaranteed to kill any 1HD or 2HD creatures it hits.
 
The caves are on my short list for this to convert for the current game, for nights when dungeoneering seems to be more of a thing.
 
Raleel said:
The caves are on my short list for this to convert for the current game, for nights when dungeoneering seems to be more of a thing.
Click to expand...
The generic nature of the module was a huge plus allowing me spend my time and brainpower populating it with cool shit instead of figuring out how to shoehorn the goddamn thing into my campaign.
 
Red Ted postponed tonight's Curse of Strahd session to a later week. Honestly, I'm fine with it, as I'm pretty tired tonight and didn't really feel like playing. I do enjoy the game, so I'd prefer it to fall on a night when I am more capable of being engaged.

I also wasn't really paying much attention in Beatrix's game last night, which I feel bad about. I wasn't deliberately ignoring it or anything, just couldn't focus.
 
Since my Savage Worlds game is online these days, two of my players kindly set up a Discord server for it. It's nice to be able to just post my recaps to the Discord, rather than email them out to everyone.
 
Honestly, Discord is super convenient for so many things with games. Even for in person games it makes between game communication easier.
 
E-Rocker said:
Since my Savage Worlds game is online these days, two of my players kindly set up a Discord server for it. It's nice to be able to just post my recaps to the Discord, rather than email them out to everyone.
Click to expand...
EmperorNorton said:
Honestly, Discord is super convenient for so many things with games. Even for in person games it makes between game communication easier.
Click to expand...
I would distrust my ability to search for it five to ten years from now. Email has a certain stability that is it's own quality.

I do like Discord though and use it in game communication.
 
One of the players in my group has had to take an extended hiatus from gaming due to work. We've been posting play-by-plays in discord so that he doesn't miss out.
 
Awesome. I'm running every week doc appointments (not for just me, since I take care of my mom.)
 
Congratulations to my group for managing to find every way to make the scenario hard.

  • Trying to get a distraught person out of his destroyed home by punching him. They saved him from the imminent collapse, but didn’t fully save him from being wounded. They drop him off at a house of healing. Then leave him - they need him to corroborate a story in which he is corrupt. Guess what, he leaves in the morning. Poof, gone.

  • sneaking Into the jeweler and forger’s house. Great job getting in. Great job searching. Get into the room with the mcguffin, don‘t search for it. Just casually look around. Decide to take papers off the desk. Then light the place on fire. Miss the secret wall safe. Find it the next morning, in the arms of the former sifting through the ruins of his house. City guards everywhere.
now they are proposing going into minotaur lands to get word that the fight with Anathaym was fair and she did not betray the city. All off the fucking rails. Congrats!
 
One of my players (and the Wednesday GM) had a deadline on his novel, so we played neither game. So, I should have gotten a lot done on my latest module. But. I. Didn't.
 
I haven't really gotten much done of late, as work has been a drain on my creativity (due to all the stupid drama I've been dealing with). I've got 3 projects in various stages of work, but haven't been able to get any farther on them. A an old friend came to me earlier this month, and asked if would be willing to take the setting of an old rpg, and adapt it to Supers! Revised and release it. I was told I could use all the old art and text. My main work would be doing stats in Supers!, and putting it together in a new file. I did some stat conversions, but it looks like we're going to take a specific group from that setting, and release them on their own. I will likely start work on that this coming week

Besides that, I've been writing various micro-fiction on and off. I've written a collection of interconnected ones revolving around a creation of mine. They start off kind of creepypasta in style, then veer into more weird fiction. Also wrote another piece with a different creation (based off a piece of stock art I bought), and am writing a dark fantasy one where the lead is inspired by my first D&D character. Most are sort of mythos related fiction, as that's where I'm at creatively at the moment.
 
Bill Reich said:
One of my players (and the Wednesday GM) had a deadline on his novel, so we played neither game. So, I should have gotten a lot done on my latest module. But. I. Didn't.
Click to expand...
It happens:thumbsup:!


Also, no Halloween session for me. I'm at work instead!
 
Last edited:
urbwar said:
I haven't really gotten much done of late, as work has been a drain on my creativity
Click to expand...

Honestly I think this is happening with a lot of people lately. I know just this year in general has killed my ability to get stuff done. I'm ready for the world to go back to normal man.
 
Last edited:
EmperorNorton said:
Honestly I think this is happening with a lot of people lately. I know just this year in general has killed my ability to get stuff done. I'm ready for the world to go back to normal man.
Click to expand...

What's going on in the world hasn't honestly affected me that much. It's the stupid soap opera melodrama at my job that's affecting me. Until that started, my creativity was fine. But dealing with stupid bs at work is irritating. Too much cleaning up other people's muckups is getting old real quick
 
In my sunday group we were meant to start playing WH40K : Faith and Glory this week, but our german player realised she found the 40K setting deeply unpleasant to mentally process or take part in. She did volunteer to sit out, but we agreed that would kinda suck for her, so that's been scrapped and we're going back to Aliens instead.
 
