The Pathfinder Chronicles

When I have time to work on my own campaign I tend to plan with an eye on a meta-plot that I want to achieve. That is I always tend to have a story that I want to tell and so I design around the story and present it to the players. I used to play with other GM's who were very good that tended to focus more on the player character development than any great plot. They would weave the campaigns story around the players desires so the plot became the story of the characters rather than the over arching plot.

Thank you http://nancylauzon.com for this very literal
interpretation...

I am, and always have been, an aspiring author. I have written many short stories, poetry, haiku's and the like in my time but nothing that I yet wish to try to have published. As a writer I seek to tell a story. I have developing characters within those stories, but those characters are fully under my control and so serve the purpose to create the plot to give my message. It is no surprise then that when I come to make my games I utilise the same approach. I get an idea for a story, set the theme for the tale and then utilise the NPC's and settings to tell that story. I have in the past created very memorable horror games, standard fantasy games, sic-fi and cybertech games as well as love stories and dramas. Many of my players still talk to me about remembering such and such a game where there character did this and that. I tend to remember the games based on the stories and plots I was running rather than the way that their character performed. Of course, the player characters are the medium through which my story is delivered the components of the plot are there to play out before the player characters are even rolled up.

Thanks Deviant artist ~Ajay-L for this Sam like image...

On the flip side, my favourite gaming memories as a player have come from the games where I was involved with a character focussed GM. They generally would start their game out with some set plot material and some of their favourite NPC's and see where the interaction took us. When I was 14 I played Mega Traveller with a GM and my character was a little roguish and the games we played developed him into a Psi drug dealer with interstellar contacts. I still have a folder containing all the notes I made in game with him that catalogued his whole story. I read it every now and again as he was one of my all time favourite characters. Another all time favourite character of mine was Sam the thief in AD&D some 20 years ago now. My ambitions started small time with her and stayed there. We played many memorable games with her where she honed her cat burglar skills. The GM of this particular game enhanced it so well by designing to cater to this with my character finding dirty little secrets of the residents in each home. Over time these little secrets got my character to a great position of influence.

Thanks tvtropes.org for Forrest :)

So, which is the better approach? Is it an eternal argument that goes on Plot or Character? Obviously it is the same in the movies, Forrest Gump is pure character where Aliens is plot. Of course there is always characters and character development in both but are they there to tell a story or just reflect on the character themselves? You could actually choose a middle of the road approach and start with an overarching plot and allow the final point of the plot to be fluid. This would allow the players to truly effect the world if they want to pursue their own ends or, the end you desire be the final point if the group is more happy to be lead than to lead. I think this can be a point of consternation between the player and the GM if the factor is not addressed.

I run my games with the plot set but I use sub plots to allow my players to explore their own character in depth should they want to. I tend to lean toward gaming systems over time that allow for the story to shine and have a richness, or depth in the way they portray things. This has meant over time that I have tended to run games that were a bit left of centre. E.g. Earthdawn is what I am best known for running, James Bond RPG (although in this I follow almost an even 50/50 split for character and plot) as well as a game system called Aria that I dearly would love to run one day. I stayed away from your more mainstream games like Dungeons and Dragons as simply by playing the system sets up an expectation for some gamers. That said, now it has changed to Pathfinder, I find it has a rich background and a good place to set meta-plots. It is also the reason that I love playing the adventure path, as long as the adventure is right.

Thanks hdwpapers for this gem :)

Most of the games that tend to be all character focussed tend to run better as one on one (or solo) games for the player. It allows for the character to be fully explored which can be a difficult task to achieve in a multi-player scenario. Multi-play with this style of play will tend to have some characters who have felt "left out" at some stage because the focus shifts so heavily on to one character at any given time.

In my experience there is a wealth of enjoyment to be had in either setting. The important thing as a GM is you cater to the players tastes OR you find a group of players that enjoy your style and play with them. After all it is just a game and the point is to have fun!

Last nights game started with a bout of diplomacy and became the largest session of actual non-combat role playing the characters have faced since the start of the Serpent Skull adventure path. I walked away from the game earlier than normal (it normally runs very late) but the players were invigorated and fully into the story. They role played well and were rewarded well for the session with an average of about 66000 experience being awarded for the session.

Seleca the Cavalier, my daughter's character
Thanks to www.asianfanfics.com for the likeness

The players finally finished their work in the great maze coming away with the "Weapon" they were looking for. I will not list here exactly what that "weapon" is as they are still not 100% sure what it is and I would also not want to put any spoilers in the posts for future players of the path. Regardless of what it is, they are beginning to put the pieces of the puzzle together and see the patterns converge to a last seasoned push to the finale.

I have to say that I am now very happy with the choice of character that my daughter took, regardless of it being a Cavalier which was the one class specifically mentioned as not advisable for the campaign. The good news is she is playing a heavily armoured martial female who is the most accomplished warrior in the group. Due to the story contained in this adventure path the players find out about a hero that shares exactly the same traits as my daughter's character and it provides a nice underpinning attachment to the original story. So much so, in fact, that NPC's are beginning to revere her for her apparent similarities to the stories that they have now uncovered. Also, she is the most diplomatic (skill wise) out of the party and is beginning to lead the negotiations to form an army.

Last night saw the group realise the fact that they needed to build an army to take on the major denizens of the under city they have been exploring and it lead to some excellent roleplaying around the table. Firstly, the group attempted to convince a vampiric race to flock to their banner. They were told that they would join at the cost of 100 slaves to torture and feed on which set the players back. However the Cavalier stepped forward and accepted a counter offer from the leader who agreed to a trial by combat. If the Cavalier won the Vampiric race would join immediately, but if the leader of the Vampiric faction won they would join and the 100 slaves would be provide, with the Cavalier being the first of those to join the slaves ranks.

That deal set up what promised to be an epic battle. The pair were evenly matched and the battle was joined. We gathered around the table and the Cavalier charged in. The Vampire leader struck back, hitting, missing and then critically fumbling, falling to the ground prone. Challenged and poorly defended the Cavalier hit with her first two hits of the next round to cause the leader to crumble and cede for fear of his life. A bit of an anti-climactic battle from my point of view but a resounding success for the players.

The next stop was to ensure the support of another degenerate race in the under city and then back to the surface city to get things in order. The players had not been above ground for some time and there was a good deal of catching up in camp to be done and various items to be sold and purchased. Amongst this the monk who is also a cleric of the God of knowledge was approached individually by a native with an artifact of a long lost soul. To cut a long story short it evolved into a situation where the monk suffered an attempted assassination and failing a save against a greater slaying arrow (although he had the hit points to survive). The truth of this shocked the group to the core. It was a game changer, their opponents were able to be born in their form making everyone a possible enemy in the camp around them. Many of the players are now more than a little paranoid about all that surround them now.

To finish the night the group managed to have the native tribe that they are camped near join them, despite their leader having a bit of a down day. They circumnavigated a lot of the written requirements of the module by offering up artistic items and items that represented them instead of all providing pure art. After all, the players have long been supporting this group and have helped them as often as they have been helped by them.

Janthir sneaking into the assassin camp?
Thanks www.fantasyflightgames.com for the
image

The second faction above ground that they have had the most history with was the Red Mantis and the party finished the night on a high with the Cavalier again using her fantastic diplomacy and the fact that one of her companions waltzed into the middle of the camp without any of the red mantis noticing that he was even present.

It was a great night of role playing and it was marvellous to see the group coming together and finally putting some of the final puzzle together. It was also great to see the shock on the players as they heard of the assassination attempt and realised that they all had been under surveillance. Not only that, it could be anyone in the camp or the surrounds that can attack at any time! Or was it just the singular assassin? The paranoia levels have started to rise. The group truly is on the downhill ride to the finish of this module and adventure path. Can they hold it together and eliminate the threat below or will the world again fall into another era of darkness and slavery.

Only our heroes can determine this question. They have stood firm against the threats so far but is the threat to much? Stay tuned to the blog and find out...

You may come to this post thinking that I am going to discuss my methods of handing out experience to the players in my game. Of course I would not blame you for that as it can be a tricky proposition at times and I do mean to write a post about it in the near future. However, by now you have realised that I intend on talking about a different type of experience. I want to talk about how to provide your game experience that the players will be talking about for years to come.

I had a player a couple of days ago ask me if I remembered an encounter that I ran in a James Bond RPG session when I was 15 (24 years ago now). He talked about his character, the plot and his actions as if it were yesterday. My memory was cloudy of the whole thing apart from the mastermind I created for the game but I nodded and made positive noises in the right place. It was this, and the fact that I have been researching how to craft games (I am a teacher who teaches computer game design) that made me decide to write a post on this. It is actually very hard to come up with these moments for players and many things have to be going in your favour but they do happen.

The first things that you must realise is that gaming (all types, computers, table-top, role-playing, hop-scotch) is about the experience. We, as human beings, crave new experiences or experiences that we have tried and enjoyed. When a game designer designs his game she first thinks about what kind of experience she wants to give to those players who will play the game. Be this from a professional game developer at Paizo who is looking to design the next six books in an adventure path, to the game designers of Angry Birds developing their new cash collector or even if it is me, considering the next game that I am having in my home grown campaign. The first thing I (and all those listed) should ask is what experience do I want to give the players.

Good old Jimmy doing his thing! Thanks www.mi6-hq.com
for the image.

Considering this we will slip back into my example of the player who was talking about our James Bond game from almost a quarter of a century ago. His character had been trailing a courier (not from Fed-Ex, more the surreptitious spy kind) and was spotted by the said courier. A chase ensued where the player was in a high powered jet boat and the courier was on a motorbike moving through the dock areas of Shanghai. The chase was brutal and called for some tight manoeuvring (if you ever want to play a great chase out it is very worthwhile using the James Bond RPG rules as they have a fantastic abstract chase set of rules) and although the player just wanted to tail them and make the courier think he had gotten away it was very touch and go with shots fired and the boat almost capsizing at one point. The climax of the chase occurred as the player attempted to land the boat on top of a boat shed while the courier was negotiating a tight corner. The chances were slim, in fact they were 6% likely I am reliably told and the dice hit the table.... 0 and then a 6! The boat plopped neatly on top of the boat shed in a perfectly timed jump and the courier looking over his shoulder gave a wry smile knowing he had shaken the tail. The player then followed the bike on foot using the jetties and punts to find where the drop was to be made and make the connection of who was receiving it. The dreaded henchman Otto 'Croc' Von Danton!

I was chatting online to the player and they were spilling all this out as if it were yesterday. Having done some research into the idea of experiential game making I spent my time analysing what I had done right that lead this player to recount this particular game to me so many years later. Of course at the time I was a 15 year old games master with only a few years experience under my belt. I still sniggered when the hot foil would enter and attempt to distract the agents with her cleavage, so it is unlikely that I sat down and wondered what experience would I be dealing today. In fact, the game was played in a tent in the front yard of my mates place on a four day role playing splurge, so largely the game would have been spun right off the top of my then young imagination. But to me now it was clear that I had done some things very right.

The chase seemed to be one of the highlights. There was a fight on the Orient Express that culminated the game as he tried to take out the evil mastermind but it was a similar thing to what I have detailed above. There are many experiences in a James Bond setting and game but the one that was paramount for my player was the feeling of control he had when at the wheel of the boat and attempting to ensure the courier took the paths that suited him the best. He loved the build up of the chase and loved that he had been spotted so that he could make this a chase. He had actually done a very good job at trailing the courier but apparently (so I told him at the time) he got a miraculous roll to spot him. This gave the player the idea that the courier had some skills and that he was a worthy opponent.

In the play there was a strong build up. The courier and the player testing each others mettle like combatants circling one another on the field. Each would then push the boundary that had been set for daring attempting to get the result that they needed (James Bond has an excellent bidding concept allowing people who win the bidding war for difficulty to choose manoeuvres and who goes first). I realised that it was this build up, a chase of over ten rounds complexity from the sound of it described in cinematic style that caught the player hook line and sinker. It built each round into a tense battle and allowed at the culmination for the player to succeed at an insanely hard difficulty level that allowed for him to outsmart the courier and further the information gathering he was undertaking at the time. The setting helped as well (Shanghai, boat versus motorbike) was very James Bond.

I then started thinking about how I would go about recreating something similar today. Not in James Bond though (as much as I want to play the system again we have too many things going on), probably insert it into the Pathfinder game to spice up a part of the adventure path that we are playing at the moment. I could set up a scene in which the Cavalier of the group was challenged to catch a creature of some form through ruins in an effort to get a faction to ally with the players. The cavalier would be mounted which allows for the player to utilise her mount which she does not often get to do in the current adventure path. She would be chasing some kind of creature, obviously swift but also nimble or perhaps with some kind of magical movement ability that makes it a challenge. The final goal of capture is something different to the norm of cutting her opponent in half that she is used to.

