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.

5 Parsecs From Home: Turn 13 / Story Track Event 3

This is a step-by-step breakdown of the thirteenth Campaign Turn in my Five Parsecs From Home campaign. This Turn's mission is also the third "Event" in the "Story Track". The Story Track is an optional plot thread that (if you've elected to use it in your campaign) shows up about every fourth Turn or so, with a custom mission that shakes things up a bit. This time, it's a pretty brutal close-quarters combat, pistols in the fog from just inches away.

Crew names below are often abbreviated "G" to "M", as explained in: Crew Roster, which also tells you about my team and a bit about their ship. See also the Index of my Five Parsecs articles for a list of previous Missions and other content.

Pre-Battle:
1.1 Flee Invasion: - n/a

1.2 Decide Whether to Travel: - no

1.3 Starship Travel Event: - n/a

1.4 New World Arrival Steps: -n/a 

1.5 Gain 1 story point if it's turn 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, etc. - n/a

2.1 Upkeep and Ship Repairs: -
Crew Upkeep - 1    Ship Debt - 0    Ship Repairs - 0    Medical Care - H needs 5 turns of recovery, and I don't have enough credits to get him out this Turn.

2.2 Assign and Resolve Crew Tasks: -
Find a Patron -    Train -     Trade - M    Recruit -    Explore - J,L    Track -    Repair Your Kit -     Decoy - G,K
Noteworthy results from Tasks: -

    Inshubur plans the attack. From the Story Track for this Turn: "One crew member of choice must be assigned to plan the attack. This crew member cannot take any actions this campaign turn. If you are not ready, you can opt to delay for one more campaign turn, but after that, it’s go time!"
    Moreva trades for Local Maps that may prove useful for future Quests
    Leonidas trades away his old Blade for Combat Armor!

2.3 Determine Job Offers: - Doing the 3rd Story Track event. Thankfully, I didn't roll a "1" and trigger Rival interference.

2.4 Assign Equipment: - n/a

2.5 Resolve Rumors: - n/a

2.6 Choose Your Battle -
Job Description:
Story Track Event 3: Disrupting the Plan - Your old friend is up to something big, and it’s time to teach his people a little lesson. You’ve found out where his organization is storing contraband for sale off-world, and you’ve decided to pay them a visit.

 
Battle: Story Track Event #3


Deployment Conditions:  Set up like a camp, with crates and barrels all over. Scatter 5 Goons, 2 Bruisers, and 1 Leader around the map.

Select which battlefield edge you want to enter from, and roll to Seize the Initiative (at +3 because I captured a mercenary in Story Track #2).

Enemy within 12” of crew figures will act with Defensive AI. Enemy that are not within 12” of crew figures will first attempt to reach the center of the battlefield, then go Defensive.

Planetary Condition: - Planet-Wide Fog - All shots beyond 8" are -1 to Hit.

Notable Sights:  The mission clearly spells out unusual deployment and objectives, so obviously you don't roll on those charts. It doesn't mention whether or not Notable Sights are a thing, but I'm going to assume that since they aren't mentioned, they're not used this mission. If I ever play the story track a second time, with a new crew, maybe I would add one just to mix it up, but this time, there's nothing notable to see here. Move along.  

EDIT: My bad, it's actually spelled out on page 152 that there are no Deployment Conditions or Notable Sights in any Story Track Events. I somehow missed that on my first two reads of the chapter, having included Notable Sights in Story Track Missions #2 and #3. Including them did not seem to break anything, just for the record. So, if having a dynamic mission is more important to you than following the rulebook strictly, go for it. 

Objective: - Sabotage the AeroSpace Fighter that my old friend has just purchased before his techs can get it armed with the missile they just purchased.

To Win, you need to either Hold the Field, or fight your way to the center of the battlefield and plant a sabotage device. This takes a Combat Action and requires a 1D6+Savvy roll of 5+. If failed, the roll can be attempted again by other characters, or through future Actions. Once planted, the opposition will retreat from the battlefield at the end of the next round.
• If you drive off every opponent, you can just plant the device at your own leisure.
• If the battle drags on too long, reinforcements will show up. 2 Goons in each of Rounds 8 and 12 will arrive at the end of the round, in the center of a randomly selected battlefield edge.

Enemy Type: -  AbsuCorp Goons, Bruisers, and a Boss

Numbers: - 5/2/1   Panic: 1-2     Speed: 4”     Combat: +0 to +1     Tough: 3 to 4     AI: D*    

5 Goons with Machine Pistols, 2 Bruisers with Shotguns and Brutal Melee,  1 Leader w/ Blast Pistol and Blade

Deploy: Enemy are scattered around the camp. I'm entering from the North. Because they have a big missile, I'm not bringing my Shuttle or ship anywhere near this place, so I'll be scattering my people along that Northern Edge. One of the cool things about this Mission is that deployment is very atypical. Usually the enemy is really far away. Instead, we can get the drop on the ones near our table edge.

In this Mission, the villains have modified AI. It's mostly the Defensive AI, but with extra instructions to head toward my Mission Objective if there's not PCs nearby them. This has an interesting dynamic where the player is tempted to rush the Objective early, before it's swarming with baddies.

Round 1: - Seize the Initiative:  We've got +3 for capturing and interrogating a mercenary in the previous Story Track Mission. Presumably that stacks with the usual +1 for being outnumbered. So that means that if our 2d6 roll is a 6+, all my people will get to act once before the first turn. I get cocky, and roll a 4. So we've blown our early advantage, but there's still normal initiative.

Quick Actions - We open with Plasma fire! Moreva shoots the closest Goon, stunning him and knocking him back to where Juniper can see him. She fires, one stun and the second hit kill.

Inshubur moves into melee with the next closest Goon. He fumbles, but both damage rolls are low so he only ends up double-stunned.

Enemy Actions - The stunned Goon shoots Inshubur from point-blank with his Machine Pistol. She dives out of the way with her Luck. Then the nearby Bruiser opens fire with his Shotgun. Both shots miss, but one of the two dice rolls a "1", so he gets a reroll from Aiming, which is a hit. Inshubur is out of Luck, so I spend a Story Point to force a reroll on the shot. It's still a hit. Then the damage is enough to knock my Captain out, and probably still would be if I spend another Story Point. Her Combat Armor also fails her, so Inshubur goes down!  Rather than spend it on a long-shot, I hold on to the Story Point, in case I need it to help her during Recovery at the end of the Battle.

Slow Actions - Leonidas vaporizes the stunned Goon.

GcViib burns a hole through the head of the Bruiser that took out Inshubur.

The Kid moves south, and shoots at the Goon on the landing pad, driving him against the Flyer we want to sabotage.

Panic Test - The Goon furthest from the PCs runs away. There's no Enemy Table Edge in this scenario, so I probably could have chosen anyone, but since he'd have to move several Rounds to get into range, I figure he's still the best one to flee.

Enemy Ploy on a "1" - And I rolled it!   There is a Sniper in that tall radio tower to the South East of the landing pad.   In a previous game I rolled up a Sniper, and blasted them to bits before they got to activate. I decided then to implement a house-rule to make them more dangerous if they came up again: The sniper gets 1 free shot immediately upon being placed on the board, before the next Round starts.

Unfortunately for the bad guys, I made that rule before coming to a planet with Fog so bad every shot is at -1 if the target is 8" or more away. The sniper's shot skips off a rock near The Kid.

Image Key: Green lines are PC's movement. Purple lines are the enemies movement. Yellow lines are retreat when Stunned or random movement from Luck points being spent. Red X's mark places where people fell in battle.

