Graph Paper Games

Boy, it feels good to see a project through to completion.  The color scheme looks really good.  It was a good first run, especially in getting an idea about much terrain a single box can hold. So what's next?  A dungeon?  A crypt?  Science fiction?

I'm continuing to run my two separate D&D games, but yesterday's session (my original home game) surprised me what I thought was going to be a sparse player group (four) turned out to be a larger than normal-sized group (seven).  Because I'm using a pre-gen adventure and wasn't really expecting a group that big, that meant that the group tended to blast through more challenging encounters and got bogged down in long initiative orders.  I think the only time the group felt really concerned was the one time the zombie beholder managed to get his turn on the initiative order, and ended up NOT rolling the disintegration ray.  One shot, didn't kill anybody, and that was it for him. The group plows their way through two (owl)bears In the past when the players have begun drifting back into the group because of lighter schedules, babies growing up, etc. I have opted to split the group or restrict the number of times per month they can play to keep the table size dow...

I've managed to get some painting time in, and it's going pretty well. Designed by Brayan Nafarrate Designed by Pinyo All of these were 3D printed on my Ender 3.  The "flameskull" was painted using the new GW contrast paints, literally only two of them, in about twenty minutes.  More on those paints later. In addition, I'm still running a game weekly: every other Tuesday for my "house group" and every other Monday for my campus ministry group.  Here's a shot from the latest session of my house group. Thanks for reading.  Comments always welcome.

It's been a bit, but I've been keeping busy. The new D&D campaign has been going very well.  It's been nice being able to work with a different group with new personalities and styles. That's in addition to the regular campaign, which has been getting back into the swing of things with some solid gameplay.  They managed to clear most of the first level of the Dungeon of the Mad Mage , and are now making serious headway into the second. Finally, I've been printing and painting a bit.  Here are some examples: So lots of good gaming and more stuff than I have time to paint.  Thanks for reading!

So, as you may know if you look at the last post, I moved over to my old Wordpress blog for several months.  The thing is, it felt like nobody moved with me. In addition, for whatever reason I found the Wordpress blog interface to be full of bells and whistles that not only did I not want, but also made it harder to write. So I blogged less.  And nobody read it.  Around the same time I stopped reading blogs, which meant I was losing a lot of inspiration as well.  So this part of my hobby life basically dried up and died. But, I am gaming, probably more than I have in a while.  So what have I been up to? Roleplaying Games My regular gaming group has been slogging slowly through the Dungeon of the Mad Mage , and honestly it has really not hit its stride.  We are only on the second level, and the odd bits of randomness is getting to be a bit much sometimes.  For example one room is full of water, which rushes down upon the players when the door opens...

So far, my decision to use Waterdeep: Dragon Heist  appears to be a wise one.  The group is enjoying the rich tapestry of personages the book has to offer, and I find myself freed up from stressing about what to do next.  Without getting into any spoilers, the group is in the second chapter of the adventure, a curiously low-key exploration phase before beginning ratcheted back up in chapter three to a pace that will continue for the rest of the book.  The long-time GM in me is mildly disappointed that I'm not creating my own material, but this has given me the time to focus on a lot of other projects, including renovating the game room.  I will have to see if I transition from Dragon Heist  to Dungeon of the Mad Mage .  In November two of my players will have a baby, while after Christmas break another player's schedule changes so he is no longer available on my game night.  That leaves me with three players, all youth rather than adults.  At...

This post may contain spoilers to the D&D Adventure "Waterdeep: Dragon Heist" I think the last time I used a pre-generated adventure was the prior time I ran D&D a couple of years ago, and that was an old Goodman Games module for 3E that I updated for 5E (which wasn't without its challenges).  But with several of our regular GM's in my gaming group unavailable, but my still having a lot on my own plate, I thought I would consider doing it again, only this time trying out one of WotC's up-to-date publications. After doing some research, I decided on their most recent product, Waterdeep: Dragon's Heist .  I'm a big fan of "caper" movies and the whole premise seemed to be a nice change from your typical murder-hoboing.  The whole adventure takes place in a city, there's a ton of investigation and roleplaying, and it serves as the prequel to their release of the latest iteration of the Undermountain megadungeon, which is being relea...

What do you do when you tell yourself you should dedicate more time to blogging right when you're not doing much in regards to the subject of the blog? Just write stuff, I guess. Yesterday I saw on Facebook that the local high school had a D&D club who was doing a fundraiser by selling shirts, so I went over and bought three for myself and the kids.  The young people I met were really friendly, and I think a little surprised.  In my work clothes I am the most ordinary looking person: middle aged, average height, nondescript dress and appearance.  But get me talking about D&D and my gaming group, etc. and I'm definitely a gaming geek through and through.  As I said the kids seemed really friendly and I wish I had met more people like that thirty years ago when I got into this pasttime.  Plus the shirts were cool and for a good cause. My current campaign is taking a few weeks off.  May is always a busy month here, and this year my son is graduat...

