Gaming at Dice Fest 2025

 Dice Fest 2025 wrapped up yesterday.  Over the weekend, I ran 9 sessions of a custom Shadows of Brimstone mission on a fancy 3D Board. I also played two games of 1,000 Blank White Cards while I was there, and one game of the The Score (a micro-RPG that takes about 20 minutes to play). 

And I also I helped create, organize, host and judge a miniatures event called the "Bitz Box Brawl" where 20 people received a box of random miniature parts and one hour to design and glue together their own chimeric monster. 

I taught all those games above to new players while I was at it.  I really enjoy sharing my favorite games with people I'm just getting to know, and conventions are great for that. It was all immense fun, but I am truly exhausted today.

Photo of Me at Work

 

Photo of me running Shadows of Brimstone on our 3D Trederra board at DiceFest Online 2020 last month. Note the creepy alien soldier in the background.

The Square Deal Saloon

Started a new RPG campaign just recently. The setting is more-or-less that of Shadows of Brimstone meets HBO's Deadwood. Two of the PCs collectively own a house-of-ill-repute in a boom-town, somewhere in the New Mexico Territory, just down the road from the smoking crater that is Brimstone. There's another competing saloon and gambling den in town, and a number of weird supernatural hijinks afoot. The other PC is one of their regular customers, who happens to work at the Telegraph Office.

For the first session I made some incoming Telegraph props. One was an actual message for one of the PCs, but the others are essentially plot coupons and nuggets of important information about sub-plots and opportunities, that the Telegraph Operator PC is obligated to make the rounds and deliver. It's working pretty well, as the PCs basically get to eavesdrop on everything going on in town. I made the community bustling with plotlines, colorful characters, and mysteries. It's meant to be layered and sandboxy, with the PCs getting to decide what things they want to stick their noses into, and whose pockets they wish to pick. So I've arranged all my subplots on a color-coded calendar (the first session is Wednesday, March 9th, 1887) that tracks how each storyline will progress if the players do nothing to interfere. I'm hoping they'll interfere frequently and with gusto. They seemed to love it, which is good, because I'm prepared to add a couple more Telegraphs each session for foreshadowing, character development, and clue-delivery.

The mechanics are a blend of Savage Worlds and the Drama System from Hillfolk, with some custom mechanics to emulate parts of Brimstone, and a few cool ideas lifted from other games I like. During character creation, I had the players choose from several small "fill-in-the-blank" quizzes I had prepared. Their answers to those questions let them define things in the town, name NPCs and establish relationships to them. Each of the quizzes had some mechanical benefit that it unlocked. For example, there was one that said: "There's a group of bandits causing trouble in the region. You used to ride with them, but had a falling out." It then listed two of the canonical Infamous Bandit Gangs from Shadows of Brimstone, and had the player choose which one they'd been part of. Then it said "someone in town knows your secret past. Who are they, and can you trust them?" It then gave a bonus on Guts and Riding skills, as befits someone who used to ride with a bunch of train-robbers. The player who chose this card was effectively embracing a western trope, getting a connection to something that's part of the official setting, and then given carte-blanche to invent and ally or foe in town. It worked great. We ended up with a really cool interlocking web of NPCs and plotlines.

I'm running this game at a friends' house, because one of the players is allergic to my cat. So I needed a good way to bring the game with me that doesn't involve me hauling the rulebooks to Savage Worlds, Deadlands, Hillfolk, and Shadows of Brimstone with me every week. So, I popped over to wikidot.com, and made myself a new GMing Notes wiki. It's a closed/private wiki, so I can just bring it up on my iPad.  All the most important rules are on there now, along with pages on every location, every NPC, those Telegraphs and other visual aides to show the players, and that color-coded plotline calendar that keeps me on top of what's likely to happen when. It's working pretty great thus far. I'm liking it enough I've begun adding my note files for my other two active RPG campaigns to the same wiki, so I'll have one highly-portable campaign database for all my future games.

Back From The Dead. (Again.)

A year ago, I suddenly returned to this blog after a long absence, posted for a few weeks, and then vanished again. I had just moved closer to work (so a much shorter commute), and started a new Night's Black Agents campaign, and thought for sure I was going to be blogging a lot more. It didn't work out that way. I started a new relationship, which is going along wonderfully, but as the early stages of a relationship often do, it tends to re-prioritize your free time.

On a completely un-related front, there was simultaneously a falling-out between two of the players in the NBA campaign that nearly ended the game, so I suddenly had a lot less regular gaming to blog about. Moving closer to work meant moving away from a lot of my old haunts and social circles, which further reduced my access to a regular game night for a while. Things have stabilized, and I thought it was time to poke my head out and shout "hello" to the world.

(An aside about work: I'm still working on Shadows of Brimstone, Forbidden Fortress, and other games for Flying Frog, but that work is covered by an Non-Disclosure Agreement so I can't really blog about it much, if at all. That's a bummer, as there is some seriously cool stuff in the pipe that I'd love to blab about if I could.)

The Night's Black Agents campaign went over 6 months without a session. That would have been the death of nearly any campaign, and you'd expect that to be doubly true for an RPG with mystery and detective roots. Not the case here at all. Night's Black Agents has amazing tools for keeping the narrative cohesive and preserving the clue trail, and the Dracula Dossier doubles down on that. I was very much impressed at how easily everything came back together.

About a year ago I blathered on about the Adversary Map, so I'll keep my praises of it brief today. Keeping a cork-board covered with strings and photos in the spare room gathering dust for 6 months was a small price to pay to preserve a snapshot of how all the NPCs and plotlines interconnected. Between that and a similar flowchart I have on my hard-drive (basically the same thing, but it also has all the secret connections and off-camera NPCs that the PCs haven't met yet), it was easy to reconstruct all the mysteries and pick right up where we left off. 

As I said, the Dracula Dossier features even more tools toward that end. The special annotated copy of Bram Stoker's novel, with marginalia in the voices of three generations of MI-6 NPCs, is a uniquely useful prompt for the players. Having a hard time remembering the clues and leads from 6 months ago? Just open the novel to a random page, and there's almost certainly something there to jumpstart the adventure.

Anyhow, just wanted to let you know that I'm still here, I'm still gaming, and I hope to blog more soon. Of course, I have to acknowledge that I said the same thing 14 months ago, only to vanish for a year immediately thereafter.

Forbidden Fortress

The Kickstarter for Forbidden Fortress started today. #FoFo is a fully cooperative dungeon-crawl game in the Shadows of Brimstone line. Forbidden Fortress lets you play Samurai, Ninja, Sumo, Kitsune, Geisha and other character archetypes of Feudal (and Mythological) Japan in a battle against various demons and other supernatural creatures.

(Hey, that's me appearing briefly on screen, flipping over some cards and moving minis, around the 3-minute mark)

It's a stand-alone that's backwards-compatible with all the many SoBs expansions that came before it. Within the setting, portals open up between worlds and times, allowing aliens, demons, and us mere mortals to travel from one era or world to the next. If you have one of the two original Shadows of Brimstone core sets, you can combine it with FoFo to have mixed parties of cowboys and samurai working together, battling and exploring across the many OtherWorlds of the combined games.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1034852783/shadows-of-brimstone-forbidden-fortress/

The kickstarter went live at 3pm today. It took us less than 3 minutes to reach our initial funding goal, and we'd hit $100,000 in about 6 minutes. We just passed the $350,000 stretch goal as I was writing this. If I'm not mistaken, getting to that level took a few days last time. It's been exciting and crazy around the office today!

SoBs was, of course, the game that brought me to Flying Frog Productions, and I wasn't on the team when that first kickstarter went live. So it's kinda wild to see things from this side. I was a random customer back then, a fan of a few FFP titles (A Touch Of Evil, first among them), but it was a big risky investment on a game I hadn't played yet at the time. A risk well worth taking, as it turns out. SoBs eventually became my favorite board game, and my persistent stalking of the designers at local conventions somehow lead to me joining the playtest team for upcoming expansions, and from there it grew in to the best damn job I've ever had.