Round 2: - Quick - The Kid returns fire, knocking the Sniper onto the supports between the tower and the radar beacon. Juniper moves forward and also shoots at the sniper, driving them further onto the walkway. They are double-stunned, but still in the game.

Enemy - The sniper shoots at Juniper, but she is saved by the Fog.

The Goon on the Landing Pad shoots at her as well, but only stuns her.

The other baddies advance. Most are heading towards the landing pad, but the Goon in the West circles around his hovertruck.

Slow - GcViib misses the sniper.

Leonidas stuns the Goon on the landing pad, who stumbles backwards into the open. Moreva flanks him, and finishes him off.

Panic Test - The goon in the west flees off the board.

Roll for Battle Events between Round 2 and 3 - 82 - Fog Cloud - The AeroSpace FIghter's engines start cycling up, causing the already dense air of Tiresias-3 to condense further. There's a cloud of opaque fog around the landing pad now, extending 6" from our Primary Objective. Line-Of-Sight is blocked by 2" of this, so there'll be some nasty close-quarters battle in our future.


Round 3: - Quick - The Kid puts another stun on the Sniper.

Enemy - The Sniper returns the favor. They hunt each other. The Leader and Bruiser move into the fog.

Slow - Everyone closes in on the fog cloud.

Panic Test - None.


Round 4: Quick - Moreva and Juniper enter the fog.

The Kid is right at the edge of the map, engaged in a sniper duel with the Corp Marksman on the scaffolding. If I keep shooting, he'll probably win, because he has Luck and a better equipment. However, I resolved in Turn 7 that I would never abuse the edge of the map to avoid being pushed back by stunned results. So, to stand by that conviction, the Kid runs for cover. (He was stunned, so he can't shoot if he moves, and can't move if he shoots.)

Enemy - The Bruiser moves up and stuns Juniper with his shotgun. The boss drops into a better position with cover on all sides, but can't get close enough to shoot through less than 2" of engine exhaust.

The sniper moves back into their original position, now obscured by exhaust. They couldn't line up a shot, so I have them shift far enough into the fog for protection.

Slow - Leonidas dashes into the exhaust. I'm gambling a bit on if I can roll at least a single "1" on initiative next turn. If I don't, he'll be burning his Luck.

Panic Test - None

Roll for Battle Events between Round 4 and 5:  "Snap shot: Select a figure in your crew. They may fire a weapon immediately. If the weapon is a Pistol, it Hits automatically, otherwise roll to Hit normally."

I choose Juniper because she has a cool pistol built-in to her cyberhand that I almost never get to use (because a gun built into a cyberhand has half normal range, and her Plasma Rifle usually crisps people from much further out). It's a machine pistol with a shock attachment, and it murders this Bruiser quite nicely.


Round 5: - Quick - I only get 1 good Initiative die this turn, and it's a 2, so it has to be Moreva (or no shot at all). She rushes up the ramp, and unloads hot plasma on the enemy Leader. His armor saves him, but he ends up double-stunned. His back is to rock, so he's not moved at all.

Enemy - Moreva is in the open, so the the Leader shoots her. A bullet strikes her square on, but he's saved by her Combat Armor. It's a good thing the Leader was stunned, because if he'd been able to Aim his second shot might have hit as well.

The sniper moves to the edge of the tower, sticking just far enough out of the exhaust to get a shot at The Kid. They roll a "1", and can't Aim this turn because they moved.

Slow - The Kid returns fire, and stuns the sniper. This pushes them enough to fall. Jumping down 3" would be a +0 damage hit, per the movement rules. I can't seem to find other falling rules, so I just go with that for now.  I roll low, so the sniper only ends up double-stunned.

Leonidas charges the enemy Leader and tries out his Glare Sword. Leon wins the fight, but the Leader rolls a "6".  Leo then rolls low damage, and the baddie rolls high. Thankfully, Leonidas' armor saves him and they are both stunned.

The fog and the placement of my other characters prevent either GcViib or Juniper from getting into a position to shoot.

Panic Test - Nope. These badasses fight on.

Round 6: - Quick - Leonidas opens up on the villain Leader, giving him a second stun.

The Kid moves and misses the sniper.

Enemy -  The leader double-stuns Leonidas. That was close.

The sniper misses The Kid because of the planet-wide Fog.

Slow - Moreva climbs back up on top of the fuel tank and fries the enemy Leader. Then she notices the flammable labels on the thing she's standing on, looks at the smoking Plasma Rifle in her hands, and counts her lucky stars.

Juniper's not Savvy enough to worth the sabotage effort, so she Dashes through the fog to try to flank the sniper next turn.

GcViib heads up onto the platform and gets into position for next Round's sabotage.

Panic Test - None, technically, because the sniper is immune to morale...

Round 7 - ...but since the next Round starts with only the sniper on the map, they automatically escape per the special rule in the Ploy write-up.

Since the Mission ends at the start of Round 7, I don't trigger the scenario-specific enemy reinforcements at the End of Rounds 8 and 12.

Yellow lines are paths of retreat, whether that's 1" of knockback from a Stun, 1d6" of random movement from a Luck spend, or the path off the edge of the board from a badguy failing a Panic test.

Analysis: -  That fight was a lot more challenging than I thought it was going to be! With mostly short-range weapons on the opposition, I expected to just plasma-burn through their ranks in short order.  That's "action economy" for you: losing a PC in Round 1 had a lot of ripple effects, and made every Round thereafter that much harder. Inshubur is my fastest character in terms of both Speed and Reactions, so I'd planned to have her race to the middle of the map and claim the Objective before things got too hot. Instead, she took a dirt nap in Turn 1.

I really enjoyed how this battle played out quite differently from the typical Mission. Having the enemy scattered about and shooting immediately, instead of tightly clustered and creeping up slowly, was pretty interesting. The two layers of Fog (a planet-wide fog that penalized all shots beyond 8", and a localized-fog that blocked all shots beyond 2" in the vicinity of my primary objective) really made me have to get up-close and personal. The only part where I didn't push in close was the long-range sniper match on the far Eastern flank, and that ended inconclusively as a result. If not for the fog, though, I would have been able to aim 2 or 3 Plasma Rifles at that sniper's tower, which probably would have wrapped that part up in a hurry.


Post-Battle:

4.1 Resolve Rival Status: - No, I rolled a 2. I'm happy with that, as I don't think a bunch of pistol-packing Goons would be much of a threat in a more typical deployment/scenario. They just don't have the range to be a serious threat in a normal mission, at least not against my team with all their plasma-rifles.

4.2 Resolve Patron Status: - N/A

4.3 Determine Quest Progress: - N/A

4.4 Get Paid and Benefits of Success: + 5 credits.

Planetary Condition - Booming Economy - When rolling for post-battle credit rewards, any 1 on the dice are rerolled until it shows a score other than a 1.

4.5 Battlefield Finds: -  Vital Info: I can turn this in for an automatic Corporate Patron on this world. Turns out AbsuCorp wasn't going to use those missiles on me, but on some other corporation. If I bring them Q'narr's targeting data and plans, his planned target will look on me favorably. I cash it in immediately, and roll up the new Patron just for fun. They have the usual Corporation rules of +1 on Danger Pay, and increased chance of jobs having Conditions. Their recurring benefit is "Connections" which means they pay in rumors. I name them Caduceus MultiMedia. One of their journalists is currently working on a hard-hitting exposé about Q'narr and AbsuCorp.


4.6 Check for Invasion!: - I don't have to roll this Turn, since these enemies aren't an Invasion Threat. That's good, since there have been rumors of war that would add +2 to any such roll on this planet.

