Category: Other Systems

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Excellent Vancouver Andventure, II

[Read the other part first, chums!]

Oh, the situation was dire indeed: my character, Ham, was imprisoned in the oubliette for a murder he didn’t commit, and Scott’s character, Benel, couldn’t have cared less! And this had been the adventure where I hoped to demonstrate that not all my thief characters are evil! **sob!**

Fortunately, I was released from my prison by the Dolphin steward’s humongous cousin, who believed I was too stupid to have killed anyone and told me to flee to the lower city. I trudged around underground, making for the docks, and encountered no monsters thanks to a merciful GM.

Benel, meanwhile, looked for employment elsewhere. First he tried the House of Otter, but they were in mourning. Then he tried the House of Octopus, where he was able to convince them to hire him to write a dirge honoring the fallen Otter steward. They said yes, as long as it was also an acrostic. He came up with:

O T T E R
T O W R E
T W I G S
E R G O T
R E S T S

Um. Yeah. His versifying was, amazingly, better.

I reached the docks, had a bath, found an inn, and slept. Benel, working on his acrostic in a tavern, was informed of my escape and my innocence. Gullible as he was, he believed every word (of course, it happened to be true…). Did he set out to look for me? No, he bought himself a drink.

Later, he went looking for the dolphin steward, who wasn’t in. He left the steward a note saying “Ham is not the real killer! If you need me, I’ll be down by the docks, alone!” He went walking by the docks. He was found later, his throat slit.

Upon seeing his corpse, I ran to the steward’s cousin to offer my services finding the real killer. He informed me he didn’t need an imbecile helping him. He gave me some money, and I went back to the inn, where I awaited the arrival of spring…

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Excellent Vancouver Adventure

During his visit to Vancouver, Josh led Rachel and myself on a two-character adventure set in Harmody in the world of Neng. I played Benel the Elder, a 55-year-old bard/storyteller from Loiborra. Rachel played Ham, a thief whom I trustingly hired as my bodyguard. (Gullibility is one of my character’s flaws.) Ham was also a skilled poisoner — think Zekel the Zekarian. Upon entering Harmody, I presented myself to the Great House of Dolphin, where I arranged to perform a 4-night epic ballad to commemorate the mercantile alliance between the Houses of Dolphin, Otter, and Octopus. We received lodging in the visitor’s part of the palace.

One evening as Ham was wandering about, and while I was getting beat up by a jug band in a taverna, someone apparently came into our room and rifled through our stuff without taking anything. Ham took it onto himself to ask around, and to search the room of another house guest, whom he concluded must have been behind this. The guest, who turned out to be the steward’s cousin, discovered Ham in the act, to which Ham responded: “Somebody rifled through my bags, so now I’m here to rifle through yours.” The other guest concluded that Ham was mentally defective, and meant no harm. Ham then went to harass the steward of the House about how our room had been searched. The steward denied that this could have been possible, and he and Ham took a strong dislike to each other. Ham was in fact thrown into the oubliette for the night, but let out the next day. Ham then swore terrible revenge against the steward within hearing of a chambermaid. Foolish Ham.

The steward and I agreed that given what had happened, it would be best if Ham left the House to find other lodging. Ham reluctantly agreed, but secretly decided to sneak around the house and get revenge. To further this peculiar goal, Ham stole a maid’s outfit, dressed as a maid (despite being a man and having no skill in disguise), and was sneaking around the House. I uncovered Ham in my room, and insisted that he leave. He then promptly crawled out a window while still wearing the maid’s outfit.

That evening the performance went splendidly. I actually wrote out my verses. Let me record the first several lines of the poem that Benel actually performed for the assembled dignitaries in the House of Dolphin:

Back when the world was young
Many songs were once sung
Of Krokan of the House of Otter
Who had a lovely daughter
That betrothed once became
To the scion of the house of fame,
Dolphin, a mighty lord
Throughout Harmody adored.
The two houses together ventured
On ships with servants indentured
Across the realm of Harm
To lands where it was warm
Wine-eye Krokan and
Long-thighed Dezeldun
Sailed for many a moon
Trade they made with Goos
Of the House of Octopus
In mercantile ability
Achieved great civility.
The rate of exchange was great
Profitable was the freight
From ships laden with goods
Like rain upon Par-quds
That for long aeons fell
As Harm’s realm did swell.
Tax benefits did accrue
To the Three Houses Great and True
As Pendel-bar’s thunderous shield
Cleaved on watery field,
As Hazaltar slew the marg
So sailed to Harmody carg-
o, rich and true
On Harm’s plain of blue.