Anyhow, I'm excited, and I think you should to be excited, too! The game is solid, and this kickstarter is exploding way faster than we anticipated, which means we're gonna hit some amazing stretch goals. Those goals will solidify the Shogun pledge level (the higher of the two pledge levels) into an amazing deal, much as they did for the Minecart pledges of the previous kickstarter. I can't reveal anything just yet, but trust me, I've seen the battle plan, and it's gonna kick even more butt than it already has.

Tiny little extra bonus: If you back in the first 24 hours (before 3 pm, Pacific Time, on Tuesday November 1st, 2016) you get an extra $5 off.

Games I played this week.

An expanded version of my weekly gamelog on facebook.

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Played Red Seven, Five Tribes, and Shadow Hunters at the Ballard Board Game Meet-Up at Card Kingdom/Cafe Mox. The games were good, the group is very welcoming, and the venue is pretty amazing. Much better than staying home and watching TV.

Red Seven is good filler or warm-up material. Solid, but not particularly exciting. It's an interesting retooling of the old trick-taking mechanic, but the lightness of play and absence of a theme keeps it from truly moving me. A game I'm always willing to play, but not one I'd go out of my way to schedule.

Five Tribes is a really deep game, with lots of moving parts and a fairly daunting learning curve. I spent the whole game feeling like I was doing horribly because I could never identify moves that were actually splashy enough to be worth bidding the victory points to get first player status. I think I only bid 3 times, and took my turn at the back of the pack round after round. All game long, I thought for sure I was going to come in dead last. Then we totaled the final scores, and I was second place and just a couple points behind the leader. I had 143 points, the winner had 146 points, and fourth place was 112 if I remember correctly. So there really were very few turns where it was worth spending, that wasn’t just me being confused or overly cautious. We were all new to the game, though, so there's some hope that more experienced players would have weighed the value of their bids better and left my penny-pinching play-style in the dust.  I'd like to give this one another try, and see how my strategy develops over repeated plays.

Shadow Hunters is short enough to be party-game filler but intriguing enough to be something more. It's a perfect game for a large meet-up, as it can handle a large number of players easily and is short enough to let people join and quit as they please. It starts with a puzzle, and generally ends with a beat-down. It’s got some “aha!” moments, and excitement, but is very random and at times unfair. Luckily the game is usually short and speedy, so if you’re getting the short end of the randomness stick at least you don’t have to suffer very long. Overall, I enjoy it quite a bit. It's got a little in common with both Are You A Werewolf? and Betrayal At House On The Hill, but is faster and shorter than either. I dig it.

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I played an unpublished scenario of Shadows of Brimstone with Jeremy, Chris, and Sarah up at the Flying Frog Productions studios. Brimstone continues to be a great co-op experience, and has grown more challenging with the expansion previews from GenCon. We’ve been playtesting some amazing content that I'm not at liberty to discuss, other than to assure you that the game keeps getting better and better.

I wish I could fit more plays of SOBs into my schedule right now, but it requires a fair chunk of time and table space. In addition to the playtests, I have two other groups that I specifically schedule Brimstone games with. It's hard to get everyone's calendar's aligned with the days when my table is clear, though perhaps that speaks to my housekeeping just as much as it does the the requirements of the game. This was extra complicated by mass of boxes (over a hundred of them) that was occupying my living room for the past couple weeks. I had to cancel two gaming events this week to stay home culling boxes of old stuff I no longer need in my life. If I don't get a box or two done every single day, I'll never get through them all.

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Goofed off with some Rock Band 4 at a Halloween party. We traded instruments and parts in and out every few songs. Rock Band is more an activity than a game, but it's highly enjoyable... especially when there's enough players on-site to feel like an audience. Scott rick-rolled us all (but especially Jim) during one of his turns on the microphone.

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You'll notice no RPGs this week. That's something I have to rectify soon. Workplace exhaustion and the aforementioned boxes kept me from attending a couple of usual gaming nights, plus there were some non-game events on my calendar. Other cool things I did this week included seeing a friend's short film play in a movie theater, and participating in a long training and team-building session for the Dragonflight board of directors. I've kept myself busy. 

Recent Gaming 9-29 to 10-5

#WhatDidYouPlayMondays #GameLog for 9/29 - 10/5/2015

Card Games: Dark Gothic / Colonial Horror, and Guillotine
RPG / Story Game: Forget Me Not
Board Game: Shadows of Brimstone
Video Game: Sir, You Are Being Hunted!

On Friday I played Dark Gothic with the cards mixed in from the Colonial Horror stand-alone expansion, as well as the smaller Smuggler's Den, Curse of the Werewolf, Dryad of Harper's Wood, and Forgotten Island expansions. I played this with Mark Walters and Laura Mortensen. It was a tense game that ended in defeat for all of us, as our second Villain was The Necromancer. He has two powers that make Minions move to the Shadows, and we kept drawing new Minions to replace the old ones. My deck was really working well and I had multiple turns where I had the cards in hand to defeat the Necromancer but couldn't because his Fight ability would cost us the game. Our bad luck in top-decking only Minions for two full rounds around the table eventually doomed the town of Shadowbrook.

Guillotine is more or less light filler, but it's always an enjoyable way to cap off an evening when the brain power or energy is starting to run low. Long enough to wind down properly, short and light enough to not wear out it's welcome as you do so. We play with the house rule that starting hands are only 3 cards, instead of 5. I first invoked that house rule at least a decade ago when doing demos at the game store I used to run, with the intention of making it easier on new players and speeding up the demos. What I found was that it actually enhanced the game greatly, and I've used that rule every since. With a full hand of 5 cards, there's often a card or two that you never feel the need to use all game long because you've got better options (so they just sit there dead in your hand). 3 cards to start opens up the need to occasionally play one of the weaker cards, and makes it feel more challenging. In the process it provides a little more variety to play experience, which is a good thing when you've had the game in your collection for 10 or 15 years. This time, Mark won, and Laura and I were tied for second place just behind him. 

On Monday I got together with Mark, Laura, Erik and Devon at Card Kingdom, and we played a fun RPG / Story Game called Forget Me Not. It was a riot. Our plot was over-the-top and our characters masticated all over the scenery. The Sheriff was crazy, the local avant-garde artist was murderous and possibly even crazier then the Sheriff, and eventually most of the town was driven just as batty as them by ergot poisoning at the bake sale (or the need for revenge). Very goofy and hectic. Pretty far from the tone of the source material (it reads as basically an unlicensed Twin Peaks RPG), but so damn much fun! I really love the way the randomized pregens and randomized subplots gives the game a solid structure, but mixes it up from one play to the next. Hugely enjoyable. 

On Thursday I went up to Flying Frog Productions' studio to help with playtesting and proof-reading of top-secret Shadows of Brimstone expansions. That's all I'm allowed to say about that at the moment, other than "OMG you guys, there is so much cool stuff coming up for Shadows of Brimstone! Trust me, you're gonna love it!"

Speaking of which, on Saturday and Sunday I spent a little time each night assembling miniatures for my own personal copy of Shadows of Brimstone. These were GenCon preview figures, stuff that will eventually show up in Wave(s) 1.5 or 2 of the Kickstarter. I built the Serpentmen of Jargono and the Masters of the Void deluxe enemy sets, and the Scourge Rats enemy set. The Serpentmen come with a Shaman who has magic trinkets and a deck of spells, and despite the name they are not purely restricted to Jargono (they can and do show up in the mines). The Masters of the Void has some sorcerers that I like to call the KKKultists of KKKthulhu. Tentacles protruding from creepy hoods. They also have a spell deck. The two spellcasting Enemy types each has a very different feel to their magic (and the "AI" that determines how they act each turn), and they really shake up the game quite nicely. Masters of the Void also comes with some other (non-spellcaster) figures that have mechanics that kind of invert which characters are likely to be effective in the fight. The high-initiative xp-gobblers in the party will have a hard time hurting Void Hounds, and the slower PCs will be able to claim a larger-than-normal share of the glory. Scourge Rats aren't nearly as "sexy" as either of those two sets, but they're mechanically simpler and seemed like a good choice to balance out the extra complexity I'd just added with the deluxe spellcasters. I've got several more sets to break out and assemble in the near future, but decided that I could play a session or two with just these three expansions (plus the two core sets and Caverns of Cynder) before I needed to add in more.

