Lacking Natural Simplicity

Random musings on books, code, and tabletop games.

Savage Worlds: Lost Property, Part 2

On Saturday we continued Triple Ace Games's Ace Tale, Lost Property.

Attending

Clockwise, starting with the GM:

  • T.K.B. — GM

  • E.A. — Aspen Thistledown & Sigisund Thorinsson

  • T.A. — Sir Deelan the Ignoble & Belinda Warmhearted

  • M.A. — Alfros Bladesinger

  • L.B. — Sir Leopold Drakehelm & Cassandra Lightfinger

Unfortunately, D.B. wasn't available.

L.B. had been dissatisfied with the character she had been playing, Belinda Warmhearted (a pacifist with a low Fighting skill), and switched her for Sir Leopold Drakehelm.

She and E.A. both wanted to try playing two characters.

Actual Play, Afternoon

As they rested, they heard noises approaching from the unblocked side of the tunnel, and prepared for battle, but it turned out to be the remains of another group the criminal syndicate had sent to find Jeck Lightfinger, Sigisund Thorinsson and Cassandra Lightfinger. They gladly joined forces against the ghouls of the tunnels.

After resting, Aspen Thistledown was able to track her way back to where they had left the tracks of the dragged body. Once there she had no difficulty tracking them to the ghoul's feasting room, where they found many bodies in the various stages of decay, including that of Jeck Lightfinger. Unfortunately, the item they sought was not on what little remained of the body. Search the room, they noticed that many of the corpses showed the signs of having died from the blood plague, which lead them to the thought that someone had broken into the burial tunnels where the plague bodies had been interred. They hurriedly left the ghoul tunnels and headed back to report.

▶ Here we broke for supper.

Actual Play, Evening

▶ After supper we picked up again.

The criminal syndicate gave them all medallions to protect them from the blood plague and sent them off to the plague burial tunnels. They found that the seal on the door to the tunnels had been broken, and someone had been coming and going. They spent some time exploring the tunnels, and eventually came to area where another had broken into the plague tunnels, coming from further in the mountain. They followed this tunnel until they heard chanting from ahead. Sneaking up, they found an ancient temple carved into the mountain, with rat men chanting and praying.

The kids knew that they needed a plan, or they'd get wiped out by the rat men, but it took them a little while to agree on one. They decided to sneak onto one of the balconies that ran along the sides of the temple, so that they could only be attacked through two places, the hallway leading to the balcony from the tunnel at the back of the temple and the stairs leading up to the balcony at the front of the temple. They positioned their ranged fighters to target the rat man shaman leading the chant, their melee fighters to hold the entrances, and started off their attack with Alfros Bladesinger casting fear on the area with the greatest number of rat men.

It was a good plan, and it worked out well for them. The fear spell drove away many of the rat men, back into their tunnels deeper into the depths. They managed to Shake the shaman, and keep him Shaken most of the time. The melee fighters kept the other rat men off the ranged fighters long enough for the ranged fighters to finish off the shaman and dispose of several of the other rat men, and they the finished off the rest as they came up the stairs and down the hallway.

They searched the shaman and found the item they were looking for, so they left to report.

Reflections

I really need to start a regular Savage Worlds campaign for the kids.

Savage Worlds: Lost Property

Late in the afternoon the kids wanted to play an RPG again, so I pulled out one of Triple Ace Games's Ace Tales, Lost Property. TAG's Ace Tales are their equivalent of PEG's One Sheet Adventures: a short adventure in PDF that fits on the front and back of one sheet, often with accompanying pre-generated characters. This particular one is a generic fantasy adventure that has the players working for a criminal syndicate trying to recover an item.

There weren't any pregens for this particular Ace Tale, so I got the ones from PEG's Wizards & Warriors Genre Supplement and the ones from Against the Orcs and let the players choose which they wanted. T.B. brought along a fantasy character he had created, a noble, and D.B. chose Sir Leopold Drakehelm, so we had two nobles working for a criminal syndicate, so I decided that they had to be disgraced nobles.

Attending

Clockwise, starting with the GM:

  • T.K.B. — GM

  • E.A. — Aspen Thistledown

  • T.A. — Sir Deelan the Ignoble [1]

  • M.A. — Alfros Bladesinger

  • D.B. — Sir Leopold Drakehelm (later played by T.A. after D.B. had to leave)

  • L.B. — Belinda Warmhearted

Actual Play

An unsanctioned thief, Jeck Lightfinger, had fled with his ill-gotten gains into The Widow's Hold, a local haunted house. The characters were charged with finding Jeck.

They entered the ill-omened house and soon found the entrance to the tunnels below. They were soon ambushed by ghouls (in this scenario a type of undead), but fought them off. When the last ghoul fled, Sir Leopald

Turkey Day Toon

L.B. decided she wanted to play Toon so much that she was willing to be the Animator and run the game for the kids; She came up the idea of a holiday-themed adventure and pre-generated characters, and I helped her with some of the game system details. She came up with a scenario: a premise, a list of locations, and obstacles at each.

