Selling your imagination

As I am technically on holiday and not sure what demons  are being summoned at the club I took a quick browse of Kickstarter for the first time in earnest. Facebook is profiling me as a role player among many other things I am sure and drip feeds me curiosities to the extent that I have actually pressed a couple of extra buttons today and my word there is a lot of stuff going on.

A couple of noteable noteables are either in prototype or have now closed but Fogbound is one that caught my eye. Defaulting to Cthulu as my go to post imperial fix I have also enjoyed Space 1889 as a Victorian romp but Fogbound could turn out to be a winner particularly as its underpinned by 13th Age mechanics. Here is the facebook link to Gareth Clegg's  page, he is looking for artists a present if any of you can put more than pen to paper.

https://www.facebook.com/gareth.clegg.5/media_set?set=a.10153675222928494.1073741836.585278493&type=3

Hunters Books, publishers of Outbreak: Zombie Undead have diversified their portfolio and kickstarted Outbreak: Deep Space. A horror/Sci-Fi RPG, which I think there is a gap in the market for as aside from the Alien series, nothing else immediately springs to mind in the genre. Whilst  Outbreak:Undead did not get a great review on RPG.net they have said that their deadlines are a little more forgiving on this project and the ratings on drivethru are a lot better. 

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112204/Outbreak-Deep-Space

Finally, this guy is nuts. If anyone works out what he is on about then let me know...

https://ksr-video.imgix.net/projects/2449428/video-669475-h264_high.mp4

Summer recess

Though we are a most wise and lumiable council of role players, games architects and live action artisans, we do talk a lot of bollocks occasionally. Some of the more astute subscribers to this tome may have deduced this already but formal gibbering has now begun regarding the upcoming cycle of new games.  Out of respect to mad geniuses here is a link to a review of Heroquest that must be forceably shown to everyone interested in tabletop sports, even sabbuteo (Do they do subbuteo DnD miniatures ?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx8sl2uC46A

All hail BardicBroadcasts

Sir, you are a Legendary Artefact

GM Bill may have another session to round off his 13th age and there are a couple of us on holiday at the moment so stray role players may just have to cope with wacky board games for a week or two. Last week we thoroughly enjoyed a game of Skulls which is a sort of cross between poker and voodoo. Many of these modern fringy tabletop games are enormous fun and are ideal to pass the time in a bar between adventures.

Upcoming I believe we are gaining traction in bullying GM Rob to open a Numenara game; a kickstarted and uniquely imagined world of SciFi that will appeal to anyone intrigued by unconventional narratives. I hope the gameplay is as stunning as the artwork.

Equially GM Jon has offered a Savage Worlds filler, which if it is anything like his previous games will be great fun. GM Kryzs has put forward a Changing breeds and GM Bill has a bag of Indie options also including a 13 Age. I also poked GM Jack who I think could be blackmailed at a push to run something. So all told lots of options depending on who turns up but just like selecting a new pope, there is a lot of smoke and dagger at first, out of which will arise a new order of gods and demons.

So come along and join a cult of your choosing!

Last chapter

The MERP has now ended in a style of its own. Whilst I had thought the session would be a 30 minuteish round off, most of the hard work having been done, the party still managed to faff it out for the full two hours. Unbelievable. They had just entered the Ancient Kingdom of Angmar where the Witch King presided over affairs during his reign. As corruption devoured him, he had constructed a Nexus between the planes of the living and  the dead for his work as a necromancer, where the party simply had to turn left and burn the book. However our Tom Cruise Mage, interested on who the book liked the most, decided to simply throw it off the side of a mountain to see where it would teleport back to. Unfortunately, it decided not to teleport anywhere.

 

Off we go then. Two more Golems were on their tail made their presence felt, although to be clever about it I made them flying bone Golems rather than clunky stone Golems to stop this incessant use of stone to mud. Sadly for me however our mage had sneaked a peek at the book earlier and had picked up some nice evil Flesh Destruction spells on which lists he managed to find Break Bone, literally disarming one of them. Very clever I suppose. However the fight started to turn into a bit of a sit com as the Golems were after the book and not the players so they tried to fly off down the cliff. Panicking, both the mage and animist managed to climb aboard a golem each and a sort of unearthly merry go round/ frogger game ensued as the Golems went flying back and forth with magic users on their backs. Cut a long and bizarre story short, they did eventually dispatch their mounts and get to where they were supposed to.

 

 

Sadly they had faffed me out of time so a few surprises didn't happen but I did get the chance to offer them unlimited immortal power and a kingdom of their own, rather then burn any books, but sadly, they did stick to their quest and the peoples of Middle Earth can once again get on with their 4th Age.

 

A mightly enjoyable adventure I would say more so because of some considerable off roading plotwise but as its a club game I had to draw down the curtain eventually. If it was a home game then I suspect that they would be riding those Golems off into the distance. In fact I suspect they would never have left Minas Tirith in the first place, being duly sidetracked by a particularly interesting piece of cheese. Anyway, here for whoever may find it is a glorious freeze to mark our adventures in Middle Earth etched by our very own Fade.
 

 

GM Bill is also putting his Bronze Age Mythological 13th Age game on timely pause so more news on the new GMs later, but if you have been out of the club habit for a while then now is the perfect time to put it back on again so come along and have a drink with your favourite geeks!



 

Necromancer Slippers

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The game is afoot in the MERP as the players finally  encroach on the lair of the Witch King. As mighty and feared as the Nazgul were, as a GM one has to address a significant amount of detail in order to maintain a certain level of ambience and context. It consequently means that I have had to give some thought as to the layout and décor of the habitat of said undead. Now I get the impression from the Lord of the Ring books that the Nazgul were trapped in the very throes of death yet sustained in unlife, tortured, with no choice but to scream in torment to enact the will of their Dark Lord. But in all of this melodrama would they not have had some respite in the little things? A comfortable throne to sit on or perhaps a nice pair of slippers for the evening. The point is that I have had to determine the living arrangements of a long dead and forgotten King. But of course the clue is in the question as not actually being alive does mean that living arrangements are sort of missing the point somewhat.

 

So Nazgul habitats exhibit the presence one would expect from former Mage Commanders of  great evil armies and also the regal but wasting décor of long lost palaces; their bodies having long since corrupted away reflects in their now abandoned fortresses and the lands over which they governed.

 

 

The party have thus entered the ruins of Minas Ithil and whilst the stone tower and battlements have remained standing, the interiors have all collapsed. Our party worked their way up an immensely long winding stair to the summit of the main watchtower. From here stood four doors; two leading West and South outside to a viewing balustrade, one magical but closed to the East and one open to a glowing corridor to the North extending beyond the physical limits of the tower itself. Our mage did attempt to open the door to the East as he had accidently been reading evil books earlier in the day that he shouldn't have and picked up a very powerful 'undoor' command. But like anyone wielding great power that is suddenly thrust upon them quite late in the evening, mistook undoor for unlock and vaporized the aforementioned gateway and its lintel, the tower roof groaning structurally in reply.

 

 

Still, building regs notwithstanding they party have skipped down a magical rabbit hole and are now somewhere else entirely....