Watch out for the bestial residents... Thanks
knowyourmeme.com for the image

With the above description we can see the experience is beginning to form, and although they are completely different settings and systems, the basis of the experience is there. To fully capture that feel I need to consider how I would form a similar environment with what I had previously. Have many spectators of the hunt seems to trite, so make the creature run into an area of the ruins that is heavily infested by bestial residents. This causes the Cavalier to attempt to time her capture, or fight a running battle with residents of the ruins attempting to dismount her at the same time. Also, I would use the environment to great effect, having the creature duck into tight confined alleys or tunnels that make it difficult or impossible for the Cavalier to follow.

Now, as the Pathfinder game has a whole party involved (rather than two of us in a tent) I would need to make this exciting for everyone. Perhaps I could allow the others into the ruins at the same time in an attempt to herd the creature toward the Cavalier, or perhaps have one of them ride with her. Still, the environment would need to change so the sorcerer rogue had a chance to affect the creature magically or by altering the direction utilising his knowledge of trapping. The alchemist could find areas that would narrow the beast into a choke point and block exit routes with well placed bombs and the monk with his super fast speed could simply aid her by blocking certain routes.

So, there is the experience set in game. I feel that with a bit of map design and consideration I could flesh the three paragraphs above into an exciting chase scene. But then would it come off? I need to then consider the playing environment. That is where we meet to game. I need to make a map that is easily transferrable to the tabletop map. It needs to be detailed so the players can appreciate the environment and use it to their advantage, but it also needs to be quickly drawn. In a chase that requires a map two of my players (the cavalier and the monk) are exceptionally quick so they will travel a large amount of distance quickly. In consideration of this I decide not to run the chase with miniatures but build a small scale map on some sketchbook pages that could be laid in a line and the players location at any time marked on the map for the chase. This incorporates the tactile as well as the auditory components. I could layer in some background music as well, low level flight of the bumblebee leaps immediately to my mind. It needs to be something with some tension and pace to build this to where it needs to be.

Me considering the experience...

You can see that I am working on only one encounter but in about twenty minutes of thinking and planning I have built the idea up from simply a chase (a few die rolls a bit of decryption) to the experience of a chase. It is true that all of this could fall apart in a second if one of the players turns up and are tired or just can't be bothered and spends more time looking at their watch than interacting with the game. Or they may show up keen to get to the heart of the plot and be more interested in encounters that enhance what they know of the evil serpents they are soon to be at war with. As a GM you need to realise that these issues are "out of your control". Some problems that arise you need to roll with. I will have a few different encounters ready on how the players will build their alliances so as to hopefully cover the feel for the night. But if you are enthusiastic and have obviously spent some time building the experience for the player it will become infectious.

When working with pre-written modules always try to find ways to enhance the experience. I have spent years on years running games and playing them. The games that I have run and played in where I just read the prepared text and run encounters as written with a lot of dice rolling tend not to be the ones the players remember. But it is a lot of work also. You do not need to value add to everything. Pick the encounters that highlight the plot or will be a challenge. Spend a bit of time to enhance the experience and your players too will chat to you in a quarter of a century to talk about the games that were!

Good luck focussing on the experience of your games!

I have been playing about with the idea of video recording one of our gaming sessions and last night when we wound things up I wished it had been that session. Last night turned into an exceptionally entertaining night of role playing. Each of the players did exceptionally well in playing their characters and the game was all about the intrigue of the story and the interaction of the characters.

Thanks azeroth.metblogs.com for the image

At the conclusion of last night the group are now but one final push away from the completion of the six module adventure path, the Serpent Skull from Paizo. Last nights session was always ear marked as a session that would be more role playing than combat based as the players needed to scour the city for support of their cause. Playing against that back drop there was the threat of assassins against the players and they became seriously paranoid of every NPC that I had. In fact they essentially were trying to garner support from NPC's without trusting a single one of them that they were speaking to. Factor in that a divination cast by an NPC cleric stated that one of their closest companions would work against them the group nearly had a melt down.

The game ran for around four to five hours and I do not think there was a low point. There were certainly points which made me laugh, such as the group decided that they had to be absolutely certain that the person who would turn against them was not one of themselves. They headed to an abandoned part of the city, removed all magical equipment, had one player cast Discern Lies and another cast Zone of Truth and state that all had to voluntarily lower their spell defence to make the spells work. When this happened two of the players refused to lower their spell defence. It was hilarious! The party were so paranoid at this point that they were not even willing to submit to something that could clear the paranoia from the air!

<SPOILER ALERT> If you are playing in a Serpent Skull game at the moment do not read any further. It will make the game less enjoyable. If you are not, scroll down to continue...

And to kunochan.com for this image. It made me lol!

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In the books there is meant to be an assassin attack on every player simultaneously after they have been separated. The assassins are tough opponents but not too tough to have super serious chances of killing a player of the characters expected level. I decided to play this out differently because I knew that it would be much more enjoyable.

Rather than having the assassins strike simultaneously I had one of the characters likely to survive attacked first. He ran back to the group after escaping to warn of the attack and the paranoia began. This was a week ago. In last nights game I hit a player with a second assassin, and although that player beat the assassin, they were not 100% certain if the attempt was an assassination attempt and decided to keep it quiet. Regardless, this had the desired effect and the party were on edge in a major way. I then focussed on NPC interaction and had NPC's attempting to get the characters attention individually and the players responded with total paranoia. That coupled with some sticky visits to previous foes who they were now trying to make allies lead to a fantastic night of gaming.

One of my players commented as we packed up that he had not rolled a die in anger for the entire evening but had thoroughly enjoyed it. This morning I found a text on my phone from moments after I left the venue last night from another player thanking me for an excellent game. It was one of those nights that make you really glad you GM! I threw myself into every role and gave my players just enough rope to hang themselves with and let them go to work. In reality, I set it up but they completed it. It was a perfect night for a game and I am keen to see the adventure path out!

Thankyou dribbble.com for my adventuring image :)

I am going on a new adventure.

I am going on a new adventure because I love role playing games.

I am, in real life, a teacher which means I am gifted with a goodly amount of holidays. Normally during holidays we play role playing games a lot. A huge amount in fact. But the past holidays it seemed to be all a little to hard for my regular group to play a lot and I got irritable about it.

As an aside, this is a grossly unfair statement for me to make as not only was it the holiday season but one of my mates in the group also moved which stole huge chunks of time.

However, as unfair as the statement was, I was irritable about so little gaming. So when I recently found the existence of tabletop role playing communities on Google plus I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Here were role players organising games on line via video chat as well as discussing all things roleplaying. It took me no time at all to get involved in the conversations that were there but it has taken me until this weekend to join a game via video link as a trial.

The new adventure path from
paizo.com is awesome!

Hence my new adventure. It is a play test, which is good as there is no longer term commitment. This is a good thing as it is an experiment for me to see how it works online as I have offered to run a Pathfinder adventure path online through the Asia Pacific Google Plus Tabletop Gaming community. This has come about as I have read the new module in the new Adventure Path for Pathfinder and I love it.

This had me torn, do I break all my in person players hearts by pulling the pirate campaign and run the new one? Well, the answer is obviously no, as I love the story of the Skull and Shackles adventure path and I am heavily committed to it already, both financially and mentally. But can I wait another year to run the path? NO!

Staring into the 21st Century of online role playing :)

So, I was faced with the choice this week of perhaps starting a new group to feed my addiction! I have been attending a gaming club to play Magic the Gathering with my children but they role play there too. I don't like the environment for role playing though as it is too open and not intimate enough as onlookers often interrupt the game. So I finally decided to give this online game thing a try. Tomorrow mornings game will see me up at 8 a.m. ready to role play in the play-test for a Barebones RPG super hero game based with the GM in America namely +Christopher Hardy . From this I will get the sense and feel of the space for my own game and get to work on how I will use the space for myself as well as helping him with the play test.

I have three players signed up for my online game already and I am planning to start it within the month, after character sessions are done etc. Hopefully I will pick up another two before play begins and the game will run well, giving me the gaming that I need to feed the addiction and getting to play the fantastic adventure path.

I do have one last confession to make also...

I am so addicted I have actually signed up to play in another Pathfinder campaign as a player over video in +Roger Lante game of Rise of the Runelords. Sweet! I have even convinced one of my in person players to come to the dark side with me. Well done +Cam Mcloughlin !

Welcome to the 21st Century indeed Mr. Knights!

Up early and eager to game!

Wow!

I am sitting here exhausted after a long day of gaming goodness! This morning I woke up at seven so I could attend the first ever online tabletop RPG game via Google+ hangouts. I grabbed a shower, a bite to eat, the URL for the pre-gen characters and chose my character and got ready to play. It was a play-test of the super hero mod for the Barebones RPG. I of course played in it to help out with the play-test but also to get a feel for these games so that I can run one myself.

Well, now I am no longer a hangout virgin I can say I loved the game! +Christopher Hardy was clear about it being a play-test but made things easy to do and joined in the roleplaying fun even though he was after a test of the numbers in his game. Things ran relatively smoothly, though there were some glitches with the tool being used (Roll20). I found them to be relatively minor for the impact on my game, and the biggest problem I had was my network connection that dumped me three times in the final 15 minutes of the game (but was perfect until then).

An image from the Roll20 website that is similar to the
view I had this morning.

The final gripe, screen space is at a premium in this style game. I found myself immediately wishing that I had a second screen to work with. I use a macbook pro with a 15" screen and I found things to be, well, squishy. Now it is true I was a virgin at this so I spent the first 15 minutes of the hangout wrestling with the interface of the hangout and the Roll20 interface also. After a short amount of wrestling though I had managed to manipulate the map into a size that suited me.

One thing that did surprise me is that there was very little video of our faces. It was mainly a voice driven thing though you could select web cams to look at them. But to do this you lose focus on the maps and the settings so it was not worth it. This did not matter though and if anything helped the suspension of disbelief. In fact there were some nice touches too! Like you could set your screen name to your character and the GM could assign you the ability to move your own tokens (and as it turned out other tokens as I reprogrammed a few robots to help out). Also, the fog of war ability seemed to work really seamlessly with the maps!

An afternoon of Magic...

In some down time for one of the other players +Larry Moore ordered pizza the GM talked to me about the other options for running the game that Google offers native to their hangouts. So in other words I got a nice idea of the contrast of options, although there do seem to be many 3rd party options for use with the hangouts to try. So, I like what I used today but I will try some alternatives with a couple of friends before my own game kicks off within the month.

So, hangout down and I am really excited about the online game that I am now organising. I signed off, grabbed the kids and we went to a Magic the Gathering Gatecrash draft tournament which is something else I have never done before as well. It was good fun but I did not do so well. My son was also unlucky though my daughter made the finals but got knocked out in the first round of the finals.

The online campaigns first module...

I came home, sent a message to the people that have already signed up to the online game about starting to look at character generation over the next week. I picked up a new player today also, from Japan which is kind of cool so welcome +Eric M to the party with +Cam Mcloughlin, +libby furr and +Dennis Laffey to the game. Get used to me blogging about it too! I love to share.

So, there you go. I have had a fantastic day of role playing and Magic. Not to mention all the thinking that I have been doing about the specifics of the game that I will be running online! It will be hard to go back to work tomorrow with the myriad of possibilities still swimming around in my head. I have my first meeting regarding the character generation tomorrow night so I do have a little preparation to do tomorrow also.

I hope all of you had similarly great days!

Hi all! By now regular readers understand that I am a Games Master (GM) through and through because I love the control! Today's blog is all about the need to let go and have a break from the pressure of being a GM and playing for a bit. It gives you a whole new perspective and helps to recharge your batteries and give you inspiration for your games.

Back to playing the game in RotR

Over the past month I have gone back to full time work for the first time in almost a decade. It is a tiring prospect to be sure and I have found that when it comes around time to leave work and go to my in person game that I am craving a coffee I.V. drip and have need of a little head break to erase the days problems and get into the space of the game I am to deliver. Add to that the fact that we have been just being able to make it through the fortnight with money as my work has taken a month to get my full time pay sorted I have been a little run down recently. It was great then that last Tuesday came and it was time to play my Summoner again in the Rise of the Runelords. I did not need to juggle NPC negotiations, critters, miniatures, screens, secret player notes. I just had to re-familiarise myself with Coltyn and Grell and try to keep the party moving forward.