That decision left me with an hour or two open at the end of each of those nights to play a video game to unwind. I chose Sir, You Are Being Hunted! which I picked up inexpensively as part of a Humble Indie Bundle this week. It's sort of like a first-person shooter, except it's more about stealth than combat. That, or I'm just really bad at the combat parts. You're on a random archipelago that feels very British, and (as the name implies) you're being hunted by prim and proper robots. I am _so_ terrible at this game, but it's fun enough I'm sure I'll give it another go sometime soon.

A little more on this week's games

An expanded counterpart to this week's #whatdidyouplaymondays post on Facebook... 

On Wednesday, I GM'd a session of FATE on Roll20, for Brendan Riley, Edmund Metheny and Sophie Lagacé. That was a lot of fun, but to be honest my campaign is a little shaky and underdeveloped at this point. I've been having trouble finding the time to prepare to my usual outrageous standards, now that I've got a job and all. FATE is a great system, but I find that it always takes me a few sessions as GM to fine tune and get comfortable with the difficulty numbers and the fate-point economy. The first session or two never seems to meet the level of dramatic and mathematic tension that I want, but then it usually gels in session 3 or 4. So, perhaps I'll do better this week. Here's a picture of one of my screens on Roll20:

On Friday night, I played Shadows of Brimstone with Laura Mortensen and Mark Walters. We played a new mission (from Caverns of Cynder) called "Defend the Bridge". It was a short scenario, and we won easily, but it was highly enjoyable. The special rules in the mission for monster movement and targeting provided a completely new tactical challenge, and it was a neat change of pace from the usual dynamics of the game.

That's the only face-to-face gaming I've done this week, despite having booked my calendar full of games that didn't happen. In the past 7 days I've had 4 different gaming events get cancelled. I bowed out of one myself to hang with a highschool friend I hadn't seen in decades, who was only in town (and the country, actually) for a short time. That was definitely worth skipping a game. In the days following, however, two other games got cancelled by other people, and the fourth was ruined by traffic. A bus snafu made me over an hour late to a story game meetup, and there was no room left at any of the tables by the time I got there. That was a bit of a bummer.

If you count videogames it gets a little better. I played some Dungeons of Dredmor on Saturday night, and got a swashbuckling rogue build through the first three floors, so about 1/5th the way through the entire game. It's going well so far, but I'm worried that this character may run out of steam in the deeper floors. His skills have decent early-game synergy, but he doesn't really have an endgame strategy. I'll have to get at least a little lucky on equipment drops, and play really sharply on the lower floors.

Next week, I plan to return to LARPing. It's been about a decade since I last made the angsty gothic scene associated with Live Action games by White Wolf, but I'll be easing myself back in to the madness by trying a session of a Changeling LARP. If I didn't work at 6 am so often, I'd go play Vampire or Werewolf, but at least Changeling can be played in daylight without it ruining the mood. LARPing, though, for reals. In the unlikely event that I break out the eyeliner and the big tin ankh, I promise I'll post pictures. 

Catching Up With The Summer Of Extremes

It has been a while since I blogged. Life has been far more complicated than usual, and gaming has been in "feast or famine" mode this summer.  2015 has been terribly extreme. The good parts have been really truly wonderful, but laced between them has been some absolutely crushing bad news for my personal life, from which I haven't completely recovered.

Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for both of the organizations mentioned below (Dragonflight and Flying Frog Productions), not an employee. While I do sometimes speak from a position of some authority in my work for Dragonflight, I do not speak in any official capacity for Flying Frog (I'm just a volunteer who helps when need with playtesting and teaching demos). Any opinions expressed in this post are mine, and mine alone, and should not be taken to represent any official positions of either of those two organizations. This isn't really a post about those groups, it's a post about my life, parts of which just happen to occur in the vicinity of those groups at the moment. 

Let's just start with the elephant in my (entirely new) room. After over 14 years together, Sarah and I are getting a divorce. (That's why you'll no longer see anything about me being a "kept man" in my bio on this site.) It came on suddenly, without really any warning for me. There was some weird tension for a couple of weeks, but it started while my mom was visiting for 2 months, so I misinterpreted all the tension as being just a function of the extended house-guest. Then, boom!, "I think maybe I don't love you anymore", out of nowhere, followed by a demand for divorce just one marital counseling session later. No fights. Not much effort spent trying to fix things, either. Just done and gone in a hurry. One minute I was a house-husband, the next I'm a grocery-store clerk living alone. (Apparently, she'd been unhappy for some time, and I just didn't see the warning signs at all.) I'm still working through it. That much is essentially public record and I don't feel I'm betraying any confidence in sharing the story, such as it is, of our sudden dissolution.

Both of my RPG campaigns (an Everway campaign, as well a Dark Heresy campaign using a hybrid of Warhammer 3rd and Edge of the Empire rules) collapsed in the process of the rapid separation. She's been a player in every multi-session game I've run in all those years, and was my co-GM in the Everway campaign. So my most recent big creative outlets vanished. To be honest, I kinda crumpled there for a while. She started her life over pretty fast (from my perspective anyway),  but I've found it hard to get going again, at least on a personal level.  For the past few years I've been the quiet one, and she's always been our social scheduler. Charisma and organization are among her strengths. So, before I knew it, she was the one with invites to events, including regular RPGs on the evenings most of our friends have free, and I'm only this week finally trying to cobble together a group and a game. Now to be fair, I've still been attending the weekly rotating-GM one-shot group that I've been associated with over the past 6 years, but that group doesn't always meet regularly, and I've had no time (my hours filled with Dragonflight prep, see below) to GM anything myself. GMing has always been my first and favorite hobby. But more than that, the creative process of GMing is the way I recover from stressful days. GM prep work is my preferred way to fill dead hours and keep my brain busy enough that I don't obsess over the little things in life. So, the extended break from it has further slowed my own healing over the gaping wound in my life, at the same time that I suddenly have a lot more hours to fill and lot more little things feeling wrong.

I'm sure there's a large helping of green-eyed sour grapes of envy poisoning my perspective there, as well. There were a couple of weeks early in the separation where every time I got up the nerve to call friends to see "what are you doing tonight?" the answer was invariably "going somewhere with Sarah, so sorry but you're not invited" and that hurt. I know she wasn't maliciously out-scheduling me, it's just in her nature to plan something cool for every box on the calendar, just as it's in my nature to focus on the now and go with the flow. Problem was, my flow had gotten a little damned up. There were big things on the horizon, and I couldn't figure out how my social life was going to trickle around them. Which, convenient to the metaphor but unpleasant for me, meant I worried a great deal about washing up on the rocks.

Convention season was, at that time, just ahead of us. I'd swung an invite to attend GenCon as a volunteer helping the Flying Frog Productions team, and of course I was running the main ballroom as Board and Card Game Coordinator for Dragonflight the week after. Both of those were solid, upbeat accomplishments that I own, and can be proud of. That said, the invite I'd landed was for both of us to volunteer, and the tickets to Indianapolis were already purchased before we contemplated divorce, and she was signed up to be the Registrar for Dragonflight, too. So there was a lot of motivation to part with a functional friendship or at least a working relationship, rather than just kick and scream and break each others' toys. We seem to have pulled that off for the short term anyway, and with any luck we may actually be one of those rare few ex-couples that stay friendly over the years. I still have some sore feelings over the sense of rejection that comes from losing love, but things could certainly have gone a lot worse and been even more painful had either of us decided not to be so smart and adult about it. Life is a cooperative game, and it doesn't do anyone any good to mess with the other players at your table. I'll take my victories where I can get them, even snatching them from the jaws of divorce.