I kid you not.

That night, during dinner the visiting steward of the House of Otter was poisoned! The steward of the House of Dolphin immediately proclaimed Ham to be the prime suspect, since he had (1) been caught rifling through belongings in someone else’s room (2) had been thrown in the oubliette overnight (3) had quarrelled with the Dolphin steward, and had been heard threatening revenge, (4) had poison, cheese and extra socks in his bag, and (5) had been seen climbing out a castle window while wearing a maid’s outfit.

The guards searched the town for Ham and found him easily enough — he wasn’t trying to hide, and of course, I wasn’t about to warn him. Now, Ham had in fact done all of the things attributed to him, except for the actual crime of poisoning the Otter steward. In spite of being innocent, you must admit that the circumstantial case was damning. Benel immediately disavowed all knowledge and association with Ham, believing him to be utterly guilty.

(To be continued)

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Like Moths to a Flame

I have just added on to a summary already written by Brian:

The party ran into a rather large ice-golem that seemed to be immune to the pink light. Trust me — the first thing we did was have Merath zorch it, so she
stayed firmly in character (Wendy was absent this session). After that didn’t work, Merath cleverly cursed it so that its ice became rotted and brittle. Nathan found a giant bow in the chamber, but he wasn’t strong enough to draw it. Marath quickly blessed him to increase his strength. This allowed Nathan to shatter the golem with a couple of well-placed arrows, which was a good thing, because Jacob the Mighty (TM) was busy rolling 1’s. We learned an important lesson about ice golems, though — splitting an ice golem in two gets you two full-sized ice golems. So although there was some clever strategy and teamwork in evidence, we required the legendary cunning of Bastriel to get us out of this mess (Editor: This was in Brian’s original version).

After extricating ourselves from the Golem Menace, we wandered about the caverns, finding that they exhibited some odd physical properties. This was quickly dubbed the “Scooby-Doo Effect” as we found that when we left the central room via one passagway, we almost always returned to the central room via another passage.

Trail and error finally worked in our favor and we stumbled upon the a small “city” of humanoid moths (we had run into one such fellow a bit earlier in the evening). Bastriel straining the limits of his diplomatic skill instructed the Mothmen to “Take me to your leader,” and surprisingly enough they complied. Queen Mothra is her name, a blue-skinned beauty (much to Bastriel’s delight), and she informed the party, due in large part to Nathan’s gentle manuevering of the conversation, that all is not right in Moth-ville. Being heroes, the party looks like they are going to help, and there have been knowing glances exchanged about perhaps adding the mothmen to the Rose Kingdom’s faithful subjects.