Our gaming table

It had been around two months since we had played this campaign so the start was rife with confusion about where we were and what we were doing. I have a really good memory for things like this but even I could not remember if Grell had been banished or not and if I had fallen unconscious or not. We were soon underway though and I made a point of standing near the map (we have a big map table we draw on) and making sure the action kept flowing. I knew that we were nearing the end of the first "chapter" burnt offerings and so I wanted us to stay on task. It honestly did not take me too long before I had the players chasing me around and sending in Grell as the remote scout everywhere!

+Cam Mcloughlin, the GM for RotR

I had forgotten the joy of being a player and I have to say that after the game I was energised and satisfied. We had played for around three hours but we had made some decent distance, fought the final enemy and I had seen a bard use an ability that did not just give us a bonus to hit and damage which I applauded! In short we had a good fun game. I had not been able to participate much in the final game as Grell had attracted some attacks of opportunity after being badly poisoned and because our fighter was incredibly self-centred and should have taken them first. So none of the game to me was epic, although I am sure I will remember talking them out of investigating the Temple of Lamashtu (evil god) even though they knew there were magical items up for grabs there.

I was even not the least bit insulted when at the end of the game one of the players (one that did not like playing characters in different campaigns to start with) asked if we could play the Rise of the Runelords for next weeks game. I had been having trouble keeping up to speed with my Serpent Skull campaign and this gives me the perfect break to take advantage of. I will be across it all and ready to make the last portion of that adventure path completely mind blowing. It also gives me time to bed down the Pathfinder adventure path that I am kicking off online next week as well as getting my mind around the Traveller game I have been working on.

The pirate ship for the Skull and Shackles campaign soon
to begin...

So, you can see from this post that although I mention sitting back and taking a break from GMing is a good thing that I actually have just diverted my GMing energy into different avenues. The thing is that I never really play that often and it was good to play to get the games perspective as the player. I can see areas that I need to improve to make the game more enjoyable. I fully expect that in the end section of the Serpent skull path that the enemies will become more vocal. They will reveal things that will give flavour to the whole adventure. Even the smallest bits of information can make a player see the game differently. I have lamented before in many conversations that the GM gets so much information that the players never do and it would help them appreciate it. So I plan to have little tidbits of information for the players to find and put together what has really happened for them.

So, that is my aha moment after the game this week. Give up a little more to the players and help them understand the progression and connections for the adventure path that they have been in. It will help heal the end of campaign depression as we lead into the pirate campaign, even though I intend to run further games for this group of characters as there is lots of loose ends for them to deal with!

The system of "virtual tabletop" that I
am using in Google+

So, the long awaited moment arrived last night. I launched my first ever international video game (I have been running an Earthdawn PBeM for about 13 years now so it is not my first International game) via Google plus and the roll20.net system. I have to say also that a damn good time was had by me and hopefully all of my players as well. By the way, before you read any further I will warn you of this, parts of the Reign of Winter adventure path from Paizo are discussed here. If you want to be a player in this campaign I would suggest that you reconsider reading this post.

The system we used was the grand old Pathfinder system, though I am adding some house rules next week to add some more flavour to the characters and also try out the Hero Point system detailed in the Advanced Players Guide of Pathfinder, with a twist. I am not going to offer up a post on the roll20 system here, I may do that via a dedicated post. I will say this though, several of the things that we did on roll20 got some "Oooohs" and "Aaaahs" from the players. I thoroughly like the system and have become a financial backer for it as of yesterday via subscription.

Thank you goes to +Christopher Hardy for this little gem
that became the sleepy village of Heldren

So the game has been set and if you are a new reader, the campaign is the newest adventure path from Paizo for Pathfinder called the "Reign of Winter". The first module "Snows of Summer" was where we started last night. It is so new that I do not even yet have my hardcopy of the book (I am a subscriber) and had to run it from PDF last night. With the call out I have got five players, four of which played last night. I am committing to a weekly game though some of the players may not be able to make it all the time. This is fine and I can use them to NPC on the weeks they are away and award them party experience. We also had a prospective player sit in last night and he is rolling up a character today to join in next week, so the party of five becomes the party of six next week.

Shun, courtesy of www.paperspencils.com

The inaugural game had an impressive lineup. First off there is Shun (pronounced Shoon) run by +Eric M. Shun is an aged halfling monk with a bad gambling and drinking problem. Fantastic rolls for his stats gave him a great start but his rolls last night were atrocious. Must have been the demon drink putting his Monk abilities off for the evening. He is shaping up to be the cinematic lover of the group with an "as long as it looks cool" attitude beginning to grow. Last night whilst trying to disarm a trap (no skill in it but the alchemist managed to talk him up a tree) he actually set it off. he was in no danger at all but Eric asked if he could be pulled out of the tree and swing down on the spiked log that was at the heart of the trap. Why? Because it looks cool!

Second character would be Urgunn Harvirr, the female Dwarven Fighter played by +libby furr. She is wandering in search for adventure so she can earn enough coin to pay for the freedom of her fellow female dwarves to choose who they want to marry out of love rather than duty. It is a great ideal but possibly one that will ruffle the grey beards of Dwarven society, almost enough to put a stop to it? Only time will tell. She did not get a huge chance to show her fighting spirit last night but she did show her temper! After being collected by the aforementioned spiked log trap she expressed her anger by king hitting poor old stunned Shun as he sat on the log.

Urgunn courtesy of
www.dndta.wikia.com

The third character for the evening has the promise of perhaps being the most destabilising element in the party. The human alchemist known as Alan Chemist played by +Reece Carter. Starting off reasonably quietly Alan came to life as they moved out to travel to the frozen wasteland that had appeared to the South. The first area they came to had Alan essentially destroy two zombies in a carriage with his bomb ability. The only one that got out being killed by the party Paladin who is soon to be introduced. Alan also seems to be the one that jumps on treasure, and is willing to take the risks to jump on treasure and secure it as soon as possible. Finding the trap last night had Alan directing Shun on the best way to "disarm" the trap showing he had an invested interest in the ways traps are made. The NPC ranger accompanying them (Erain) did warn them prior to playing with the trap, but did they listen? Noooooo. The result had Alan first in line for the log to hit.

The final PC for the night was run by +Cam Mcloughlin, a Sulis (half human, half djann) Paladin named Corbyn Duvaal dedicated to Torag. Corbyn soon showed himself to be the heart of a Paladin, making a big show of his dedication to the cause of good and law by leaping at the chance to find out what happened to the noblewoman taken by bandits into the frozen woods. He further shone in his Paladin like demeanour by breaking out the soap box after the other members of the party a) put treasure over personal safety; and b) hit another player due to the injury caused by point a)! As an aside, Corbyn was the only one smart enough to move out of the path of the log before they started to disarm it. I can see some interesting sessions in the future being born from the dynamic between Corbyn and Alan.

Alan Chemist courtesy of onlyhdwallpapers.com. He is a big
boy with attitude...

So, now you have met the player personalities, lets discussed what actually happened in order, inclusive of out of game events. Firstly Cam and I were in a room next to each other (as I was leaching his internet) and we sat waiting for the 8 P.M. time deadline to come. It arrived and I looked all over my event page to find the link to join now and could not find one! I think I may have erroneously set up the event not to be a hangout event. Don't really know, so I created a hangout and invited all those people that I had previously and we were away.

I knew Reece would be a little bit of time so I did a bit of an introduction and showed the players some of the features of the roll20 system and allowed them to practice their dice rolling. I also foreshadowed some additions that would occur in week two to their characters like Hero points and the like. Then we hit snag one in that when one of the players logged in we got horrible feedback. Cam was certain it was him and he immediately started messing with his microphone which later paid off by causing him not to be heard by any player! I had to take off the headset and allow him to be heard through my Macbook's internal microphone, which worked in a fashion.

When we finally got underway the players learnt that the small village they were in (a temperate climate near the middle of summer) was located North of a forest that had suddenly been overtaken by ice and snow drifts. To make things worse, a mercenary rode into town the day before babbling feverishly about being attacked by the witches servants. The players that were strangers in town (Urgunn, Corbyn and Shun) started to get some funny looks and so they decided to set about finding out what this snowbound forest was all about. After all, they heard over and over again that snow here was rare enough in Winter and totally unheard of in the Summer months.

Corbyn Duvaal courtesy of www.giantitp.com

They visited the mercenary, now holed up in the apothecary and found that he was of Linnorn blood and happened to know what he was talking about. He claimed the carriage he was protecting was attacked initially by bandits and then he discerned winter touched creatures. he described them and thanks to an excellent role Alan was able to identify the type of winter touched they were. The mercenary helped them identify the creatures weakness and assured the group that the inhabitation of the forest was part of a plot by the Witches of Irrisen. A country thousands of miles from their current location.

So, after harassing some councillors for a bit of pay they headed off to see the forest for themselves after purchasing some snow gear and some cold iron weapons. It was around then that the modem Cam and I were using went into meltdown and after a few minutes rebooted. The other players were chatting happily waiting for our return. unfortunately when we did get back in I had lost my GM abilities with roll20 and so I had to start another hangout (as I did not know how to get them back). Anyway, that only took a few minutes of down time and we were into the first combat-esque encounter as the players discovered the sight of the massacre the mercenary had escaped from. The players found a dismembered member of the mercenaries frozen in statue form and a couple of really slow zombies who had no effect on the group at all.

the group did find a nice little haul in the carriage as they pushed on to see if they could make it to the ranger lodge that had not been heard from since the start of the frost. Beginning to push through the frosted areas of the forest they find a large chest half buried in the snow. It is here that Alan found the spiked log trap and read the character descriptions above to see how that turned out!

So, that was our first three hours. We were having a good old laugh by the end of it and it felt like a group that had been playing together for some time. I gave them a further brief discussion on the idea of hero points in the game and also an idea toward how I want to use them next week. I want the players to fully appreciate their characters and so am stealing some ideas from another system to use build their personas up. But more about that after next weeks game!

I was so looking forward to a relaxing game
of RotR...

So, after missing out on a prepared game this week of the Rise of the Runelords I was pretty down as I love my in person games that are generally my stress relief from work. A few weeks back I accidentally stumbled into a hangout (I had it appear and say I was invited but said nothing about what it was so I hopped in) where they were creating characters for a game called Fate Core. It was this group that came to my rescue this week and allowed me to get my groove on!

When I stumbled into the hangout I found a group of gents who seemed familiar with one another talking about what style of game they wanted to play. They welcomed me and told me they were going to make some Fate characters and have a game. I replied that I had never heard of it and could I sit in. Well, it seems that sitting in to them means make a character! They decided they would make characters that were a spoof of the A-Team of sorts so in short order I was drafted into making a character along with them. I ended up making the pilot/driver Murdoch in their system as a reinvention. Fate Core at it's heart is a neat system that allows a lot of power to the player. The character is made by coming up with things called "Aspects" that define your character concepts. It is good if they contain short sayings, so the main aspect for Derek (my Murdoch remake) was "Always in the pilot seat". These are tied to the use of fate points in the game. If the action you are doing can be tied to your aspects, you can use fate points to enhance or reroll etc.

That is Derek, in the middle with the cap!

It is a deliciously simple system that is fleshed out with skills (that you can build stunts or specialties with) and then you are in to it. I joined a game they were having last weekend but I was at work and it was a busy day so not much got done in the way of roleplaying. But it did stir some thoughts in my head of trying some optional rules in Pathfinder I had been avoiding besides the fact that some of my players had asked about them. But more of that in a little bit. It was with some relief that yesterday I got an invite to a game with these guys and I got my roleplay on. It was really good too as a lot of it was surrounded by vehicles and I got to shine in some regards. I am sure that I will remember the call my character made to an Indian call centre to find out about a particular engine part for quite some time.

Had never heard of it prior to a few weeks ago...

It is from this game though that I have a criticism of Fate as an overview from a player that knew nothing about it at all. That criticism is that the damage system seems to be a bit confusing. To see how the opponents that we opened up on had to cross out stresses and then have some kind of arbitrary effect put on them confuses me, and terrifies me that I may have to do something similar to myself if I get damaged? I have a copy of the rules so I need to read this section to see if I can make sense of the combat and damage section. Apart from this I have to say a big thanks to my C-Team mates (+Jonathan Henry, +Cameron Corniuk, +Robert Hanz, +Tim King and Cameron's wife Jen) for the great game we had, releasing the stress of a hard week at work!

So, back to the Pathfinder options I want to play with. In the Serpent Skull game that is coming to a close soon a couple of my players asked about using the Hero Point system that was introduced in the Advanced Players Guide. I have not much been a fan of it before. But, after playing Fate I saw a way to get players to be allowed Hero Points and encourage them to flesh out the character and play them according to their concept. And I plan to do this (as if you haven't guessed already) using "Aspects". I am trialling this in the Reign of Winter game that I am running via hangout. Here is the text of a message that I sent to my Reign of Winter players this morning to clarify the idea of what is required of them. I prefaced it on Monday when we had our first game.

