Der PigDog's PigBlog

Untitled Vampire Game with Martin. Martin played a refugee and orphan from a civil war between rival ethnic groups in a small east African country. I played a charismatic older boy assembling a gang of child soldiers among the refugee. Despite the oppressive subject matter, play was in a sense relaxed; we didn't drive towards any climax or conflicts, we simply narrated events as they struck us. In the end, the boy survived the gang, but his overall odds look grim, and I doubt he'll live much longer. I have complicated feelings about the ending of the game. It worked, as in, it felt right, that the boy should escape the gang by jumping off a bridge, and in the process breaking his leg. But I don't want things to be up whim like this in general; the chance of wimping out and pulling punches is too high. I want a resolution method with teeth. My current thought is that the Vampire should add a die whenever they take steps to feed on the Victim, and the Victim sh...

I'm 10 or more session reports behind and it's time to stop pretending to write the old ones and start actually writing the new ones. Here we go! Second session in Simon's Under the City . Just Jay and me. He is returning with his character Hanbul Al-Alawi, a Sufi mystic and newcomer to the city. We determined that he's living in the crusader state of Odessa, and filled out a lot of detail about the city, its current religious and political tensions, and his place in it. We started with some  downtime maneuvers , three of them since it had been three weeks since the last Under the City session. Normally that would be so much window dressing, but he spent a week collecting rumors in downtime, and he rolled the rumor "Several prominent citizens stand accused of grisly murders." I don't give bum rumors, the whole point of the rumor table is to see if you hear anything scenario-relevant, so we know it's going to come up sooner or later. We figured out who ...

 In my Arcade Mode game, players don't take downtime. They freely adjust their resources between sessions. That was the intent, anyway -- most players are unwilling to simply give themselves more resources. So I decided to draft a very simple downtime system. Every real world week, or every session, since your last session with a character, add 1 downtime point. Spend downtime points and (10 * level * points) rupees on downtime actions. (The rupee is your campaign's base currency type, whatever that is. 1 rupee = 1 xp = 1 days' wages for a basic infantryman, roughly.) Here are some simple downtime maneuvers, listed with their costs: 1 point = 1 streetwise check for new hirelings, rumors, rare items, contacts, trainers 1 point = 1 visit to a known sage, library, expert, important contact 1 point = 1 martial art technique learning check 1 point = 1 hireling recruitment roll 2 points = reroll HP, take the higher result 2 points = 1 attribute improvement roll 3 points = train ...

Reposted from Adept Play. We went spelunking in the module Caverns of Thracia by Jennell Jacquays. My play reports are woefully behind. This was our second session in Thracia. The first had been well populated (I think 7 players, including myself), brisk, and controversial, as a nasty encounter with a wight killed all but two of the characters. This one was the opposite, in every way. I had one other participant, Jay, who had been in a good number of my pickup games before. It was slow-paced and cautious, and surprisingly collaborative. Jay likes to play wretched, pathetic characters, at a steep disadvantage in any tactical situation, and then claw himself up if he can. I didn’t record his character sheet before the session, but here’s what Wybert looked like after: Spent a lot of time in jail (“gaol”), raised by ghouls, failed career — eek! I’m glad it’s not me! Wybert started with like no equipment (I think just clothes and a dagger?) and no friends or...

Session 6: Gliding through dark water, Lichway 1 Patrick and Fishbones. Patrick has a gift for character concepts. He pulled in a Knave necromancer with a hireling that had “big bones”, no doubt so he could reanimate the guy once he died. I asked if they wanted any hirelings and they took several, maybe 3 or 4. My memory of this session is dim so I’ll skip a lot of it. I want to focus on a few key situations. In the set-up, I had a really tough time explaining the geography of the situation. In part I blame the module, because the geography doesn’t really make sense. I also think I had some misleading word choices that caused a lot of confusion. There’s no concrete lesson in this. Describing things accurately is a skill, and needs a lot of practice. The dungeon has a lot of water features, and the players followed an underground stream through it, avoiding a lot of potential violence. They found themselves in the east branch of a four-way intersection. North and south lead apparently t...

After I finished my stint as referee in a long game focusing on sailing, exploring the wilderness, and leading bands of warriors , I wanted to try something a little different. That game had risen to really great heights, with dramatic, difficult challenges for both myself and the other players, but also spent a lot of time, maybe too much time, on low-stakes travel and bookkeeping. I wanted to play shorter sessions, in a more accessible format, spending more time facing immediate challenges. I also wanted to see a bit more of classic dungeon commando gameplay. I’d never played a game with serious players that focused on dungeons, and I didn’t really know what the format was capable of. I was especially interested in the tactical possibilities of various spells and magic items. I also had some goals for my own development as a roleplayer: Improve play that involves precise locations in time and space Run an environment where creatures respond intelligently to enemy...