Special Delivery

We wrapped up our second Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure last night; second and perhaps last, as while it's close to being the perfect version of Dungeons & Dragons for me, I know that not everyone in the group is anywhere near as keen.

Anyway, I've scanned and cleaned up my scenario notes from the game, and they can be downloaded as a sort-of-a-One-Page-Dungeon here. For those interested in the tension between preparation and play, it took about a couple of hours to put together and gave us two four-hour sessions of play, although there was a fair bit of faffing about in the first session. I've dropped most of the LotFP-specific statistics, so it should be easy enough to import to your game system of choice.

Thanks to the Queen -- not of the Demonweb Pits -- giving everyone a couple of extra days off work, we should be meeting again tomorrow, this time to either play a bit of RuneQuest -- I haven't played since a total party kill about fifteen years ago -- or perhaps the D&D5 playtest, if I can get my head around the adventure in time.

The Hills Are Alive

It's been a bit of a funny time of late for our gaming group, as one regular member has had to relocate to the other end of the country, and another spent a few weeks touring South America, so we've not been able to put together a regular roleplaying campaign. That might be a bit of a blessing in disguise though, as it's allowed us to try out some other games we might have overlooked if we were in full campaign mode.

We've played a few games of the new Wizards of the Coast board game Lords of Waterdeep. I was a bit hesitant at first as I'd played a couple of the recent Dungeons & Dragons board games and while they're fun enough -- sort of light versions of D&D4, concentrating on the good bits of that game and cutting out all the dodgy stuff -- they're not that engaging. I also find it difficult to work up any enthusiasm for a product associated with the Forgotten Realms, surely the most dull of the classic -- I use the term with reluctance -- D&D settings.

It turns out that while Lords of Waterdeep is published under the D&D brand, it's quite a different kettle of ixitxachitls in terms of gameplay. I'm not a big enough enthusiast of board games to be able to identify its lineage, but it reminds me of a fantasy-themed Monopoly coupled with the mission structure of the old -- and brilliant -- Shadowrun collectable card game. The combination is quite a lot of fun and I would be more than happy to play it again, even with the bland Realms trappings. At least Elminster or Drizzle haven't turned up in our games yet.

We also played a bit of Kingdom Builder, a game which is fast and fun to play, but the English translation of the original German rules is so poor that we found ourselves better off using the French translation. It strikes me as a bit limited in scope, but it's a good way to while away an hour or so with friends.

The past couple of Fridays have seen us return to roleplaying with a couple of games of James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess, with me as the GM. I've never been a big D&D enthusiast, and I did not react well to our abortive D&D4 campaign. I'm happier with Pathfinder, but I did not enjoy running it; my preferred level of complexity is somewhere around the BECMI level, and LotFP sits right about there, making a few tweaks to some of the wonky mechanics that have always put me off running the otherwise similarly simple Labyrinth lord.

I ran the included adventure last week and we enjoyed it enough to play again last night. I have developed a bit of a -- mostly unfair -- reputation in our group for a certain type of adventure, and without revealing too much for those who haven't played "A Stranger Storm", I rolled my eyes when I read through and got to the climax of the scenario. Of course, my players all thought I'd written the thing myself when they got to the end, and I'm still not sure they believed me when I told them I was running it as written.

Last night's adventure was written by my own hand, although "written" is perhaps too strong a word. I had an adventure hook in my mind and a couple of hand-drawn maps, and that's it; I've not often gone into a game with so little prepared in advance, but I found it worked well, and the light nature of the LotFP rules made that easier. I was again accused of being up to my old tricks as the player-characters butted heads with what they assume to be inbred hill-dwelling cannibals, and I can't really put up much of a defence in this case.

Again, everyone seemed to enjoy the game, although the slow character advancement was a shock to a group more used to Pathfinder; that said, most of their earned experience has been from killing monsters so far, as they've shown an extraordinary aptitude for overlooking loot. We finished the evening with the party deep inside an abandoned silver mine, surrounded by the corpses of hill people and with an ominous moaning coming from further on down the tunnel; I don't know if this cliffhanger will be resolved, as we may well be playing Stuart's conversion of The Shamutanti Hills next week, and I'm looking forward to treading those old paths once again.

The Fellowship of the Railroad

As previously reported, we wrapped up our Call of Cthulhu campaign a couple of weeks ago, and with our Pathfinder campaign(s) still on hiatus, there's been a bit of a gap in our gaming schedules.

Stuart stepped into the breach first with a Barbarians of Lemuria one shot and his thoughts on the game prompted some of my own. As he says in his post, the scenario was a bit linear to say the least, but the restrictive plot didn't grate quite as much as that of Tatters of the King. I'm sure part of this is because I was playing the former and running the latter, but I also think it may have something to do with genre expectations. We were playing a game of pulp fantasy, so when we were looking for a lost temple and Stuart told us we were on an island with a volcano at its centre, of course the temple had to be there, but it didn't matter because that's how the genre works.

It was a fascinating contrast with the heavy-handed approach of Tatters of the King, and it's made me wonder if all those old Chaosium scenarios that led player-characters on a path from "letter from distant relative" to "going insane at the sight of some blobby thing" weren't as unimaginative as I once thought, since they were only playing up to genre expectations.

Following that, we decided to have a go at The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild, the latest Middle Earth roleplaying game. Through a convoluted series of negotiations, I ended up running it despite not owning a copy of the game, and having no time at all to prepare I decided to run the included starting scenario. It went well enough and I think we got to grips with the game's mechanics, although the players managed to avoid combat on at least three occasions.

We liked the game enough to play again this past Friday, and this time I had to write my own adventure; I did manage to find a free scenario Cubicle7 had put put to promote the release of the game, but it's set at the opposite end of the game's campaign area, which is none too helpful. All was not lost though, as I discovered that underneath all the modern mechanics and elegant integrated game design is a game based around old-school hex-crawling, so I put into action some of the tips and tricks that I've picked up from a couple of years of reading a bunch of old-school D&D blogs and that I've never been able to put into action since I don't run old-school D&D games. I wouldn't say it was a proper open sandbox, but it was still quite a change from the more rigid plotting of our roleplaying games over the past few weeks, and it does look as if the system will support such an approach with ease.

I had a better grasp of the game's -- many, but simple -- subsystems the second time around, and we even managed to engage a little with the game's interesting combat system. Overall, I like The One Ring a lot, as it seems to blend elements from some of my favourite games; there are recognisable bits of Pendragon, Shadowrun, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and even Rogue Trader and 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars in the mix, but it all fits together quite well. Perhaps my only criticism of it is that there's not much actual stuff in the game, and when you run out of interesting orc or spider encounters, there's no real guidance on how to make the setting your own. That said, the rules are so light and abstract that it's not too difficult to extrapolate from what's there.

Our own fellowship looks to be breaking up in a few weeks, but I think we may be adventuring in Middle Earth until then.

After the King

Last week we finished Tatters of the King, sort of. As published, the campaign is split into two halves with a clear break in the middle, but I'm not fond of the second half so I decided to concentrate on the first part and run it in isolation. It was not without its problems -- as written, it is linear and inflexible, although the second half is even worse in this regard, one reason why I decided to drop it -- and it ran much longer than the six or so sessions I imagined, but I think everyone enjoyed it in the end.

In my last post, I pondered the ending of the scenario and how I was going to tackle it, given that the players had gone off-piste. What was supposed to happen was that the player-characters would pick up the trail of the cultists after Carcosa had manifested on the shores of Loch Mullardoch and would have to enter the alien city to deal with the cultists before they summoned Hastur.