Attending

Clockwise starting with the Animator:

  • L.B. — the Animator

  • E.A. — Rachel Rabbit

  • M.A. — Pete Pig

  • T.A. — Chris the Chicken

  • T.K.B. & D.B. — Pat the Pilgrim

Actual Play

E.A., M.A., and T.A. came over to play Thanksgiving morning to play before heading next door to the holiday meal at Grandma's.

Not long after we started D.B. arrived, looking for his cousins, and since we were playing, I bowed out and handed Pat the Pilgrim over to Dan.

The kids all seemed to be having fun, and L.B. said she enjoyed running the game, although she did say that playing was more fun.

oo2c on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

It looks like I got oo2c to build and work under Mac OS X Snow Leopard, with some stupid hacks, at least enough for my purposes. I don't claim that this is suitable for production work.

Here's the configure invocation I used:

CFLAGS='-no-cpp-precomp -fnested-functions -I/opt/local/include' \
LDFLAGS='-L/opt/local/lib' \
    ./configure --prefix=/sw/versions/m64/oo2c/2.1.11 --disable-libs

Here's the patch.

4e, Session #1: Goblins and Villagers

4e, Session #1: Goblins and Villagers

version:

2021-08-09 11:59:34

This is an actual play report from our 4e Dungeons and Dragons campaign. These actual play reports are available in html from T.K.B.'s blog.

Attending

Clockwise round the table, starting with the DM at 12 o'clock:

  • M.A.F. as DM

  • P.D.F. playing Kelvish, the arrogant Eladrin wizard, and acting as scribe.

  • T.K.B. playing Grimnir, the reckless dwarf fighter.

  • B.MC. playing Wrathgar, the dragonborn paladin.

  • C.A.H. playing Angore, the indispensable human [¿is that right?] cleric.

J.H. was unable to attend, alas.

Introduction

Since J.H. was unable to attend, and our regular campaign was at a point where all the characters needed to be there, we switched and played an alternate game, starting with the adventure from the 4e D&D Roleplaying Game Starter Set.

Actual Play

Encounter 1: killed 2 goblins: 2 black blades. 10 cp, 40 gp. Found map of village (Harken) with Cliff's Brewery circled.

Encounter 2: killed 2 fire beetles and several goblins, spent most of our time in a cloud, wedged the door shut, and fled.

Interlude: Got the villagers all set up in the rundown stockade, ready for the goblin assault. Bad guys left during the night.

Encounter 3: Loot the ancient evil tomb! Jar of healing potions, 5 doses. Long sword +1, evil. Studded, ceremonial high priest of demon.

Aftermath

In after game discussion we decided that, although most of the concerns we'd had about 4e were valid, we still had fun, and would look forward to continuing this as a campaign when our regular 3.5 D&D campaign couldn't run.

We each got +800 XP.

The Gray Goblin Warrens, Part 1

Attending

  • T.K.B., the Labyrinth Lord

  • M.A., playing Niall, a cleric

  • L.B., playing Caramel, a halfling

  • T.A., playing Angrim, and Elf

Overview

This was another short session, and since one of the regular players was missing (E.A.) I decided to run something other than B2.

Attempt #1

S, SE branch, to room S, attacked by Living Statues. Eventually fled, jumping and pulling Caramel up, and back to town.

Attempt #2

S, W to S, to G, when attacked retreated to passage, then ran through to SW branch, killed 2 goblins, then killed the 2 goblins from other side who came up behind. Loot: 14 cp, 9 cp, 12 cp, 4 maces, 2 crossbows, 4 scale armor.

Tomb of the Iron God, Session #1

We had a little bit of time to play, but not all our usual players were available, so we rolled up Swords & Wizardry characters, and started down into the Tomb of the Iron God.

Attending

  • T.K.B., the Dungeon Master

  • M.B., playing (with T.K.B.'s help) - Red Gorm, a human fighter

  • M.A., playing - Bub, a male human cleric, soon surnamed the Naked for skinny dipping - Cedric, a male human fighter

  • T.A., playing - Nameless, a male human magic-user - Wolfgar, a male human fighter

  • E.A., playing - Errin' (as in erring), a female human fighter with a 3 INT - Bob-Jo, a female human magic user

Bathing and Blood

E.A. had fun playing an immensely strong character with no sense at all, clearing the steps down to the first level with ease, but taking no care to avoid her comrades when flinging the boulders up out of the stairs.

They were suitably creeped by out the goblin head in the entrance room, but eventually moved on through the door to the left, and entered the first room. There M.A. decided he was going to bathe in the fountain, and stripped down to nothing and splashed about. The splashing and the resultant argument attracted the attention of a couple of striges resting in a large crack up near the ceiling, and before it was over Bub was jumping around in combat naked and and Nameless was down to 1 hit point.

After that Bub got back into his clothes and armor.

And that was all we had time for that afternoon. Everybody seemed to have fun.

Recent Reading: C. S. Harris

  • Where Serpents Sleep, by C. S. Harris, copyright 2008 by The Two Talers; Obsidian/New American Library/Penguin Group (USA) Inc./Penguin Books Ltd.; November 2008; ISBN 987-0-451-22512-2.

    A Sebastian St. Cyr mystery. The others are: What Angels Fear, When Gods Die, and Why Mermaids Sing. (I think I've missed that latter. Have to find it.)