5-year Re-Anniversary

About 10 gamers circled me on Google Plus (find me --> G+ Link) today, and it kind of inspired me to return to this sorely neglected blog. I'm going to give this another shot and see if I can get it up off the ground again. I was in the process of writing most of this as an introduction to new folks in my gaming circle on G+, but it felt a bit personal and long winded, so I'm morphing it into a blog post instead.

I did a little research and some number crunching and I realized that this past Saturday was my 5-year Anniversary of getting back into gaming! Pretty exciting, right? Extra cool, because, by coincidence, I spent the entire day playing RPGs at GASP Game Day -- a Call of Cthulhu one-shot, first game of a Pathfinder campaign, and the continuation of the Darves Hill Labyrinth Lord Campaign.

Anyway, here's a little extra background info if anyone is interested.

I got into D&D via the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon and playing the Dungeon board game with the   neighbor across the street. He was a bit older and ran us through live action dungeons in his backyard. We used cardboard tubes for swords. Nothing like a yard full of 8-year-olds playing a boffer larp without even knowing it, right? Unfortunately, that awesome neighbor moved away before he got around to playing real D&D with us. Eventually, I got the Mentzer box set on my own. We tried to play, but without that older brother or neighbor to teach us, we never really got very far. Another friend had some of the AD&D books, but his older sister went whack-o Christian and made his parents throw away his books (and accused us 12-year old burgeoning headbangers & punk rockers of being Satanists, which we thought was pretty cool at the time). We also tried to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Palladium Fantasy RPG, and I remember rolling up Rifts characters, but I don't think we ever actually understood how that was supposed to work. Unfortunately, we could never manage to get a long-term campaign off the ground.

Fast forward almost 20 years (of wishing I could play some D&D) and we finally put a group together to play 3.5 D&D. I also started following some blogs and discovered the OSR. I was really relieved that the game I spent so much time reading (and not enough time playing) as a child still had a strong following. I enjoyed 3.5 for what it was, but there was something about that old school style that really drew me in. I drank the Kool Aid and started buying 4e books, which lead to me running a 4e game for almost two years. During that time, I got more into the OSR stuff, and purchased copies of the Swords & Wizardry White Box, Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and other OSR products. Back in October 2010, I started attending the local gaming club, GASP, just to get the opportunity to actually play Labyrinth Lord with some like-minded folks. I turned my home group on to the OSR stuff and we dropped 4e like the ton of bricks it became. Right now we're just starting out a new LL campaign and it's going great. I'm still playing in a 3.5 Ravenloft Campaign and just started in a Pathfinder campaign at GASP, too.

Over the past 5 years I've managed to play 3.5 D&D (player & DM), 4e D&D (player & DM), Call of Cthulhu (player), Lamentations of the Flame Princess (player), Hackmaster Basic (player), Aces & Eights (player), Hollow Earth Expedition (GM), Swords & Wizardry White Box (DM), Labyrinth Lord (player & DM), Mutant Future (DM), WOTC Gamma World (player), Stars Without Number (player), Deadlands Reloaded (player), Savage Worlds Fallout (player), Spellcraft & Swordplay (player), Pathfinder (player), Spirit of the Season (player), Castles & Crusades (player), and Dark Heresy (player & GM). I possibly missed something in that list, but that covers most of them...

Most importantly, I've met a lot of totally awesome people, and had some amazing adventures. Sincere thanks to the following:

• First, to Brad F, wherever you are, for putting us through all those crazy "dungeons" in your back yard. 
• Mark R, for being willing to DM that D&D 5 years ago and Curt G, for posting about D&D enough "on the board", to convince Mark to run 
• All of the "Friends of Milo", we should do a reunion game someday. I wonder what Tordak is up to these days... 
• Dave 8C for almost always "being there" and always being open to trying something new 
• Allen for almost always "being there" and finally giving me the opportunity to play Call of Cthulhu 
• Tim and John at GASP, for being so damn friendly with the new guy and allowing me to join in your games 
• Geoff at Phantom for listening to my weirdo stories and selling me awesome product 
• All the other friendly folks I've had the opportunity to game with over the past 5 years!

Okay, this is feeling a bit sappy, and probably a bit long, so I'm going to wrap it up there. Hopefully you'll see some more posts out of me in the near future.

Poor neglected blog...

Poor poor neglected blog. I had such high hopes for you in 2011, but I've been wasting my time with the dreaded television too much.

Lots of stuff going on in the Gutter Cult game world. I gotta get back in the swing of things with this here blog, I suppose. More soon.

Hollow Earth Update

Have I been lazy about updating or what?

The new found interest in 40k has been a bit of a nerd-time suck. I've got my second game this weekend and I've been modeling like mad. Fortunately, the guys I'm playing with are okay with me showing up with unpainted models, so I've actually had time to eat, sleep, go to work, etc.