4.7 Gather the Loot: -  The first roll gets me a Hunting Rifle and a Military Rifle, both Damaged. I get a second roll on the Loot table as specified by the Story Track's rewards section, and this rolls up a Unity Battle Sight, which is far more useful.

4.8 Determine Injuries and Recovery: -  I roll a 90, so it turns out Inshubur was merely knocked unconscious, with no lasting injuries.  H'Xex is envious, since he's still in Sick Bay from last Turn.

4.9 Experience and Character Upgrades:  G.0 H.0 I.1 J.4 K.4 L.3 M.3   - First Kill: - J    Rookie: K

The Kid is not happy about that sniper getting away, so they practice long-range shots in the fog. XP spent to bring Combat Skill to +3.

Leonidas raises Reactions to 2.

4.10 Invest in Advanced Training: -  Juniper uses her ex-Enforcer contacts to get enrolled in night classes at the local Academy, hits the books, and learns Security Training. (Total cost, including application, is 2 Credits, and 8 XP, and an Instruction Book.)  This will give us +1 on Seize The Initiative in the future, which I note would have been huge this Mission.

4.11 Purchase Items: - None

4.12 Campaign Event: - You renegotiate some old debts. (If you currently owe money, reduce your debt by 1D6+1 credits. If you owe nothing, earn 2 credits for being prudent with your money.)

Well, I'd just typed the meaningless phrase "Juniper uses her ex-Enforcer contacts" as how she arranged for her Security Training, and then the very next die roll recouped the costs of that Training. So yeah, some sort of favor called in by her Mentor/Partner from back during her old Enforcer days. I love it when story-dressing and randomized mechanics cooperate like that.

4.13 Character Event: - Leonidas discovers he likes the local cuisine, and gains an XP. I just hope he didn't eat H'Xex's delivery order -- a K'Erin's stomach is teflon-coated.

4.14 Check for Galactic War Progress: - N/A

4.15 Tick Story Clock: -  Set the Clock to 5 Ticks.  Based on that, I expect the next Story Event to be around Turn 19. Not that I'm complaining, as I enjoy the game quite a bit, but I hadn't realized when starting this just how long your Campaign has to run to get all the way through the Story Track.  I was planning on running this for about 20 Missions, but the Story Track will still be rolling strong at that point, so I'll probably keep going until it's done.

5 Parsecs, 1 Mission

This is a Battle Report (or "BatRep" as the kids say) for Mission 1 of my 5 Parsecs From Home campaign. 5 Parsecs is a solitaire miniatures game, which I'm playing on Roll20 (mostly because projects from work have consumed our dining room table). So instead of actual miniatures, I'm using little token images on a virtual tabletop.

As a refresher, the crew of the merchant ship The Rhapsody of Inanna have names starting with the letters G to L. At various points in these posts, I will no doubt refer to them by just the first letter of a character's name.  See also: Crew Roster, and the Index of my Five Parsecs articles.

G: GcViib, a standard Bot
H: H'Xex, a K'Erin soldier
I: Captain Inshubur Nastarastar, a Precursor hacker and spiritualist
J: Marshal Juniper Sasparillax, a Human enforcer
K: The Kid, a Human technican and Hopeful Rookie
L: Leonidas, a Human military brat and scavenger

Crew Member Spotlight: Captain Inshubur

Inshubur Nashtarastar spends a lot of her time online, experiencing holos and VRs about various ecstatic religious experiences. The pursuit of knowledge is of great importance to her, but she gets caught up in her eclectic, pantheist epiphanies. She's a religious experience junky, and a technophile. She won't lecture you about a one true religion, but will absolutely ask you a never-ending series of questions about your personal religious and philosophical beliefs. That's part of why she's collected this crew, is that she's gathered around her people that are capable of engaging in spirited philosophical debate.

Her own beliefs are a syncretic melting pot of philosophies. The foundations of it were the Precursors star-worship that she grew up with, but to that she has wedded parts of the K'Erin warrior goddess cult, terran zen archery and martial arts training, and a potpourri of interesting theological tidbits from a few dozen cultures.

Lately, she's fixated on a Skulker cult relic called "The Strange Brain", which she believes to be technohypnological in nature. Rumor is its hidden somewhere in this sector. While she'll be perfectly happy to give it to a Skulker religious community after it's been recovered, she hopes to interface with it before turning it over. This has caused her to run afoul of Ratlobe Kur, an insular and conservative Skulker community of dubious moral character. Skulker's are generally quite open-minded, but Ratlobe Kur is uncharacteristically xenophobic, and has threatened to kill any non-Skulker that comes in contact with The Strange Brain.
While Inshubur isn't afraid to fight (she's quite good at it, actually), she would much rather find an amicable solution to problems when possible. Who does she have to sleep with (or bribe, or rob, or kill) to get an hour alone with The Strange Brain Of The Skulker and the higher dimensional mysteries contained therein?

Pre-Battle Sequence:

Crew Actions:
J talks with Menrva Bail Bond company, gets a mission, and an introduction to Mr Manselli who will have another Mission for us later.
I trains for +1 XP
L and G trade for a pre-owned Jump Belt in need of repairs, and miscellaneous Trade Goods.
H explores, and is offered a small job to take out a particular baddie for 2 credits.
K decoys successfully.

Rumor Roll: 1, so a new Quest has been triggered, but I had not yet found the page in the rules that really explains that, so I started with the Bail Bonds job. As it turns out, the rules are pretty vague about what constitutes a Quest.

Later, I put together a random "Quest Object Name Generator", and rolled up something called The Strange Brain of the Skulker. That's why such a thing is mentioned in the Captain's bio, above.


Job Description: 

Patron Job from Menrva Bail Bonds. Danger Pay is +1 Credits. Time Frame is Turn 1 only.
Hazards is "Hot Job: After the Job, you will earn an enemy on 1-2 instead of just a roll of 1".
Conditions is "Busy: If the mission is a success, this Patron offers a new job next campaign turn." 

Battle Sequence:

Deployment Conditions: Nothing Special

+ Special Modifier this turn only: "Offered a Small Job" from Explore: "When fighting this campaign turn, select a random enemy figure. If your crew kills them, earn 2 credits. No reward if they run away."

Notable Sights: Priority target: Select a random enemy figure. Add +1 to their Toughness. If they are slain, gain 1D3 credits. (This is in addition to the Small Job above)

Objective: Eliminate: Select a random enemy figure. They are the target. If they are killed, you Win the mission.

So  there's three random targets I need to take out. One for 1d3 creds, one for 2 creds, and one to actually complete the mission. What they call a "target-rich environment".

Enemy Type: Hired Muscle:  Subtype: Skulker Mercenaries
So basically I'm fighting skaven / ratlings.  They come in large numbers. In this case, 5 regulars with Military Rifles, 2 specialists with Plasma Rifles, and an LT with higher skill and an extra melee weapon.

I deploy in the North-West. Skulkers are in the South East. There's a lot of open space along the major road in the middle, so this is going to be bloody and awful. The Skulker Mercs have got longer range weapons then most of my crew, which proves problematic.


When I was playing this first mission, I wasn't yet planning to blog these, so I didn't take good pictures. I'll try to at least save higher resolution shots for future missions, but these first few BatReps at least will have little imagery.

 

The green arrows represent the movement of the PCs. Red arrows are the NPC opposition, Skulker Mercenaries. Purple and blue arrows are the randomized motion (and intended motion) of neutral NPC cars, explained in detail below. The red "X" is where H'Xex (one of my PCs) got shot and taken out of play. Not visible is the ladder The Kid used to get up on a roof, and the underpass my team used to get into the starting position.