What in fact happened was that the players captured a character the campaign assumed they'd kill, interrogated him and found out about the cult's activities- long before they should have done; this led them to Loch Mullardoch days in advance of Carcosa's appearance, robbing the campaign of the evocative climax of a manhunt in a weird, otherworldly locale, and forcing me to come up with an alternative. To say that I felt some pressure would have been an understatement.

I decided that it would be dishonest to fudge things so that events occurred as written, and instead I took a good long look at the remaining non-player-characters, their knowledge and their goals, and tried to generate an ending from there. I had already established that the cultists knew of the player-characters' movements against them, and would be prepared to a certain extent, so I had them fortify themselves in their headquarters and also lay on some extra security in the form of some summoned monsters; the scenario as written suggests that most of the cultists are normal folk with only a couple of combat-capable individuals amongst them, so it seemed logical that they might appeal for some more supernatural assistance. I hoped that this haphazard improvisation would be enough to entertain my players.

Aside from a brief detour into wilderness adventure that saw them get lost in the Highlands and begin to suffer the effects of exposure, the player-characters were quite clinical about their assault on the cultists; at times it almost felt like a game of Shadowrun, such was the intricacy of the planning. In the end, things went well for the investigators; their plans involving dynamite went somewhat awry —- and this was bad GMing on my part, as I should have informed them of the difficulties of unskilled but successful explosive use, which may have led them to reconsider their plans -— but they managed to capture or kill the more dangerous cultists and fight off the summoned creatures, all with no investigator casualties. Call of Cthulhu has a reputation for deadliness, but if the players are careful — and if there are no Great Old Ones or Elder Gods stomping about — chances of survival are not inconsequential. That said, a couple of characters picked up some nasty injuries, but once again my random permanent wounds table -- stolen from Elric!, I think -- went unused, much to my dismay.

I was concerned that this more mundane finale would be a bit of a disappointment after months of play, but the players seemed to enjoy it, although Stuart did suggest it was more Miller's Crossing than Call of Cthulhu; that said, I'm not sure it was intended as a criticism, and the whole thing reminded me a little of Inspector Legrasse's cult raid in The Call of Cthulhu itself, so it was not too much of a deviation from the genre.

I don't know if I'll run the second half of Tatters of the King, and if I do I won't do it without substantial changes or even a total rewrite, but I enjoyed the experience of running the first half of the campaign and I learned a lot -- even after all these years as a player and GM -- about the craft and challenge of running a game. Above all, we all had fun with it, despite its flaws, and that's what counts in the end.

Now, who's up for Masks of Nyarlathotep?

Lawrence Bacon Must Die!

This post contains spoilers for Tatters of the King. My players shouldn't read on, nor should you if you intend to play this campaign.

You've been warned!

Right, so I think my players have broken the campaign. To be fair, it's not the most well-designed thing in the world, and regular readers will know that I've been struggling with it since we started. Tatters of the King is not the most egregious railroad I've ever seen in an rpg product, but it's far from flexible in its plotting. The writing assumes that things will happen in a certain order and at certain times, and leaves little room for player agency; it does not seem to have occurred to the writer that most players will not be content to sit on their hands and wait for the next clue to drop into their laps.

On the plus side, the non-player characters are written in exhaustive detail, so the Keeper has more than enough information on their personalities, goals and methods to play them in an organic way and respond to the players' actions. In that sense at least, Tatters of the King is quite a well-written scenario. I made a decision early on to ignore the heavy-handed plotting and run the campaign in a more sandbox style, and the strength of the NPC detail has made that quite easy.

Until the players met Lawrence Bacon, that is.

Bacon's one of the key antagonists, a member of the inner circle of the cult that the players are trying to defeat. What is supposed to happen is that the players fight and kill him, and then, as a result of his death being reported in the press, receive a clue about the cult's whereabouts. The delay between the fight and the news of Bacon's death being published gives the cult enough time to get on with their ritual to bring the city of Carcosa to Earth, leading to an exciting finale as the players rush to get to the cult before the ritual can be completed. It's quite a well-written climax, with lots of interesting choices for the players, and the appearance of Carcosa is quite evocative; I was looking forward to running it.

In my Tatters of the King, Lawrence Bacon is far from dead, and not in your general Call of Cthulhu immortal wizard way, either. Instead of the expected fight, the players surprised him -- through use of a spell the campaign gives them, so how this didn't come up in playtesting I don't know -- and subdued him before he could get a single spell off in his defence. Then they made use of their connections to have him committed to an asylum under maximum security, and began to interrogate him about the cult's plans. He is their enemy, so despite their cleverness he hasn't told them everything, but even so they now know where the cult is and what they're planning to do, and they know it much earlier than they should. As a result, they're now in a position to stop the cult and save the world, which is good, but -- and this is the tricky bit -- they'll be able to do it before any of the interesting stuff happens.

I could have stopped all this. I could have had Bacon resist their attempts to subdue him, but it would have involved fudging rolls and undermining their very sensible plans. I could have had him resist their attempts at interrogation, but again their approach was a good one and I couldn't have blocked it without being unfair. I could have the ritual happen early, despite their cleverness, but then we're getting into Quantum Ogre territory. Besides, it was fun to play through, and that's the point of the hobby at the end of the day.

It is just not in my nature as a GM to fudge things to such an extent, but I'm left with the problem of delivering a finale to the campaign. There's nothing in the book about what to do if the players are clever and efficient and turn up early to the party, but that's fine as I can make it up for myself; the bigger problem is that sneaking up to the cultists and bashing them over the back of the head before they've had a chance to summon a single byakhee doesn't seem like much pay-off for months of play.

Perhaps I am worrying too much. One of the more interesting aspects of the cult is that a key member -- Alexander Roby, the asylum inmate who involved the players in the first place -- isn't a villain in a traditional sense; he does want to bring Carcosa to Earth, but only so that he can live there, and it's his colleagues who want to use the city to then summon a Great Old One. As written, the climax involves the players having to figure out how to remove Roby from a place he considers to be more or less heaven; the most efficient way is to kill him, but can the players get past the rest of the cult to do so? Even if they do, can they make that choice?

It's a good, meaningful ending, and it more or less remains intact in my version of the campaign, except that it won't be taking place against the backdrop of Carcosa. So my gut reaction is to let it all play out as it will, but I worry that it won't be enough of a dramatic ending for my players after all the work they've put in. Am I concerned over nothing?

Christmas in Carcosa

I was aware of the controversy surrounding Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa as every gaming blog and site seemed to have an opinion of it at the time, but as I've never been much of a D&D player I never read the book itself. I did get involved in a small way when Geoffrey put together a sample adventure for publication in Fight On! and I -- alongside the gloriously-named FuFu Frauenwahl -- provided some art for it.


Geoffrey later published the scenario as a self-contained booklet and the image above ended up on the cover, so I've always felt part of the extended Carcosa family, even if I never read the original book.

Now James Raggi -- publisher of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess role-playing game, Vornheim and Death Frost Doom -- has published a new version of Carcosa, and of course the controversy has shambled back into view, stinking of the grave and bawling "BRAAAINS! through the rotten hole where its mouth used to be. Geoffrey and James are being applauded in some parts of the internet while being characterised as corrupt monsters in others, and so the cycle continues.

Almost none of my work made it into the new book, but that happens with new editions, so I'm fine with it. It helps that Rich Longmore was chosen to provide the art, and I adore his scratchy, detailed style -- I'd love to have a print of his shoggoth illustration -- although I do prefer my version of the Bone Sorcerer. Sorry Rich.

