High Adventure Wednesday

I'll start with Wednesday. We hit D&D and started up the Savage Tide path. The crew is as follows:
John (both humans of course)
Satanos - a young goth lad. Warlock. whipping boy of John's other character and pseudo adopted ward of one of Wendy's.
Bill Grimm - a huge fighter. modeled somewhat after Caramon Majere and a little of Ben Grimm (The Thing). Trouble is, Bill's one of the smartest in the group. His "low Charisma" of 10 means John plays him as an uncouth brute. Too bad, he could be the teams unofficial leader otherwise.

Wendy
Kima - an elven archer fighter type. She's a wiz with a shortbow. Not your typical elf, this girl has a bad case of ADD and eats a lot. I mean A LOT.
Oreana - human spirit shaman. she's the big sister of the group. Looks out for Satanos and likely keeps everyone from arguing.

Me
Nyfel - Nyfel is the fat kid everyone forgets about, which is great, because he shouldn't do too much as a a DM PC. He's a wizard/cleric, and I'm trying out the "booster" archetype from Complete Mage. His only offensive spell is magic missile.

*Spoiler warning*
The first job given in the Savage Tide is to board a ship and recover a signet ring for the party's soon to be proprietoress. The group does some good research, comes up with a good plan, and then hire the loudest boatsman in the world. Bribing him to be quiet solves the problem, but their ability to be incognito is nil. They eventually do sneak up to the ship, though.

Unfortunately, both of the armored fighters get hung up in the ships rigging trying to board. A fight begins before they're even aboard. There's 7 pirates and a leader aboard. The party makes pretty quick work of the underpaid pirates thanks to low morale. When it comes time for the pirate boss, though, and the monster that's loose in the hold, things go awry.

No amount of buff spells can counter not rolling above a 12 for a group of level 2 adventurers. Bill's sword got stuck in the mast, and he had to use his javelins as melee weapons. Took him a little time to take care of the pirate boss. Kima stayed up top to help him, which left the three support characters in the hold to take on a melee brute; a rhagodeesa. Given tactical options, the story might have gone differently. Unfortunately, they were stuck in a 20 by 20 hold with one tactic available: hit it with everything you have.

Oreana cast shillelagh and Nyfel used enlarge person on her. In retrospect, he should have used it on Bill up top to end that fight quicker. Satanos couldn't hit jack with his eldritch blasts, and his other abilities are more utilitarian. Once we have a little down time, Nyfel will probably make a dozen or so magic missile scrolls for Satanos to use with his Use Magic Device skill. Unfortunately, the rhagodeesa needed a 5 or higher to grab Oreana with it's tentacle things and a 7 to bite her (which dropped to 3 if she was grappled). She was doomed if her back up crew couldn't come up with something. They didn't.

Oreana died.

Her scream finally elicited help from Kima, and she made short order of the rhagodeesa, but it was still too late.

We stopped after the team found the ring. We didn't role play out the encounter with Lavinia, but we will. The group took the money they earned and had Oreana reincarnated. She came back as an elf. Too bad, I was hoping for a bugbear or gnoll.

Overall, good fun.

• Bill's a strong character.
• Satanos needs something, but I'm not sure what yet.
• Kima can hold her own in, and, like Bill, she excels when things are right.
• Oreana has potential, but she's hampered by a low strength. With no range weapon her AC is pitifully low. To her credit, we were cutting produce flame short. She should have been getting two attacks with the spell, not one. Overall, though, she either needs a bag of holding or bracers of AC.
• Nyfel's just what he's meant to be, although I doubt he lives long. He's the type of character that picks the magic items last, and his AC will lag behind because he'll be pumping out scrolls whenever possible. With all of his buff spells, I'm gonna need to come up with some means of tracking when the effects end.

Should be interesting. Hopefully, the game stays fun. It's meant to be our goof off distraction so that we can maybe be a little more serious in the Cthulu campaign. We'll see if that effect works out.

SR4 Loki Shaman

Sunday we're getting back together for the mad rpg character session. We should have our SR4 characters done, and we'll make characters for Godlike, Anomane (sp?), and Werewolf. As I think I mentioned before, I've got 9 characters for Godlike ready to go. I want the crew to pick at least two so we don't spend all day making characters for just that game. I should have my SR4 character ready to go by then, too. For the most part, he is. I still need a personality and knowledge skills. Hopefully, I'll get to use those this time. Didn't happen with Gaz.