Hi all. +Cam Mcloughlin asked me to put up the details of the hero point stuff that we will be starting with next week. The rules for hero points are in the PRD under the Advanced Players Guide New Rules section. I am twisting this slightly to include a proviso to most uses of the Hero points.

The twist is you will have three "aspects". That is short statements that represent the character. The first "aspect" should represent your overiding character concept. e.g. If I were to play a gunslinger who was a law enforcer I may have the aspect "Delivering justice, one shot at a time".

The second "aspect" will be a trouble aspect. This is a source of possible conflict for the character so running with the same character concept as above (i.e. the gunslinger) I may have "I have to go, somewhere there is a crime happening" showing that he is overzealous in enforcement of the law and also a little paranoid.

The final "aspect" will be created by another player for your character. It will be based on a little improptu roleplay session that the other player will come up with that describes how you met and also displays an aspect. Using the above example another player states "The bandit had the tip of her dagger pushing against my throat even after I was stripped of all my valuables. I looked up into her eyes and knew I was looking at Lady Death herself. And then BANG! The sound ricocheted off the walls of the alley and the bandits head exploded like a watermelon dropped on pavers. A gloved hand reached down and helped me up. It was a law man with a gun" and then the player gives the gunslinger the "aspect" "Just in the nick of time."

So, you will be able to use hero points in game IF the use of the hero point can be connected to one of your aspects. The ONLY exception to this will be the "Cheat Death" usage which will be avialable at any stage to you, regardless of Fate points.

I hope this helps out and gives you an idea of what you want.

Woo hoo! New book smell!

So, if this works it should intensify the players characterisation of the alter egos and allow them a benefit in the form of Hero Points that allow a range of bonuses and abilities. It can also save them from death, if they have enough of the points to share around. Will my trial work? I will tell you how it goes after Monday night's game!

By the way, my hard copy arrived yesterday :) Soooooo excited, see!

Me with roll20 last night. Must learn more!

Last night saw the second of my hangout games broadcast in the Reign of Winter campaign. We had three new players join and one of the existing players could not make it. I had spent most of the day preparing everything on roll20 so things would run smoothly but things proved to be a little bit of a comedy of errors from my standpoint.

Firstly, I had organised another area to have games from so +Cam Mcloughlin and I did not have to sit in the same room together and cause echo. Once I arrived at the new destination I realised I did not have the keys I needed to get in and I only had 9 minutes until game time! I rang Cam and ended up at his place, arriving just in time to open my macbook and open the hangout as scheduled!

I then noted that the hangout was not going to be recorded as I had hoped. Someone had told me I just had to hit a button when opening the hangout to do this. This is true if you are setting up the hangout from scratch but when it was already set up as a part of an event it needs to be organised with the event which I failed to do. So next week will be the first week that the hangout gets sent to you tube.

Next hangout will be on air so it will get recorded...

It took us around 15 minutes to get everybody to a point where we could start after a bit of mucking around and a recap of what happened the week before for the new players. I had made the decision that I would not be giving reasons as to why some characters arrived and disappeared due to personal schedules, just that the players should assume that they had all been travelling together regardless of the company week by week. So I had just started to get into the game when one other player joined a little late (she had said she would be a little late) and I switched mode to discuss hero points.

I had decided to allow the use of hero points as outlined in the Advanced Players Guide with a twist as a trial. I had never liked the addition as hero points as written as there was no balancing to it and the players could use them freely so I decided to add my own twist to them. I have been playing an online hangout game of Fate Core recently and I really liked the concept of "Aspects" that they use so I decided that I would use a similar system in this game where the players came up with some aspects for their characters and that they could use hero points whenever their actions were tied to the aspects for the character. By doing this I hope to encourage a stronger sense of character in the roleplaying that the players get rewarded for by being able to use hero points. The aspects the players chose were;

An aspect that represented the core of their character concept;
A trouble aspect, or an aspect that causes concern to the character (to build drama); and
One of the other players linked to the characters story and gave their character an aspect to use.

Nobody went for the fate point option last night so it remains to be seen how the system will work out.

So, after about half an hour of aspect talking we got back into the game. I found that I am still a little bit at sea when it comes to fully understanding the roll20 system but I hope to be fluent soon. It caused me some grief last night as I had prepared a heap of handouts to show the players various things and then could not get them to show to the players for about ten minutes while I worked out how to set the permissions correctly. I also had several stuff ups attempting to switch maps and talk about things only to realise I had not changed the player view. Also, even though I was sitting in the room with Cam and using the same connection I kept cutting out and we had to spend a little bit of time hooking me up physically (rather than wi-fi) to the modem.

Thanks to goldenwoodstudio.com
for the stag image. It was a real
chatterbox!

The players edged their way along the trail and encountered a serpent not native to the region, some pixies fond of knocking out Dwarven Fighters ( +libby furr ) with their colour spray only to fall to the same spell cast by our two new players +Martin Miyake and his wife Angie. They are both playing Elven Wizards, one a utility mage and the other a combat mage. Finally they came across a talking stag who they managed to get a lot of information out of.

Plot aside, Shun (played by +Eric M ) continued his tradition of rolling atrociously all night, only getting double digits on his d20's around three times. His initiative rolls totalled 15, 14 and 13 in each scenario and he gets +10 to them! The other new player Gordon Smith is playing a half-elven rogue and was with us up until the second encounter when he got dumped and could not get back on. He also had other commitments for the night but it was good to have him for the time he was there.

So, the next game is up and it is an "On Air" event which means anyone can watch it and it will go to my Youtube account after it so people can check it out that way. The players are not too far away from heading to the ranger lodge that was the initial goal, although they have now found out that it is has been inhabited by bandits and other creatures from the witches home lands of Irrisen. Come and join us there!

No more miniature making sessions for Serpent Skull :(

Tuesday night rocked up and we returned to the final few sessions of the Serpent Skull adventure path from Paizo. the last push to the finish was under way as they used the ultimate weapon to find Ilmurea in turmoil and their direct task at hand. It was a grim start to the game as the players realised they were going to be heading into the depths of the Serpent folk city.

Earlier in the week I began to get the touch of nostalgia for this game. I realised as I sat cutting out paper miniatures that this would be the last time I was doing this for the campaign. The wild creatures of the deep jungle and the even darker creatures of Ilmurea will soon be a thing of the past, of course depending on what the players decide to do post war.

So much evil in such small packages

I have also made the decision to try and communicate as much of the remaining plot to the players as I can through the actions of the NPC's though Tuesday night was a massive failure. I have been gaming nearly every night this week and the energy banks were low for the game so the NPC's had little flourish. This of course did not mean that the game was not exciting. The design of the final push had the players deep in the story and worried for their lives. In fact there was a death even as the Temple Guards finished off the Cavalier's (Seleca Crane) cohort from her leadership feat. The only real cleric in the party!

Some of the parties original miniatures. Soon I will need
to paint a new "fellowship" of cut-throat evil pirates!

The players are also beginning to feel the effects of the game coming to a close. I have been asked several times over the past couple of weeks from different players that I am still planning on some games with these characters after the adventure path is over. I do, of course, intend to do just that but not immediately. The Skull and Shackles adventure path is to be immediately started at the end of this adventure path though i intend to run one month of games with the old Serpent Skull crew in between each of the Skull and Shackles modules. this should get the characters close to twentieth level by the time the Skull and Shackles come to a close. It has taken about a year and three months of practically weekly games to get the players to this point and I have no intention of discarding them long term.

The party last night fought some tough opposition in the final battle that should have tested them. A variant of a hydra and some serious fighters with some major discipline in their weapons. As noted above the cohort was a casualty, and one that cannot be replaced easily. The Cavalier herself almost got killed as she could not find a way to stand toe to toe with the hydra as it kept snatching up opponents and hurling them away. Prior to that encounter the party came across a trap that contained wild arcane energy flailing about a chamber contained by an anti-magic shell. The players could not get the rolls they needed on their Knowledge(arcane) and spellcraft checks to piece together what was actually happening with it. The cavalier ran through it to no effect but when the arcane trickster tried it was not pretty. It was the first time ever in a game that I had seen a teleport spell used to get from one side of a room to another!

Poor Seleca ambushed once again!

While they were trying to sort out the trap the cavalier found herself ambushed by skilled barbarian morlocks working for the serpent folk and almost fell before the monk could get to her aid. They are tough battles that they are facing and they are not even in the front door of the temple yet. That will come next week as they are sure to hit seventeenth level when they enter the temple and try to stop whatever ritual is going on to bring back the long decapitated god of the serpent folk that will spell ruin to all of Golarion...

All images today come from the X3 Reunion PC game and
the images come from gamespot.com.au

I am mad. Totally insane. Completely loopy. One beer short of a six-pack. Why? Well, I agreed to run a game in a system that is over 30 years old that I had never played before (in this rule set) and run a game after only having two weeks to get through around 8 main rulebooks. That game: Traveller. Yes I know, not Pathfinder but still relevant to the roleplaying conundrum :)

Totally freaking unbalanced.

Last night was the first game. I have only three players at this stage which is largely how I like it while I get the rules under my belt but they are a diverse mix. I am running a mercantile (space merchant) campaign so it is not all space wars and fights. I want this campaign to build organically and have the players take it where they want. I don't want to drive them into a solid plot but I will offer them opportunity to build on plot hooks that I will introduce along the way.

Some great space stations in this game

I was extremely scared prior to turning up at the hangout last night. I had not really had anything to do with any of the players apart from being talked into running the game by +duncan mcphedran and reading the character that +Seth Blumberg had created for the game. The third player +Peter Byrne was pretty close to an unknown to me as well. That plus reading the rules had dominated my life for about five days and it seemed that none of the rules appear to be sticking inside my head. I had a sheet of paper in my role playing notes book dedicated to a couple of plot hooks I intended on using as well as details of the starting area and a few names to use as we moved along in plot. I had also put a placeholder campaign onto my roll20.net account but I was not sure if any of them even had accounts. I got my computer out, readied myself and clicked the join button as it turned 8 P.M.

It was a few minutes before the first person arrived. +duncan mcphedran said hello and we chatted about how his girlfriend hates Tasmanians (just kidding) and we waited a little bit before +Seth Blumberg arrived. Seth is our American amongst us and he had meant to set his alarm to wake up at an insanely early time just to play in the game. I was a little daunted as I had found our biggest Traveller fan amongst us. I had played a little story driven Mega Traveller in my time but here was Seth, whose pronunciation of names and background knowledge of the meta plot would leave me in awe by the end of it. We sat and chatted in general as Duncan chose and named his character and then I sent a message to Peter.

Contact!

Peter had expected it to start a little later than it did so I decided we would leap in after having a bit of a discussion about some house rules that bend the "experience" system of Traveller (which sucks in its original format). With that under way I leapt into the situation and talked some rough trading and sketched out the local happenings. Peter joined us along the way and picked out his character from the few that I had generated and the game got into full swing.

The plot essentially found the Captain ( +Seth Blumberg ) trying to build a reputation for his newly formed company after leaving the merchant fleet with his own Far Trader the Lark Song being Cpt. Beniades Lark's ship. he had hired on an engineer ( +duncan mcphedran ) Mullock Extrovian who had been on a free trader for some time but the free trader had fallen on hard times and so he has moved to the Lark's Song in hope of a new start. His third employee is brilliant with his hands and has a broad range of skills that he learned in the Navy. He was a bit of an NCO star in the navy and got out early as he had always wanted to be a marine. A close second was travelling to different star systems with a trader to soak it all in if he could.

They had picked up some standard cargo and the Captain began to speculate about filling his ship with more cargo (I got very nervous here as Seth knows sooooo much about this game) but could not find anything suitable. Luckily there was a loud explosion as a ship in a nearby cargo hold exploded and then a mysterious sect of Alien (volatile) artefact worshipping mass suicidal sect suddenly needed passage to a small lawless planet close to their flight path. Oh, and the sect seems to be run by a mind reading Zhodani too, right near the Imperial border... And then there was the mysterious woman who rushed to get allowed to travel to the same planet, almost as the doors were closing.

Traveller is an inspiring game... So is X3!

Also, the more mechanical minded found a planted device on the hull of the ship, somehow connected to the Jump Navigation data feeds. They attempted a patch over it to stop it transmitting but did not want to take it off, just in case it was bomb like... And in mid jump they noticed some regular, strange fluctuations in the jump energy patterns.