All that said, one of my pieces did make it in, sort of. I drew a picture of an idol of Cthulhu, not one of my favourites, but James decided to keep it as an Easter egg of sorts as an icon on the scenario's map. It's only about five millimetres square and you'd never notice it if it wasn't pointed out, but even so it's apparently enough for James to send me a contributor copy of the book. It's a three-hundred page hardback book, a beautiful thing to behold, and I got it for more or less nothing.

I've not read it yet, but this offensive content everyone's going on about is going to have to be offensive indeed to convince me that Geoffrey McKinney and James Raggi are anything other than a couple of really nice guys.

In somewhat related news, Tatters of the King has continued, and I have continued wrestling with the poor editing and wonky structure of the campaign, although I've managed to shield the players from the worst of it, and they seem to be enjoying the more sandbox-like approach I've taken. They've missed some clues and discovered some that weren't in the original text, and everything is chugging along well, aside from the odd blip with dates and locations.

In the past couple of sessions -- there may be another one tonight -- the investigators headed up to Suffolk to look around a cult ritual site and ran into their first direct encounter with the supernatural as they battled some weird -- and deadly -- creatures. I must applaud them for not using player knowledge to ruin the mystery of what the Things That Should Not Have Been were, as I'm certain that at least a couple of them knew from previous adventures or reading of the core rules; by not attaching a name to the Things it made the encounter all the more effective, at least from my perspective.

The battle was great fun, a chaotic mess of serious wounds, fluffed rolls and Sanity loss. Bringing a battlemat to a Call of Cthulhu game strikes me as far more blasphemous as anything in Carcosa and so we did without, with no serious consequences. A couple of the investigators brought shotguns and started firing them into the mêlée, so I called for Luck rolls from the relevant comrades to see if they were hit; perhaps the statistic should be renamed, as most of the damage caused to the party was self-inflicted. A couple of characters were rendered unconscious by their wounds, and Ben's poor psychologist tried to flee on his knees across the snow while trying to hold his intestines in.

Did I mention that there were five investigators and only two of the Things? I love this game.

The players survived -- and managed to avoid any permanent damage, so I didn't get to use my serious wounds table from the big yellow BRP book -- and now have their eyes on one of the cultists who is holed up in a fortified antiques shop in London. Via a tip-off from an anonymous source they've discovered when their target is going to leave his hiding place and through the use of Sanity-draining magic they've seen what will happen when he does -- creating all sorts of narrative challenges for me -- so they're planning a trap. If we play tonight, we will see how successful they are.

The Dandy and the Madman

Spoilers for Tatters of the King follow.

Stuart was unable to join us for last night's game, so the investigator party consisted of Ric's professor of literature, Manoj's artist and Ben's psychologist. They rattled through more of the clue-finding first phase of the campaign, before heading to Herefordshire to meet Alexander Roby, one of the key non-player-characters of the campaign. This is where we hit a problem.

The sequence in which the players meet Roby is pivotal, perhaps one of the most important scenes in the campaign, but it's also a closed scene. It's designed to give the players a lot of information about the campaign -- although it's almost all hidden behind layers of obfuscation so as not to give away everything -- but there's no room for expansion or further exploration; Roby says his piece and then shuts up.

Any player worth their salt is going to try to get more out of the character, and that is exactly what my lot did, trying all sorts of methods to get the NPC to reveal more, but the fact is that there is nothing more for the character to reveal. I spent a good twenty minutes blocking every attempt to get more information and it felt like I was pixel-bitching; this is not at all my preferred GMing style, and I felt frustrated and unsatisfied by how it was played. I didn't want to break the fourth wall and simply tell them that there were no more clue tokens to pick up in that location, so I attempted to disguise that information in psychological terms for Ben's character; even so it felt like a fudge, but I'm not sure there's a better way to resolve the problem. I'm surprised that it's not something that came up in playtesting of the scenario, as further questioning seems like an obvious thing for players to do, and I don't blame them for trying.

I've mentioned before that the campaign as a whole tends towards the railroad, but most of the problems can be solved through sensible play; indeed, a good half of the initial phase of the campaign has been played out of the designed order, and I don't think the players have noticed. It's this one important scene that is more difficult to fix, perhaps because it's so important.

Also annoying was discovering that one of the key handouts -- the transcript of the meeting with Roby -- features a signature from a non-player-character who is not present in the scene! It's not the first error we've seen in the player materials, and probably won't be the last; the editing in this book is shocking in places.

By the end of the session, all three of the investigators had had a brush with insanity, and if that's not a measure of Call of Cthulhu success, I don't know what is! Next time, they're going rambling in the wilds of Suffolk on the trail of a cult worship site, without the relatively tough Hemingway to back them up in case  things get violent.

Have You Heard of Ernest Hemingway?

My group finished the first book of the Carrion Crown campaign Adventure Path a couple of weeks ago, and in order to give Ben a bit of a rest before he runs the second book, and to give the group as a whole a change from our usual heroic fantasy fare, I volunteered to run the Call of Cthulhu Adventure Path campaign Tatters of the King. One reason for the choice was that it was one of the only campaigns for CoC that between them Stuart and Ben had not read, run or played. It also has a structure that suits our demand for something short to run between Pathfinder adventures; although it has a fair whiff of the globe-spanning epic to it, Tatters is less cohesive than -- for example -- Masks of Nyarlathotep and is structured more like a hefty adventure and its sequel, separated by a short related vignette. My plan is to run the first half over the next few weeks, and then the second half the next time Ben wants a break, perhaps after the second Carrion Crown book; one neat aspect of Tatters is that the first half can end in a classic Call of Cthulhu fashion so we could finish play there and still be satisfied.

The campaign is not perfect and as written is a bit heavy-handed in its direction, but I suspected that this would not be a problem in play and so it proved. All the necessary information is there, but laid out in an expected order that I knew wouldn't match up with how any group of players would approach it; a bit of creative reshuffling was in order, but it all worked out in the end.

The characters are for the most part not an active group, consisting of Ben's psychologist, the painter who helps him with his dream studies, as played by Manoj, and Ric's decadent Oxford don. Only Stuart's globe-trotting American author -- some bloke called Ernest Hemingway -- seems to be of much use in a more physical confrontation. The first session -- apart from the small matter of a riot breaking out at the theatre, in which Hemingway defended the meek don from a maniac wielding a broken bottle -- was less physical than cerebral, so the group's weaknesses in the latter area have not yet been exposed.

As of the end of the first session, the group had access to one Mythos tome, the professor was plagued by disturbing dreams, the painter had gone temporarily insane after reading the aforementioned tome, and the psychologist was worried about everyone's sanity. Hemingway just wanted a drink.

Carrying On Carrion Crown

Well, last night we played our second session of the Carrion Crown campaign adventure path and things seem to be slotting into place. During our time in the village of Ravengro -- and that is the silliest name for a village I've seen in a published scenario for a long time -- we uncovered evidence that an evil force was possessing villagers and making them commit acts of petty vandalism. Realising that we couldn't simply arrest everyone in town, it was decided that we should attempt to discover the source of the eerie occurrences, and hit the books for some Call of Cthulhu style Library Use; this is not what you might call a tale of high adventure.

(That said, Stuart's cleric Veneticus got into an altercation with some village children who were singing a song the staunch moralist considered inappropriate. The little perishers took little notice of the ragged holy man's orders to stop messing about, and he skirted close to alignment change as he became frustrated and started lobbing stones at them. The rest of the party stepped in to calm him down, and all of a sudden my necromancer is no longer the most distrusted member of the party. Result!)

Later, we headed to nearby Arkham Asylum Harrowstone Prison to see if it was, as suspected, the source of all the odd goings-on. We cleared the ground floor with little resistance beyond some spiders and a couple of half-hearted ghosts -- although one spooked our paladin Sir Erudil enough to have him smash right through a heavy oak door in order to escape -- before running into the shade of the former warden's wife -- pictured -- who gave us a fetch quest; in order to defeat the ghosts of The Joker, the Riddler, et al the prison's most dangerous inmates, we would have to make use of items associated with them, items which were -- of course -- hidden throughout the ruined, haunted building.

