boreders

An adventure ’snippet’ for Maelstrom RPG.

Synopsis: Beggars find something of value, but need to get back to civilisation to make anything from it.

Adventure Outline: The characters go scavenging in the fields around the city, wandering the paths and lanes in search of anything valuable. In tough times, you have to be prepared to do what you can to make a few pennies. They have a small scuffle with a couple of ruffians in the morning, out to cause trouble; but by lunchtime nothing of value has come to light.

Following a short rest, they decide to head back to see what scraps they might pick up around the markets, and stumble across a corpse in a ditch at the side of the road. As luck would have it, this scene – though gruesome – is not a murdered soul, but the carcass of a dead pig.

On closer inspection, it looks like it may have died from a hunt related injury, a slow bleed. The carcass may have been there for a day or three, but the flies swarming around aren’t too bad. Back in the city, you could get a shilling or more for meat like this from a pie-maker.

Trouble with stuff like this, the authorities don’t approve of people bringing uncontrolled foodstuffs into the city. Disease runs rampant, so controls offer some measure of protection. They wouldn’t know a nice bit of seasoned meat if you slapped them around the head with it.

Complications: Guards on the city gates will not allow anyone to openly walk through with a carcass. Secondary gates or waterways may provide an alternative, but they provide their own hazards. Beggars tend to gravitate towards suspicious activities, so the characters may face nosey competition trying to claim the carcass for their own.

Adventure Preparation: The adventure provides a little entertainment for a band of beggars, so you may want to run as a one off – or perhaps engineer a situation where non-beggars fall on really hard times and need the money badly enough to consider smuggling condemned meat!

We played a game of Power Grid yesterday for the first time. Bought the copy at a gaming event over the summer when we were looking for recommendations on a good new game. Unfortunately, gaming evenings have been few since then, so yesterday was our first chance to give it a go.

Basically, you buy power plants, acquire the rights to power cities, and then make money from supplying power with resources you purchase from the open Market. Well, something like that.

You get the power plants from an auction, so there’s increasing competition in that area to acquire the most fuel effecient options – one player got an all wind power power plant, which powers for no resources at all. The auction gets complex when you’re trying to plan ahead for city growth, while balancing against the cost of buying resources and building into cities to begin with. Do you drive to outbid someone for a more fuel efficient station or go for something dirty and resource hungry to save for greater expansion? Once you have a plant you can’t bid again and there’s nothing more frustrating than finding a more fuel efficient plant than you just bought comes up for auction next!

Once everyone finishes acquiring a plant, you then acquire resources in reverse player order (based on the number of cities you’ve built into). Rules of supply and demand dictate the value of resources – so being first matters. You can buy as much as you want, providing your plants can use the resource and you can’t store more than double the plants consumption. So, more planning – buy now or maybe pay extra later.

Building into cities comes next – in reverse order, too. I’m reasonably certain you can pick a good spot from the outset. Maybe I chose wisely or simply lucked out. Suffice to say, if you’ve planned well in the previous two phases of the round, you’ll either have the resource to build or you won’t!

In the end you get paid for each city you supply with power, expending the resources at your plants. You can choose to power less, but you make less money, which will impact your activities in the next round.

There’s more complexity to the game, but suffice to say, as a first timer, I enjoyed it and the other players did too. Recommended. A good balance of thought, skillful planning and a dash of luck.

Well, I’ve spent today at Game 09 in the middle of Manchester at the Palace Hotel. Nice enough venue, though a little thin on traders for my tastes. While the kids chose to play Magic or Warhammer 40k, I decided to do something a bit different, opting for Decipher’s Fight Klub.

Basically, take some movie heroes and villains then launch them into a pitched battle that stretches reality a bit. Imagine the Terminator fighting Hannibal Lector, for example. You might be able to explain the conflict as one of brute force against guile and intellect, but you don’t doubt in truth Arnie would reduce Hannibal to paste. You can fight with Tank Girl, Jigsaw, Ash and others, choose moves, advantages and gear from your hand, fuelled by limited energy tokens. There is undoubtedly more skill here in deck construction and play than most, but I had to borrow a deck lacking one of my own.