On that note of victory, I should add that both conventions went really damn well, and I've been invited back to help next time(s).  So that's really good. Hard work, but rewarding, and they gave me something to throw myself into instead of just sitting in a room by myself feeling pitiful. I think overall they did me a lot of good, even though it meant I was too busy every night leading up to the Cons to consider putting together the game that might have helped me de-stress. It's a trade-off. GMing sooner might have been more helpful, but these Cons required me to interact with people and not just lock myself up in my new little apartment. If I didn't have the Conventions to keep me busy, there's no guarantee that would have turned into "more time to GM" and not just "more time to wallow in my loneliness". Especially early on.

Apparently, I felt very strongly about that card.

First was the unending stream of games that was GenCon. I lost count of how many dozens of people I taught how to play Colonial Horror / Dark Gothic at the Frog booth. It was quite a few, many of whom went on to buy the game. In the evenings I hung with new friends on the Frog team, playing card games over drinks and slowly processing all the crazy new emotions just barely contained inside my head. Jason and Scott Hill (the brothers at the core of Flying Frog Productions) are two of the most generous people I have ever met, and they made us all feel like family. Hotel, airfare, food, con tickets -- all paid for, and all I had to do in return was spend my days teaching people how to play a game I really enjoy. I got my quota of much-needed fun that week, that's for sure. And for several weeks before that too, as the fine folks at Flying Frog have been inviting me up once-a-week for the past few months to help playtest upcoming Shadows of Brimstone expansions (many of which debuted at GenCon). That's been a series of very cool experiences. It's rather amazing just how well they treat their volunteers.

One night at GenCon they took us to True Dungeon as a group, which was staggeringly enjoyable, and very unique. Live-action puzzle-solving in a 3D life-sized dungeon, with a shuffleboard to-hit system and memorization minigames for the spellcasters. It was a lot of fun, and I definitely carried my weight by solving one of the puzzle rooms singlehandedly, and by scoring some high-damage spells during our fight scenes. Go me!

The weekend after that was Dragonflight. GenCon had over 60,000 gamers in attendance, and Dragonflight had under 800. That gives two very different experiences. One is roiling chaos, the other feels more like a community. (Though, as I said, the Flying Frog crew was my community while in the GenCon chaos, so I've been surrounded by friends this whole time.)  This was my third Dragonflight, so there were a lot of familiar faces, and I'd gotten a good sense for how the convention rolls along.

Dragonflight ballroom, on a slow morning hour.

It was my first year as Area Coordinator for the main room at Dragonflight, so I had a lot of responsibilities... and yet, it felt like less work than the previous year. Last year, we'd had a big computer problem, and I'd been "Johnny on the spot" retro-converting us back to a paper sign-up system when the website went down. That was grueling work, but worth it to keep the convention running in spite of tech failure. This year, I pushed to just use electronic/online for pre-registration leading up to the convention, and have paper sign-up sheets prepared in advance for the events. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, and it all went really smoothly.  Smoothly enough I was free to actually play a couple games during the convention. (Meanwhile, Sarah had similar impressive success at the Registration booth. Go, Sarah!) Multiple people have told me that this was the smoothest running Dragonflight in over a decade, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. Attendance was up 25%, but numerous people actually said it felt like it was down a little from last year because the lines were so short and it was so easy to get into a game or find a table. I went to a lot of trouble engineering the flow of the ballroom to make it feel that way, and I'm thrilled it paid off so well. Go me again!

That said, there were a number of other changes and improvements I was unable to implement this year at Dragonflight. I didn't get to everything on my list, partly because I was away at GenCon the week before, partly because it was my first year in this role and I underestimated how much work it would be, but partly because all the stress and craziness in my life eroded my focus and efficiency a bit this summer. Regardless, the convention still went well enough that people were impressed, and partly as a result I've been elected to the Dragonflight Board of Directors. So I'll get to implement my ideas next year.  And to be honest, the hours I put in in the last two months before Dragonflight were a little unreasonable anyway. I had around 400 games to coordinate -- I had to solicit GMs and game hosts, assign them rooms and tables, create a schedule and a map, approve listings on our web software, edit descriptions for the program, and answer a lot of questions over many months to make this all run so flawlessly on the weekend in question. The only person who had more work than me was Amy, our Convention Director (though I'm sure Ted, our Web Developer, would disagree with my assessment). Next year I hope to "hire" (it's an all-volunteer organization) an assistant to handle some percentage of the work. I've got a lot to be proud of, and have laid a solid foundation for even better events next year.

Not bad for a single week.

In the first 7 days of June 2015, I played the following games:

• Dark Gothic (semi-cooperative deck-building card game) x4 game sessions
• Shadows of Brimstone (cooperative miniatures board game)
• Pandemic: The Cure (cooperative dice game) x2 game sessions
• War of the Worlds (home-brewed RPG scenario)
• Ultimate Werewolf (8+ player bluffing/deduction party game) x7 game sessions
• Shadowrun Crossfire (cooperative deck-building card game) x6 game sessions
• Forbidden Desert (cooperative board game) x3 game sessions
• Dead of Winter (cooperative survival-horror board game) x2 game sessions
• Lego Avengers 1895 (home-brewed RPG scenario)

That's 27 plays total of 9 different games, with over 20 different people (ranging from as few as 2-3 in some of the games all the way up to 8-12 players per round of Ultimate Werewolf). Both RPGs were run by GMs I hadn't gamed with in four years or longer. Some of the games were pretty fast little things (Pandemic: The Cure can be pretty zippy), but there were several multi-hour games on that list (Brimstone, Dead of Winter, both RPGs). It's been a pretty great week in regards to restocking the fun after a recent gaming deficit. I actually had the opportunity to spend a little more time gaming than I did this week: I ended up cancelling an RPG session I was going to run on Wednesday because a player had a rough day at work and needed to call the night early. On top of all that, I spent 4 hours at an art museum this week, and took multiple long walks that added up to at least 10 miles.

I needed it, though. The past few weeks have been really stressful and exhausting (more about that some other time, perhaps). I really appreciated the chance to kick back and game my brains out for a few days.

Flying Frog Productions

On International TableTop Day last weekend, I ran a bunch of demos for Flying Frog Productions at Uncle's Games at the Crossroads Mall. I taught 14 people how to play A Touch of Evil: Dark Gothic that day, and Uncle's sold out of copies of the game I was running. It felt kinda good, resonating back to my time running a game store years back before we moved out to Seattle. I clicked well with the Flying Frog staff and volunteer team, and it sounds likely that Scott Hill from FFPwill call upon my services as a volunteer for future demos and events. So that's a pretty exciting development for me.

Yesterday at home, Sarah and I played another fun game session of Shadows of Brimstone (also by Flying Frog Productions). For those who are unfamiliar, Shadows of Brimstone is a big, RPG-like cowboys-vs-cthulhu dungeon-crawl dice-fest miniatures-based board game with really great character- and world- building, and lots of variety and replayability.  If that sounds like fun, you should go buy it now, because it really is the best of the dungeon-crawl genre. (Believe it or not, this is my really trimmed back, dialed-down-the-fanboy version of this post. The rough draft was painfully exuberant and about 5 times a long. Seriously, it's one of my all time favorite games.)

