Dwarves in Eden – Securing the Forge

Unfortunately we had to skip a week of Burning Wheel. We showed up last week and there was some confusion about where someone’s character sheet was. So, instead of leaving someone out or just making up numbers I ran some InSpectres instead. Went well, but I definitely need some more practice with it.

Anyhow, this week shows the return of Bozkar the gambler. The player’s missed a couple sessions and he was playing catch up. We know from a couple sessions ago that Bozkar’s relationship, Devlin, was being blamed for the theft of valuables from Kilgen’s cart. The theft that Flint actually performed.

Dwarves in Eden – Into the Mines

Two weeks in a row, we’re going strong! This week again we have Flint and Kardin as well as a new character, Ilsa, who’s part matronly healer, part shepherd (she’s also Flint & Arak’s aunt).

Back at Camp

Rewinding a day, Captain Arak comes to wake up Ilsa. He wants her help looking after Halel. The host’s Khirurgeon (Khirurgy is a Dwarven doctoring skill and covers quite a bit of ground), Tigh, is looking after her, but Arak is worried that Halel is poisoned and Tigh isn’t really treating her properly. Ilsa agrees to check things out. She goes to the medical tent where Halel is being cared for. It looks like she’s being pretty well cared for, the bad laceration on her neck from the attempted strangling is still inflamed, but clean. Tigh is in the tent, reeking of alcohol. Tigh is reluctant (to put it lightly) to let anyone else take a look for Halel. “I’m the doctor! This is MY job!” Ilsa is able to keep him a bit distracted by talking about different things (she also learns that Arak apparently has a thing for Halel) and eventually gets a good look at the young girl. “Look here, do you see the color of her lips and the way her tongue is extended? She’s definitely been poisoned and the treatment is simple” (successful Khirurgy test). “Bah, we just need to keep this wound clean. She’s got a bit of a fever from infection, that’s all. Now get out of here! This is my patient and I’ll take care of her!”

Dwarves in Eden – Into the Ziggurat

After a number of weeks of scheduling problems (holidays always tend to present this problem), finally enough of us were able meet up to play some Burning Wheel. Not all was lost as we broke out some old-school Heroquest one week, which was pretty fantastic. On to the game! The game picks up directly after the last session just after the crazed Urgo runs off into the forest.

The Stairs

Unable to sleep and knowing he can do nothing for Halel, Kardin decides to take a look at all the writings that are on the walls of the Great Stairs that lead out of the mountains. He barely gets into the entrance before he hears the distinct sound of hammer-on-chisel on rock. Fearing the worst he rushes in and sees a crazed-looking old dwarf with hammer and chisel raised to the wall. It’s obvious he’s trying to destroy the runes and writings on the wall. Without hesitating Kardin rushes forward to tackle the old dwarf. They both go tumbling down the stairs, but not before the dwarf’s chisel catches in the stone and pulls away a sizable chunk (tied Power vs. Speed). Kardin is on top of the dwarf, pinning him to the ground. He recognizes him as Fergus, head chronicler.

InSpectres

I recently got my hands on a couple games I’ve been meaning to buy for a while: InSpectres, & Lacuna Part I, both from designer Jared Sorensen. I got to play a session of InSpectres at GenCon this year (I posted about it here). I’ll start with InSpectres. It’s definitely the easier of the two to talk about.

If I were going to describe InSpectres as succinctly as possible it would be: corporate Ghostbusters RPG. That tells you about 80% of what you need to know about the game. The idea is that supernatural stuff happens and InSpectres is a corporation that has come about to deal with such phenomena and people are founding InSpectres franchises all over. So, imagine Ghostbusters with a bit of Office Space mixed in for all of that hair-pulling corporate bullshit.

Let that awesomeness sink in.

Dwarves in Eden – A Midnight Kidnapping

My gaming group has started a new Burning Wheel (Gold) campaign. It feels good to be out of the GM’s seat. I’ve been mostly running since around February.

Anyhow, the setup we came up with is that the PCs are all dwarves from a formally very powerful hold. The clan wasn’t well liked, but even together the other clans couldn’t oust us. Eventually they got the help of some elves and the entire clan was forced to retreat into deeper tunnels. About 100 dwarfs survived the journey — that we know of, we were cut off from the Prince’s party and they’re assumed dead. The tunnels are collapsed and flooded behind us, so the only way to go is forward. We find ourselves in a dense jungle. In the distance we see the top of a volcano, belching up smoke.

In play we’ll discover this is a cradle of life sort of area and it’s still inhabited by men — tribal, with spirit binding. There are also ancient dwarven ruins scattered around and huge golem/automoton sort of things called Collossi that were probably built by dwarves in the ancient past.

Burning Apocalypse Con (11-11-11) Highlights

This past weekend I was in Manhattan for Burning Apocalypse Con (11-11-11) following up last year’s Burning Con (10-10-10). Two full days of gaming (3 slots Saturday, 2 slots Sunday) with a party to kick things off Friday night and a party to wind down with Sunday night. Luke Crane (of Burning Wheel, Burning Empires, & Mouse Guard) & Vincent Baker (of Dogs in the Vineyard, In A Wicked Age, & Apocalypse World) teamed up this year to put on the con.

I played in one game of Burning Wheel, a game of Dogs in the Vineyard, ran a game of FreeMarket and ended things off with two sessions of Apocalypse World. A really fantastic time was had. Instead of going through excruciating detail and rambling for pages, I’ll just go over some highlights.

Murderous Ghosts

Vincent Baker (creator of In A Wicked Age, Dogs in the Vineyard to name a couple) just released a new game, Murderous Ghosts (currently in pre-order phase). I was fortunate enough to get to playtest the game along with 205 other people.

In the span of a couple weeks I was able to play through the game 4 times. Although thanks to busy lives and such I didn’t actually get to play it in person. I played 3 play-by-email games (two where I was the GM, one where I was the player) and I ran one game over Google+ with Hangout.

I’ll start off by saying I’m not normally a big fan of horror. I don’t so much dislike it as generally there’s plenty of other options that appeal to me. But, I’m a big fan of Vincent’s games and I’m always up to playtest something new. I was especially interested since it’s a game for just two players and is designed to be played in a short amount of time (20-60 minutes).

Dread: First Reading

First things first: as of now I haven’t actually played Dread. I played a really interesting hack of it a while back, but as far as Dread out-of-the-box I haven’t played it yet. I just recently read the rulebook and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to note down some thoughts I have just from reading the book and then, hopefully, I’ll get a chance to run or play it at some point and I can compare that experience with what I post here.

Fiasco

At GenCon this year I finally had the chance to play Fiasco (I talked a little about that in a GenCon Debrief post).

It was pretty much love at first site and I immediately ran off to buy the game as well as the companion. I finally got around to reading them a couple weeks ago. And, more importantly, played a session of Fiasco shortly after that.

NOTE: The Fiasco Companion is currently my favorite RPG supplement ever. There’s really nothing new mechanically. It has some new Fiasco playsets and a handful of proposed hacks. More importantly are the pages and pages of play advice, not only from the game designers, but from other game designers and players. The best part is huge chunks of the advice pretty much exists in a vacuum. So much of what’s said can be taken away from Fiasco and applied to any other game. A lot of the advice will seem familiar to anyone that’s ever done improv or read up on it, but it’s still incredibly useful information and will positively impact pretty much every other game you play.

I am a Story Whore

My name is Jeremiah and I’m addicted to stories.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. Why do I like the games I do and what about others don’t I like?

Something I’ve started to realize lately is I can enjoy just about any story. It doesn’t have to be terribly compelling. The presentation can be awful. There just has to be a story.