Round 1: The skulkers were waiting for us. They had guys on the roof, and started raining firepower down on us like you wouldn't believe. H'Xex took cover behind a bollard, but was hit anyway, and taken out of the fight instantly.

The Kid slagged one of our targets with their Infantry Laser. Good kid.

Round 2: The Skulkers shoot first. Inshubur had a close call, but Luck let her fall back around a corner out of sight. GcViib was hit but not damaged. No one died on either side.

Round 3: Leonidas took out their other specialist. GcViib took out their LT.  

Then the Kid nearly died, but Luck took them off the roof safely, and into cover. One could argue that the change in elevations should have been a fall, and potentially a hit of it's own, but that seemed to be against the spirit of Luck, so I assumed he landed safely. (Also, since I wasn't yet planning to blog these, I didn't take good notes on The Kid's actual position. It's possible he was actually on the roof of the building at the NorthWest corner of the map.)

Round 4: Leonidas took out our second "extra" bounty. The Kid hit our main target, but his laser didn't have the power to kill it. Two cars pulled out into the intersection and provided brief cover for Inshubur and Juniper to inch closer to the enemy. Their shotguns are not proving effective at long range.

Round 5: The cars nearly collide in the middle of the street and brake hard amidst the screaming and gunfire. Inshubur takes advantage of the opportunity and runs around them to blast a skulker that had been taking cover behind a dumpster. Two of the skulkers bail and run as Leonidas pegs our final target with a fatal plasma blast.

Analysis: That was a challenging fight. Both characters with Luck used it up. Two PCs never got in range for their shotguns, and one of them was knocked out by enemy fire well beyond his own range. Big wide empty areas like that are really dangerous in this game.

I did make it a little harder on myself by taking out the bonus bounties. If I had concentrated all my firepower on the "kill him to win" target, I probably could have won in Round 3 instead of Round 5, but that gamble seemed worth it at the time, and paid off successfully.

I forgot three rules during play, and taken in aggregate I think forgetting them made the game harder for me.
1) I forgot to have hit-but-not-killed figures fall back 1". This may have actually saved H'Xex from being taken out if I had remembered it, as he was stunned by a shot before the one that made him a casualty, and I know a couple of those attacks were at extreme range.
2) I forgot to roll on the Battlefield Events table at the end of rounds 2 & 4. This is hard to say if that helped or hindered me, but I did do something else more homebrew-y with NPC cars that helped and was hella flavorful, so it was still plenty unpredictable even without that chart.  
3) If you don't shoot, you can Dash an extra +2". This would have helped my shotgun characters get into cover, or maybe even get into range.

The Cars:

You can't really tell from the crummy image above, but I had a cool map with a bunch of streets on it, so I got out some car "models". (I'm playing on Roll20, so everything is virtual miniatures, basically just movable pictures.) I numbered 8 possible entry points, dictated by traffic lanes. After the PCs and Enemies were deployed, I rolled 3 random entry points and put cars at them, then moved each 2d6 inches forward. These represented innocent motorists unfortunately driving down the street at the worst possible moment. The cars provided mobile Cover if Line-of-Sight  on a shot passed over or through them. Each turn, I had each car move 2d4 inches forward. If this would have caused it to collide with anything, it would instead stop just short, and if that something was a model it would become stunned.  It worked really well. 1 car ended up irrelevant, just moving near the edge of the map. I had planned that if a car exited the map a new car would enter the map at another random spot at the start of the next turn, but it didn't quite happen due to how the die rolls played out. One really cool piece of emergent behavior happened, with two cars coming to an intersection at the same moment (not intended, and one had randomly traveled much faster than the other in order for it to happen this way). They stopped short of colliding, and this provided 2 consecutive turns where my fastest PC could rush across the street using them as cover, and get in range with her shotgun as a result. It was dramatic, unpredictable, and felt totally awesome like a moment from an action movie. I will likely try this again sometime. Now that I remember there's a +2" dash option, I probably should increase car speeds to 2d6, so PCs would be less likely to outpace them.

Post-Battle:

Pay and Benefits of Success: "Success" plus "Priority Target" and "Small Job" and "Danger Pay" pay a total of 8 credits, which is off to a great start.

Thanks to the Busy Condition, I also get another Job offer from the Bail Bonds company.

Battlefield Finds: Scavengers: Roll twice on the Battlefield Finds Table. I get another Plasma Rifle! I also find Vital Info that can be turned in to gain an automatic Corporate Patron without rolling.

Gather the Loot: is a "Shatter Axe"! That sounds awesome.

Injuries and Recovery: H'Xex has a Serious Injury that will have him out of commission for 4 Campaign Turns! This is pretty dreadful.

XP and Upgrades:  G0 H1 I3 J3 K5 L3  - How to read that: The Kid got first kill (+1 XP), and their Hopeful Rookie reward (also +1 XP). So the Kid gets a total of 5 XP, and most of the other non-bots get 3 XP each. H'Xex gets only 1 XP because he was knocked out. GcViib is a bot, and thus gets no XP.

I spend a story point to give Inshubur an extra 3 more XP so she could level up her Toughness. Even with the Luck point, the Toughness 2 of the Precursor species is a very limiting vulnerability.

Purchase Items: Not worth it while my cash is in short supply, especially since I found a new gun and a shatter ax. Eventually I'll want some Gear and Gadgets, but for the moment getting my ship debt under control is probably a better early goal.

Campaign Event: Made friends among the locals. +1 Story Point.

Character Event: H'Xex find the local food is good. Reduces his recovery time by 1 Turn! Now I see why they let you roll Character Events even from the Sick Bay.

Thank you for reading my first 5 Parsecs From Home battle report!

Five Parsecs Crew Roster

I've been playing a lot of Five Parsecs From Home in the evenings. 5 Parsecs is a solitaire miniatures game. You control the crew of a small independant spaceship, something like the Serenity or the Millenium Falcon, having episodic adventures (often on the wrong side of the law) over the course of potentially quite lengthy campaign. It's a really fun game, with procedurely-generated narrative and fast-playing combat missions.  I like it a lot.

At the moment, I don't really have table space to keep miniatures and terrain set up, so I'm actually playing on Roll20's virtual tabletop. It was a bit of effort to set up initially, but is working really well now, and helping breathe a second life into maps I had already made for my various online RPG campaigns.

Here's my current crew:

5 Parsecs Crew Roster

I started with 6 characters. I chose to have a robot, and then the other 5 were all rolled up at random. They worked out to 2 normal humans, 1 human "hopeful rookie" special character type, and 2 primary aliens: a Precursor and a K'Erin. That's pretty close to the default non-random crew build option, which would have been the same except a third "baseline" human instead of the "hopeful rookie".

During character creation, my dice were pretty streaky. Here's a few ways I beat the odds:

Half my crew got random upgrades of +1 Combat Skill, which was a pretty great. Combat Skill is welcome on any character.

About half my characters got random upgrades of +1 Savvy, which I was honestly a little disappointed about. You would much rather have one character with +2 Savvy than 3 characters with +1 Savvy.  You get so few starting upgrades, and it's kind of a shame to see redundancy on the one stat that's not used in fights.

 A few sessions later, I rolled up an event that gave me another crewmate, which was of the Engineer species, which also has a low Toughness, and a high base Savvy, on top of which she got a random Savvy upgrade. I wasn't sure at first if I would keep this character or fire her, because going to 7 crew doubles your upkeep costs with only modest benefits.

We started with 3 Patrons and several Rumors. These are fun little story bumps to get the narrative going, but they're not exactly powerful. They can be hard to leverage into success early on, since the initial offering of Patron Missions they give you are likely to "expire" over time before you can complete them all. 