As I looked over my tally sheet where I record missions we'd won and lost, I realized that my wife and I have played about 30 sessions of Brimstone so far (maybe more as I realize today that there's at least two sessions we didn't write down on that log). Since most of our games have been with 4 players and lasted around 3 hours, it amounts to well over 350 "man-hours" of entertainment split between us and the various groups of friends we play it with. When we put up the money for a "Minecart" level pledge on the SoB kickstarter, it felt risky. My wife and I are not rich. We'd never spent that much on a single game before, let alone a game we hadn't even played yet. It was a big leap of faith, but luckily the game turned out to be great. I have _so_ gotten my money's worth already.

Shadows of Brimstone is already fun and engaging, and it's just gonna keep getting deeper and better as the expansions roll out later this year. I've talked to Jason and Scott at multiple conventions (I've pretty much been stalking them at their booths at PAX and ECCC ever since Brimstone was announced), and I'm very excited about everything they've told me is coming up. New characters, decks, monsters, missions, and whole other worlds. So many good treats in store for us! Here's a BGG thread I started about some of the cool stuff that they told me about at ECCC. I meant to cross-post it here at the time, and just got too busy to do so.

Highlights from Emerald City Comic Con

I went to the Emerald City Comic Con last weekend.  My wife joined me on Friday, but due to illness she had to skip out on the other two days of the con (and three days of work after that). Cons are better when you've got a friend to gawk with, but I still had a lot of fun despite being on my own for the weekend.

I ran two sessions of Psi*Run for the Games On Demand / Story Game Seattle booth. The first was a little disjointed and didn't really come together until the third hour of play. That happens sometimes with the game, due to its highly improvisational nature. The second session found its footing immediately, and just took off. One of the players posted "playing my new favorite RPG, Psi*Run" to her Facebook page. So that's definitely a success. Both games were over-the-top crazy, but I suspect the first group might have enjoyed it a little more if I'd reigned in the zaniness a bit early on and given them a more coherent faction of Chasers.

While at the con, I made frequent visits to the Flying Frog Productions booth. The Frog continues to impress me with their customer service, friendliness, and with the immense fun their games provide. They told me a lot of what's coming up in future Brimstone expansions, which deserves a post of its own here sometime soon. Now that I'm not nursing my wife back to health, I should be able to find time to type that up.


Other purchases I made last weekend included:

• 4 expansion decks for Shadows of Brimstone, including much-needed new artifact cards for Targa and Jargono and some more blanks just in case we burn through those in a hurry too.
• 2 expansion decks for Fortune and Glory.
• A die-rolling tray to reduce dice-related clutter when playing big board games. I've had one for years, and decided it would be useful to get a second one.
• Two expansion decks for Super Fight that add Locations and Scenarios to provide some context for the ridiculous battles in the game.
• A handful of custom Lego minifigs and accessory pieces. I have plans to use these in an RPG I'm running called BrickerWorld.
• An album by local nerd-rock group Kirby Krackle. Got it signed by the song-writer.
• The goofy godzillesque board game Terror In Meeple City.
• Crazy game and science themed nail art (for my wife) from Espionage Cosmetics. She can decorate her fingers in nebulas and dice.
• A gift for an out-of-town friend that I probably can't talk about until it shows up in his mailbox.

Beyond that, I played a few demos, geeked out a lot, and just generally had fun. It was a really good con.




EDIT: Oops, forgot to mention the expansion deck "Curse of the Werewolf" for Dark Gothic. It's a very small expansion, but solid. I had to build an entry for it on Board Game Geek it was so new.

Fully Cooperative

My wife and I played 5 games of Shadows of Brimstone in this past week. Three 2-player games, and two games with other couples. While I’ve only recently been keeping track on the exact count, I’d guess that I played the game at least 20 times before this week.  I haven't paid much attention to the clock, but my instinct is that they've probably averaged around 3 to 4 hours a piece.  So I’ve got at least 100 hours of play under my belt, plus an unhealthy amount of time thinking about it and a day or two spent assembling minis. So I clearly like it a lot, is what I'm saying.

For the two most recent sessions, we tried out making the game _fully_and_actually_ cooperative (as opposed to _just_fully_cooperative_, as the game is written). Meaning that we divvied up the XP and $ rewards of the mines evenly. Artifacts and Darkstone, too, though that sometimes required some negotiating. For the main part, we handled it like an old D&D party, giving everyone fair, if not exactly equal loot. (You know how it works. If your party only has 1 fighter, but the only two magic items found were a bastard sword and platemail, you give those to the fighter and reduce his share of the gold somewhat to compensate.) 

I was amazed how much more satisfying an experience this was. I've really enjoyed Brimstone, but there's always this little bit of either envy or guilt tainting the experience every time we play. If I personally had a bad game, I was envious of the XP or Wealth that others were getting instead of me. Conversely, if my dice were hot while someone else was struggling with bad luck, I always felt really guilty about it. It’s because I’d look ahead at the big picture and the long campaign.

This dissatisfaction was basically unique to Shadows of Brimstone amongst all the cooperative games we own. Other co-op games don't trigger this emotion in me.

• If we're playing Pandemic, and I’m the Researcher while the other two players are the Dispatcher and the Medic, I don’t feel any envy. Those two characters acting in combo is brokenly good, but having it at the table makes the win more likely for everyone. Go team! 
• In Space Hulk: Death Angel, I’m naturally a tiny bit more protective of my own fireteams than others', but if something bad happens to my guys I don’t take it personally, and I often sacrifice my marines for the sake of the mission (or to save someone else's character whose special power I feel is vital to our success). 
• Even in other Flying Frog Productions games, there was rarely a sense of envy or guilt. If you have terrible luck when drawing cards in A Touch Of Evil you might end up with only hardship instead of building up stats and equipment, but even with the worst possible draws you at least know that the next time you break out the game it will all reset to a level playing field. You might feel a little bad that you’re not carrying your weight in the cooperative game, but if someone else is having a good run of luck you can still be excited for them (and hope they’ll do well enough to carry you to a victory). 

In any of those other cooperative games, I've never or rarely felt a need to be competitive.

Brimstone is different, because XP is awarded individually per attack roll or skill check. Each session in which you underperform makes it more likely you’ll have subsequent bad sessions (or at least relatively bad when compared to the other characters) in the future. Someone scoring a little more XP or cash than another in one session is no big deal, but if it enables them to level up sooner and buy more potent equipment it could compound and lead to an ever-increasing power gap between the Heroes.

Because it's in my nature to look at the big picture and evolving patterns, I rarely felt completely happy with the way Brimstone played out. Fear that the XP disparity would eventually get out of hand was sometimes distracting me from enjoying the game. Not enough to ruin it, but enough to undermine the fun just a little every single session. Splitting up the rewards equally fixed that entirely. We played two games yesterday with the new reward system, and even though my Bandido flopped horribly and got KO’d in the second game, I still had fun cheering on the other player as she fought valiantly over my not-dead-yet body. A good game, now made better.

We tracked XP with poker chips, and divided them out evenly at the end of each fight, during the Catch Your Breath phase of each turn. Cash went into a common pool, and was split up right before the Traveling step at the end of the Adventure. Dark Stone gained during the adventure was counted as $75 towards your share of the cash. Realistically, it sells for about $90 on average at the Frontier Outpost, but it comes with extra risks (Corruption check, Town Events, etc) that caused us to settle on a figure that compensates you a little for those dangers. Gear and Artifacts found were also counted against cash share. It worked well. We did all the splitting up before heading to town, and didn't split up rewards (or consequences) from Traveling or Town Events. While this did leave some room for variation that could theoretically matter in the longest of runs, it was a small variance and a lot less work than trying to divvy up again every day in Town.

Chasing Brimstone

Over at Board Game Geek, someone was asking for ideas for Shadows of Brimstone scenarios that wouldn't just play out as the same "stumbling about in search of clue tokens" feel that is the default experience for most of the published missions.

Here's the rough idea I threw at him. I figure I might as well cross-post it here, since I haven't blogged much lately.