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Deeper Into The Ice

The Rambling Bumblers (it is the Rambling Bumblers, isn’t it? Are we all agreed?) explored deeper into the Nefari-built ice caverns beneath the Red Keep. Coming to a huge fanged archway carved in the ice, Jacob the mighty sliced it apart with the Thorn Sword….and released an enormous Ice Worm. Unfortunately for the poor fauna of the ice cavern, Jacob’s skill at Giant Killing made short work of the beast. Unfortunately for the party, the carcass of the worm attracted the hungry attention of the cloud beast in the chasm, which poured up out of the chasm towards them. Eleazar quickly hurled some silver crescents and put up a ward to protect the party, and after some hemming and hawing, Merath of Yahar let loose with a full-power blast of the Rose Light to try and destroy the worm carcass, so that the cloud would lose interest. Merath forgot, apparently, that within the Rose Kingdom, the power of the light was nearly unlimited, and ended up vaporizing a 30-yard diameter sphere including the worm, the archway, a goodly chunk of the cliff, and the ice bridge that the party had come in on. Ooops. It did kill or drive off the cloud beast, though.
Buried in the ice they found a new PC, Nathan (played by Brian). Nathan had somehow came to be buried there after severely annoying a curse witch three years before, but he was fuzzy on the details. Seeing no other way out, he elected to follow them, although throughout the evening they gave him cause to wonder at the wisdom of that decision.
A bit of fancy work with the rope later, and the party was in the ice tunnel (twenty yards behind the original entrance); proceeding down the tunnel, lit by Merath. After a while, the tunnel came to be suffused with at first a blue, and then a blue-green glow. Eleazar came to be more and more aware of whispering in Nefari that apparently only he could hear. Spotting shadowy humanoid figures paralleling their line of march, Jacob slashed through the ice, revealing another tunnel, and the polished surface that was reflecting the party’s images. They moved over to the new tunnel, and a fair distance farther came to a big, deep cavern, reminiscent of the cavern of the Rose Light beneath the Rose Tower. In the center of the cavern was an icy platform, and there were 24 ice bridges from the platform to tunnels in the walls; below they could see another such platform, and another beneath that, which was as far as the golden light from the torch ensorcelled by Bastriel could carry. As soon as they stepped onto the bridge, the ambient blue-green glow went out, and Eleazar stopped hearing the whispering.
Merath refused to enter the cavern once she figured out that her precious pink light wouldn’t work there, so the others investigated the platform and discovered a Nefari spiral underneath the undisturbed snow. Unlike certain other PCs, they did not walk right across the hidden spiral, so no unexpected journeys to the Nefari lands for them. Yet.
They decided to explore the tunnels methodically, starting at the immediate left, and once they had gotten to it safely managed, with some difficulty, to persuade Merath to join them. Once in the corridor her light worked again, and she was much relieved.
Down the corridor they were attacked by a horde of tiger-sized Ice Weasels, who attempted to rip their flesh. They dispatched several, but there seemed to be no end to them, and eventually (once they rediscovered the fact that Merath’s pink light worked as a damage shield) they sent Merath out into the pack, and eventually the ravening weasels were reduced to so many cauterized gobbets of flesh. In order to prevent them from being used by spirits to make undead, Merath systematically vaporized the lot of them. In the weasel’s nest they discovered a fancy red stone box with gold trim, in which they found a Nefari magical charm (a ring linked to a bracelet) that they tucked away for future examination. There was a narrow tunnel leading out, but since they would have to slither through it, they elected to ignore it.
In the second corridor they found a barrier of differently colored ice, and when Jacob poked a hole in it, water poured out (presumably from the lake above); Merath used her hedge-wizardry to reseal the hole before the entire lake came in.
In the third corridor they discovered a temple with a Nefari altar of ice (shackles, blood-grooves and everything), which Eleazar ritually defiled–although the process of doing so knocked them all out. Upon recovering, they explored two of the three adjacent rooms, in one finding feathery vestments in iridescent blue and green, and in another many sharp knives and instruments of torture as well as a big black Book O’ Evil. Jacob attempted to set fire to the book, and burst into flames himself. Unable to put out the fire on his leafy form, he raced back to corridor two, cut another hole and doused himself. Merath followed, a little belatedly, and sealed up the hole before too much of the lake came in.
At that point, we broke for the evening.

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BESM Dungeon

I tried running a solo game for Russell, using the new Big Eyes, Small Mouth: Dungeon pregenerated adventure. I’d been wanting to try BESM, just to see how the system worked, and this seemed like a good opportunity. As it turns out, BESM isn’t bad–I think a bit better in terms of chargen than actual play (the combat system in particular has the feature that equally good opponents will actually score a hit on eachother at most 25% of the time–which makes for pretty long combats without a lot of decision points); it’s close enough to my homebrew that in the future I’ll probably either swipe some of it for the homebrew (I like the point cost system for buying unique powers), or if I run any BESM tweak it with house rules from my homebrew (e.g. making degree of success matter in combat would fix the problem I mentioned).
That being said, though, the editing in Dungeon was horrible: bad enough that it nearly negates the usefulness of having the adventure written out for you. For instance, it provides templates to make it quick to create a character–but the templates have enough errors and omissions in them that you really have to recalculate them from scratch before using them. Similarly, the random encounter charts helpfully indicate the page numbers for the creatures encountered, but those pages turn out to be templates for creating monsters, not fully-stated monsters. The idea, I suppose, is that you can adjust the difficulty to match the party; in practice it means that you have to spend time building the monsters in advance or try to do it on the fly during the game. I did the latter, and accidentally made the first encounter too tough and it wiped out Russell’s party (timely intervention by an NPC that they had rescued saved them, but still…) Even the monster encounters that are fully worked have problems: one room (that Russell never got to) said it contained a necromancer and twelve zombies. A sentence later it said “Both zombies have swords.” Looking at the description of the necromancer to try and settle whether it’s twelve or two zombies shows that he doesn’t have enough points allocated for twelve unless they are flunkies who can’t attack (but that’s not how their stats look–they have fighting skills and are built on double the points of a flunky), but it’s not enough points for two servants (who can attack) who are a powerful as the zombie description, either. Argh.
The final verdict: BESM, pretty cool rules-light system, but needing some tweaks to make it scale and speed combat. BESM Dungeon: waste of time and effort.