New player Alex seems to be getting the hang of things a bit better now, but he was very quiet during the game and seems unsure of how role-playing games work; on more than one occasion he asked if it was okay to do simple things like search a room or open a door. I wonder if there's some sort of paralysis going on as Alex sees the somewhat crowded Pathfinder sheet and assumes his options are constrained by and limited to the numbers appearing there?

Once More Unto the Breach

Last week's Pathfinder session was a bit of a disaster, to be honest. We were keen to finish a campaign for once, but this clashed with the arrival of a new player, one who'd had almost no experience with role-playing games; although he gave it an honest try, it was clear that the complexities of a thirteenth-level Pathfinder game were beyond him.

So we decided to pause the Kingmaker campaign, sorry "Adventure Path", and start afresh from first level; this is annoying given our tendency to abandon campaigns, sorry "Adventure Paths", but we were in danger of losing our new player by overwhelming him with a high-level game. We chose the not-at-all-like-Ravenloft-honest Carrion Crown and it seemed to go quite well. Our new player, Alex, had a much easier time playing a half-elven ranger than the halfling thief of last time, while Stuart chose a cleric with a fondness for censorship, Manoj played a paladin and I chose a necromancer with the swaggering attitude of a rock star. We were all old friends of Rudolph van Richten Professor Petros Lorrimor and were attending his funeral in Ravenloft Ustalav when mysterious events came to light; a quick reading of the Professor's will and his private journal gave us some hints as to the source of the unusual occurrences, although we only had enough time to follow up the first of many leads. Next week, we're off to the ruins of Arkham Asylum Harrowstone Prison to investigate the suspicious deaths of Batman's rogues gallery a number of notorious and colourful inmates.

I haven't played a D&D wizard since a single session of the 1983 Red Box about fifteen years ago, and I was a bit apprehensive of the class given the complexity of everything else in Pathfinder, but it seems like wizards themselves are quite simple in terms of mechanics, with most of the fiddly bits coming from the spells. I will have to be aware that he is quite fragile -- even if wizard hit dice have increased from d4 to d6 over the years -- as a couple of bites from a centipede almost ended his career at the outset, and I'll also have to think of strategies for spell selection, as I found myself prepared for undead but not for murderous arthropods. It's almost like a whole new game!

Two Jolly Butchers, a Necromancer and a Drunk

Englebert the cat burglar has been tasked with restoring his family's control over the Doodkanal district of Marienburg; with him he has brought two slabs of muscle, the Norse berserker Steiner Eriksen and the dwarf Hammerhead Harry, and the smuggler Gisbert Lufthansa. Together, they are the Jolly Butchers!

Accompanied by the witch hunter Kurtz and his manservant Percy, Englebert and Harry descended into the tunnels below the city, intent on catching the necromancer Heinz Gerber before he completed whatever task had led him into the damp, dark labyrinth. The Jolly Butchers had Gerber's journal, and a rough map of the tunnels, both of which gave them some confidence; the recognition of Percy's thousand-yard stare and the realisation that Kurtz was blind drunk did not.

Harry was rather in his element underground and his sense of direction helped make sense of the incomplete map, while Englebert's keen eyes kept the party safe from traps; Kurtz and Harry had blundered into a pit trap early on in the expedition, but after that, the burglar took the lead and steered them clear. Soon enough, and with a suspicious lack of interruption from the undead things they knew were lurking all around them, the party reached an open chamber lined with statues. Because this was WFRP and not D&D, the statues did not come to life and attack, and the party passed through to the bronze doors beyond. Intricate carvings -- some form of writing -- covered the doors but none in the party recognised it, although it was clear it was ancient.

Nudging the doors open, the part entered a large mausoleum, at the far end of which stood their quarry, the necromancer Gerber, engaged in some kind of ritual. As Gerber chanted and waved his hands in eldritch patterns over a stone sarcophagus, the party attempted to creep forward, only for the whole plan to be blown by Kurtz bellowing a challenge to the wizard.

It was at this point that the party was ambushed by skeletons. At first Englebert was the only one not frozen by fear, but the group made short work of the undead, only to be assaulted by a second wave almost as soon as they'd put down the first. Meanwhile Kurtz was screaming at the Jolly Butchers, ordering them to take the battle to the wizard; Harry was busy stomping about with reanimated corpses hanging off him, scratching at his armour with all the force and fury of  light drizzle, and Englebert wasn't about to go on a lone charge, so they ignored the witch hunter's ravings.

As it turned out, the fates -- or WFRP's treacherous magic system -- did the party's work for them, as Gerber's ritual backfired and he started to be thrown about by invisible sorcerous energies. Harry and Englebert smashed aside the last of the lesser undead, while Kurtz and Percy reloaded their pistols -- which up until now had been rather useless as anything other than loud and expensive clubs -- and all looked up as Gerber underwent a change, ripping, expanding and twisting into a new form. From the necromancer's desperate cries of anguish, the party guessed that the transformation was not voluntary.

Gerber had become a blasphemous, stinking thing, with multiple heads, sharp horns and a bloated belly, all surrounded by a cloud of buzzing, unnatural and mutated flies. Worst of all, his shape was still in flux and he was floating a few feet off the ground. As the thing bobbed at a leisurely pace through the air towards them, Englebert let off an arrow and retreated back to the tunnels, while Harry sidestepped into a better position and readied his warhammer. Kurtz had by this time reloaded, but Percy fumbled with his shot and powder and would not be ready in time for the creature's assault. It belched and spewed forth a stream of vile, maggot-strewn vomit at the dwarf and the burglar, but missed, the slick yellow filth hissing and bubbling as it slid down the stone wall of the tomb.

With a sound like a crack of thunder, Kurtz fired both of his pistols at the thing, spattering gore and ichor across the entire party -- an Ulric's Fury result caused twenty-two wounds on the second hit, more than making up for the ineffectual shooting earlier on-- but even this did not seem enough to slow the creature, until it started shimmering and flickering, before collapsing into a tiny point of light that disappeared with a pop as whatever sorcery tying it to this plane failed at last.

Kurtz and Percy set about purifying the tomb of Gerber's necromantic influence, and Englebert and Harry set about liberating it of any treasure, finding a bag of ancient gold in the sarcophagus, as well as what they took to be the bones of Bigby; Harry crushed these to bits, just in case. The two Jolly Butchers would have liked to have looted explored further, but ominous howls and scratchings from the tunnels behind them suggested that time was short, so they fled the tomb and returned to the surface.

Now satisfied that the barman Jorn was not also the necromancer Gerber, Kurtz released the Jolly Butchers' employee into their care, and offered to treat them all to a slap up meal; while it was clear that the man was deranged, Harry was not about to pass up a free meal and agreed on everyone's behalf. Soon after, Kurtz and Percy left Marienberg and the Jolly Butchers settled back to discuss their plans to expand their modest holdings, at which point they discovered that one of the old captains of the gang -- from before Englebert's appointment as leader -- had escaped from the prison on Rijker's Isle and was on his way to the Doodkanal.

Ten Jolly Butchers

Englebert the cat burglar has been tasked with restoring his family's control over the Doodkanal district of Marienburg; with him he has brought two slabs of muscle, the Norse berserker Steiner Eriksen and the dwarf Hammerhead Harry, and the smuggler Gisbert Lufthansa. Together, they are the Jolly Butchers!