But then there was the other upside to my swingy streaky die rolls, which more than made up for it. I started with multiple Plasma Rifles. Now, it's not like the Plasma Rifle is the best gun in the game, but it's definitely above average. It's basically a shotgun, but with nearly double the range, and the armor-piercing ability. The range is the important part. Enemy armor didn't really show up in my first few sessions, but in game after game the characters with plasma rifles were able to engage early and often, while other characters tended to get shot-up trying to close the distance.

Speaking of getting shot up, I chose to make my Precursor be my Captain. In the early stages, the Precursor was the character I most expected to die, as that starting Toughness 2 on that species is a real dangerous liability. Your Captain gets a luck point, so it meant a much better chance of her surviving enemy fire. 

I also had The Kid, who was a "Hopeful Rookie". This is a special character type that starts with 1 Luck, and gains bonus XP for every Mission until the first time they end up in the Sick Bay. From then on, they can no longer spend or gain Luck.

Starting Equipment

Starting rolls had been:

• Low-Tech Weapons: 5:    Shotgun x3    Scrap Pistol    Blade
• High-Tech Weapons: 3:    Plasma Rifle x2    Infantry Laser
• Military Weapons: 1:    Boarding Saber
• Gear: 2:    Steel Boots    Booster Pills
  
• Gadget: 1:    Repair Bot

 

What's in a Name?

Two little things about my character names. 

1) GcViib, H'Xex, Inshubur, Juniper, the Kid, Leonidas, Moreva. GHIJKLM. Why did I do that? Well, over a year ago I played a six-session mini-campaign of the previous edition of 5 Parsecs. One of the things I noticed then was that you write down a lot of notes about which character did what. To simplify the shorthand, my characters in that mini-campaign were Albertus, Bolokon, Carissa, Dirrin, Errice and Francis, so I could just use the first initial of each. It worked well. I considered just rebooting that campaign with the new 3rd Edition rules, but chose to start a new crew because the old version only had Human PCs. 

2) Captain Inshubur is named for a figure from Sumerian Mythology. Ninshubur was "the Queen of Servants", and right hand of the goddess Inanna. So I named their spaceship "The Rhapsody of Inanna". I didn't really have a deep meaning or plan to it at the time, but if I do post my game logs and mission reports here in the near future,  you may notice that I have continued to riff on mythology (especially Mesopotamian mythology) for the names of my Patrons, Rivals, and other NPCs. My crew just fought a battle against hired guns working for AbsuCorp, for example. 

The Rhapsody was randomly generated as a "Unreliable Merchant Cruiser" with 30 Hull Points, and a starting Debt of 24.

6 Games I'm Loving Right Now (and a runner-up that's probably working its way on to the list)

 Been keeping pretty busy lately. Running two RPGs on the regular, each meeting online every-other week. Also playing in two RPGs, also biweekly. And then cramming in board games, computer games, and even solitaire miniatures into my late evenings. Here's the seven games eating up the majority of my time:

1. Night's Black Agents has been ongoing for several years now, since 2017. Two sessions ago the PCs crashed a meeting of Renfields and a motorcycle gang all working for a vampiric cabal. They created a lot of chaos, got the gang fighting itself. They realized in the process that one of the biggest vampires (Count Orlok) is making some sort of move on the territory of one of his biggest vampiric rivals (the intel was a little vague as to whether his move is against Elizabeth Bathory, or Dracula). While all the feuding vampires are busy in Romania, there's an opportunity for the PCs to strike at one Orlok's properties that they'd identified in Munich. This will probably be the most dangerous target they've gone after, so I'll need to roll out the big guns for the next couple of sessions. What I love about NBA is the tools for building intricate investigative plots and complicated enemy organization charts. We're 5 years into a mystery/detective game that has occasionally had to skip sessions for two months at a time due to schedule conflicts, and yet the game still has momentum largely because of the tools the system provides to the GM and players. We were recently discussing the idea of taking the game back to face-to-face analog sessions, and realized that whatever we do, we absolutely want to keep the Roll20 Adversary Map even if we do start meeting back up in-person.

2. I'm also GMing an Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign. It's about 20 sessions in, despite my only getting around to posting the campaign logs here of the first 7 sessions so far. A huge backlog of material, but hard to summarize or talk about without spoiling upcoming plot surprises. Crazy colorful characters, byzantine multi-layered plots and schemes. The universe imperiled, as it often is in such games. Lots of fun. What I love about Amber is the narrative freedom. The story can go literally anywhere, riff on any pop culture icon or break new ground. The rules are so minimal that, as GM, I can spend all my energies on plotline and character, never having to spend even a minute thinking about whether an upcoming fight scene will be sufficiently challenging yet not roll over into a TPK if the dice fail. GMing Amber is pure creative joy.

3. I'm playing in an Unknown Armies game. What I love is 70% my GM's take on it, 20% the weirdness other players have injected, 10% the setting and game itself, and 0% the mechanics. I'm at best a little "meh" on the mechanics. I've written most of a lengthy analysis post about it, and keep not quite finishing it because I'm having trouble getting blogger to properly format my charts. Deep data number crunching has convinced me that the game would be much better if the PCs started with a little more numerical oomph out the gates. More on that if I ever get the charts working. I will say this, I'm digging the weirdness and open-ness of the setting, and what the participants of the game are doing with it. Our party/cabal of characters isn't making much progress on our goals just yet, but we're definitely chewing the scenery and finding it delicious. My character is a Chief Medical Examiner in her community, who keeps doing autopsies of people she thinks are her dopplegangers. That was part of my character introduction, and I told the GM that I was happy with however he wanted to interpret that. At this point, it seems to be that my character is from a parallel universe and is only just starting to figure that out, and that other parallel me's are also ending up in this reality. The GM even enlisted me to surreptitiously play one of my dopplegangers in a single scene, which the other players didn't see coming. They gave not-me a gun registered in one of the other PC's name, and just a ton of intel that we really didn't want the opposition to have. It felt kind of dirty, but the fallout from this bait-and-switch moment is shaping up to be narrative gold. What I love about Unknown Armies is definitely the GM's doing. I've been gaming with him for years, and this is definitely the best, most engaging, game I've seen him run. One of the best I've ever been player in, honestly.

4. Dungeons & Dragons, an oldie but a goodie. I'm running a once-or-twice-a-year D&D game for friends in other cities, but that hasn't had a session in a few months, so nothing new to report there. The other D&D game I'm in is biweekly game where the GM throws the challenge ratings out the window and doesn't pull his punches. It too is great fun, but it is really tense at the same time. It almost has a horror-game vibe in that every week I feel like my character is just about to die... but it's not using any horror tropes at all. It's mostly about politics, at least on paper, as the big-bads who keep sending assassin after us include a couple of Senators of a powerful city-state. The GM is pretty good at applying the thumb-screws.  What I love about this campaign is getting to navigate against the storm, to struggle onward in the face of insurmountable odds. Assuming it doesn't all end in a TPK, it's gonna feel like a hell of an accomplishment when we dethrone those baddies. 

And then I've been doing a bit of solitaire gaming in the background on free nights. 

5. I've played a fair chunk of Stellaris lately, which is a sci-fi-themed "4X" game. Basically you start with one world, and expand out into the galaxy. It's a pretty long run-time for each game, and only worth cracking open when you have an evening to set aside for it because you'll spend the first 45 minutes just refreshing yourself on the state you left your empire in last time. What I love about it is how much it has going on at once. Actual play is kinda slow and chill, but punctuated with "oh crap" moments when you get invaded, and interesting little event chains of events when your archaeologists start uncovering the ruins of ancient extinct civilizations. It's got a ton of different sci-fi tropes stirred in.