I propose a mission that is a chase through a tunnel, where you place ~4 tiles in a row at the start. Place the Corrupt Sheriff token (or an unused red mini) at the far end from where the Heroes start. Players are trying to catch up with him.

How far he moves each turn depends on the Hold Back The Darkness rolls / Depth Track, or a custom chart. Some rolls trigger him to jump ahead to the start of the next tile, and other rolls just send him a number of spaces forward.

You could avoid Exploration Tokens entirely, so no clues at all. Maybe the only Encounter cards drawn are ones that correspond to the "Advanced" block at the bottom of room tiles. Threats are produced by the same chart that governs the Corrupt Sheriff's movement. Instead of being Threats determined by your Posse level, it'd be only Low Threats entering via side doors, and the frequency (instead of Threat Card color) is determined by your posse level.

They want to bring the Corrupt Sheriff back to justice, which requires getting adjacent to him and making a 6+ Strength check to wrestle him down. Once he's down, no more monsters spawn, and the players win if he's down and they've killed all the monsters that had appeared during the chase.

Stopping to fight the monsters while the sheriff is still on the loose is counter-productive. There'd be a rapid pace forced on the players, with optimal play being about punching a hole through the monster formation, not fighting everything to death (which would only allow the Corrupt Sheriff more time to run away).

Catching Your Breath wouldn't be triggered by eliminating all the monsters, as there's never a moment without at least that one Enemy (the Corrupt Sheriff) in play. So instead Catching Your Breath comes from some entry on the Sheriff's movement chart, which also provides the Loot rewards, and can happen even if there are monsters still in play.

The Corrupt Sheriff is himself carrying a Lantern, so if a Hero is faster than the rest of their posse, they could risk running ahead and try to use the villain's light instead.

The idea would be to reward characters with Move bonuses, since they'd be able to catch up with him fairly quickly. In one of the posses I play with, there's a character with +3 movement, that's pretty much always wasted as she can't safely move ahead of us slow-pokes. In this scenario, she'd excel, provided she can slip around the Low Threats as they come up.

It would also make "discard and redraw the map tile" powers somewhat better than they are in most missions. You'd use them to redraw large rooms (since the Corrupt Sheriff can sometimes jump the whole length of a room in a single turn) in favor of short passages and small rooms.

Building the chart and getting the timing right on the Sheriff's movement and monster spawns would take a lot of playtesting and number-crunching, but it's a starting point.

I haven't posted more Shadows of Brimstone cards

 WARNING: In the body of this post I assume some dark motives on the part of a fellow gamer that likely didn't exist. Copyright law is a nasty tangled mess, and involves a lot of weird grey areas and few clear-cut solutions.  I misread the situation, and came off sounding like a sanctimonious prick. I still think it was the right thing for me to pull the cards in question off the internet, but I probably didn't need to be quite so "high horse" about it. I'm leaving this post intact, so that if anyone asks me what happened to those files, I can just direct them here rather than start this fight all over again.


Several weeks back, I made some cards for use with my favorite game of 2014, Shadows of Brimstone.  I posted one group of those cards to this blog, and announced I'd be making more. While I did make several more, and have played a ton of the game in these past months, I never got around to posting any other Town Item cards here. I just used them in my home.

Since then:

Some other fans have produced similar cards for their own use. Many of those were posted to the various corners of the web. This made my efforts less necessary. I slowed down my work a lot, and didn't feel very motivated to go to the trouble of posting the cards I did make. Why go to the trouble when there were so many alternatives.

At least one of those other fans made his files available via a "lightning press"-style company, where you could click a button, and pay money to have the deck printed commercially and shipped to you. The person who did this set this up so they'd get a commission from the printer, and the printer would make money, but FFP, the makers of Shadows of Brimstone would get zero money for it.

FFP, publishers of Shadows of Brimstone, asked that person to cease and desist. This was a completely reasonable request. As much as I support remix culture, copyleft, creative and artistic freedom and fan-created expansions, I can understand that Flying Frog Productions has a need to protect their Intellectual Property rights. The fan in question was profiting on these cards, which included significant amounts of text stolen straight out of FFP's rulebooks and charts. That's not cool, and FFP was in the right for asking them to stop it.

Today, that so-called fan tried to start a nasty rumor about FFP*. I'm not going to repeat it, or link to it because I don't want to give it any support. (Nor am I naming that person, nor linking to the printing company he'd partnered with, because I don't want this nastiness to drive any business or internet traffic to them.) From my perspective, it seems like that person is childishly lashing out in retaliation. I can only guess at their motives, but given the context the guesses that pop into my head are all pretty damning. That so-called fan's actions were reprehensible.

So, I'm taking the high road here, and am going to remove my versions of the Town Item cards from my previous post. FFP hasn't asked me to do anything of the sort. They probably don't even know my site exists or that I made such cards. But they've made their wishes clearly known in the more severe case of someone else making money by plagiarism and piracy, and I don't want to be (anything like) that guy.

*: Speaking of That Guy: He's responded at the original place and says it wasn't meant as a rumor, just a joke.  Feels like he's just backpedal-ing once I called him on it, but I don't know the guy, so I can't really say what's going through his head. If it was a joke, it was ill-considered. Either way, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I guess I should give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume he was so innocent regarding this that he had no idea anyone could misinterpret his words and motive the way I did. The alternative would be to pick further fights over the internet, and that's never a worthwhile use of time or energy.

(Also, FFP had previously announced they'd be releasing an "Expanded Frontier Town" supplement, which I assumed was new material, but I now realize may actually just be the sorts of Town Item cards that fans were making. I don't want my little fan project to make the original designer's previously announced expansion unprofitable. That would suck.)

I've been brainstorming entirely new cards for when my Brimstone encounter decks run low, and I'll probably still post those whenever I complete them. They'll be entirely new cards for use with the official Shadows of Brimstone blanks, not merely plagiarized or infringing text, and if I make them available, they'll be available for free.

High Degree of Randomness

I've played Shadows of Brimstone 5 times now: twice at demos with the publishers, and three times at home.

I'm enjoying the game significantly. The randomness is high, but it provides a good variety of play experience. You never know what you're going to get.

We completed our mission at both of the demos with FFP really easily, so much so that I was mildly worried the game was too easy...

Since getting it home, we've lost three missions in a row. So, "too easy" is not such a concern now.

Cross-Posted at BGG 

If this is sounding familiar, it's probably because I adapted this from something I wrote on the forums at Board Game Geek. This version is longer, and includes some analysis I hadn't done there, but it also skips a bunch of TPK detail that here I could just replace with a link to a blog post from a couple days ago. This is the better version of the post, but if you've already read the BGG version recently, you may find this to be mostly redundant.

Two of our three losses were TPKs caused by chains of Threat cards. I gave a thorough example in a previous post. The other TPK wasn't quite as ridiculous as it was only a 2-player game, but similar in theme.

The third mission was lost by Darkness meter and the villain escaping. The corridors and exploration tokens pwned us. Despite thorough shuffling, we got 8 corridors in our first 10 map cards. (Each boxed set comes with 6, so a total of 12 of the 48 mine cards are corridors. 8 in a row wasn't even possible if playing from a single boxed set, and the odds of it with 2 boxed sets aren't exactly high.) This pushed us to the deep end of the track where Holding Back the Darkness is really hard. We continued on, but now the Exploration tokens conspired against us, and delivered all 7 of the tokens that don't have Clues before we could get the third (of 5) clued token. Game ended with villain escape despite us having handled all the fights really well and done everything "right". We wasted no time, but still lost on the timer.

These losses were of course all flukes, and won't be indicative of overall play experience across dozens of games... but it's still kind of awesome (or frustrating, if that's how you choose to look at it) to know that such losses are lurking in the cards. Even a well-equipped high-level party will still lose to the Darkness meter from time to time.

Despite the shocking upsets, I still feel that the randomness is a benefit. It's surprisingly fun to get curb-stomped by a cooperative game when you thought you'd won.