They made it to their first waypoint and I called it for the evening. I had a talk with the players and they all seem to be enjoying it thoroughly at the moment which makes me feel a bit more confident. The trick will be balancing the trade assignments with the role playing as it is clear that Seth loves the trading and the others are along for a space adventure.

Welcome aboard travellers!

Thanks to Heath Lees and http://williambeem.com for my
slice of humble pie today!

I have been running a Play by e Mail game of Earthdawn since around the year 2000. The game is Earthdawn and we have had good and bad times with the game. the game came about as I moved from my regular players of a face to face game I was running so I decided to run the game by email once I moved so it has now been running for a little over 13 years.

However, the past four years have not been good for the game. I had fallen into a deep depression for some time and the posts became fewer and further between. I realised my players had been a stable group for a while so I attempted to recreate their characters and revitalise it but the book keeping for five or six players as well as the game was wrecking my sanity even further. I have never called the game off as it is telling a story that I have always wanted to tell. Ever since reading one of the particular sourcebooks of first edition Earthdawn I have always wanted to tell this story. And it is a story that deserves to be told. The players in the game are really only about three quarters of the way toward finding what the story is about. If you want, the prologue. It has been probably two or three months since the last post and I got an email today titled Eulogy - Bush Namur which is the name of the campaign where many of my current players joined, I had actually run Mists of Betrayal prior to this. The email read;

Friends,
It is with a heavy heart, that I stand before you all today to deliver this eulogy for our old friend, "The Game." Our friend, the game started over a decade ago, a humble little thing, it was a gathering of misfits, who were thrown together and pushed out the door into the big wide world. Through the common bond of a love for a good game, a bastard GM as well as mutual experiences, friendships, which endure to this day were formed. I like to think that each of the characters bore more than a passing resemblance to one aspect of each of our personalities. From stolid Elven Nethermancer, with a tendency to rub daisies on his stinky bits, through to our latest addition, a wise cracking, though slightly timid T'Skrang and wrinkly old Illusionist with some fancy duds. "The Game" allowed me to express myself through the written word, as well as investigate my own creative side, complete with a gutter mouthed ork with a penchant for nick names and a desire to see elf maidens in wet clothing...

Special mention must be made of the steely eyed, though evil GM who was fondly labelled "The Bastard GM' for his tendency to pull stunts and wound characters or even off them at inopportune times. Like J.R.R Martin he would regularly fashion NPC's who you had a connection with and just when you felt comfortable with them and felt that you had finally found your side kick, he would off them. To this day, I still picture him sitting there in a dank little closet of a room, a single candle burning and rubbing his hands together as he laughed a high pitched yet evil laugh, killing his creations. It was not just his creations who he offed, with at times unrestrained and apparent glee and gusto. Many a PC, whose reigns had been handed to him met a terrible and grisly end. No amount of wheedling, pleading, bribery or even outright threats to his person would bend this stickler for the rules or his "grand plan" which appears will never be revealed. Damn you...I wanted to know about the Corinthian and his plans. However, despite his "bastard" tendencies, it was readily apparent that no small amount of time was spent crafting his own vision of the world. Care and passion was laced through each post, which had many of us itching to receive and then reply to week after week and pushed us to be creative. Thank you.

Well my friends, I think I have waffled enough. So it is with a heavy heart, that I thank you all for your friendship, the laughs I have had and also pushing my creativity. The next round is on the Daisy Eaters, try not to step on the T'Skrangs tail or sit on the Windling and Fancy Pants, could you make that ugly thing by the bar more comely for the Ork with a belly full of Hurlg! (Unless there is one more post for the old girl...come onnnnnn over a decade cannot go out with a whimper like this.)

Heath.

Great roleplaying game rich with background!

Heath (Lees) is one of my best distance mates. A guy that I met through this game and visited with my wife and we have become good mates. So this coming from him did serve to slap me across the face to some degree. It brought home to me the effect that my non-posts were having. I am on the repair from my depression but a lot of my gaming has now been aimed toward hangout and face to face gaming. But this campaign sits with me as a part of me and my players deserve more. But I cannot face the administration of the characters and the game as well. So I replied immediately upon reading the email with the following;

You drama queen Lees. I have been thinking of how I can make this a little more relevant. Earthdawn has gone through many changes over the time and I am afraid that it is with these many editions that I have been trying to come to terms with as well as the fact that many of the characters have no firm character sheet in this world.

So I offer this reinvention as it is the story that I want to tell. It is a story that I have been trying to tell ever since I read a particular sourcebook as a 20 something year old and I believe it a story worth telling.

I want to continue this game and (hand on my heart) to offer something as prosaic (read over the top) as Mr Lees, I the aforementioned Bastard GM Martin (read Mark) will devote myself to this post once a fortnight, starting from this Sunday should the players accept the following changes;

Character sheet-less game; which in turn means
Mechanic-less game; which in turn means
Story driven.

I offer a game where we remove the mechanics and tell the story with an Earthdawn bent. That is you continue with the concept of your characters e.g. play your discipline, but I relieve the need for the massive amount of record keeping that goes along with it. I will advise you every now and again that you circle up and you can increase the power of your characters through your written posts including increasing spells etc. Talents you can fashion from the books if you have them or as long as they seem in line with the discipline I will gladly accept any description from you.

So what say you people of the game?

The Bastard GM Martin

Mark

I have not looked at my email all day and so it was with some pleasure that I have read many positive messages from all my players. They are keen on this systemless Earthdawn setting based game. And best of all I got this from Heath in a message entitled the truth (I am sure he will not mind me sharing these and if he does, he has a gun!);

I have a confession to make, I have been following your blogs on a semi regular basis and the pathfinder material. Your post in relation to how distressed you were when you could not engage in your normal cathartic release of gaming got me thinking, that I am also missing the one stable gaming group I have ever been involved in and the anticipation that I had when I used to open the email client and would see one of your posts. Whilst I can understand the emotion you feel at not having a face to face game, there are in fact some dedicated gamers, who have been with you for over a decade who also enjoyed the creative outlet of gaming, even if they are geographically challenged. I am sure that it does not perhaps come with the buzz associated with a face to face game, however there is still a lot of merit and pleasure to be derived from a PBeM, especially when you have some players who have invested heavily in it. I have undertaken a co-operative free writing game before as you suggest and thoroughly enjoyed it. The free form type game allows a lot of expression in the writing and is particularly pleasureable for those who have a gift with the written word and those who enjoy reading. Particularly when you can re word the events from the perspective and thought process of your own character. I am again...giddy with excitment upon opening the email client.

As always, your annoying and bothersome friend,
Heath.

Thanks ongoing worlds.com for the graphic!

So I have had the need to eat a little bit of humble pie and realise that as bad as my life may be sometimes there are other people that are involved in my life who I respect and care for. And at times they rely on me and value my input. So it is time to give all my gaming streams the respect they deserve. my PBeM is as important as my hangouts and my in person games. In fact, to me the story I am portraying has been inside me for a long time. I have never told a single soul this story although I have known it intimately for around twenty years now.

Viva le Game!

Last nights Reign of Winter game was meant to be the first "On Air" event that I had hosted and posted to YouTube after the game. Unfortunately it appears that through a slew of technical issues means that it has not happened. This is unfortunate but hopefully we will have everything ironed out by next week.

When the time came around to start the hangout the promised "Start Broadcast" button did not mystically appear on my event. My phone received a loud alert that it was time to start but my computer could not even see this. It took me ten minutes to decide to create another hangout and put it "On Air". At this point it told me that my YouTube account was not upgraded to accept longer than 15 minutes and got me to fix this problem. I am assuming that this was the problem initially and I am hoping that those permissions now sorted mean that we will be "On Air" next week. Though I am still uncertain as to why the "On Air" hangout did not appear after the end of the game last night.

Almost the only thing that worked
correctly was roll20!

The other technical issues that occurred last night was with one of my players sound and video. I sit in a room with one of the other players and he spent a good half hour before the hangout trying to get his headset to work at the same time as his webcam. By the time that the game started the only way anyone could hear him was through my microphone and he had to continue to play with it for a further ten or fifteen minutes before he had both working. And then a few clicks of his mouse later nothing was working so he had to have no video and I had to move closer to him so other players could hear him through my microphone.

And just if you think that was not enough, we went through a power outage which of course shut down our modem just as we were getting into game. Then one of the other players computers had a meltdown and he was unable to join for the rest of the game. Bugs, bugs, bugs! However, roll20 performed like a trooper while we were gaming and we managed to cover a lot of ground when we finally got into running the game! So lets move on to what happened.

There was some discussion at the start of the game that the party should turn back as there were wounded and the mages were out of spells. The paladin and the alchemist banded together though and suggested camping out in the snow, which was a risky situation but the accompanying Survival and Heal rolls saw the party set for the night.

Unfortunately, early in the night an uninvited visitor alighted into the camp, completely making it past the watchful eyes of the fighter and the paladin who sat by the campfire on watch (the mages had blackened the flames of the fire with prestidigitation to avoid unwanted attention). The fighter and the paladin knew nothing was happening until they heard a noise amongst the alchemist's bags. The fighter (a Dwarf) then spotted a raven with one of the alchemist's flasks in its talons and the paladin moved forward to shoo it away. The raven turned to face them and told them to "Bugger off!" which took them a little by surprise. The paladin took a swing and the bird took off flask in talon. The fighter hurled a dagger and collected the bird who in frustration turned and swore at the Dwarf cursing her with ill fortune. Luckily the paladin then hit the bird with a bolt and it dropped the flask and flew off into the darkness.

After destroying the elementals on the river

The next morning they headed down to the river and found a snowman. Luckily the mages detected there were a couple of magical effects on them, one an illusion and the other an evocation. They wisely avoided it and crossed a little further to the South. On the way across the frozen river they were attacked by two ice elemental spirits. With a handy Grease and Enlarge Person spell the spirits were dealt with efficiently and the party managed to cross the river and find a dead farmer from Heldren who had fallen foul of the elementals in the river.

The campsite dealt with...

Soon after crossing the river the group heard arguing in the distance and snuck along the trail until they came across three bandits arguing how they were going to split up some treasure from a successful raid a few days ago. The party had some ghost lights appear in the distance to distract them from their own presence and then took the group down easily in a round with bows, crossbows, force bolts and a charge from an eager Dwarven fighter.

Following the trail before them the players climbed up a small trail that lead up a steep hill and they finally came to the site of the rangers High Sentinel Lodge. The Paladin was keen to take the direct approach and charge the front doors. Travelling with a fighter and two mages (the alchemist unfortunately was the player whose computer had a meltdown) I thought there was no chance of this plan getting up and was alittle gobsmacked when everyone agreed! The combat mage spotted a trip wire just in the knick of time that would have set off a crossbow trap and alerted the bandit residents of the ranger lodge to their presence. The group moved carefully up to the door and the Paladin and the Fighter tried to smash through the door.

With a resounding thud the doors remained unopened and the party realised they had just alerted everyone to their presence. The Fighter attempted simply to open the doors to find that they were locked. The combat mage used an open/close spell to swing open one of the windows and sent Jake her Raven familiar in to get some kind of empathic sense back from the familiar as to what was present. She found that there were five bandits mobilising for attack. Her other elven mage companion stepped back and shot one of the bandits with a longbow taking him down. The paladin again tried to kick the door open failing again on his check (they were two sturdy oak doors). The bandit closest to the door unlocked it and swung it open. Arrows shot out and around from three of the bandits but none of them found their target.

The state of play on roll20 last night at the end of play.
The players were victorious!

The next round saw some more ranged combat from the elven mages who managed to collectively take down another bandit and the Paladin rushed in using his two handed hammer to take out a third opponent. The Dwarven fighter managed to clip one of the others but next round had the Dwarf and the elves take out one of the bandits and the Paladin quickly dealt with the final one who was rushing to get up the stairs.

That unfortunately was where we had to end it. The party had come crashing into the building and are looking at the scene I have displayed here. There is a balcony above with a door exiting and a door exiting below. The room stretches further back and they know they have not seen the last of the bandits just yet. What will happen next week? Who knows but it will be fun finding out!

Last night my in-person game entered the Sanctum of the Serpent God temple in an effort to disrupt whatever ritual may bring back the big bad. The group had fought there way to the doors last week and were keen to get inside this week. Being the telepathic beasts that they are though the interior was on high alert and aware of the parties location.

To prepare for last night I had read a fair bit of the section again over the previous day and looked over the stat blocks of various things and I had concluded that the party should be able to handle anything they met reasonably OK as they progressed into the complex. There are some very cool beasties at this end of the six game adventure path (as there should be) and each challenged in a different way but the combinations were interesting and balanced. I went to the game feeling things would work out well.