Parts of his personality are already determined.

• He's an elf.
• He's a caster of some Charisma based tradition.
• Raven is his mentor.
• Only two of his seven spells are combat spells, the rest are manipulation.
• He has 9 dice in etiquette and Con, with 11 in Fast Talk (good bullshitter); plus 9 dice in spellcasting (with 13 in manipulation), but only 7 in ritual spellcasting, and 6 (1 level) in counterspelling.
• 5 dice in a firearms skill means it better not get that far on a bad day.

I was originally thinking of making him a shaman of the Crow people, but that character doesn't mesh with this character's skills OR the actual Raven mentor spirit. That character was a tad more benevolent than what I've sent this character up to be.

This character would be a dick if he wasn't quite so sauve. He manipulates everyone into getting what he wants, but it's not a brow beating, crush your will sort of manipulation. It's subtler. People want to help this guy, in part because he's capable, and sometimes does, help them back. He's not bad, but he does take more than he gets.

My thoughts for his tradition are threefold: shamanic, but with a power hungry twist; black magic, possibly opening him up to some good roleplaying options as he struggles with spirits that he can't quite manipulate like normal metahumans; and the Norse tradition, as a follower of Loki.

Let's consider Loki. As I understand it, the cult of Winternight saw the Matrix as the chains holding Loki prison and set about to destroy those chains to bring about Ragnarok, yada yada. They saw otaku and deckers as spawn of Loki. With that in mind, clearly they were wrong. If they were right, why did they fail?

I just decided I'm gonna name this guy Fritjof Odegard. It means "peace thief from a desolate place," so that should tell us a little bit about this chap. He's a snow elf from Sweden. Not albino, but white hair and pale eyes nonetheless. Luminescent white skin that his tattoos seam to glow from. I'll figure those out later. I digress. Back to Loki and Fritjof.

So, Fritjof doesn't worship Loki, he's a ganner. That's a spellweaver according to Street Magic. Hence, no worshiping, sacrificing, prostrating, etc. Instead, there's idolizing, hero worship, and acceptng guidance from Raven as the voice of Loki. At least, that's how Fritjof sees it. That leaves him some room to risk pacts with powerful spirits, possibly kiss the toxic side of things abit, and depending on where Charlie takes it, really struggle against the dark side of magic that involves Loki.

Public knowledge of Fritjof doesn't reveal much background. Raven spoke to him when he awakened and helped him find a pretty posh living in whatever sort of society the elves of Scandanavia have, but wanderlust, greed, and a taste for excitement sent Fritjof packing. He's in Denver because Minnesota was too much like home, ie boring, and Denver's similar climate-wise but way more exciting.

That's Fritjof Odegard in a nutshell. Thanks for listening. The bummer is I like this guy, I'm excited to play him, but I'm fully cognizant that the likelyhood of this SR4 campaign being a long term story is slim.

Checking in

For those that read this that don't chat with me in some other forum, the promotion is working out well. Had three days this week flying solo and scored one comment of "You picked this up very quick!" Well, yeah. I fix shit that other people broke. Not that hard. Oh, and they pay me to break stuff during "testing." Also not hard. I got $6 more an hour for it. Whoot.

In worse news, I won't be posting any updates on getting published in Dungeon or Dragon magazine. Why? WotC isn't continueing the license with Paizo, so the mags are closing as of September. Makes me sad. I'm flying a wait and see on both WotC's proposed online content and Paizo's Pathfinder subscription service.

The Pathfinder is a 96 page bound book adventure path (first campaign runs levels 1-15 in 6 books) that sounds like it's a mix of Dungeon and Dragon mag content with the added advantage of being OGL. My trouble with it is the $19.99 plus $4 shipping price point. That's steep. First, it's only slightly less than a WotC splat book, and it's not hard cover. Granted, I paid more for 150ish pages in Expeditious Retreat material, but I'm always making new worlds. I usually only run published adventures in a pinch. My main reason for the subscriptions to the mags was to stay abreast of what they needed in submissions. It's a prestige thing I guess. Some people look confused when I say I've got shit published with a 3rd party publisher, but their eyes light up as if I'm famous when I then mention I have submissions into Dungeon mag...