Contrasting with Myth:
We took a break from Myth because it was getting too repetitive, and just too easy. There were only two or three monster types that you'd see again and again, and our characters had earned titles and got good gear. Brimstone seems likely to avoid those problems because it has more encounter variety and built-in methods to upgrade the badguys and challenges as you level up. Also, there's more PCs to choose from in Brimstone (assuming you have both boxed sets), and each PC has more customization options out of the gate. If Brimstone starts to grow stale, swapping characters should actually freshen it up again.

In theory, Myth is finally actually shipping wave 2 to the US now, which may even it out until Shadows' second wave many months from now. If I can tear myself away from Brimstone long enough to find out, I'll post my observations here.

My expectation, though, is that the clarity of the rules and card phrasing in Brimstone will push it over the top in any comparison to Myth. There are parts of Myth I do like better (the action decks are fun but clunky, the monster AI is more varied, and the two-stage bosses are cool nod to videogaming), but Brimstone's far gentler learning curve, and dramatically fewer rules-holes is thus-far making it feel like the superior game. 

Little Annoyances:

Which is not to say that Shadows of Brimstone is without flaw entirely.

I do find it a little annoying to track XP during combat in Brimstone. I would have been happier if the xp per hit and per wound on the big guys had been more standardized and tracked with tokens or something that would have sped it up during the most complex of the combat rounds. It's not bad, but it could have been better. It's also not as bad as it had been, because in earlier drafts the XP per wound on large monsters was variable by monster type.

I also think that the high-Initiative characters are going to pull ahead in the XP long haul, and that might prove problematic. In yesterday's game the Saloon Girl asked me to give her my last dynamite so she could throw it before the monsters got to act, and it kinda sucked to be giving her a 100 xp worth of potential kills when she was already the only person to level up that session.  If your group includes anyone prone to jealousy or being a sore loser, I'd recommend rotating out characters frequently (so that you get a different party mix and can share the spotlight moments around the table from game to game), or splitting XP evenly (but that will increase the amount of math during fights, and as I mentioned above, I already find the XP tracking a little tedious). I haven't played enough, or leveled-up enough, to know if this problem self-corrects or not.

I do know that this problem is less pronounced than it was at the time of that first demo many months ago. At the time I complained to Jason Hill that I felt my character (the Gunslinger) was too good, because of the way Quickdraw interacted with Dual-Wielding and his high Initiative. Since that time, the Dual-Wield penalty has been rewritten to be more severe (it used to apply to only your off-hand shots, not all of them), the Quickdraw card gained a restriction that it can't be used when Dual-Wielding, and the XP numbers were tweaked in a way that rewards hits instead of wounds (so you can still get a decent amount of XP if you are shooting at a monster that only has 1 wound left).

On a related note, I don't quite understand why low-Initiative characters lose their activation if the last monster dies before they move. Restarting at the top of the round only makes it more likely that the high-Initiative PCs will get the scavenge rewards. This seems an unnecessary bit of insult-to-injury, even if they do get some manner of compensation during the Catch Your Breath step.

Things I Love

The combat system is solid, and the handfulls of dice are fun. The components are beautiful, and the tile system rocks. Variety of play experience is high, thanks to 18 missions, tons of cards, customized PCs, and lots of random events. As mentioned above, the game can turn difficult with a single bad roll or draw, which is a good thing in a cooperative game. The XP system solves the problem of being the party healer - you score a lot of experience patching up the other characters.

I really appreciate the Traveling and Frontier Town portion(s) of the game. While some folks are probably going to complain that the game inserts random rolls into everything, I find that the risk of events really spices up what would otherwise be another boring min-max shopping trip. I _hate_ those "stop and ponder the equipment list" moments in traditional RPGs, but in Brimstone shopping is actually fun.

House rule caveat: 

When we play, we don't let you buy things for other people. Doing so (there's no clear official rule against it, but the rules seem to vaguely imply you can't) would allow a 6-player posse to hit every location on the first day, and that's just not as much fun as pushing your luck on multi-day town stays. 

And really: Outlaws, Bandidos, Saloon Girls and Gunslingers probably shouldn't be trusting one another with their wallets.

The level-up system is kinda fun, too. You get one random (rolled on a chart) stat boost each level, and then you get to pick a cool power to go with it. This gives you control of the important parts of your character (choosing your new trick) but the random chart makes it harder to min-max. In most level-up systems, the players who've mastered the system (at least to the extent of having identified dump stats and exploitable interactions) have a huge advantage over casual players that haven't done as much analysis. In theory the random stat boost should even this out a bit. It won't perfectly balance things if one person is making poor choices while the other carefully weighs the options, but it should at least reduce the gap. I'm excited to see to what extent that holds true over the long haul, as we've had such bad luck that only 2 characters have leveled up in 5 games (though to be fair, that's also because I've played a different character in each game to get a taste of everything). Worst case scenario: the casual player gets unlucky rolls for stats with no synergy, and the min-maxer rolls exactly what they wanted. While that sounds bad, it's actually basically the default assumption/starting point of most other games.  Worst case is essentially breaking even, and it's still providing at least a small extra hurdle for the shameless min-maxer to have to work around. I feel like that's a step in the right direction.

Doc's Office Cards

EDIT: I've removed the images for the cards that were in this post. Here's why I got rid of them. I felt like I had to take a stand, and not be that guy.

I'm preserving the text below, but it's probably confusing without the pictures. Not much point in reading this one. I've got better posts elsewhere.



Shadows of Brimstone has a very interesting campaign mode. After each adventure in the mines, you head back to town. This involves a handful of die rolls to generate encounters in the frontier town, so that even the act of stocking up for the next mission remains engaging and mildly dangerous. I'm really enjoying the system.

The equipment and effects that you can get in town are recorded on a handful of 8.5 x 11 sheets. You can copy the relevant details down on your character sheet, but after just one or two adventures your sheet becomes a mess of handwritten notes, abbreviations and eraser marks. Which is silly, since the rest of the game goes the route of having cards for everything. I get a card for my starting pistol, and if I find an awesome alien beam weapon on the other side of a dimensional portal it'll be a card too, but the game doesn't have a card for the modestly upgraded gun I bought in town between my first session and getting that lucky artifact draw. Strange, huh? Clearly just a cost-saving measure because the game was already loaded down with ubercool components.

You know where I'm going with this. I sat down and started making spiffy cards of all the entries on the chart. Without further ado, here's everything you can buy at the Doctor's Office that isn't available as a sidebag token. (I started with the Doc's Office, because our first session went so painfully that our total purchases were just Bandage Tokens and a single Specimen Jar.)

Doc's Office Items:

CARDS DELETED.

Bone Saw, Field-Surgeon's Apron, and Tools of Science are straight from the Doc's Office chart. No functional changes at all (unless you count rounding down to the nearest dollar on the apron, but what else could I do?). Note that, like Gear cards, the listed values are the sale value of the item, which is 1/2 it's purchase price (hence my rounding). So don't try buying them for what's listed there. You make purchases according to the big Doc's Office sheet (usually double what's on the card), and only then acquire cards to represent them.

Which brings up a good point: there are no intentional changes to the functionality on any of these cards. I did have to alter some wording for various reasons, but my stated intent is to make them work identically to what comes in the Shadows of Brimstone box. For example, the Specimen Jar (below) may seem a little odd at first glance since it's now two cards, but if you read them both and think it through all the way, you'll see it works exactly the same way as the item on the Doc's Office chart. I just made it two cards so we could easily track from session to session whether the Jar you're carrying has been taken to Another World yet or not. If a failed mission or town event destroys a Doc's Office or two, you no longer have to try to remember whether or not you sacrificed your Move for a turn in that game session two weeks ago. Plus, y'know, cool monster in a jar art.

CARDS DELETED.