The party entered the first set of doors to the left. This is
just after they cleaned up a four Serpent-folk squad

The party started with an odd tactic that they had not used before, or not brought so overtly to play as they decided that they were going to the left. What did that mean? Well it meant that they would find the leftmost set of doors and head into them. they would then continue on along corridors checking out any doors to the left and always heading left along corridors. This took me a little by surprise, and will have some effects that I am not going to reveal here for fear of giving my players information. If you are a GM or have the Sanctum of the Serpent God on your bookshelf, turn to page 35 and from where the doors go into the temple find the left most set of doors and trace where that will lead you. You will see my point pretty quickly.

Anyhow, mysterious GM speak aside the group fought a small squad of temple guards and their pet snakes. They also disobeyed the rule of left long enough to find their way into a small room with arrow slits onto a larger chamber. They killed a serpent folk in here and then moved on. The less pious of the group eyed off the adamantium doors that they were coming across and trying to work out if they could fit them into a portable hole for selling later on. They decided to check that idea on the way out. In fact at one point the group saw a bunch of chests (in a barracks) and they made the comment "Treasure later" which also caught me a bit by surprise.

Well, the group stuck (more or less) to the left rule and moved up a massive 20' corridor resplendent with murals of the aforementioned evil god's teachings and histories. A couple of massive doors through and they made it to the final encounter of the night. This was an encounter where I had glossed over the stat block included in the module and thought it would be an interesting fight, but nothing too challenging for the group. At the end of the night I had made a mental note to go back over the stat blocks of possible encounters in this section and reread them carefully.

Making good use of the real estate on top of the gaming
table last night. Shows the path "left" they took

My daughter was really chuffed at the start of this encounter because just before they opened the door she said "I bet you the head of the slain god is in here". Well, she was wrong but as they opened the door they were faced with a rather irritable huge floating snake head with a multitude of snakes dripping beneath it (like a reverse medusa hairdo) that hissed insistently and snapped at any that came close. Along with that there were a couple of large iron statues (read golems) that animated. The battle started and I used this guy (I will not repeat any real mission details here so as not to spoil anything) to communicate some choice details. I also tried to encourage my players out of the "I roll 33 and do 42 damage" kind of descriptions into more "I duck low and drive the two handed bladed into the snake heads neck causing a grievous wound of 42 hit points damage." kind of description. Makes it much more exciting.

Well, this little (read huge!) creature had a bunch of abilities that when used as a whole spelt trouble. In the first few rounds the Cavalier was in it's stomach and unable to do anything but play about in the acidic stomach juices as she only has two handed weapons. It had knocked the monk unconscious (with the aid of the iron golems who everyone was ignoring). It had the alchemist in its mouth ready to send it into its gullet and had the sorcerer on the back foot trying to work out what they were going to do. In fact, on several occasions I heard the monk and the sorcerer talk about teleporting away and coming back to deal with their lost friends at a different time. I decided to allow the Cavalier's new cohort (if you read the previous post to this campaign you will see they died) appear earlier than I had planned. He was (yes was) a 14th level fighter who ran directly up to the beast and attempted to slow it down.

This gave the sorcerer time to power up his arcane trickster power to get two impromptu ranged sneak attacks on the go and hit. The beast was finally brought to the ground in a combination of the sorcerer and the new cohort combined. The alchemist after being swallowed gave the Cavalier an infusion to turn her gaseous and drank one himself, which I thought was really thinking, until the alchemsit said to her "Which end do you want to exit through?" Bloody hilarious. Unfortunately for the Cavalier she never met her new cohort whilst he was living as one of the iron golems saw to it that he became a bowl of human porridge on the ground. Being released they worked out that the creature was regenerating so while the alchemist tried to work out how to stop that happening before it got back up again the Cavalier dealt with the two iron golems in short order (with a tiny bit of help from the now conscious Monk.

This is just after the Cavalier and the Alchemist came out
of the creature in gaseous and probably seconds before
the new cohort got turned into porridge.

The alchemist lucked onto the type of energy that ceased the regeneration (which I'll not add here) and the group stood back and took stock. Another death for one of the Cavalier's cohorts, another 12 to 15 charges of the Wand of Cure Serious Wounds used up and a good deal of spells down for the spell casters. The Monk was all for pressing on but the Sorcerer pointed out they were nowhere near where they need to be if they came across the ritual. They know that the battle for Ilmurea is probably going to take 2 to 3 days to be played out so they teleported back to base camp, way up in Saventh-Yhi to rest and recuperate.

This was the point we broke at. The players got enough experience to raise them all to 17th level which was cause for much rolling of hit points and clapping on the back. My daughter was talking about her 20th level Cavalier ability and I told her not to count her chickens and advised her that very much will be determined by the end of these modules. I warned them all that there is a very real possibility that they could fail this end step and then the ritual may complete, bringing back the long lost evil god to terrorise the world of Golarion again. Of course they did not listen to me... Foolish mortals!

In what may be the concluding game I will report back again next week on what is happening in the depths of Ilmurea as the Serpent's Skull adventure path comes near to its completion.

It must be my awesome GMing... OK, Just got over myself. Last nights gaming hangout place to be in the Asia-Pacific region apparently was in my hangout. I arrived, set up and was pleasantly surprised by the fact that two of my Reign of Winter players +Martin M and his wife Angie had said they would come along. I also knew that one of the coming players of Reign of Winter said they would come along also for a look +Matt Guyder . Last week it was myself, +Seth Blumberg , +duncan mcphedran and +Peter Byrne that made up the Traveller group.

Space, no longer the final frontier. X3 is a beautiful game and a huge
inspiration for my Traveller Universe

Well, the time started and +Matt Guyder was the first to arrive, followed by +Martin M and his wife pretty close behind. Then came +Jonathan Henry up well late from his last game that bombed so bad it was apparently like "A bad first-time experience with sex" and he had been a woman "he would still be crying". he is playing about with the format of a game that I think sounds cool but apparently did not hit the mark the first time around. He dropped in just to watch and give us a hand taking on a role or two if I needed him. He kept us all amused for some time as he is likely to do. Go to one of his hangouts, and if he does not make you laugh I will do the dance of joy in a mini skirt and post it to YouTube (warning statement of consequences I will perform may actually be a lie).

After that +duncan mcphedran arrived, the first of the originals! That is correct, I had four people (and myself) in the hangout before an original arrived. I thought that a little ironic. And then the next to arrive was +Dan Hall who I had thought was not coming after thinking about it through the week. Finally +Seth Blumberg rounded out the group. So at the end of last week I had said to the players I may keep it this small for a while and then get extras to come in as we go along in the future to the next week having a cohort of Traveller players six strong with an audience!

Lucky I did not plan things in detail! There were a few issues to deal with because of the increased crew. First and foremost was pointed out by the Captain who only had room for four crew members on the Lark's Song. So the ship took off from Rangent and entered the space near the next planet on their journey Tionale. When they arrived the Captain found the spaceport in bad repair as if parts of it had been attacked and a swarm of fighters being kept at bay by a large warship that was at dock. The Captain kept a reasonable distance and contacted the space port who seemed very keen to get them to dock, to which the Captain complied.

The passengers of the ship (the church lunatics and the mysterious woman in black from last week) exited and the device that was planted on the ship last week ceased to operate. The Captain went to the starport manager and found out the warring had spread from the planet below. They starport was keen to fill their ship with refugees and pay them in spice. They also had a bunch of people that could function as new crew (new players... nice tie in me!). Filling their hold the group headed off planet and into Imperial space at the planet Extolay.

They are just in the top right of the Villis quadrant moving into the Lanth quadrant last night

They entered Imperial space and were boarded for inspection (apparently by a guy with a perfect Japanese attitude according to +duncan mcphedran ) although they got inside the border and made a tidy little sum off the cargo (the Captain quite understated the fact by saying it should just cover monthly payments). Couple of the crew hit the bars and found out some information to help out the Captain with his next cargo whilst other crew members busied themselves finding out about the device that had been planted on the ship. Apparently it was organic and looked like several of the electronic boards had been extruded whole. Not to mention that they were apparently at least Tech Level 15 and not of any sort of tech the engineer had seen before.

Then the Captain kind of got signed up to a trial run on behalf of the Covert Intelligence organisation out of the Imperial Navy. While the role playing of this was going on there was some serious comments going on in the chat box of roll20 and I had to really try not to laugh at it. The Captain eventually signed up for the contract (which involves surveillance devices in the ship and a team of operatives clearing every member on the ship for the duty) much to many of the players disgust!

Thanks games.mail.ru for the fantastic images from the X3 game that are
so my Traveller Universe...

It was at this point we broke and it seemed everyone had fun. +Dan Hall kept saying he felt like he was 14 again which is kind of the vibe that I get from this. I never played this version of Traveller, but I did extensively play in a MegaTraveller campaign and this is bringing the memories flooding back of that. Except this time it is really mercantile based. My character when I was 14 was kind of a merchant I suppose. When you read merchant, think drug smuggler as he lead a group of pro-psionics users rife through the Imperium spreading psi-drug joy everywhere he went...

It has been two games in this and not a single act of violence taken by or against the players. Conflict and tension need not be built out of threatening the characters lives all the time! I am really enjoying allowing this campaign to build from the players own participation and all I need to do is keep the Universe functioning and keep throwing various plot hooks their way to see what they take and what they don't. Do not get me wrong though, I have a long term plan for this campaign. I have a story that I want to tell in this space but I will start to apply it in layers, gentle cross threaded strands that will eventually build until the players can begin to get a glimpse of a whole.

Until that time, let the Merchant's Rise!

Last night saw the first of our "On Air" events which was a bit of a marathon session lasting over three hours of actual game time. I have embedded the video on this blog so if you do not want the hassle of finding it on YouTube you can simply watch it here. That said last night was a trial and the video will be made less interesting for one particular reason. You cannot see the Virtual Tabletop that all of the players are looking at and that I am running the game from. This will in effect make the video quite confusing to watch so when I describe things I will often refer to maps and things that are occurring on screen. Still, regardless of this you will get the idea of what is happening in game just the same.

I have done some research this morning to find out how to fix this problem and have come up with a solution so the next game (which will also be "On Air") should have this setback fixed. I am fairly certain that this issue will actually mean more work for me as I will have to do all of my preparation and some extra work on top of it as i will have to blacken areas completely out which will make it a little more awkward to run the game but I really want people to be able to see this roll20.net system in action. It is a good tool for gaming on line in this format (that is tabletop Role Playing Games).

But to my brief for those that do not want to watch the video. Last night was good fun and saw seven players join in. Corbyn the sulis paladin run by +Cam Mcloughlin, Shun the halfling monk run by +Eric M, Alan Chemist the human alchemist run by +Reece Carter, Urgunn the dwarven fighter run by +libby furr, Ololamin the half elf rogue run by +Gordon Smith, Jack Churches the half elven Cleric of Erastil run by new player +Matt Guyder, Renesmee the elven combat mage run by +Angie Miyake and Amaron the elven utility mage (read necromancer after last night LOL) run by +Martin M. It made for an interesting game but as the party all wanted to split up and investigate various portions of the lodge it made for a challenging game as a GM.

The game started just after the fight of last week where the players had killed the initial group of bandits in the lodge and managed to get in the door. The paladin and thief (an unlikely pairing) decided to check out the door above the patio whilst the dwarven fighter headed to the northern doors in the lodge, the new cleric investigated the area surrounding the old battle with the elven mages. As the paladin reached the top of the patio the door underneath the patio opened and some rather ill looking bandits stepped up to the door and threatened the players. Amaron caused the first bandit to soil himself with an innovative use of prestidigitation and the battle was joined. It was really only a couple of rounds of combat though. Renesmee got hit with a short sword as the only damage to the "hero" team and little was done to the bandits. Jack Churches stepped up to the plate before the Paladin and ordered the bandits to stand down or be killed and got a great intimidation roll. Corbyn leapt from the patio down to the lower floor and emphasised the danger of the group and the players caused the bandits to surrender.

He loves the night life, heloves to boogie...
Thanks languagemoments.wordpress.com
for the awesome skeleton!

Amusingly, as the paladin landed to the ground floor Amaron finished his summon monster and brought into the conflict a bloody skeleton... Very necromantic of him, and with a paladin in the group. the skeleton then proceeded to grapple the poor old bandit that soiled himself. Corbyn of course demanded it be dismissed and then attempted to dismiss it himself with a hammer, failing utterly. The skeleton released the bandit the next round and lay prone, perhaps attempting to avoid attention. The bandits knew little under questioning and were ushered back into their room and locked in after Jack determined that whatever they had was catching.