6. This weekend I dove back in to 5 Parsecs From Home. It's a solitaire miniatures game with emergent narrative structure. The third edition just came out, and I love the major upgrade to the look and feel of the game. What minis you use are up to you (or you can very easily run it in your favorite virtual table-top), as it has no official minis, so I'm mostly talking about how I love the visual upgrade to the rulebook. I'd played half a dozen sessions of the previous edition a year and a half ago. That edition was fun, but not much to look at. The new edition is a cooperation with Modiphius, and is a pretty slickly produced product. Could maybe use a better index, but the search function on the PDF is your friend. What I really love about the game is the freeform way a narrative emerges as you play the campaign mode. Last night, I found myself making intentionally bad decisions for the long-term success of my ship full of charming space rogues, because I felt it was what the characters would do. If a game that is mostly charts and die-rolls gets inside your head like that and inspires Firefly-esque drama, it's achieved something powerful.

7. And lastly, I'm playing an asynchronous game of Beyond The Sun on Board Game Arena, taking roughly a turn per day. The game is very interesting. I'm not quite going to say "I'm loving it" quite yet, but I'm intrigued, and it's growing on me. It's pretty novel, and was bordering on overwhelming at roughly the 5th turn of the game, but I'm starting to get the hang of it now. What I really like about this game is how the technology tree develops uniquely in each game, it's a pretty compelling little puzzle with a constantly changing solution. I suspect I'll want to play it again soon, and if it's one of those that gets better as you get more comfortable with the decision trees, it may well end up becoming a "I love it" recommendation.

So that's what I've been playing lately. How about you? Any games you'd endorse?

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.

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 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.

No Use Matrix Tables, Play Og!

I just signed up to run a session of Og: Unearthed Edition at the Dragonflight convention next month. I'll also be GMing it this weekend for a group of friends from my wife's workplace.

I just keep coming up with crazy ideas to spring at the poor cavemen.  Ran down to Top Ten Toys and Archie McPhee to get some megafauna and other props. Being a gamer is fun.

I'm also currently toying with the idea that a sheet of black construction paper and an old Icehouse set makes a good simulation of the table with the matrix of control crystals from the inside of a pylon in Land Of The Lost. The idea is to present the players with the sort of intellectual challenge that makes D&D gamers groan and start asking to short-circuit it with an Intelligence check... knowing full well that as cavemen, they'll just smash the device with rocks and clubs. It's your classic unsolvable puzzle situation, but this time no one has any delusions about needing (or being able) to actually solve it. I mean, I did work out a puzzle for it, but I'm not expecting the players to actually solve it, and the plot won't bog down regardless of whether or not they do. No use smart thing, play Og!

Recent Ogsomeness

Just a typical day in the land of Og:

Here you have sleestacks about to sacrifice a caveman on an altar to their unholy alien god. Behind them, several more neanderthals ride up in a flinstones-style car, while a phorusrhacidae (giant flightless carnivorous "terror bird", here played by an oversized dodo miniature) and an allosaurus watch on. The weird lump in a net next to the tirepile in the foreground is yet another hominid "hero" bound and awaiting his chance to be sacrificed by a lizardman priest. Yep, perfectly average day for our prehistoric ancestors, just dripping with verisimilitude.

I've run two games of Og in the last two weeks. One session had 4 players, 3 of whom had never played an RPG before. The other session had 7 players, 2 of whom I had never met before. Both games worked bangingly well, and I've been asked to break out the game again next month.

This is a big step up in Og-GM-ing frequency for me; I usually run the game about once a year. Mainly the long cooling-off cycle was because coming up with genuinely funny plotlines is hard, and the only alternative to running a truly funny scenario in Og is to dare to run its' bare-bones ass-backwards stupidly-simple d6-only retro combat mechanics.

Anyone who's ever read those rules thinks "OMG, this system is horrible! It's too limited and it takes forever to kill anything. I don't want to ever run this part of the game, so I'll just avoid all the fights and it'll be much better."

Those people are wrong.

True, the system is ridiculously light, and the fights are all rigged against the PCs, and it takes far too many hits to kill anything of importance, and your character will probably forget how to attack three times before the combat is done... and that's what makes it so awesome. In both of these recent sessions I had multiple combats running simultaneously on different parts of the table, and the pacing was still smooth and speedy. Seriously, if you've avoided big fights in Og because it seems like the combat system is made of un-fun, you're doing your players a disservice. Break out the biggest ugliest plastic dino you can find, and let them fail miserably for an hour or so. They'll laugh themselves to death.

As you can tell, I GM Og with a lot of props close at hand. It's an RPG where characters have extremely limited, damn-near-useless, vocabularies. This results in the "party", such as it is, scattering to the winds every chance they get. There is absolutely zero tactical planning and next to zero in-character cooperation. So I load the game down with as many WYSIWYG props as I can, so that everyone understands where things are and can judge for themselves just how screwed they are. (For the record, it's "very" screwed. Just sayin'.)

Towards that end, my wife and I have thrown together a few custom props for Og.

Props are a caveman's best friend.

From left to right:

• D&D minis make fine cavemen. Ghouls, ghasts, taers, quaggoths, morlocks, poorly-equipped orcs, etc. Anything brutish and almost-human works fine as long as it's underdressed. I use a mixture of species for the PCs so they're easier to tell apart.
• Land of the Lost references a plenty: 
• the little crystal-matrix table I made from sculpey, in scale to the pylon and the cavemen.
• the larger translucent crystal is from an icehouse set, and not to scale, but I sometimes use them to represent the pylon's matrix in-game.
• the construction-paper pylon has little foldable flaps that let change it from open to closed formation as the fickle whims of fate demand.
• My lovely wife made the excellent sculpey nest. I plan on using it every time we play. You can never have too many dino (or terror-bird, or pterodactyl) eggs.
• "You Go Bang Food" are four of the cards I use to assign vocab words at random. Rarely do the words empower fully-formed sentences like that.
• The doedicurus (5000lb spiky-tailed armadillo) is made by Safari Ltd, whose line of very fancy megafauna and dino minis can be found at all your better toy stores. (I shop Top Ten Toys in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood.) If your budget is tight, most thriftstore toy departments will have some truly wretched hand-me-down plastic dinos that will work just fine, and the teeth-marks merely add to the authenticity.
• The framework of a sculpey flinstones-style car I made yesterday just before heading to the game. It fits four cavemen in comfort.
• My wife made a series of little sculpey flames useful for noting where the campfire is, which caveman set himself ablaze this time, and what portions of the jungle are currently being consumed by the wildfire.
• She also crafted the stone wheel and it's too less-than-perfect prototypes to match the illustration of the "Build" skill from page 12 of Og Unearthed Edition. Stupid cavemen.

The crawling chaos; the plush abomination; Gnarly Hotep!

Sometimes all that hard work and sacrifice really pays off, such as shown above when the lizardfolk managed to summon up their foul god, Gnarly Hotep via an offering of caveman blood. Ia, Ia, Sleestack Ftagn! (Apparently some people spell it "Nyarlathotep", but he'll always be Gnarly Hotep to me.)

The crappy plastic trees and rocks in the backgrounds of my various pictures came in 2-dollar bags of plastic dinos or green army men. They are absolutely horrible, but they do the trick. They also get caught in my long hair every time I lean over the table to move a mini, so apparently I need to pack a pony-tail holder in my box of dinos and terrain.