The Jolly Butchers were without two of their number this time around, with Lufthansa still busy with his business at the docks, and the mighty Norseman Eriksen off wenching somewhere in town. This left Englebert and Harry to investigate the mansion they had taken from the Red Hand Gang; they found that the rooms at the back of the building -- abutting the supposedly haunted garden -- had been locked and boarded by the previous occupants, and considered asking a priest of Morr to come and investigate. They were interrupted by one of their network of street urchins, who told them that a riot had broken out at the prison on Rijker's Isle, involving some members of their gang; this news concerned Harry, as the Butchers imprisoned on the island were of the old order and were of higher rank than the current leadership, all of which could cause problems if they broke out and returned to the Doodkanal. The young guttersnipe also told them that Jorn, one of the doormen at the Moby Dick, had been arrested; since the bouncer wasn't involved in any direct criminal activity, both Harry and Englebert found his arrest to be unusual.

Jorn's arrest was deemed to be less of a headache to investigate than a full-blown prison riot, and they discovered that the doorman had been identified by a witch hunter named Kurtz as being the necromancer Heinz Gerber, and that he was to be given a trial in seven days, at which point he would be burned alive. This would not do, so the dwarf and the burglar went to the guard house in which Jorn was incarcerated in an attempt to get him freed. The guards proved unhelpful, and Kurtz more so, but Harry and Englebert nipped around the back and managed to talk to their employee through the window of his cell. Once they were happy that Jorn was not in fact a dangerous necromancer and that he was being treated well enough, the pair planned their next move.

They had a number of options: to discredit Kurtz, to break Jorn out, to present exonerating evidence at his trial, or to find the real Heinz Gerber. They considered the first two options to be very unlikely, and the latter two just implausible, and thus the choice was made. They set about assembling friends, colleagues and family members who could vouch for Jorn and also started researching Gerber. They discovered that he was indeed a notorious magician with an interest in peering beyond the veil of death, and his chief interest was in a necromancer who was reputed to have found the secret to eternal life. In a cross-setting tribute to Gary Gygax, this necromancer was named Bigby.

The Jolly Butchers decided to put the word out that they had found an artefact belonging to this Bigby and, sensing that there was something a bit off about it, were eager to sell it as soon as possible and for a low price. After a day or two, an urchin arrived on behalf of an "old man" to look at the artefact -- an ornate box stolen from the tomb in the first session -- and having done so, headed off to report his -- or her, urchins are dirty and difficult to identify with certainty -- findings; Englebert made excellent use of his stealth abilities to follow the child back to a house across from the very graveyard from which the box was stolen -- and which they'd been searching for the creature which had been bothering the rat catchers -- and right next door to Skinner's funeral parlour, one of the Jolly Butchers' front businesses.

Popping in to speak to Alf Skinner, they found him nervous and shifty and he explained that some bodies had gone missing. He seemed less bothered by the theft itself and more that the Butchers would be angry that he'd been filling the empty coffins with junk to cover the absence of the rightful contents; as it happened, neither of them cared. They told old Alf to lock and bar his storage room in the basement, and they went next door with four Jolly Butchers as backup.

The gang members were reluctant to enter the house, which was run down and exuded the sickly smell of decay, and so took up covering positions with their crossbows, leaving Harry to venture inside alone, with Englebert just behind. He was attacked by three stinking, flabby pale things with poisonous claws, but Harry proved resistant to their venom, and with the aid of supporting fire from Englebert's short bow, the dwarf smashed his opponents. They threw the bodies into the streets to be burned and sent a message to Kurtz to tell him that the necromancer was still quite active and that he should perhaps come down to the house to see for himself, but a reply came a while later suggesting that the creatures they'd killed were just remnants and that the danger had passed now that Gerber was in custody.

With a sigh, Harry and Englebert went back into the house to investigate, finding nothing of interest except steps leading down into an ominous cellar. Harry went first, to find a crude laboratory inhabited by some misshapen patchwork creature.

At first, even Harry's stout dwarven mettle wasn't enough and he was frozen in fear as the thing swung at him, but he was lucky to avoid injury and snapped out of his paralysis in time to fight back. It was a tough battle, with the creature able to absorb a great deal of damage and not even Harry's mighty hammer was enough to bring it down; two massive strikes to Harry's head put great dents in his helmet and left the dwarf unconscious on the cellar stairs.

The creature bawled "FOOD!" from a slack and ill-fitting jaw and Englebert ran for it; at the time it was unclear if he was just saving his own skin or if he was trying to distract the thing from eating Harry, but it did indeed follow the thief up the stairs. Englebert climbed the outside of the house and on to the roof, thinking the thing couldn't follow, but it proved more agile than it looked and thus ensued a rooftop chase that ended when Englebert's nimble footwork had him ducking out of the creature's overextended grasp, causing it to fall into the vat of a conveniently located tannery.

Harry rested and healed, while a search of Gerber's house went on -- with an eye to a possible future career as a physician, Harry pocketed the necromancer's surgical tools -- and the Jolly Butchers found a trapdoor leading into a warren of tunnels under the city. When he was fit to move, the dwarf ventured in and identified the passages as belonging to some old necropolis, perhaps forgotten by the people of the city. Their henchmen refused to go into the tunnels, but did continue the search of the house, turning up what seemed to be Heinz Gerber's journal. The mad ravings of the necromancer were difficult to decipher, but the Butchers did find a partial map of the tunnels below their feet, as well as a number of entries concerning Bigby's tomb, dated after Jorn was captured.

They took this clear evidence of Jorn's innocence to the witch hunter and the belligerent sod did not release the doorman, but declared that the matter was worth investigating, and so agreed to go with the Jolly Butchers as they pursued Gerber into the tunnels below the city.

Seven Jolly Butchers

Englebert the cat burglar has been tasked with restoring his family's control over the Doodkanal district of Marienburg; with him he has brought two slabs of muscle, the Norse berserker Steiner Eriksen and the dwarf Hammerhead Harry, and the smuggler Gisbert Lufthansa. Together, they are the Jolly Butchers!

This session was heavy on the old fisticuffs, and because of the unique way in which Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay handles combat, it was also quite heavy on the gore, even more so than usual.

Following the events of the previous session, the Jolly Butchers decided to stake out the headquarters of their rivals, the Red Hand Gang; setting up shop in a, um, shop across the street, the Butchers watched and waited. The mansion was fortified with a strong gate for the outer wall, and the windows on the ground floor had been converted into arrow slits, but there were only a handful of guards visible. After some time, a cart came out of the front gates, accompanied by four gang members, and the Jolly Butchers decided to see where they were going and if possible pick them off, so reducing the opposition within the mansion itself.

Harry and Steiner followed the cart, while Englebert went to send a message to the rest of the Jolly Butchers and have them meet the core group; Gisbert was still busy with some smuggling activities down on the docks. The Red Hand Gangers took the cart -- Harry noticed from the way it was moving that its cargo was heavy -- to a warehouse where they were met by two other ruffians, and together the six of them entered the building. Englebert had returned by this time, and sneaked up on to the roof of the warehouse to peek through a window; inside he saw the enemy loading crates on to a waiting barge at the back of the building, and so he returned to the rest of the Butchers.

Four other Jolly Butchers had arrived -- Kaspar, Waldred, Grimwold and Hamlyn -- and with only one way out for the gangers and their cart, an ambush was arranged. Englebert took up a sniping position on a nearby rooftop, while Harry and Steiner took two men each and hid on either side of the narrow alleyway leading off from the warehouse.