The problem with the game is that Fight Klub cards come in kilo packs… basically 120 cards, rules and energy counters. That will set you back $35 (inc. postage) and is the smallest retail set you can buy. No boosters here. So, playing is fine, but you need to commit to get your own play cards and will want some for an opponent. That’s an investment. Yes, you can get a reasonable play deck together for one sum, and that’s a good thing. Great decks don’t necessarily involve spending tons of cash on cards. However, the event I played in had 13 players and about half of those were existing players – and while I might be wrong, it was those who had played before (including one of the organisers) who won the prizes. I don’t think that’s an ideal way to recruit new players into a game with such a start-up hurdle.

I’m being critical here, because I think the game has potential; but learning and buying curves make it a tough sell and a tough recruitment prospect.

Update: I have taken the plunge and expect a couple of Kilo packs to the hit the doormat within a week or so. As I said, I see Fight Klub as having great potential and I want to prove it to myself and my friends. If I can make Fight Klub successful in my home, I can contribute toward the greater cause.

In addition, I have started a Fight Klub-specific blog on Tumblr called Don’t Talk. I fully intend to outline the trials and tribulations of my Fight Klub buying and playing experiences – so the public can get a sense of how it works. Decipher have taken a big risk here with a new model – and it needs a little confidence and a dose of patience to get involved.

I’m trying to do something restful, something that will take my mind off the headache. So, seeing as I want to try some D&D soon, I thought I’d paint some miniatures.

Out come the paints, the geeky paint station, the brushes and files, and epoxy glue. It takes time and I’m little more than an enthusiastic amateur, so the end result is never going to win any competitions.

Indeed, I envy those who have spent the time honing they’re craft and can recreate the Mona Lisa on a 1cm diameter shield without breaking a sweat. When White Dwarf published the annual Golden Demon award supplement with miniature masterworks by the score, I gaze in wonder.

Anyway, I’ll just do the best I can and glean a moment of calm from the experience. That’ll do just fine for me.

Oooo… Oooo… Ooooooo… Looks like the second part of the Warhammer 40K RPG trilogy is on the near horizon, in the form of the ‘Rogue Trader’ game – see here. Page is coming soon, apparently.

When the Black Library originally launched Dark Heresy, it was backed by the promise of two further games centred on Rogue Traders and the Space Marines. I’m thankful that the mission to pursue publication of these additional volumes has not been lost in the transition to Fantasy Flight Games. They’re doing a sterling job and I greatly appreciate it.

Of course, I have other problems stemming from this game. I’m actually half-considering collecting and painting up my own Warhammer 40K army… something I haven’t considered in a long while. I used to play Warhammer and 40K in my youth, but those models have been gathering dust for the better part of 20 years. Now, I find myself driven by the urge to dig out all those Marines and paint myself up a fine party of Grey Knights. My sons have Necrons and Tau, so I’m guessing I’ll need to shape and focus Grey Knights accordingly, as they’re more used to Daemons than Xenos.

What next? Any chance someone could summon up the resource to create a full length Warhammer 40K movie? I’m sure Vin Diesel would be up for it…

In 1446, Wales perched on the precipice, faced with the prospect of a new rebellion by restless natives. Complacent English nobles, entrusted with expansive domains, stretch themselves all too thin, leaving stewards to run much of their lands and properties. In many instances, these stewards come from the local population, swayed by misplaced loyalties and the corrupting influence of power.

In the midst of this, a simple merchant requests the assistance of travellers in Swansea to drive, and provide escort, to a cartload of goods, bound for Pembroke. It seems a simple enough task, providing payment and transport for a couple of days on the road. However, how often do games present simple tasks that stay simple. Mixing legendary stones, agents of the Crown, bandits and stray sheep, ‘The Sward and The Stone’ is a new adventure for the classic ‘Maelstrom‘ role playing system.