Thanks to the in-character Draw skill, you can also sometimes ask your players to contribute props mid-session. Last night, one character was searching for beloved possession that had been stolen by the sleestacks. He was using Explore or Forage (I forget which) to search his tribe's cave (because the lizardmen who abducted half his tribe clearly weren't the main suspects in his infallible caveman logic) for the missing item, and rolled a "1".  Something caused him to forget how to search... so I turned to another PC who had the draw skill, and asked her to draw the dirty pictures that had distracted him.  You ready for the state-of-the-art in cave-painting porno?

NSFW Og Porn Alert!

Og Porn: Doin' it mammoth-style!

Yep, I run a classy game.

Infinite Darkness Loop

Played some more Myth last night, and ran into a weird spot where two different instructions from the FAQ resulted in a not technically infinite (but functionally very close) loop, that became a rather painful TPK.

Myth FAQ, Page 7:

What happens if you need to spawn monsters but have no more minis?
Players can use proxies for any additional minis that spawn. Additional Minion Packs will be made available in the future. If players do not want to purchase additional minis or use proxies, they can implement the rule: For every two models that can’t be placed for any reason, increase the Darkness Meter by 1.

Myth FAQ, Page 9:

In the quest Drums of the World, the card text says: “The Heroes must kill the Mucker to stop the drumming. Roll 5 b” When are these Fate Dice rolled? 
This is done at the start of each Darkness Cycle. If any duplicates are rolled, treat them as if they are only 1 of the corresponding result.

We started our Act with a 12x12 board. That size board has a Quest and a Lair. The Quest we drew was Drums of the Wold, which places a large orc hunting pack on the board, plus an orc captain who has a set of magic drums. Since there's already orcs from that card, we made the thematic choice of having an orc lair.

In the first two Hero Cycles we were unable to kill the captain with the drums. He was surrounded by minions, tucked behind a red-bordered terrain feature, and Captains aren't really all that dangerous in the game. So we buffed and positioned and loaded our quivers and hid in shadows and refreshed our hand once. What a mistake.

None of us had snapped to the math of the situation, so we didn't realize that in order to survive we absolutely had to kill him before the first Darkness Cycle could happen.

Every single Darkness Cycle, the orc captain rolls 5 Fate Dice, consulting this little chart. For the benefit of those who haven't played Myth, I'm translating these into normal d6's:

1. Monsters get stronger.
2. 4 monsters spawn.
3. The next darkness cycle happens nearly twice as soon as normal.
4. Monsters get faster.
5. 4 other monsters spawn.
6. The monster-captain who's rolling these dice is harder to kill.

Then the Darkness card itself almost always spawns at least 4 more orcs (3 normal, +1 because there's an orc captain in play) at the end of the Darkness cycle, sometimes more than that.  So if 5d6 turned up at least one "2" and one "5", there would be a minimum of 12 monsters spawning that turn. Of the two monster types the drums could spawn, the base game comes with 15 of one (orc minions), and 9 of the other (specifically the melee-version of the arachnid minion). So if you roll both of those "spawn more monsters" results when all the minis are already in play, the Darkness meter advances by (12/2=) 6... which is exactly what it takes to trigger another Darkness Cycle.

That meant every bad guy on the board took 6 turns in a row, which was enough for them to kill 3 of the 4 Heroes, before finally getting a "bad" roll that left the Darkness Meter on space 5 (of 6). Sadly, the only surviving Hero had 3 cards in her Action slots and nothing else good in her hand. So she had no choice but to refresh her hand, and the Darkness Meter automatically advances one per monster type during the refresh phase. So the bad guys immediately took two more back to back turns, killing the final PC. They technically triggered a third Darkness Cycle before they were done, but it didn't matter since we were all dead.

Curious what would have happened if we'd used proxies instead, we immediately reset the board and got out a bunch of green legos to be proxy-orcs. I wouldn't call it an easy fight, and the Soldier and the Acolyte both nudged up to 9 Threat before it was over, but we triumphed without losing a character.

I'm not yet certain if the fault lies in the alternative-to-proxies rule, or in the Quest we played, but either way something smells rotten in FAQmark.

Why I Haven't Kicked Recon

Mercs/Megacon, the company that made Myth (which I really liked) have another Kickstarter wrapping up in a few days. Mercs:Recon looks like an interesting game, but there’s a few things holding me back. Really this is the post where I talk myself into it, or out of it.

Okay self, why should I NOT irresponsibly throw oodles of cash at Mercs:Recon?

• 1) I’ve got too many cooperative minis games right now. For the last week I’ve been posting about Myth, Galaxy Defenders, and the upcoming Shadows of Brimstone. The only way Recon will get any play time at my table is if I retire 2 or 3 of the other games permanently. Much better to save my money for the inevitable Myth Expansions kickstarter. Recon is more of a "one-off" board game, and not campaign-style. That does make it easier to jump into on a off night, but at the cost of some of the fun and investment.

• 2) It’s not cyberpunky enough for me to use the parts for something other than the game itself. Futuristic mercenaries breaking into a corporate high-rise sounds like it should be right up my alley. I love CP2020… but this game only has about 10% of the CyberPunk aesthetic. The game has minis for modern-day office workers and private security, and for futuristic mercs in MetalGear, but not for anything that represents the core player characters of a CP2020 campaign. If there were cyborgs, or street punks, or even glamorous CEOs in fancy italian suits and evening gowns, it might be worth my kicking in for the minis. I kinda want the office-building map tiles, and the add-on purchase 3D terrain and drones, but at this point there’s better ways for me to spend my $135. While that's not their fault, they aren't making CP2020 the minis game after all, it definitely means the game itself would need to be more compelling because there's nothing else for me to do with the parts.

• 3) The four playable factions don’t seem different enough. 3 of the 4 are indistinguishable to my eye, all being decked out in basically the same power-armour and armed with the same style of weapons. The sample character sheet was all about bonus dice, instead of more colorful abilities. Character niche seems a little shallow at first glance, though that could just be a marketing failure. If the other elements were compelling enough, I could get past this issue.

• 4) I’m not so thrilled with the stunt-casting. Remember how Galaxy Defenders has minis that are clearly lifted from Aliens, Predator, MIB, and RoboCop? That’s kinda cool, but very distracting. It undermines immersion, and leaves a weird taste in my mouth about the setting. Now Mercs:Recon also has a mini lifted from RoboCop, not to mention a couple from Die Hard and, of all things, Tango & Cash. What!?! Rambo and Snake Plisken I might have been able to get behind, but Tango & Cash? Really? That's what you thought gamers were dying to play?

Tango & Cash scored 39% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Just sayin'.

• 5) The Myth pledge level is a bad deal. For a $40 pledge, you can get just the stretch-goals that come with a Myth tie-in. At the time of this writing, that’s 1 figure that comes with 2 cards. By the time you’re reading this (I’ve written so many posts today that I’m scheduling them out to go live one per day), they may have hit the next Myth-related stretch goal. That’d be a second miniature, with about 30-35 cards. Still not a great deal, and not Megacon’s best mini either — it’s hard to get excited about a mini that’s intentionally generic enough to kinda sorta fit both the near future and medieval fantasy europe. If the kickstarter gets another $100,000 past that, it’ll unlock 4 zombie minis that most likely come with a single card.  Are 1 to 6 minis and 2 to 40 cards worth $40? That kind of pricing is what drove me out of WH40K. The original Myth kickstarter was $100 for 150+ minis and 200+ cards, so you know the cost to manufacture any given component can't be very high. I'm a little worried that if people buy into this, it will set some really bad precedents for what Megacon can charge MSRP for a single figure.

Good points, self. You’ve convinced me to stay out of this one. Though there is a little voice over my bad shoulder that tells me objections # 2, 3, and 5 could all be negated if there’s some cooler stretch-goals added in the final days. I wonder how I’ll feel about it a week from now when this post goes live?