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The Body Count Rises

The Joe Dimaggio of Fallen Heroes kept his streak alive last night — just in the nick of time it seems. The mighty Monkasho (sp?), Scott’s character, was unceremoniously squashed, sprayed and flushed last night, bringing his campaign to character death ratio back to perfect alignment. Some said it could not be done, particularly since Scott had just leveled up (making his character the toughest in the party), but Scott, always the resourceful gamer, proved us all wrong. Now, just like all great champions, Scott is going out on top. 🙂

Rachel and Scott will be deeply missed.

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Las Confesiones de Sor Teresa

I’ve been charged with writing up last night’s session — the one where the GM was, quite literally, on the floor laughing — but it’s easier said than done. Mental mistakes were made, and it’s difficult for me (the person who made them) to quite reconstruct why. However, I’ll do my best.

We were looking for one last artifact: a pistol with a medallion embedded in it that belonged to one Colonel Beauregard. We’d been sent to a rather unfortunate moment in the past, however — the past self of one of our party, James Jadwin, had just knocked over a bank with his partners. Beauregard was hot on their trail. We could hear the hounds baying in the distance. We were going to have a hard time explaining our presence in that snowy field at midnight, so we took to our heels and ran.

Jadwin urged us not to hide the same place as his younger self, fearing that we might lead the posse there. I told him that if the posse caught us and thought he was himself (so to speak) we could say, “No, no, this isn’t James Jadwin. The *real* James Jadwin is hidden in the tanner’s shed!” Jadwin thought this was a bad idea.

We came to an apparently abandoned barn. But when Jackie “Fingers” McGuire opened the door, someone shot at us. Using a hitherto undemonstrated power, Fingers was able to let the bullet pass through his body without harming him.

“Stop shooting!” he shouted. “We don’t want to hurt you!”

But the fellow in the barn (one of Jadwin’s gang, presumably) shot at us again. So Jackie blew his face off. That boy always was hot-headed.

Of course, the posse heard the shots and came to investigate. Jackie tried to explain, but was stumbling through it, so I took over. I told the posse we’d been weathering the storm in the barn when this bandito came upon us and shot at us. In self defense we blew off his face. The deputy sheriff looked through his stack of wanted posters, and I identified the man we’d killed as “James Jadwin”. There was a $500 reward for Jadwin, and we were all set to collect it the next day.

It wasn’t Jadwin, of course, and *our* Jadwin, 24 years older than the one they were looking for, was just laying low and trying not to attract attention. He was trying to look as old as possible. I identified him as my nephew Alfonso, at one point, which caused a bit of confusion.

I asked the deputy sheriff a few questions about Beauregard and the army, and was starting to feel quite at ease. This is where I get a little hazy. I believe our Jadwin expressed relief at not having been caught. He didn’t say it in language the deputy sheriff would understand, however, but said something like “Boy, I’m not going to get any sleep tonight!”

Aaaaand… that’s when Sor Teresa had her astounding brain fart. Completely forgetting that the deputy sheriff was standing RIGHT THERE, she says loudly, “Yeah, JAMES JADWIN is going to need some clean pants!”

And that just about did in our GM. He laughed. He laughed until his face turned red and tears streamed down his face and he ended up sitting on the floor HOWLING. We were all laughing, even me (although I punctuated it with “Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!!)(Sor Teresa has Tourette’s, apparently).

Josh let us off easy. He shouldn’t have, but he was so out of breath he didn’t have the will to look up all the fiddly Deadlands combat procedures. The deputy sheriff was astute enough to realize that the dead man wasn’t Jadwin — his hair was the wrong color — but he didn’t realize Jadwin was in our party. We got $100 instead of $500, and Scott took back my MVP award (which he’d given me for convincing the guy that Jadwin was dead).

Now I will say, I had the power to spend a blue chip and become an avenging angel of death, and I would’ve done it if the posse had really gotten wise to us and tried to do us harm. It would’ve been completely my fault, so I owed it to the party to fix it. However, anyone who looked upon me would’ve had to make a sanity roll, I was that terrifying, and even if I had warned everybody to close their eyes, I don’t think anybody would’ve done it (unless *maybe* Doug — he has pretty strong self-preservation instincts).

So then the whole party would’ve been insane. But, as Josh might say: “This is different, *how*???”

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James Jadwin – 1840-1886. RIP.