As you've no doubt noticed by now, all these cards have a little "Doc's Office" label on them, so you know where they come from and can quickly look them up on the official chart if anything here is unclear.

Doc's Office Injections:

Injections aren't technically items, so I wanted to make them obviously different so no one would get them confused and try to discard them if an Encounter card (etc) stole or ruined an item, and you wouldn't try trading them with adjacent PCs like an item, etc. I made them half-sized and distinctively colored, so it should be hard to mistake them.

	CARDS DELETED.

Again, these are intended to work exactly as the official chart describes, and are merely meant to be reminder cards that you'd stick in whatever ziplock, box, or envelope you're using to keep all your character's cards together for next session. So, for example, the two injections that cause a Corruption Hit when first administered make no mention of that effect here. I'm assuming that you'll read that on the chart, resolve it as per the rules, and only use this card to remind you of your bonuses during the next adventure.

Doc's Office Miscellaneous:

The Sycorath Injection can cause "Temporary Withdrawls", so I figured that might need a reminder card as well, just to be thorough. Then I noticed that the Plague Tent entry on the Doc's event chart can cause a one-session penalty as well, so, I figured what the heck I might as well make that, too. Apparently I'm using little green cards to mean any non-item modifier that you pick up in town and discard at the end of your next adventure.


CARDS DELETED.

I plan on doing the same sort of cards for all the other Frontier Town charts... and then I will probably have to redo them all when the Expanded Frontier Town releases a year from now. :) Unless it uses cards, in which case I'll need to just pull these down.

In case it wasn't abundantly clear from the rest of the text: Everything in this post is derived from work by Flying Frog Productions. No challenge to copyright is intended. Mostly I just engaged in cut and paste with their art and text. The whole point of this project is to make it easier to play the awesome game that is Shadows of Brimstone.

TPK’d in Brimstone

We got our chaps-wearing butts handed to us when we played Shadows of Brimstone on Friday night. We had four PCs (gunslinger, preacher, lawman and an indian scout) so we our threat difficulty was Medium.

The first couple mine cards we drew were just corridors, so we were all getting a little antsy by the time the first room showed up, so we weren’t coordinating our movement very well. The preacher rushes ahead into the new room, leaving my gunslinger around a blind corner. I considered asking him not to do that, but I figured it was our first room and we were all at full health and equipment, so what could go wrong?

The exploration token called for an Attack, so that’s one Medium Threat. The room had an Advanced box on the mine card, calling for an extra Encounter card. Long story short… The Encounter card added a High Threat to the fight. The High Threat was itself "Draw Two Medium Threats", one of which was "Draw Two Low Threats". On round two we failed to Hold Back The Darkness, and the card added another Medium Threat to the fight. Thus our very first battle of the campaign was against 3 Elite (+2 damage) Night Terrors, plus 1 Slasher, 6 Void Spiders and 6 Hellbats. All appearing in a large room around the corner where my gunslinger special ability to get free shots at spawning monsters couldn’t draw line of sight.

TPK in the first room. Technically, they left us for dead, and wandered off to destroy half of the frontier town.  We fought to the bitter end, and when finally the Lawmen fell, there were only two monsters left (the Slasher and the last Night Terror) both of whom were badly wounded. Those of us who didn’t go down the first round scored a lot of XP, but not enough to level up. So we survived, but with a permanent wound or two, hardly any treasure, and very limited options for stocking up before our next mission. We’re off to a great start on the campaign.

I’d actually been a tiny-bit worried prior to this that the game might not be dangerous enough. The two demos we’d played with FFP had been mostly cakewalks (especially the more recent one). Fun cakewalks, to be sure, but not exactly close calls. Instead, I see now that the full game starts in the sweet spot where one wrong move (or unlucky card draw) can smash your face, but actual “gone forever” character death is rare. (They may have stacked the decks and/or exploration tokens at the demos, to specifically encourage the cakewalking. I don't know.) Given the way the Elite and Brutal system automatically scales up the monsters as you advance in character level, I think it’s going to sustain the tension into the later stages of the campaign. I’m very excited to play more again real soon.

A Fistful of Super-Glue

Yee-hah! I just finished gluing all the grey minis from the initial wave of Shadows of Brimstone. 8 player characters and about 50 monsters. A few of them still need some gap-filling green stuff, and nothing's been painted (and, dear god, there's still the duplicate minis in red plastic to tackle), but the both boxed sets are now fully playable. The figures are beautiful, but they were exhausting to assemble.

Played the game on Saturday at the Seattle pickup for Kickstarter backers. It was my second time playing, the first being months ago. Had a blast. Really looking forward to getting an ongoing campaign started soon of this "cowboys vs cthulhu" minis game.

PAX 2014 Highs and Lows

Wow. Pax was mostly pretty wonderful, though I did have one ugly Enforcer incident, and one very failed demo, both of which I'll whine about below.

Dragonflight is more my speed (the crowds of tens of thousands at PAX were at times overwhelming) but I certainly had a great deal of fun.

High Points:

• Flying Frog Productions blew me away with their sheer power of their awesome friendliness. My wife and I really connected with Scott Hill and Mary Beth Magallanes, and we gabbed with them quite a bit. They gave us lots of free stuff, a great deal on something too big to just give away, and then they go their whole staff to sign everything, and then gave us more free stuff so they'd have an excuse to sign some more things. It felt like we were reconnecting with old friends, not having our first real conversation with total strangers. It's cool to learn that the designers of some of my favorite games (I love A Touch Of Evil, and the demo I played of Shadows Of Brimstone was great) are such friendly, excellent people.  If you have money burning holes in your pockets, might I suggest you spend it on a Flying Frog game?

• Games On Demand was great. For those unfamiliar, Games On Demand is like going to the library during the con, except you're not checking out a book you're checking out an RPG to play, and the GM to run it.  My wife and I were volunteers. I ran three tables of Psi*Run for total strangers, including two amazing incredible games, and one just merely solid and enjoyable. My wife ran three tables of Microscope, which were, to quote one of her players, "Fucking _Metal_ As Hell!"  Good times.

• So many awesome things to spend money on! Dice, T-Shirts, RPGs, board games, video games, you name it. Expect a series of posts about all the cool stuff we bought, at least until the check for our internet bounces. Then expect smoke signals.

Low Points:

• Overall there weren't enough chairs or tables, and the lines were too long. With 70,000 people out there, it's hard to find a place you can just catch your breath for a moment. Random chairs in the various nooks and crannies and back passages would be wonderful. I don't quite get why they stuff 50 bean bag chairs into two places, rather than spreading them out across 10 or 20 different spots across the various floors, which I think would be a huge improvement.

• Absolutely pathetic demo of the Netrunner card game from FFG. The guy from FFG forgot to tell me two really important rules that resulted in me actually losing during my first turn, and then couldn't shut up about how he'd never seen anyone lose that quickly or make such a big mistake.

• One of the Enforcers (a bearded guy in the Indie Megabooth area sometime between 2 and 3 on Friday afternoon) was a total asshole too me, screaming in my ear from well inside my personal bubble because the heel of my right foot was across a line of pink tape I hadn't even known existed. When I tried to apologize, he flailed his arms and yelled more like he thought I was starting shit. His aggression actually drove me out of the convention center for more than an hour till I could calm down and cheer up, and I stayed out of that part of that exhibit hall for the next two days in case it was his assigned area. If someone on my staff behaved the way he did, I'd fire them immediately. The Enforcers don't have badge numbers or name tags, so there was nothing I could do to report him. I suspect his blue uniform labeled "Enforcer" had gone to his head. Seems like that word is just asking for trouble. At the very least that term has some risk of attract raging jerks to the position, and I suspect it was provoking a bit of Stanford Prison Experiment mentality too. I would strongly encourage the PAX organizers to change the labeling of their staff, but they'd probably just tell me I should just be happy the shirts read "Enforcer" not "Dickwolf".