My tuesday night my regular group (Dave, Allen, Hickey, Paul and Brad) finished up our Hollow Earth Expedition adventure. Brad was absent and Paul, being back from tour, got his first chance at play in the Hollow Earth.

The adventurers had succeeded in thwarting Dr. Von Wartenberg's plan to steal the Atlantean crystal in the previous adventure, but discovered their way out of the Hollow Earth had abandoned them. They decided to follow the Nazi's tracks through the jungle. They heard some tribal drumming and what sounded like a woman shouting insults. The heroes quickly (and quietly moved towards the sounds) and stumbled across what appeared to be humanoid lizards in the midst of a ritual sacrifice of a beautiful woman (played by Paul -- hah). Some chaos and combat ensued and woman is released and joins the fight against her reptilian captors. When the group realizes that more lizardmen are being alerted to the disturbance, the party high-tails it towards a raft on the river bed.

They proceed down the river, with much chaos (including a fight on the raft with 2 lizardmen and a velociraptor and almost going over a giant waterfall), and eventually find a ruined temple in the valley beneath the waterfall. Inside the temple, they are able to solve a puzzle that opens the waterfall. There are a bunch of traps which are navigated on the way to a large room with some sort of glowing crystal. The players grab the crystal, shit goes haywire, the caverns start to flood. The snooty professors falls in the drink, and Dr Dan the field biologist gets crushed in a trap.

They stumble out of the ruins and notice the prof crawling out of the lake looking like a drowned rat, but otherwise okay. As the waterfall begins to close, they realize they are surrounded by Nazis, let by Von Wartenberg. As he delivers a soliloquy on what happens to those who defy the Reich, the adventurers spot a pack of lizardmen making their way towards the group. From the other direction a horde of Raptors and finally, from the surface of the lake, a giant octopus surfaces. As the 5 way fight breaks out, the players high-tail it into the jungle as the screen fades to black.

Good game. I think everyone enjoyed it and we'll likely run more HEX adventures in the future. Definitely recommended for folks looking for some pulpy action and adventure.

Status Update

Wow! It looks like I let over a week creep by with out a post. I not doing a good job of keeping up with my self-appointed posting numbers. I should be doing some studying for some up coming games, really, but I'll sneak a post in before that, and hopefully get some feedback.

Speaking of upcoming games, I'll be running my second session of Swords & Wizardry White Box this weekend. All seven players from the first session were so enamored with the play style (particularly the speed and lethality of the combat), that they demanded a deeper delve into the dungeon. When we last left them, they were down a man or two after a scuffle with some goblins in a hallway. Fortunately, they left some potential adventurers up with the horses and supplies on the surface level. Those unnamed mooks will be getting tossed into the scrum.

Tuesday, I'll be running another session of Hollow Earth Expedition for my regular crew. As I mentioned in a recent post, it went over big, so we're going to keep rolling with it for a few more sessions. I decided to drop some cash over at FRP Games to pick up the GM Screen, Secrets of the Surface World and Mysteries of Hollow Earth source books. Eventually, I foresee a longer, campaign style game, with the players actually generating characters instead of using the pre-gens from the book. Well, at least I hope that happens, since I put another $70 into the system.

Expect some brief play reports from the sessions in the next few days. After HEX wraps up, we have to decide what is next. Allen, who runs my regular Call of Cthulhu game has offered to do CoC adventure for this group, which could be a good experience for everyone. After that, it may be time to revisit the ongoing 4e campaign for a few sessions.

Up next will be a post on "Appendix N" and my exposure thus far.

More thoughts on HEX

I had a question about the Hollow Earth Expedition System after my previous post. I was typing a response in the comments and realized I was going a bit long, so instead I decided to expand it into a more complete post. If anyone has any additional questions, let me know and I'll try to answer, based on my experiences playing / game mastering.

Hollow Earth Expedition uses a dice pool system, known as Ubiquity Roleplaying System. With Ubiquity, you can roll any dice you own, as long as they have an even number of sides (so keep those Gamescience d3s, d5s, and d7s in your dice bag). Instead of looking for 4 or better, like your might in a table-top war game like Warhammer, you're just looking for the even numbers. Count them up and that gives you the number of "successes". Alternatively, Exile Games sells a set of "Ubiquity Dice" to use with the game. It's kind of an innovative system to cut down on the number of you roll each turn. I picked up a set at Origins last year after checking out a game demo. Essentially, the white die is the equivalent of rolling "one die", the red die is the equivalent of rolling "two dice", and the blue die is the equivalent of rolling "three dice". All the probabilities are worked out with the numbers on the faces. So, to represent a dice pool of 6, you can either roll 6 white dice, 3 red dice, 2 blue dice, or 1 white, 1 red, and 1 blue, or 2 red and 1 blue, and so forth. I was the only one using the Ubiquity Dice last night. As a bit of a dice nerd, it was fun to use something off the wall, but by no means necessary. Then again, our Big Game Hunter was dumping 14 dice on the table every time he fired his rifle. He could have done that with 3 blues, 2 reds and a white from my pool (the Ubiquity Dice set comes with 3 of each color).