OK, maybe I shouldn’t be have been surprised.

Last night my Deadlands character James Jadwin was struck dead by God. Frankly, I’m surprised that God had the balls to do it.

In our continuing quest to put back together the universe that we had so blithely destroyed, our party had acquired the last of three artifacts: an obsidian knife, a medallion-adorned pistol, and a jeweled crucifix. Orders from God, relayed through Sor Teresa, were that we were to place these around the canyon where our characters previously shattered time, and so contain the explosion.

So we have the artifacts, and we travel back in time to the canyon. Who should we see going into the canyon but ourselves, on our way to the Nevadan silver mine where it all started?

Suddenly it hits me … we could either put God’s plan into action, deploying the artifacts around the cavern, or else we could try something much easier—just warn ourselves not to shoot that damned Clock!

Thoughts race through my mind. Do we really want to put God’s plan into action, when God has bungled things so badly already? How do we know that this really is God’s plan? We only had Sor Teresa’s word to go by, and you can imagine what that’s worth! Why waste these cool occult artifacts on a containment field, when a simple holler would do just as well?

Then the metaphysical worries kick in … is it actually possible to alter the past? If I shout at the party of adventurers below, will they hear me, and heed my warning? Of course it must be possible to change the past—isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to do here? I figure that there’s actually little to lose—if it is possible to change the past, then I will be able to shout, and stop the tragedy of the exploding universe before it starts. If it’s not possib le, then I will somehow fail to give a warning.

So I shout “Hey! Don’t shoot the clock!” It was really the only option. Suddenly, before the words can come out of my mouth, I’m stricken dead. Technically speaking, it might have been a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. But no matter. We all know that really I was struck down by the hand of God.

I’ve been pondering why. At first I thought it was obvious—God killed me so my actions wouldn’t alter the past, and destroy the timeline, and wreak havoc upon the world a second time. (I refuse to comment as to whether this was what I was really hoping to accomplish in the first place.) But upon further reflection, that doesn’t make any sense—the whole purpose of our mission was to alter the past, and prevent the universe from being destroyed. So altering the past clearly couldn’t create some kind of catastrophic failure. So we were definitely supposed to alter the past.

The problem is, of course, that I came up with a simpler and better way to save the universe than God did. I made him look bad. So the bitch slapped me down. Hard. Vindictive bitch.

There was a happy ending of sorts … my dying prayer was to be saved by the beautiful goddess Althea. My prayer was granted, as I found myself in Her universe for my afterlife. James Jadwin has successfully emigrated from this universe to enter paradise, thereby making a lie of Sor Teresa’s predictions that he would go to hell.

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Clockstoppers Quotes

“Well, hell, I’ve got the clap!” – Cal
“The corn grows as high as the vampire bat flies…” – Scott
“I can make any of jou dead at any time.” – Sor. Theresa

“My suggestion is, if they come and catch us, we all strip.” – Sor. Theresa
“You will report to the stripping angel of death” – Doug

“All of our quotes involve sex or death” – Wendy
“That’s because that’s what you guys think is funny.” – Joshua

“We are all nephews under God” – Sor. Theresa

“It always comes back to the hot nun nooky.” – Paul

Wendy’s character Fingers is made to split the bounty money with the rest of the party, which makes Wendy start sputtering in outrage…
“God says you have to share–” – Sor. Theresa
“–and stop making noises like a parrot.” – God
“…and God says spend it now, because it will be worthless when we get back” – Sor. Theresa

“Perhaps I can offer my services to the entire army…then he won’t be suspicious” – Sor. Theresa
“That’s it! A special blessing for his special pistol!” – Fingers

“Nobody plays bagpipes that loudly unless they’re raping their aunt” – Rachel

“Oooh-kay, you’re standing knee-deep in sh-now” – Joshua
“That’s not where I thought he was going with that” – Rachel

“That’s God’s whore, thank you very much.” – Paul

“Jou can explain jour slave-holding ass to God when the time comes.” – Sor. Theresa

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More quotes

(Because I want to get this little piece of paper out of my life…)

They prefer to be known as “Americans of Necrosis”. — Scott

I am Cornholio Kobold! I need TP for my bunghole! — Fitch the manic kobold

I will sing an irresistible Kobold love song! — Fitch the androgynous kobold

What if it’s infinite because it’s fractal? — Josh, on Infinite City
Then we stab you! (*chuckle, chuckle!*) — Scott, on Josh

I have healed the building with cleansing fire! — Doug