The in essence the group splintered again and all started to search different areas of the lodge each. I handled them a little bit at a time but it was not long before Corbyn and Ololamin came across a half-orc rogue named Ten-Penny with a chip on her shoulder and a drive to look after her own skin. Corbyn however managed to calm her somewhat and get her to appear as no longer a threat although it was safe to say that paladins are not Ten-Penny's favourite people. In the meantime Ololamin was sampling the broth the thief had been making and settled down beside the fire for some comfy time.

Alan in the meantime had found a trapdoor to a hidden cellar under a bear rug. He flexed his muscles and attempted to rip the lock from its clasp, failing utterly and embarrassing himself in front of Corbyn. he tried again immediately, this time ripping the lock to pieces and swinging the trapdoor open. At the same time Shun, Amaron and Renesmee opened the upstairs door finding two skeletons just itching to attack them and emanating a horrid chill at the same time. The battle joined as Shun ran in but the group completely missed the invisible bandit leader who snuck out the door, leapt off the balcony (Jack missed the sound also) and began to raise zombies with the use of a clerical scroll.

Thanks screened.com for the zombies!

Everyone joined the combat. It was frenetic and extended. The clerical bandit leader managed to scare off Jack with a use of cause fear spell, but did fail to stab him with his poisoned blade. The zombies tied many combatants up however Corbyn, Alan, Renesmee and Urgunn combined to strike the cleric dead. Once this had succeeded the zombies quickly followed.

After this the remainder of the lodge (with a couple of exceptions) was searched they found a little bit of treasure, they found the noble woman who had been ambushed a little battered and bruised but her ego and sense of righteousness seemed well intact. Let us just say that she earned herself no friends in the party with her attitude apart from perhaps Corbyn (let's face it to be a paladin you have to be self righteous) and Amaron who she initially insulted as a bit of a half wit and then he seemed to bend over backwards to make her comfortable.

So that is where the night ended. The group has decided to stay in the lodge overnight and perhaps help the Lady back a little way along the path until she could make it back safely. They will then push on and see what is causing this winter like weather. They know from judicial questioning that it is some kind of portal but can they do anything about it? It was good to see last night also that a couple of the players got so close to levelling to 2nd level. They can literally taste it, but of course they will have to wait until game 5 before they get to increase their abilities! Join us to find out what lies closer to the portal :)

The final two modules of the Adventure Path

Last night saw a marathon (yes +Christopher Hardy this one "actually" qualifies) of a game for our in person Serpent Skull adventure path. We started at around 7 P.M. and finished at around 2.30 A.M. which made me oh so very unpopular with my wife when I got home. But was it worth it? Oh hell YES! Be warned, DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU ARE A PLAYER IN A SERPENT SKULL GAME AS THIS CONTAINS HEAPS OF SPOILERS.

Ok, first a bit of scene setting. The players are +Cam Mcloughlin who plays Janthir the Fetchling rogue/sorcerer/arcane trickster, +scott desmond who plays Kaleb the Aasimar monk/cleric, my 14 year old daughter Courtney (largely why I am in the bad books keeping her out so late on a school night) who plays Seleca the Elven Cavalier (with her newly minted druid cohort after the fighter died last week) and Mark Desmond who plays Seroquel/Hank the Tiefling Alchemist/Master Chymist. If you have been following the blogs you would realise that the party had moved through a portion of the final module of this adventure path and last week they fought through a bunch of beasts to get to a set of stairs that lead to the second level of the evil temple dedicated to the decapitated serpent folk god Ydersius.

What I am now comfortable to reveal as my players now know is that by following their travel to the left mantra that they avoided a whole bunch of threats and made it to the stairs down in the quickest way possible. What this meant was for the final battle they had a heap of really high threat level creatures that would be called in to assist the end foes. What this meant to me was I was expecting a TPK (Total Party Kill) to be the finale for this adventure path. I had told the players that when it came to the final battle the screen would be taken away and the dice would fall as they do with no fudging (not that I fudge often, but there is always a player perspective that you do).

Now you may be wondering why did I call this post the penultimate game when it is quite apparent that the final battle appears to have been done. This is true. The final battle occurred last night. Was there a TPK? Why do they need another session? Do they all need therapy? Read on and find the answer to that question somewhere below dear reader.

So, to the story. The players returned from their camp above and headed down into the second level, completely oblivious to the danger they had left behind. They were moving into the large opulent temple corridors below and every step of the way they were expecting doom. Enough of them had read my blog to realise this may be the last game so they were nervous. Very nervous.

They headed into some rooms and found collections of ancient Azlanti artefacts that they decided to leave alone and then came to a junction to which they (of course) took the path to the left. They found themselves opening a large set of doors into a massive room with a strange green path on it. The players were very paranoid and they soon noticed there was magic emanating from some sections of the columns that were present here so gave them a wide berth. They moved to the doors at the far end and found they could not get them open. The monk went into gaseous form and found that the reason they could not get them open was that there had been a cave in on the other side. They returned to the junction and headed to the hissing room a little further away.

Six armed brassiere wearing demon? Check!

They came to a large long room and found it coated in a carpet of snakes. Janthir sent in a fireball and the snakes just seemed to roll in over the damage done. They were considering flying over the room when a six armed, snake bodied, brassiere wearing demon appeared and threatened their doom. A bit of back and forth later the demon covered the entrance to the room with a blade barrier. While the players discussed what to do, the demon teleported over to the main chamber and warned the big boss that the party was in the lower levels and returned, dropping the barrier and readying for a fight. The kicker? Well, the snakes on the floor were an illusion as was the image of the demon. The demon was real enough but she was lurking in an alcove nearby waiting for a good time to spring her attack.

Janthir unfortunately struggled a little in determining that it was an illusion whilst the rest of the party picked it up pretty quickly. Unfortunately that meant that poor old Janthir was the first one that got targeted and he found himself swiftly caught up in a grapple from the demons coils whilst the demon then began to slash and whip the rest of the party as she squeezed the life out of him. Long story short, the rest of the party managed to do more damage to her than she did to Janthir quickly enough to get him free of the creature as it was banished to the abyss to harbour her resentment.

The party had little time to breathe (just enough time to work their Cure Serious Wounds wand into a lather) before they rounded the next corner and came across an undead spirit tied to a hollow snake skin. The party leapt at the opportunity which meant Seleca unfortunately got caught in the creatures mouth. This is an unfortunate place to be with a hollow serpent as it is in precisely that point where you start getting energy drained. She did have a good idea whilst spending time in the creatures teeth and she poured a cure serious wounds potion into it with the positive healing energy damaging the creature. The party managed to take it out quickly with Seleca losing only a single level loss to the creature.

It was over quickly for this overconfident degenerate!

Moving forward they came to the next odd shaped room that contained an overconfident degenerate serpent folk and some guards. Unfortunately for the "big" threat in the room he got stunned by Seleca's stunning assault feat and spent the one round it took the party to despatch of him "looking at the pretty birdies"! To add insult to injury the pleb guards then took about four rounds to despatch of.

And then they came to the final room. A huge chamber with an obvious ritualistic platform and a dirty great big hole into the realms of Orv at the other end of the cavern. the players spotted what looked to be a dirty great big snake skull sitting on the ritual platform and a serpent folk cleric in front of it facing them feigning surprise hat they had "interrupted" his ritual. Then a massive snake came from the north west and the battle got under way.

Can you spot the invisible miniatures? Paizo make these
and they are great to use. Just watch you don't put your
hand on one because they are sharp and hurt!

What the players did not know at this stage is the "skull" on display was actually just the fossilised stone that had formed around the skull. The bone had already been extracted and used to complete the ritual. Ydersius was on his way and the players had five or so rounds to deal with this priest before the main event arrived. Unfortunately for the players though there were three other NPC's that they had not dealt with on the first level that were on their way to help deal with them. It was certainly looking like a TPK from my perspective. The screen got thrown away and the next three hours played out in devastating style.

What happened? Lets dot point this.

The priest set himself up protectively with a Globe of Invulnerability and a Repulsion spell that essentially ended up affecting only Seleca
The party came charging in with an aim to deal with the two threats only to find a pair of transmuter serpent folk arrive on the second round with some devastating spells at their disposal (can anyone say disintegrate?).
The party did a reasonable job of dealing with the snake and also taking the fight to the priest so that when he was due to start summoning some buddies he was looking a little shabby and needed to take a time out

To do this he cast a Destruction spell and nearly killed Janthir outright (which would have consumed his body in unholy fire). Thanks to a pre combat buff of Greater Heroism Janthir actually managed to fall unconscious rather than die. The priest then used quickened teleport to hide out amongst some rubble and get himself back in the game.

The attention turned to the two transmuters but they both got off some Resilient Sphere's and retreated to make themselves a little more combat worthy.
The Ydersius rose and the party charged in (apart from Seleca who was still prevented from moving in that direction by the Repulsion effect.
Kaleb and Hank went toe to toe with the god while Janthir healed himself out in the back room and Seleca attempted to cut her way through the spheres the transmuters had created. Meanwhile the priest created a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a couple of Invisible Stalkers to complicate the matter and things turned ugly
Janthir arrived back just in time to see Hank caught in the dinosaurs mouth and Kaleb step into the back room (the back room was the room of the last encounter) to heal up also. Janthir managed to get a couple of amazing criticals against Ydersius just in time to knock his HP down to a manageable level. The priest also started to come back to the fray to see if he could support his god.
Ydersius unfortunately made the bad decision to charge in on Seleca and it was the opportunity she was after. Kaleb and Hank had done enough to make one blow from Seleca sever its head again from its body.

The transmuter's arrive!

The player's thought they were home free. But as it turned out the body fought on. One of the transmuters (amusingly) threw out a Prismatic Spray which turned Hank permanently insane and turned the Tyrannosaurus Rex insane before sending it to a random other plane. Long story short, the insane Hank places the gods skull in his portable hole and attempts to run away. The battle turns into a bad version of a capture the flag video game as the remaining serpent folk attempted to retrieve the bag. A couple of summoned creatures (Purple Worm and Cloud Giant) from Seleca's cohort (a new druid she picked up in camp) complicated things for the serpent folk as the purple worm swallowed and eventually finished off the big cleric and the giant tried to wrestle with the now headless Ydersius to little effect. Then the final supporter arrived just in time to meet the departing (insane) Hank. There was a tussle with the headless god's body who snatched up Hank, and then Hank got cut into pieces by the new follower (a Troglodyte warrior).

Players just got hit with the Repulsion effect

Things at this point were balanced on a knifes edge and it could still go either way. The only living transmuter usesDimension Door to snatch up Hank's body and the creatures descended for the final struggle. The giant managed to kill the transmuter and Janthir scooped up the remains of Hank with the skull to teleport away to the camp far above them, leaving Seleca, her cohort and Kaleb behind. Kaleb fled and called for Seleca to do the same. Seleca cut down the Troglodyte and the now headless body of Ydersius fled back into the darkness of Orv to while away the time until it can rise again.

Uh-oh, who invited an evil god to this rumble?

It was at this point we broke. No resolution to the battle. Three of the party (Seleca, Kaleb and Seleca's cohort affectionately nicknamed Deno5 for Death number 5) stuck in the temple. One of the party (Hank) dead and Janthir with a god's skull in a portable hole in a lost city on the surface. So you can see there is still at least a session in it to tie up some loose ends and determine "Where to from here?" Not to mention the loose ends from the players perspective "Show us the loot!"

I have to tip my hat to them. I was convinced that this could end in only one way (TPK) when they failed to explore the first level of the temple thoroughly. All rolls were public, above board and true to the game. The final encounter was meant to be simply the high ranking priest and Ydersius, both CR19 foes, but they also defeated two CR16 transmuters and a CR14 (I think from memory) fighter. Not to mention the invisible stalkers and the Tyrannosaurus Rex. This group truly are the heroes of Saventh-Yhi. I bow to your success and look forward to winding things up. Well done adventurer's! There are more tasks ahead but the Serpent Skull adventure path has but one short game left in it to wrap it up!
Scroll down for a few final images from the night.

Not as impressive from a distance, are they!

Here comes the Cloud Giant!

Cloud Giant and Purple Worm spells trouble for the
serpent folk evil god side :(

The ship at dock

This is the post I have most been wanting to make here ever since I started this blog. My pirate ship is complete!!! (Well if you don't count me being short two sails which I will fix on Monday!) It has been a labour of love for the beautiful thing but it is now here! Again, I will give a shout out to the wonderful team at World Works Games as it is their product that I am displaying here. They are the clever ones, I just printed, cut out and glued together. I am exceptionally impressed with the result and I will definitely be purchasing more of their products in the future.