The GM determines how challenging the task should be, allowing for adjustment for creative ideas or tactical advantages. The system also supports the use of the average successes for scenarios where time is not a factor and nothing critical is happening. For example, in last night's game one of the players has a high Linguistics skill. We decided that he understands the basics of most European languages to avoid having to roll every time one of the NPCs spoke Norwegian. When that same NPC spoke Atlantean, he had to make a roll, because it was unlike any language he had experienced. Even with a success, he was only able to understand the very basics of what was said. It allowed the game to move quickly, but we could leave it to chance when that had the opportunity to make the game more interesting.


Combat is handled with opposed rolls. The attacker rolls a number of dice based on his or her weapon skill and the quality of the weapon. In the case of our Big Game Hunter, that number turned out to be 14. Here's how it breaks down: Firearms are based on your dexterity (4 for BGH). During character creation, he spends build points on three levels and buys a Talent, boosting his Firearms rating another 2. Additionally he buys a specialization in rifles, adding another point, bring him to a total of 10 dice. The .405 Winchester Rifle has a rating a 4L (the L stands for lethal damage). There it is 14 dice. When using his .455 Webley revolver with a 3L, his attack drops to 12 dice, because he can't count the rifle specialization. The defender rolls his defense rating. I don't have my books in front of me, but I think the defense rating is a combination of your Intelligence and Dexterity scores (plus any armor you might be wearing). Subtract the defense success from the attack successes to determine the damage you take. There are some rules for cover and special attacks, but those are the basics. It sounds a bit complicated, guess, but in practice it went pretty fast. People seemed to enjoy having the "active" defense, because I think everyone likes rolling dice. Their dice rolling prowess (aka LUCK) had something to do with how well they shrugged off a potential hit.

I've never played any other dice pool system, and I don't think any of my players have much, if any, experience with them either. The rules were light enough that everyone picked up on it pretty quickly. Since I was the only one who owns/read the book, we skipped over some of the fiddly options for combat (like the continuous initiative option and some more advanced combat actions).

Having a more limited/generalized skill set, than say, BRP or Call of Cthulhu, allowed the players to be a bit more free-form/creative with their actions, and the skills and skill specializations made sense to everyone. I think the players were pretty innovative in combining their player smarts and character skills.  The Style points were also popular. As I said in the previous post, the players did a pretty good job getting into character and seemed legitimately excited to gain a Style Point. I need to refresh myself on the rules and suggestions for distributing the points throughout the game. I'm not sure if they were going out too easily or I was being stingy, but it felt right for a first try at the system.


I found it a bit funny that my players were kind of in Call of Cthulhu mode, rather than high adventure mode, but that might have been related to their selection of characters.

"Hey Guys! We're going on a big adventure, filled with all kinds of crazy traps and dinosaurs and evil Nazis!!"
"I wanna be a snooty college professor!"
"I call the Field Biologist!!!"

My one concern, so far, with HEX is handling future adventures. Part of the fun of the game was the players not knowing what was going to happen. I pretty much told them that we'd be playing a pulp adventure game. I made some references to some books and movies for framework, and they new the game was Called Hollow Earth Expedition, but they didn't know much else about the setting. How do you keep the concept of a foreign world interesting to the players if they've delved into the world in the past. You loose the freak-out my players experience when their characters watches and compasses malfunctioned and the sun never set. You can roleplay that feeling for a new set of characters, but not for the players behind those characters.

I think the Ubiquity system could easily be used for other gaming styles, but there doesn't seem to be much else out there right now. There's no reason that I noticed that you couldn't reskin the skills, talents, and flaws, for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc. I see that an upcoming supplement for the game is called Revelations of Mars, which I have to assume will allow for some Sci-Fi gaming. There is also a fairly active section of the Exile Games Forum, where folks discuss alternate uses for the Ubiquity system. I could see this eventually competing alongside Savage Worlds as a nice, compact, generic system for running a variety of games. The folks at Exile would probably need to do some significant work to strip off the pulp adventure layer, though.

The world is big enough, and with the two supplementary products currently in print (Secrets of the Surface World and Mysteries of Hollow Earth) there is more than enough for players to do and see. I'm curious to see how this demo game develops and if my players request a longer campaign in the future. After finally getting to play a game, I do plan on grabbing those books, plus the GM screen at some point. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any of my FLGS currently carry this game. I'm going to talk to Jeff down at Phantom of the Attic to see if they can get it from their distributors, though, as I'd rather pass the cash through them than Amazon or something.