Ladybird said:
but our german player realised she found the 40K setting deeply unpleasant to mentally process or take part in
Click to expand...
Out of curiosity was it the rough everyday life in the Imperium or more violent elements like the Dark Eldar? Or just the whole thing?
 
I've been working on a renderer for sectors off and on for a few evenings, and I spent yesterday tidying up a near star data set. This gives me about 1400 systems in a roughly 100 light year cube, with some hanger-ons. It's not 100% accurate as I've filled in a few gaps with made up stuff, but it will be fine for this.

At some point I'll add a few more hanger-ons, although expanding everything out by one sector (10 parsecs) runs one into a couple of problems. The first is that the quality of the star data goes downhill quite rapidly beyond the Gliese-Jareish catalogue (25 parsec) and is a bit ropey at the outer edges of that, and secondly that going out one 10-parsec sector in all directions bumps the size of the data set by a factor of about 5.

At the moment I've got a little under 1,700 stars in 1400 systems. which makes for an average of a little over 50 star systems per sector. The objective is to have about 200 systems with permanent inhabitants or some other playable mcguffin that could support an adventure, so it doesn't really need to be much bigger than this, at least not beyond some bits dangling off the side.

Fun fact: the sun would be too faint to see with the naked eye past about 60 light years.
 
Last edited:
Steel Aces 7: Price To Pay
Deeper and deeper down we go. Last time we saw Mel, she was being forced into an unmarked car. Things have not gotten better for her.
housedok.com

Playing Jacks, Page 7 - House Dok Productions

Price To Pay Growing up I was told not to get into cars with strangers. Unfortunately, for Pamela Price there wasn’t much of a choice. Not to give anything away, but fan’s of Metahumans Rising may recognize one other person in this scene. Also, I want to call out Jake’s use of blue’s against a […]
housedok.com

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Metahumans

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HouseDokPro

Website: http://housedok.com/

Print: https://studio2publishing.com/products/metahumans-rising?_pos=2&_sid=145b3fa95&_ss=r\

PDF: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/277614/Metahumans-Rising

#Metahumans #Superheroes #RPG #TTRPG #Comic #SteelAces
 
AsenRG said:
It happens:thumbsup:!


Also, no Halloween session for me. I'm at work instead!
Click to expand...

I can only remember one Halloween session in all my years of gaming, and it was the very first session I played. Halloween 1975 after an SF club meeting and there was no Halloween theme. It was just John's regular campaign. I never ran anything Halloween themed, although a Troll Grinch once stole Christmas.
 
After running my 1st session of B/X as an adult I have to say that it is a seriously sweet little ruleset. Even with a severe hangover I was able to keep things moving and we covered much more ground than we are used to. There are many cool little subtleties I wasn't aware of as a child such as the use of retainers and the progression wasn't as slow as I had imagined, either.

One of my players sent a nice email I wanted to share:

I really like how some of the darker elements of Carcosa (slavery, cannibalism, racism, collecting heads for bounty) immediately struck home the difference between it and Hyperborea. It absolutely created the “we’re not in Kansas anymore” feeling.
Click to expand...

For fuck's sake, after the first two hours of our first game everyone in the party had (unintentionally) eaten human flesh and no I did not plan that in any way shape or form. I was really too hung over to process it at the time but the players were pretty unfazed beyond stating that one day they are going to return and destroy the settlement about as calmly as I'd say I was going to the grocery store.
 
Séadna said:
Out of curiosity was it the rough everyday life in the Imperium or more violent elements like the Dark Eldar? Or just the whole thing?
Click to expand...
The Imperium and the attitudes that it has and espouses. Here are her messages from our group chat:

Can I just say that the symbolism and ideology remind me uncomfortably of German brand national socialism. Humans as the supreme beings, xenophobia, fanatical worship of a god-like leader... This is basically about space Nazis, as far as I can see. Am I missing something?
No offense, but I'm puzzled why this is a popular gaming system. It seems pretty off to me, but then I'm approaching it from a different background (although it seems to be popular here, too). The fact it's popular with soldiers gives me the heebie jeebies.
Nazi Germany was ludicrous and overblown from today's sane perspective, as was the Spanish Inquisition, and both were real.
‍♀️
That said, I'm not worried about glorification, but tbh the religious fanaticism alone makes me pretty uncomfortable. I think this is simply not the system for me, because it touches heavily on a couple of sore spots for me, and I don't think I can handle that. That's my issue though, not yours. You have fun with the chainsaw swords
1f60a.png
, and I'll sit this one out.
Click to expand...
We did try to explain that the Imperium are bad guys and the original intention of the setting was as a satire, but it didn't make her feel any better about it or playing as someone enforcing those values. To be honest I don't even disagree with her, I think she's right, but it's a distinction our different cultural upbringings have made us react differently to.

Also, "while living through the end of the world" maybe isn't the best time for a grimdark game just in general.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top