The Jolly Butchers launched their ambush, the Red Hand launched a counter-ambush, and the little street was soon awash with gore. Through strength of numbers and the uncanny bloodlust of Steiner's unusual elven blade -- pilfered from the tomb in the first session -- the Butchers prevailed with nary a scratch, and while most of the Red Hand Gangers were left dying in the muck, there were a couple of survivors. They told the Butchers that only three men, plus the halfling Steevil and his lieutenant Catspaw, remained in the mansion, but more were supposed to be on their way from out of town. Harry -- with an eye on the interrogator career -- also found out that the gang had a secret knock with which to identify themselves at the front gate, and a plan was formed.

The Butchers pulled up their hoods and took the cart and one of the survivors back to the mansion. With the rest of the gang hanging back, the survivor went up to the front gate to request entrance, while Harry -- tall for a dwarf but still just small enough to hide below the gate's viewing grille -- kept a tight grip on the survivor's, ahem, crown jewels.

The group was let in, Harry pushed the survivor to the ground and rushed into combat with the guard, with the rest of the Butchers following up. The guard managed to let out a few shouts but soon he too was dead; not soon enough though, as crossbow bolts started whistling through the air towards the Jolly Butchers. Harry rushed over to the arrow slits, while Englebert scaled the house itself, and Kaspar, Waldred, Grimwold and Hamlyn ran for the mansion's front entrance, which was in an alcove and would provide some cover from the crossbowmen.

Where was Steiner? Well, expecting a somewhat different welcome, the big Norseman was hanging off the bottom of the cart, ready to jump out and into combat, only now he found himself in cover but perhaps pinned. Nonetheless, he made a break for Harry's position, just as the dwarf chucked his favourite mining lantern in through the arrow slit; as planned a small fire started up, which only got larger as Steiner then lobbed a bottle of spirits in through the same slit. Spotting a stable door and a possible side entrance, the dwarf and the Norseman headed in that direction.

Meanwhile, Englebert was on the roof, removing tiles in an attempt to get into the space below, and Kaspar, Waldred, Grimwold and Hamlyn found the front door of the mansion locked and barred, and the alcove not as safe as they had thought, as the pernicious halfling Steevil had installed murder holes above them. Poor Kaspar was shot twice in the head -- "Now he's a ghost!" said the GM -- and the rest of the thugs ran back to the relative safety of the cart.

In the stables, Harry and Steiner did indeed find a back door, through which they heard frantic voices and "the sound of pumping", a description which provoked a long round of laughter at the table, although I can't think why as we're all sensible adults. Honest. The two meatheads took a round or two to smash down the door and into the mansion's kitchen, by which time the, um, pumpers had returned to put out the fire. Steiner went into a berserk charge, Harry tried to keep up, and the pair burst through into a large room; the two Red Hand Gangers inside then faced the difficult choice of putting out the fire or fighting the two slabs of muscle pounding towards them.

At this point, Steevil -- robbed of easy prey -- made his way downstairs, and buoyed up by his presence, the two thugs chose the latter option, which in hindsight would prove to be their last mistake. Upstairs, Englebert poked his head in through the gap in the roof and got a crossbow bolt in the face from Catspaw for his trouble; this knocked him off the roof and into a handy hay cart in the street below, where he lay unconscious for the rest of the fight.

Back inside, the fight got brutal, with even the big Norseman into critical condition, his arm numbed and his sword dropped... except the eerie elven blade would not allow itself to be dropped, so Steiner remained in the fight. The Red Hand Gang, with their fondness for crossbows and fighting from the shadows, were no match for Steiner and Harry, whose enthusiasm for toe-to-toe fighting came to the fore, and soon enough the Red Hand Gang ceased to exist as a going concern.

As a result of all of that messy business, the Jolly Butchers have taken up residence in the mansion, and have taken control of the Red Hand Gang's assets. Next up is the exploration of the mansion itself and of its gardens, which are reputed to be haunted. When that will happen I'm not sure, as Stuart has a busy calendar over the summer, and Manoj is expecting a baby very soon. It's been great fun playing a bit of WFRP though, and a pleasant change from the heaviness of Pathfiner; the big fight at the end was very smooth and quite quick, for example, even with about twelve combatants. Ben's trying to get me to run something in the same setting, and I have some ideas on that front, but I'm also really enjoying playing.

Return to Orc's Drift

Stuart was home alone over the weekend, so a couple of us went over to his place to play the second scenario in the Orc's Drift campaign. Ric had observed the last few rounds of the first battle and is a veteran Warhammer 40,000 player -- discussion turned to that after the game, and if we can scrape together some armies, we might have a battle, perhaps using the Killzone skirmish rules -- whereas I'd played the orcs last time, and Stuart once again took the role of referee. Ric gave me the choice of armies, and since the first scenario was weighted towards the orcs, I decided to play as the defenders this time, a small group of dwarven gold miners.

You'd be forgiven for not spotting the dwarves in this picture, as there are only about eleven of them, whereas the orcs brought this lot along:

Eight Jolly Butchers

Englebert the cat burglar has been tasked with restoring his family's control over the Doodkanal district of Marienburg; with him he has brought two slabs of muscle, the Norse berserker Steiner Eriksen and the dwarf Hammerhead Harry, and the smuggler Gisbert Lufthansa. Together, they are the Jolly Butchers!

Last time, the Jolly Butchers were scouring the local graveyard for evidence of some kind of beast that had been bothering the local ratcatchers, and causing them to go on strike until it was dealt with. Although we'd done a bit of grave-robbing and earned some cash as a result, we were no closer to finding this mysterious creature, and so made the decision to put aside the ratcatchers' strike for now and focus on other issues.

We had only just arrived in town and our control over the Doodkanal was still almost non-existent, so there were a number of roaming thugs causing trouble in the area. Furthermore, a bigger and more organised gang -- the Red Hand Gang -- had taken over half of the district, although had not yet allied with the Marienburg thieves' guild, so could technically still be ousted without political repercussions.

We chose to go after the lesser thugs first, and soon ran into a group causing trouble at the fish market. As planned we roughed them up, a task which took much longer than it should due to Harry's inability to hit anything with his not-so-trusty hammer. Only one survivor remained -- covered in the blood and bone fragments of his fellows as a result of WFRP's lethal combat system -- and he was persuaded to join the Jolly Butchers, bringing the number of enforcers up to eight. Harry took the survivor off to get his gang tattoo, while Steiner and Englebert -- Lufthansa had been called to the docks on business matters -- set about displaying the corpses in public as a warning to other opportunistic ruffians.

Next up was the Red Hand Gang. They had taken up residence in an abandoned mansion in the eastern part of the Doodkanal, and were under new leadership, a halfling poisoner called Steevil. That part of the Doodkanal bordered on the Little Moot, a halfling district, so we got in touch with the halfling boss Rudolf Ingo Pickles, who was also the head of the bakers' guild of Marienburg.

We met Pickles in a lovely patisserie called The Crepe Hole where Harry enjoyed some spiced pork pasties -- Harry's human comrades declined to partake, which he put down to some kind of strange human religious practice -- and Englebert set about charming the diminutive crime boss. It seems he was none too fond of Steevil, would be quite happy for us to expel him from the Doodkanal and gave us a bit more information on the poisoner and his gang; there was some talk of owing favours at this point, but Harry was too busy munching away on a pasty to pick up the details, although he did hear something about a back way into the mansion.

The Jolly Butchers were too few and too disorganised to make a frontal assault on a dozen career criminals holed up in a fortified building, so we decided to pick off as much of the gang as we could while they were out and about on their business.

We took over an abandoned building in what the Red Hand optimistically called their turf, spruced it up a bit and opened it as a pawn shop. As expected, a group of Red Hand enforcers wandered by after a couple of days and took notice of the new shop; they entered and intimated to the shopkeeper -- Harry, in an unconvincing disguise -- that he should pay them some protection money. Harry said he didn't understand what they were getting at -- this may or may not have been a ruse -- which angered the thugs, and they grabbed him, which is when the rest of the Jolly Butchers sprang into action.