You can download The Sward and the Stone now from Drive Thru Stuff and RPGNow. A 27-page adventure plus two maps, the booklet provides background, NPCs and a gazateer of the character’s route through the craggy, troubled landscape of south Wales in the mid-15th Century.

E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson made a difference to my childhood and adult life alike. Without the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and the surge of games that spawned around the role playing phenomena in the ensuing decades, I would never have led the double life I have. Yes, I would have still read fantasy books, but I might not have read them with such interest and enthusiasm.

Having read ‘Lord of the Rings’ (or part of it) in my pre-teens, I received a copy of the Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) game as a birthday gift. I had been playing occasional games of D&D in the practice rooms behind the main music room in my school for months and wanted to run my own game. One friend, Graham, ran D&D – where I had a fighter called Ironheart, while another friend, Jon, ran Call of Cthulhu and Star Trek – which generated Matt Houston, the grizzled private investigator, and Captain James Andrew Garth, commanding officer of the USS Lexington, respectively. When I finally ran MERP, I did so with the over-enthusiasm of an amateur gamemaster with a dodgy understanding of the setting, throwing the characters into a conflict with a group of Black Numenoreans just outside Bree. However, with time I found my footing and a firmer grip on the setting, resulting in adventures that spanned weeks, then months. At one point, we gamed for an entire summer almost non-stop, spending endless hours in the sweltering heat of a caravan in Graham’s parents’ driveway.

Those were exciting times, filled with constructs of imagination and youthful excitment, peppered with references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the adventures of Guybursh Threepwood that ground sessions to a halt in storms of laughter. In time, the real world crept in and sessions became ever more infrequent until they stopped altogether… but, my interest lingered on.

I played extensively at university, finding a splinter faction of the Role Playing Society that didn’t find character generation such an exciting nine week experience. I then dragged around my role playing collection from house to house, moving for convenience to get into work, wherever that might be. Occasional culls led to the destruction of the occasional magazine or the loss of a book to amnesiac borrowers, but otherwise my collection stayed intact and grew.

A few years back I stumbled on the rebirth of the PARANOIA role playing game and the open playtest that surrounded its creation. Allen Varney gathered a team of willing co-writers around him who have helped to generate a whole new line of books. Not only did I finally get my name into print inside the covers of a role playing manual, but I managed to beat out a supplement of my own – ‘The Underplex‘ – and fulfil some small dream. Now, I play a little with my own children, engaging their brains and voices in a way that Nintendo never will – throwing them in the face of challenges and danger without threat of harm, and seeing what they can make of it.

E. Gary Gygax (1938 – 2008) changed my life. In one way or another, without him (and Ironheart the fighter) I would be who I am today. I’d certainly have a lot more free shelf space… Gary – you willed me missed. Like that final climbing skill roll that killed my favourite Gnome rogue Golchak Grimface.

In an action that seems to beggar belief, Games Workshop has decided to stop game related publications by the Black Library – meaning an end to Talisman and Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Dark Heresy, amongst others. In an announcement dated 28th January, the fate of these lines was sealed – with a decision to concentrate solely on novels instead. Just three days earlier, ‘Dark Heresy’ saw release through the likes of Amazon, and sold out immediately. So, you can understand the fundamental logic behind the decision.

Talisman only just came out last year after a lengthy absence where the eBay market flourished. You could sell a complete set of Talisman, supplements and all, for £700+, with the basic game 1st edition game going for £30+, with the 2nd or 3rd edition going for more. To have waited this long to have it pulled again…

It feels like a short term decision, taken based solely on current trends and profits. I have more thoughts on this that I’d like to back up with some evidence from a similar decision made a while back – that invariably proved short-sighted as well – but I don’t have it to hand. I’ll update when I have it with me…