Entering the Hollow Earth

My regular Tuesday night group had their first adventure in the Hollow Earth last night. I made some slight modifications to the adventure featured in the back of the Hollow Earth Expedition core rule book...

The Cast of Characters -
Allen - Dr. Whipple Van Phillips - Snooty Professor
Brad - Crosby ?? - Big Game Hunter
Dave - Dr. Daniel ?? - Field Biologist
Hickey - Dr. Albert Franklin - Mad Scientist

I laid out a few sample pre-generated characters that were available on the Exile Games website (the same that are included in the book). The players veered towards the more scholarly types, with the lone exception of the rifle-toting Big Game Hunter. Other options were Fortune Hunter, Rugged Explorer, Occult Investigator, and Intrepid Reporter. 

I won't bore you with a full recap of the adventure, as it is mostly retelling of the sample adventure, with a few minor additions. Since two of the four players have a fair amount of experience playing Call of Cthulhu, they had a basic understanding of what it means to play and investigative game and jumped right in, looking for clues and leaving no stone unturned. The other two players caught on quickly. I feel like I gave up some information a bit too easily,  but they were really drilling me with questions and observations, so any game master is bound to slip up occasionally.

I will say that my players did come up with some fairly interesting methods for resolving the problems and did a great job playing in character. I wasn't sure how many Style Points I should have distributed throughout the evening, but Allen, particularly, was cracking me up with his snooty behavior. He insulted everyone at the table at least twice, prodded a velociraptor with his umbrella, and scooted up a tree at the first sign of trouble (including making sure to climb just a bit higher than his compatriot in the same tree, assuming the raptor might be full after the meal of Field Biologist). Everyone had their moments to shine, though. Dave befriending a triceratops and arguing the scientific method, Hickey blowing up a dino with a makeshift bomb and attempting to sell mining equipment to Norwegians. Brad regularly threatening folks with his boom stick and putting his neck on the line to protect the others.

Overall impressions? First, all the players seemed to be enjoying the session. They were coming up with creative solutions to the problems. The one bit of combat went pretty quickly (though I missed an opportunity to introduce some NPCs in the manner I planned, because I was so wrapped up in all of it.) It was fast and fun, but I think I'm going to need some work. I might have another player joining, and where I left it, it might be a challenge to introduce him. Additionally, the story as written in the book is about to wrap. I have some ideas on where to go next, but it's going to depend on the direction the players take it. I've dropped plenty of hooks for future adventures, but I have no inkling which direction they'll go with it, which is good. I need more practice at not "over-planning" and railroading, for sure. I'd like to run at least two or three more sessions of the game, to get a  good feel for it before moving on to something else.

Up next? Returning to re-read some of the fluff sections of the HEX book and see where we might take this. I'm going to need to so some sort of planning to at least have a basic story arc to work from. I think the game can be used for sandbox storytelling, but the way I've started the adventure, it's looking like it would be best to have some sort of resolution at the end. Since this is a distinct short adventure, I really feel the need to have a beginning, middle and end to a story-line, even if it gets pretty free-fore there in the middle. I'll also need to review some of the mechanics. I'm thinking that some of the parts I'm confused about may make a bit more sense, now that we've successfully completed a game session.

If we end up playing again in the future (and I hope we do), I'd certainly like to allow the players to create their own characters. I skipped it this time, because we're all still learning the rules and I didn't want to blow the whole first session on character development. It was nice, because the sample characters came complete with notes regarding

Still "In Battle". Still "No Law".

I assembled 5 more Space Marines this afternoon while watching the playoff games.

I now have two tactical units of 10 marines. I still need to hit the bits box at Phantom to see if I can find a chainsword or powerfist or something for my Sergeant. I should probably try to find another flamer and/or rocket launcher, too.

Up next is a ton of painting. I have a all but 5 of my minis based and primed, and got a base-coat on probably 10 or so. Lots of work there, but since I'm going with a single color scheme, it seems like it goes a bit faster than I'm used to. All of my other painting experience has been for individual minis for D&D games. After that, is assembling and painting the devastator squad. Fortunately, I have no immediate plans for public play, so I can get away with partial paint jobs amongst friends.

I have make some decisions on which direction to go with the army after that. I need some sort of dedicated transport to help get the marines around the battle field a bit more quickly, and some sort of fast attack option. Finally, I really want to buy this, because it looks so damn cool:

A Techmarine and his Thunderfire Cannon

 

I've got a bit of a crush on Tech Priests after playing one in my first Dark Heresy campaign, so I want some in my army. This looks like a pretty badass choice. The model is awfully expensive, but it looks wicked, so I may make the investment.

More RPG stuff soon, I promise. I'm playing in the 3.5 D&D Forgotten Realms campaign tomorrow evening and I'll be running my first session of Hollow Earth Expedition the following day. I'll definitely have a report for the HEX game sometime later this week, at the very least.