Still, I get the first issue of Pathfinder with my subscription credit, so we'll see how it is. And I'll see what WotC puts out, too. Most importantly, I'll see how the restructuring in both companies affects the freelance market. The plus side is that not trying to do at least one subscription a month frees up more time for pursuing bigger paid projects. The down side is that 5 cents a word is so much more than 1/2 a cent per word, and the 5 is gone now.

!e! Yep, that many games

Last week, Wendy wasn't feeling up to Cthulu, and I was bemoaning the fact that there was some cool shit in both the Age of Worms and Savage Tide campaign paths that they would never see. So, we made characters for Savage Tide. Wendy and John both made two (John did a fighter and warlock, Wendy did a fighter and spirit shaman), and I filled in the gaps with a personalityless wizard/cleric. I don't know much about the other two, but the DMPC is basically gonna be a booster type filled with self doubt and constantly comparing his own inabilities to the heroic actions of his friends and teammates, while never realizing that he's somewhat and sometimes primarily responsible for the success of those same said heroic actions. On the one hand, I hate the guy, on the other, I'd love to have him as a player character. There's a big understanding with the players, though, that if this guy steals the limelight or gets any favoritism, tell me, and he's out. Also, he's never confidant enough to give an opinion.

That takes care of Horrorble Hump Day (so named for playing Cthulu on Wednesday of course). On to Shadow Sunday.

Turns out that Charlie was/is about as uninterested in having Outback survivalists in Hong Kong as we were in playing that game. Couple that with his current bid to be a Fanpro Commando (John, if that goes through, you'll have to come play SR4 at the Source once a month), and the man is experiencing burnout on our Sunday gaming. Understandable, but frustrating from a player perspective. From now on, my new motto is "Don't quit, kill em." At least then there's an end to the game. ;)

Charlie's original request was for someone else to GM entirely on Sundays. No one jumped up and said, "Oh hell, yeah, I've got this great idea!" So, we started out by making a list of every game that we had and one of us would run. Pretty much everything but Shadowrun had at least one of us waffling on it, and nobody was really willing or confidant enough to dedicate to running that. So, we each picked a game we'd run, and we'll alternate through adventures. For instance, I'll run a Godlike mission, followed by a chapter (or whatever the hell White Wolf calls adventures) of Werewolf ran by Nick, then some Inomine from Justin, and finally SR4 from Charlie. Or some order like that. We'll each finish our respective adventures before passing the GM scepter.

Honestly, I don't expect much story to come out of this. Let's look at our SR4 experiences thus far. Anything more complex than going into a low security building to retrieve some data has taken upwards of four weeks to finish.

Godlike is hard to tell. We had five full combat encounters in six hours of play at GenCon. Having only played it once, I don't know if that's fast or slow. I think it was fast, as I know we blazed through a few encounters on sheer numbers. The game started with 10 players and ended with 6. One encounter was drastically shortened by some quick thinking by a few of us. I think we faced 3 or 4 rival talents that were supposed to be tough, but the sniper took out one with a rifle grenade to the head, and I blew up the human torch by saying "Hot Potato" and tossing him a satchel charge, which he caught instinctively, blowing us both up, but not so badly that I didn't regenerate. :) I digress.

So, let's say four weeks average per SR4 run. 1 week to research, 1 to get in and hit a cliffhanger, 1 to fight the big bad and run away, and 1 to hide out and drop the loot. Let's say 3 weeks on Godlike. Werewolf? Hell, I don't know, 3-6 depending on whether Nick runs a thick story or just full on bruiser sessions. Inomine is a wild card, but let's stick with the average and say 4. So, I run a Godlike session. It'll be 11-14 weeks before I run another one, barring weekends off for camping, tournaments, conventions, weddings, vacations, etc. Think any of us are gonna remember what the hell we were doing 3 months ago?

My bet is we rethink the whole think around Gen Con. Consider the 29th is our next session, and that one's character development. Add that to us probably playing twice in May, most of June, and probably twice in July. What you have is Gen Con coming on and we've played one mission of Godlike or Werewolf and maybe one round of Shadowrun.

But who knows, that might be great for my ADD.