Myth vs Galaxy Defenders vs Shadows of Brimstone part 8: Non-Combat Actions

This is the 8th, and probably final post in a series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. In this installment, I discuss the non-combat portions of three games that mostly about their battle systems. What is there to do in these games, other than kill monsters?

Non-Combat Actions

Myth provides a great variety of things for you to do in-between killing monsters. Nearly every session will involve at least one trap that needs to disarmed or circumvented. Many of the quest cards provide allies to rescue, timers to race, or special terrain to interact with. You probably average from 3 to 6 of these special rules or objectives in a typical session, and they really change your goals and play style when they’re active. The main boxed set includes a nice variety of such activities to liven up your sessions, and there's a lot more coming up in the expansions and stretch-goals. Admittedly, the non-combat-action rules are sketchy and under-developed, but they’re also quite flexible.  I particularly like that most non-combat checks don’t interfere with your fighting abilities at all. You don’t usually have to choose between kicking-ass or advancing the plot, as more often than not you can do both equally on your turn. Each character class has at least one unique card that helps them in non-combat activities.

Galaxy Defenders seems to offer a bit less than Myth in that area. There are missions, and most of them involve getting to a particular place and doing something special once there, so that's a step in the right direction. The first several missions in the rulebook are just 1 or 2 small rules or objectives that only come into play at the end of the hour-long session. Later missions are more involved, but are also balanced for larger groups of high-level well-equipped characters, and have longer expected run times. GD has interesting quests and events, it just takes several sessions and level-ups to unlock them.

Characters in Shadows have a large number of non-combat stats on their character class sheet: Agility, Cunning, Lore, Luck, Spirit, Strength, and Willpower. You don’t roll any of those in normal combat (sometimes Willpower is used for a Sanity check during a fight with the worst supernatural horrors), they exist mainly for use with the Encounter cards, which are little quests and events that happen as you travel through the maze. The demo I played was a pretty simple “learn the rules” treasure hunt, so we focused mostly on combat and didn’t see many of these Encounter cards. If that same ratio of fights to encounters exists in the main game, then SoB only has about the same number of non-violent activities as your typical GD mission… but I honestly doubt that’s the case. Given over half a dozen non-combat stats, it seems likely that they’ll come up quite often in normal play. I expect cave-ins, clue-gathering, and other exciting subplots and side-missions to crop up regularly. That said, each session is on a turn-clock (if a particular token advances 15 times the heroes lose), and the tunnel layout is pretty linear, so there may be practical limits to how many encounters and side-quests can actually happen.

And The Winner Is: Myth. Its lead in that area may shrink somewhat when I get more time with the other two games and learn their secrets, but at very least Myth has the most immediately-accessible things to do other than just simply kill for profit. (Killing things for fun and profit is the mainstay of all three games, though, so don't take that the wrong way.)

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Summary and Conclusion

In the previous posts, I awarded "wins" to each game in various categories.

1. Character Customization: Shadows of Brimstone
2. Set-Up Speed: Myth
3. Flexibility: Myth
4. Game-Length: Galaxy Defenders (was tie with Myth before this update)
5. Pacing: Myth
6. Setting: Subjective
7. Miniatures Versatility: Shadows of Brimstone
8. Maps/Tiles: Shadows of Brimstone
9. Rulebook: Galaxy Defenders
10. NPC AI: Myth or Galaxy Defenders
11. Non-Combat Activities: Myth (but Shadows of Brimstone looks interesting)

If those were all evenly weighted (and they're definitely not) the score would be something like Myth 5 to GD 3 to SoB 4, depending on how you handle ties. Of the three, Myth is currently my favorite, but the character advancement system in Shadows has exciting potential so that could change over time. All three games seem very solid to me, but each has it's flaws as well.

• Myth's rulebook is a ridiculous mess, and individual sessions may not have enough structure for some players.
• Galaxy Defenders has a very involved set-up process, and the game itself includes a little more clutter and book-keeping than the others.
• Shadows of Brimstone has slightly less interesting AI for the monsters, but otherwise seems quite solid. It also doesn't release for several months, and so it could have additional flaws that weren't evident in the demo I attended.

Myth cost about the same as GD via the Kickstarter, but it will include a lot more content once all the stretch-goal items arrive later this month. Myth and Shadows feature what seems like comparable amounts of content from my current perspective, but the full palate of stretch-goals kicked in at a much lower price tag on Myth. Overall, Myth feels like a better deal to me, though again the bad rulebook is a deal-breaker for some groups. It's kind of a shame. I may revisit this series when Shadows of Brimstone actually releases, when a more detailed comparison can be made concerning components I don't yet have in my hands.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 7: NPC AI

This is the 7th of 8 posts comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and in this post I will compare and contrast how the monsters move and act in each game.

NPC Movement and Artificial Intelligence

Myth's monsters behave in organic and interesting ways. The actual movement rules are relatively simple, but the clumsy rulebook makes them seem more complicated than they actually are. Each monster species has its’ own targeting priority, which is pretty neat because it means smarter monsters fight more intelligently and cooperate better than others, and cowardly monsters fall back to shoot at easy targets from a distance. The monster’s actual tactics are a little predictable, but there’s a nice variable turn-length mechanism that introduces an element of skill (and teamwork) into anticipating which heroic actions will be accomplished by the party before the monsters get to counter-attack. Overall, it’s a little clunkier than it needs to be at times, but it really does keep the game fast-paced, flavorful, and interesting. They give the very encouraging advice that if you do it wrong, don’t sweat it — it’s a cooperative game where you can easily scale the difficulty on the fly. If you’re having fun, a technically misplaced monster or two doesn’t matter. If the mistake bothers you, make up for it by spawning extra monsters when you're placing the next room.

GD has a similarly organic movement system, operated by card draws. It does a great job of differentiating between the monster types, so smarter/faster/vicious/stealthy monsters behave appropriately. It automates their tactics, and keeps the players guessing. You have to take opportunities as they present themselves, because you never know what’s going to happen next. It’s absolutely the best part of the game, and is actually a better version of what Myth was aiming for. (GD's take on it is smoother in play, and more crisply differentiates between the monster types.) Unfortunately, it’s permanently wed to the mostly-dreadful hexagonal area boards, which are an eyesore. If I can figure out a way to pry the heart of this game away from its hexagonal boards, I bet I’d play a lot more of it.

Shadows of Brimstone has the most conventional movement system of the three. It’s the very board-gamey, where the monster directives in the other two are more immersive and flavorful. Most monsters are very predictable in Shadows. They quite sportingly attempt to split their numbers (and attacks) evenly between the heroes. They arrive in a checkerboard pattern for the express mechanical purpose of keeping dynamite from being too powerful in the first turn of any encounter. Those are solid play-balance decisions, but they seem a little artificial once you’ve been exposed to Myth’s “it’s a cooperative game, so set your own difficulty and do what's fun” philosophy. That said, some folks find Myth to be too malleable and not challenging or structured enough. I’m predicting that those folks will prefer the balanced concrete systems present in Shadows.
I do have one minor setting / mechanical gripe about SoB, but it might just be a function of the specific demo I played. All the monsters we faced were melee swarms. In a game about Western gunfighters, it seems like cover should matter a little more, and some of the bad guys ought to be shooting back at you. That feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, and it may actually auto-correct itself when I see the final mix of NPCs. The monster stat cards had a box set aside for ranged attacks, but that box was empty on every creature we faced in the demo.

And The Winner Is: Either Myth or Galaxy Defenders, depending on whether you find the former's awful rulebook more or less of a hassle than the later's overly-busy mapboards.