The ship pulled apart...

OK, first things first, I had better answer why I built the ship in the first place. About a year the people over at Paizo were making an adventure path for their Pathfinder line. It was called the Skull and Shackles and it was the first adventure path I had gotten via my subscription with them. I read the path and was very taken by it. It had a great story and a good rewards system for the players the further you got into it. I was very keen to run this as the adventure path after the Serpent Skull adventure path that we were around halfway through at the time. I was talking to one of my players about it and he turned to me and told me he had no interest at all in a pirate campaign and would not play in it. This was pretty disheartening to me as I love these modules and so I decided that I was going to win that player over.

The ship under (almost) full sail!

I remembered reading in one of the editorials they offer at the start of their adventure paths that the group at Paizo had decided to actually play this game and the GM had found the Maiden of the High Seas product made by World Works Games and also sold on by Paizo. He made the ship for his group and they loved it. So I decided if I were to make a ship (that is around an impressive 90 cm long) that was scaled for miniatures to play on I would have the hook I needed. I bought the PDF from Paizo and eagerly started printing some of it before I read a manual that said it needed to be printed on card stock and as I read the first bit of what to do it was also talking about foam core board! I was a little deflated that I could not immediately build my ship that very day but I went out and bought some decent card stock and put in an order for foam core board (as nowhere sells it locally) over the internet. Only later did I realise that foam core board is only used on the deck and the base of the ship and hence realised I had well over ordered for it.

The main cargo bay and under the Captain's cabin

I printed out all the bits and began to start. According to the booklets it would need just a little over 10 hours to get it all done, which seemed OK even if the pile of card stock printed images was so big, maybe they were right... Well I can now tell you that I think that I may have sunk around 25 to 30 hours into this boat to get it completed. I have done this over a six to 8 month period in fits and bursts. The cutting out of the images to use takes up a massive amount of time but it is a thing of beauty and hence it really has been a labour of (monotony) love!

I had been doing this project in secret so as my players did not know though I knew word would get out as one of my players is my daughter and she knew what was happening. I also mentioned it to one of the other players when he mentioned that he could not understand why one of the other players was not keen for the pirate campaign. After this it got spotted at my work where I had taken it to do some work on it and the whole secrecy thing cam crashing down around my ears. That said, it had the exact effect I was after and now everyone in my playing group are eager to sink their scimitars into a good roiling pirate adventure. Not to mention they have decided to play an "evil" campaign where they are amongst the worst scum on the high sea! This will make it very interesting for me as I have never run an evil campaign. It should be fun.

Under the officers quarters and the main cargo hold

So, back to the boat... It is almost entirely made out of card stock with the non-gridded version of the boat (you get a gridded and non gridded PDF you can choose from) as I hate the rigidity a grid creates in game. The boat is very modular, that is you can take it apart and sit bits to the side so if there is a ship combat that engulfs the ship you can pull out each bit and have them laid out on the playing surface. The main deck comes up and shows the cargo hold underneath. The roof of the forecastle lifts off to show inside the officers quarters. The sterncastle roof section lifts off to show the Captains cabin. The officers quarters lifts off to reveal the forward cargo hold and the Captain's cabin lifts out to show the stern of the cargo hold. Each of theses sections are scaled to 25mm miniature scale and the bases of all the parts I just mentioned (and the roofs) are based with foam core board giving them a sturdiness as these are the sections where miniatures will be used the most.

A reasonable view of the figurehead

The mast sections were by far the hardest section to make and also the most crucial to get right. When the ship is put completely together it is the masts that lock all the sections in place to make it appear as a complete ship. The design also allows for you to use transparencies to create windows, grates, chains, rigging and climbing rope to appear on the ship making it look brilliant. You can look in windows and see the miniatures inside at the accessory desks and chairs they supply too. they supply a large range of accessories like cannons (which I did not make as the adventure does not really use them) gangplank, two different figureheads, cargo cubes, interior walls so you can segment your cargo bay and various other things like desks, chairs and hammocks. It was these accessories that I finished building today. My son was incredibly concerned about where was the gangplank. I will have to show him the photos tonight to put his mind at rest!

the next sections to go on top

But of course building the ship got met with (by my players) "When are you building another?" Of course they see it as completely reasonable that I should build another one so they can raid other ships!
They are pirates after all. I of course returned a sour laugh when they asked me to build another. but I have compromised. In my local bookstore there was a kids pack to build a pirate ship out of pre-cut cardboard that went on special for $10 so I picked that up and made it one night. It is a bit cartoony but it will work. Also it has no colour as they leave it up to you to paint which I might, or I might leave it white for a ghost ship. Then, walking through K-Mart last Thursday, my wife spotted a large childrens plastic pre-made pirate ship on the shelf and she basically forced me to buy it for the campaign also. It is a good size too in comparison to the main ship that I have poured my heart and soul into. Not to mention the plastic one came with a very cool treasure chest!

Forecastle on with some rigging

I have also gone overboard on flip mats focussing on ships and map packs of ship cabins etc. This is without a doubt the most expensive campaign I have ever run! I may have to buy a tricorne hat and an eye patch for when I GM this one! I actually got a lovely pirate pin in a special copy of the PS3 game Two Worlds II that I will be wearing on the first few nights to get the players into character! I am all set to captain this bunch of land lubbers onto the high sea and beyond aaaaaargh!

Officer's quarters a little mean, but better than the cargo hold

Some nice accessories for the Captain's cabin

The transparencies make great windows

Sterncastle on and helmsman at the wheel

Main deck on as the halfling walks the plank yarrrrgh!

The length of the ship from forecastle down

The ship with masts locking the sections in place

The ghost ship...

The plastic pirate ship my wife made me buy

Wow, I have been flat out this Easter break. I am a teacher (in real life) and I got Good Friday to Easter Tuesday off this year and I have been flat out through it. Friday and Sunday were family days for me and Saturday saw me finish the build on my boat as handled by my previous post (my effort for tabletop day). But that was only the start of the gaming goodness I have been involved in over this break.

What my new Fudge Dice look like

On Sunday as my family got ready to head to the movies I joined in one of +Jonathan Henry 's gamer chats and was talking to him about various systems that I have played and he was giving me some suggestions on what to play also. We play in a Fate Core game together and he was talking to me about the changes that they had made in the draft document for the game and this inspired me to finally get around to reading the document from back to front. He also talked about a game called Hulks and Horrors that I had never heard of so after I logged out of our meeting I went to DrivethruRPG to buy a copy of it. While I was there I spotted another special on a game system I have always wanted to try, the Dr.Who RPG and I picked that up too! Just to cap the day off with purchases I also logged on to my online hobby store of choice, Military Simulations, and purchased my first ever set of four fudge dice for my dice collection too!

I transferred all my new material onto my iPad and started to read Fate Core solidly through the next few days. I love this system. I have stolen bits out of it and placed them in my online and in person Pathfinder games! The more I read of it the more I like of it, though a lot of the examples in the book do tend to be a little overly wordy or not concrete enough and can cause confusion. It is also very strangely set out with some sections I am reading in the book heavily relying on rules sections that occur later in the book making a cover to cover read a challenging task at the best of times. Still, I intend to run a Fate session or two in the near future as it is a great mechanic for an RPG.

The mini notebook is my new purchase along with my
quill and ink set!

Sunday afternoon my family and I went and saw a movie and then travelled along to an antique store in Latrobe, Tasmania called Reliquaire. It has bunches of antiques mixed with new stuff, geeky stuff, heaps of board games, some LARP stuff, and a variety of other bits and pieces. While I was there I was chuffed to pick up a miniature version notebook of my larger notebook that I normally carry around with me and a full on quill and ink set. Take the virtual tour on their website of the store. If it is anything half like the store you will not be disappointed by the trip! I have an idea or two about how to combine the notebook with the said quill and ink set for a bit of a unique role playing experience. If it pans out I will blog about it. Need to practice with the quill though as my writing is awful and I press too hard!

The Monday came around and I had organised to spend some time with my in-person players doing the wind up for the Serpent's Skull adventure path. We got together and talked about where to from here, handed out the treasure parcels that they found after the battle and gave them their final XP award. I was expecting a lot more direction from the players than what I got, but that is OK. They were excited to dole out the treasure and plan some things for their own characters.

All finished for the time being...

Seleca (the Cavalier) has decided to stay on with the Pathfinders in Saventh-Yhi as she is romantically involved with the Captain of the Guard there and she wants to see how things pan out while keeping an eye out for any resurgence of the serpent folk. Janthir (the rogue/sorcerer/arcane trickster) has taken the skull of Ydersius and placed it in a portable hole with a Mages Private Sanctum spell with Permanency cast on it and teleported to Absalom where he has rented an apartment and he means to further research the destruction of the skull. Seroquel/Hank (the alchemist/master chymist) has decided to return to Smuggler's Shiv where this all started. He wants to destroy the altar there and turn the Shiv into an Adventurer's Wilderness Tour kind of place where he will populate the island with all manner of dangerous and intelligent creatures whilst setting up challenges for money. He also hopes to create a trade haven for the Shackles pirates to take advantage of also. Finally, Kaleb (the monk/cleric) intends to either set up a monastery where he can share his skills and teachings or make a pilgrimage back to his own monastery. Whichever he chooses he too is also attempting to find out a way to destroy the skull of Ydersius for good and thus kill the god once and for all.

I don't think I have a career as a professional model
ahead of me

After this was done I had a little bit of time to get planning on the Reign of Winter campaign that I was running that night! I hopped on to roll20 and adjusted some maps to be able to use dynamic lighting and headed off to my mates place to get the Google+ Hangout up and running. It was a good game overall and we got to the point I had hoped to in the end though it was another near four hour game so I have to be a bit more rigorous in calling the game at the three hour mark in future. These late nights are beginning to slow me down a little. The players moved on from the lodge that they had taken, had some trouble with an icy bridge and a cranky ice mephit, found a dead hunter and then the thing that killed him and finally ended up on top of a hill at a hut with a creepy doll in it.

The video for the game is embedded on this blog if you want to find out the details but it still does not include any of the screenshots of roll20 at this stage as I need to do some testing to make sure that the game is not negatively impacted by the fix for showing the screens. And if it is I need to look at a different service for providing the video. I can do this from my desktop without making it an "On Air" event but we will see what happens with my tests this week.

So, on to Tuesday where I spent a lot of the day preparing for my in-person gaming group for Tuesday night and the first game of the Skull and Shackles adventure path! I had to cook a roast at the same time and this made me feel a little bit rushed when I got to the game, so much so that I forgot until the last minute to get all the miniatures and cardboard cutouts for the game together. This was OK as we covered the new rules about Aspects (that I have stolen from Fate Core ) and how they would apply to my introduction of Pathfinder's Hero point system (which the players renamed Villiany Points) and we got into the game. I had a great time with the game as the players got "volunteered" (read press ganged) onto the crew of the Wormwood and spent their first day getting beaten up by a displeased boatswain and first mate.

The ship has not yet been used in game, it
will come in near the end of the first module

The players (well three quarters of them anyhow) have worked out that there is swift punishment on board the Wormwood for any that step out of line, though the Drow in the party is having problems bowing to the discipline of dirty humans and looks extremely bruised, with several whip marks across his back after a day of being too proud to accept orders. I left it at the end of the first day with two of them pushing on to late in the night and will be waking up to face the gruelling tasks of being a swab on the ship already fatigued. I picture quite a few more whippings for day 2 of the game!

So, that has been my Easter and Tabletop Day round up finally blogged about. I am busy thinking of plot hooks for this evenings Traveller game and also that I need to make a few more characters for the night as I have a few more people interested in joint the game. It is about time I closed the game to new players as I think this will make about 9 or 10 possibly active players in the game! I probably should have closed it after last week, but I want to see where this game goes.

I will try to find some time to blog about what goes on in the Traveller game tomorrow! Until then, thanks for reading!

Meta-Plot or Character Focussed

The Finer Points of Diplomacy

Forming the Experience?

Great Game Last Night

Welcome to the 21st Century Mr. Knights

A Day Full of Gaming

Taking a Break

GMing Via Google Plus Hangout

Playing Online

Last nights Reign of Winter hangout

Fighting to the Temple Doors of the Sanctum

Old School Traveller via Google Hangout First Game

A Little Bit of Humble Pie

Technical Issues Abound

Read Your Stat Blocks Carefully!

The Traveller Crew Grows

First "On Air" Hangout Completed

The Penultimate Game - Serpent Skull

The Boat Post!

Gaming Over the Easter Break