Englebert had rigged the door to spring shut behind the last of the Red Hand thugs, trapping them in the shop with an angry dwarf, a bored Norse warrior and a bloodthirsty cat burglar. Once again Harry missed with pretty much every strike of his mighty hammer -- despite a Weapon Skill of 51 and two attacks per round -- giving his foes a chance to whittle away at his stockpile of Wounds with little in the way of a retort. By the end of the fight, Harry was battered and bruised, but the Red Hand Gang members were all dead or unconscious, largely at the hands of Englebert and Steiner.

Once again, there was a lone survivor, Wolfgang:

"Tell us what you know about the Red Hand hideout!"

"I don't know anything!"

"Then you're no longer useful to us."

"I might know something!"

The Red Hand often met in a tavern not far from the mansion, called The Sea Hag, so we decided to press our advantage and attack them there before they could withdraw to their fortified headquarters. Harry was too injured to go straight into another fight however, and was forced to rest for a day or two, a delay which may yet prove disastrous for the Butchers.

We went to the tavern and attempted to pick up some gossip from the locals -- this is where Harry did shine in the session; despite not having the Gossip skill, and so defaulting to a modified Fellowship of just 11, he succeeded with each and every attempt he made -- but were unable to learn anything helpful, although they did make the acquaintance of a boat captain who went by the name of "The Captain". As Harry chatted to his new friend The -- being a dwarf, Harry either didn't understand or didn't care about the difference between a name and a title -- Steiner's sixth sense warned him that trouble of some sort was on the way.

The Butchers left the tavern, and detected they were being followed. Suspecting the Red Hand, Steiner and Englebert dropped back to set up an ambush, while Harry provided the bait; a short fight ensued between the Butchers and a pair of suspiciously skilful swordsmen -- we suspect that the GM was cheating a bit here, as he is wont to do on occasion -- which ended with Englebert once more turning on the charm and negotiating a truce. The two flashing blades wandered off into the night, and the Butchers made a quick retreat back to base to plan their next move against the Red Hand Gang.

Maniac Mansion

The Jolly Butchers didn't venture out onto the mean streets of Marienburg last night, as Steiner Eriksen was laid low by some Nordic ailment, so instead we broke out the newish Mansions of Madness board game from Fantasy Flight.

It's in a similar vein to Wizards of the Coast's Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon in that it's a tile-based exploration game intended to emulate, at least partially, a tabletop rpg. In this case, the emulated game is Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu; Fantasy Flight already produce Arkham Horror, which is in the same milieu -- and indeed Mansions is part of the same line, although the games seem to be incompatible - but Arkham Horror is at the summer blockbuster special effects end of the scale, while the newer game is more of a low-key horror movie type affair.

In the game, players are sent into one of the titular buildings to track down some MacGuffin, along the way encountering various gribbly beasties -- axe-wielding maniacs seemed to be popular in our game -- and sanity-shredding shocks. While the D&D games mentioned above feel like stripped down and simplified versions of the parent system, Mansions is very much its own thing, emulating a Call of Cthulhu investigation but not attempting to replace Chaosium's original game; for one thing, mysteries seem to be quite linear, which isn't an issue in the board game, but would kill the rpg equivalent stone dead.

There are some neat mechanics -- there were some grumblings about the card-based combat system, but I quite liked it, and am already thinking about ways to import it into an rpg -- and there's an interesting balance of play between the investigators and the Keeper -- the player who runs the Mansion's monsters and effects -- with a larger party giving the Keeper more options for mischief, but also enabling the group to search more thoroughly, for example. There's also a fun time limit mechanic, which came into play in our game last night, as we rushed to the finale with one turn left and had to kill an undead creature; the gangster fired two bursts from his Tommy gun -- missing with the second -- and the detective did the same, leaving the hobo to wrestle with the thing -- having dropped his axe in an earlier fight with no time to recover it -- and needing to roll a 7 or less on a d10. It would all come down -- literally -- to the last throw of the die.

The die came up as a 9.

A tense ending then, but still good fun, and I'd be very keen to play again. The system enables the same mystery to be explored up to three times, with differing paths through the plot, and I'm interested to see how that works out in play. All in all, it's a good fun game, and in many ways I prefer it to Arkham Horror, not least because it's much faster in play.

I'm not sure I would ever buy it though, as I don't think it offers good value in its current form. It's an expensive game, but I wonder how much of the cost comes from the thirty included plastic miniatures. The designs are rather uninspiring, and the miniatures themselves are completely superfluous; each has a slot in the base into which is inserted a little token, much like the ones from Arkham Horror, on which is a picture of the monster -- or rather a picture of the grey, unpainted miniature, which strikes me as a bit cheap -- as well as all its game statistics. As such, all the miniatures seem to add to the game is price; I'd have much preferred to see the game use the tokens alone, and the extra cost either dropped or used to provide more monster or layout options. After all, Arkham Horror does just fine without plastic figures.

That is my only criticism of the game -- admittedly based on only one evening of play -- but it's a significant one, and one that prevents me from recommending the game to others, let alone buying it for myself. That said, now that the group has it, I'm keen to play again, and I'm quite interested in taking a turn as the Keeper.

Based on gameplay alone, I'd give Mansions of Madness four out of five, but the pointless miniatures bump it down to .

Four Jolly Butchers

We played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay last night, and it was everything I expected it to be. Stuart has a summary of events over at his blog, so I'll try not to go over too much old ground.

The setting was Marienburg, a prosperous but independent trading port that is a little bit Amsterdam, a little bit New Amsterdam, and a little bit Bristol. Apparently. Local crime boss Smiles Vanderveel had fallen ill with a mysterious malady, and with his withdrawal from the day-to-day running of his turf, his men had either deserted or been picked off by other gangs moving into the area to take advantage of his perceived weakness. As such, Vanderveel's boss, "Uncle" Smalls decided to send in some heavies to see if anything could be salvaged from the situation.

So on Angestag the ninth of Brauzeit, four unsavoury sorts got off a leaking boat at the rotting docks in the Doodkanaal district of Marienburg. I played Hammerhead Harry, a dwarven slab of muscle with a hammer, Stuart played Steiner Eriksen, a berserker from Norsca, and Stuart's son Sebastian played a boatman-turned-smuggler named Gisbert Lufthansa.

Now that last one is quite a silly name, but it's very much in keeping with the tone of WFRP, and is one of the things I love about the game; you could have the same tone in any fantasy game, but for some reason it just doesn't fit as well as it does in WFRP. I've seen people complain about how grim and depressing they find both Warhammer settings, and I wonder if they've missed the point.

Rounding out the party was Manoj's cat burglar Englebert, who was one of Smalls' "nephews" and as such was supposed to be in charge. Our gang headquarters was in the back room of a butcher's shop called, er, The Jolly Butcher, so after some initial missteps -- "You can call us... The Dicks!" -- we took our gang's name from the shop.

Our GM Ben had set the game up as a sandbox seeded with clues and rumours, so we were free to roam and restore the gang's fortunes in any way we saw fit. In our initial forays we discovered another group -- the Black Dogs -- selling narcotics in one of our pubs -- the Moby Dick, hence our first, failed, attempt at a gang name -- so we found their hideout, roughed them up -- which, due to WFRP's brutal combat system, ended with two of their men bleeding to death in a cellar -- and forced them to join the Jolly Butchers.

We also rounded up all the protection money that had gone uncollected during Smiles Vanderveel's absence, and gathered enough to hire a physician from one of the posher parts of town to come and attend to the boss. The doctor suggested that although Smiles seemed to be suffering from a tropical disease, it was more likely that he was under the effect of a magical curse, and that we could either find the original magician and kill them, or find another magician to dispel the enchantment. We decided to look for a necromancer who was reported to be causing trouble in the Boneyard, a nearby cemetery; it was possible that this necromancer had cast the original curse, and even if not, he might be able to undo it. Furthermore, the local rat catchers' union -- who were supposed to be under our thumb -- were on strike following the killing of two of their number by some sort of beast, also in the Boneyard, so we saw this as an efficient way to deal with a couple of problems at once.

We found neither beast nor necromancer, but did run into a couple of grave robbers who claimed to be working for a rival boss, Mad Eye Eddie; they were taking the body out of the Doodkanaal area and into Eddie's turf, but we decided we weren't tough enough to take on another boss just yet, although we did warn the robbers not to mess about in our backyard again and to tell Eddie that if he wanted to do business he could get in touch, and didn't need to be so sneaky about it.

Returning to the Boneyard, Englebert decided to do some grave robbing of his own, but was paralysed with fear when he ran into a bunch of animated skeletons. Harry remained stoic and waded in with his warhammer, until the rest of the group shook off their fear and finished off the undead. Steiner was quite annoyed with the burglar for taking the group on such a pointless and dangerous digression, but the discovery of a cache of gems changed his demeanour somewhat.

That's more or less it for the session. What perhaps doesn't come across above is how funny it all was, with fluffed rolls and comedy accents aplenty, and the decision to mark all our gang members with a tattoo of a smiling pig, even those who had "joined" the gang while unconscious. We had a couple of very tired players at the table, but even so everyone was enthused, and I haven't seen so much laughing in a game in a long time. It was a brilliant three-or-so hours, and I'm looking forward to more of the same next week.

Savage Eberron IV: The Caverns of the Kobold King

The session began with the players getting into a debate about what to do with the young Jenna ir'Wynarn; the half-ogre bard Jon Loger and human duellist Fibulon wanted to press on with their plan to form an underground organisation around Jenna's claim to the throne of united Galifar, while Galaxy Jones was undecided and the dwarf artificer Stones McGuffin wanted nothing to do with any of it and just wanted to go looking for adventure. As it turned out, adventure found them.

Edie Stone -- occasional player-character and their employer -- told them that she'd been contacted by Morina Wood, a Sharn resident whose father was missing. The team headed off to speak to Wood, finding her in a somewhat disreputable tavern, engaged in a drinking competition that she seemed to win with ease. Any suggestion that I lifted this scene straight from a classic adventure film would be completely unfounded, obviously.

Morina Wood explained that he and her father Roderick were archaeologists and that they often went on expeditions abroad to explore ancient ruins and bring back artefacts so that modern society could better understand its past; it was on his most recent trip, into the monster-ruled nation of Droaam, that the elder Wood made his last contact. His plan was to cross the border between the coast and the southern edge of the Greywall Mountains, and Morina was to travel later by the more traditional -- and safer -- route and meet him in Greywall itself; Morina arrived to discover that her father had indeed crossed the border, but was lost somewhere in the southern part of Droaam. She offered the player-characters three thousand gold pieces if they could bring back news of Roderick's fate.

They accepted and spent a day or so looking for clues and following leads in Sharn, running into the fixer Fennifee, who appeared to be a vampire but was revealed -- after some cajoling and threats of violence -- to be a poser. They discovered that the Woods were less into academia and more into grave robbing for cash, and also found out more about Roderick's expedition; he'd taken a group of mercenaries with him as protection, and Fennifee was also able to provide a fairly detailed plan of the expedition's route.

The team felt that they had exhausted their leads in Sharn, and hired horses and a cart for the journey into Droaam. Just before the border they were stopped by a group of Breland soldiers who inspected their paperwork, and it seemed as if there was going to be a fight -- players being players -- but the episode passed without violence, although the soldiers suggested that the team either turn back or take a safer route into Droaam.

Moving on, they crossed the border and picked up Roderick's trail, which was later crossed by another large group of tracks. The second set seemed to be newer and to be heading off to the north, while Roderick's carried on into the west, suggesting that the two groups had not met; still, there was some brief discussion over whether to follow the new trail, and Galaxy Jones took flight on his glidewing Trixie to see if he could get a better view of things from the air. He saw that the second group were still quite close and seemed to be made up of around twenty to thirty gnolls, marching at great speed northward. The team were aware that gnolls made up a large part of the military of Droaam, and so decided to stay out of their business and carry on following the Wood expedition.

They soon came across evidence of a camp, and so decided to rest for the night in the same spot. During the night they were assaulted by small robed figures wielding daggers, and despite the hard-of-hearing McGuffin's inability to wake up, the team captured or despatched their assailants. The would-be-assassins turned out to be kobolds and were no opportunistic bandits, as they claimed that they had been sent to do away with the player-characters. The team also learned that Roderick and his party had also been ambushed further along the trail, and had been taken back to the kobold lair to be fed to "the Big Big Boss"; some of the more paranoid members of the group wondered if the Big Big Boss might be a dragon, but their captive assured them that he had no wings, which didn't seem to make them feel any better.

The players did not treat their captive well, and this was one of the stranger parts of the session for me, as they were quite happy to torture the poor thing to the point of death, heal him with magic, then do it all over again. Perhaps it was fatigue, or blowing off steam at the end of a long week, but it all seemed a bit unnecessary to me. Since we're using Savage Worlds and not D&D proper, there's no alignment -- not that I'd use alignment even if I were running D&D, but that's a subject for another day -- and Eberron as a setting was designed to be far less tied to that moral framework, but even so this whole sequence struck me as a bit off and I found it quite uncomfortable.

The team managed to glean the location of the kobold lair from their captive and began to plan their assault. A quick flyover from Galaxy Jones revealed that the lair was a cave complex within a butte and that there were entrances both at ground level and on the top; despite the presence of a couple of guard stations, and the inherent difficulty of reaching the summit of the butte unseen when only when party member had the power of flight, they decided to attack from the air.

They approached with relative stealth but once again it seemed as if they were expected, and although the kobold guards retreated, the team's path into the complex was blocked by an enormous red kobold they took to be the Big Big Boss; a brief taxonomical discussion followed as the players pondered whether a really big kobold wasn't just a dragonborn, but then he started hitting them with his flaming meteor hammer and that soon stopped all talk of science.

The Big Big Boss was big -- obviously -- and strong, and also had some magical abilities, throwing up a ring of fire around the edge of the battlefield and reflecting the energy from one of Stones' inventions right back at the artificer, but even so he did not last long against a combined assault by the players. Jonark's mind-affecting magic is quite potent against even the strongest creatures and did much to soften the target for the others, aside from poor old Stones McGuffin who spent most of the fight trying to catch up with the others after a misunderstanding between myself and Stones' player regarding relative distances. Though I loathe battlemaps, I need to find a middle ground so that such confusion doesn't arise again.

As was inevitable, the Big Big Boss fell but laughed at the player-characters as they struck the final blow, something which didn't seem to faze them one bit, although this laissez faire attitude would catch up with them later. They explored the inside of the butte -- no sniggering at the back -- discovering a beaten and malnourished minotaur chained up in one cave, and a midden in another; after some discussion, they healed and freed the minotaur, and digging through the kobold refuse the party found what was left of Roderick Wood and his soldiers.

Considering their job done, the player-characters fled the cave complex and headed back to Sharn. Upon arrival, and wanting a bath and a meal even more than that three thousand gold, they discovered that their home base had been razed to the ground and that Edie and Jenna had disappeared.