So far the D&D mega-dungeon campaign has been running pretty smoothly.  For those who missed the earlier posts, this campaign is a fairly straightforward one featuring a dangerous, multi-level dungeon buried deep between the ruins of a destroyed manse.  The local community has suffered the deprivations of the dungeon's inhabitants for years, and now the heroes are there to clean house. There's seven players, but I've decided to limit the table to four each gaming session.  With two sessions a month, everybody gets a chance (with one person getting two chances, a privilege I rotate around the group). We are on the third level of the dungeon, with the group just having hit level three.  The engineer in me (I won't use the hackneyed and callous "OCD" joke) has each level having enough XP in encounters in it to advance the group a single level.  The downside is that sometimes the group has skipped encounters, etc. so the bookkeeping still has to be done. ...

The title pretty much says it all. In my last post I was all "oh there's nothing going on and what am I going to blog about?"  Then one of the two people planning on running a game in my gaming group has decided to postpone his plans until later this year.  The other GM is running a game with a small, limited number of players, so the torch has been passed (back) to me to run something for my big, honking, inconsistent gaming group! So the first session will be sometime in late January, which means I've got a few weeks to pull something together.  I'm pretty sure I'm ready to stop running Bash , because it is just not holding the group's attention.  Or rather, some people are into it, but many are not. With the other game being Star Trek , I'm loathe to run science fiction, to avoid comparisons, although running a game featuring the decimated Resistance in Star Wars sounds like a lot of fun.  I've found that those games are hard to run wi...

I felt it would be good and fair to run one more session of the Grimfest D&D campaign (aka "The Bad News Bears") in order to resolve a loose thread of a plot point: the fact that the group had never managed to find the missing fiance' of their elven druid, Calidis.  So I dusted off my GM screen and ran one more session for the Bears. A drawing of the angel descending.  There's a lot going on in this picture. The PC's managed to trace a clue indicating that Calidis' fiance' was being held by an efreet in his palace on the Prime Material plane.  After clashing with fire giants, fire elementals, and even young red dragons, the PC's were able to rescue him (and possible his "love the one you're with" girlfriend). I don't would to sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but the adventure had lots of madcap action, problem-solving, and dramatic tension.  Oh, and a cleric who had an 11% chance of having their goddess intervene ro...

The D&D gaming group decided to combine both the last session of The Other Rob's D&D campaign and our annual Halloween party on Sunday.  Click on the pic for a bigger version! Mummy dogs and spider-infested Mac & Cheese The gaming group in all its glory In the last session the group participated in the raid of the Majestrix's castle to depose her and put her step-son on the throne.  We seized control of the airship docks, sabotaged their "magic napalm" factory, and then went after the Majestrix herself.  Unfortunately, when the group confronted her Sign, the assassin-turned-wizard member of the group turned on the party and sided with the Majestrix (apparently Sign's player had informed the GM that this was going to happen).  So in the end the group battled the Majestrix (who turned out to be a pushover), Sign, an Archmage, and a pet basilisk, all of whom were killed in the end. I'll have to process a bit before I write about my ...

The PC's battle the final boss in a semi-active volcano A while back one of the younger members of my group, part of the "second generation" tier of players, decided to run a D&D game for the other young members using Fourth Edition rules.  His choice, I suspect, is based on the fact that Fourth Edition is pretty easy to run insofar as you can just use their XP guidelines and roughly "one encounter=one hour of play" ratio to come up with sessions fairly easily. You'll not hear a single critical note from me about this campaign, merely an observation that it suffered from the fact that since it was not the regular "house" game (or games, since there are currently two) then it wasn't really part of the schedule in the minds of the players.  That made attendance spotty and eventually a couple of parents would sit in to round out the group.  I was one of those parents, and so I got a chance to play an RPG that I had not for many years. ...

The other Rob took over my D&D game once I had wrapped up my Grimfest storyline, and last Friday ran his first session.  I'm playing Maarku, a human barbarian/gladiator who had fought his way out of the slave pits to freedom. The group is approached by an ambassador from the Windsong Islands to ask if we could travel there to help the recently-widowed Majestrix consolidate her claim to the throne.  Opposing her are rebels called the Sea Vipers and a neighboring country controlled by a council of mages.  The big reveal for the session was the existence of airships, flying craft powered by magically-controlled air elementals. The group knows a plot hook when we see one, so we headed off to the Windsong Islands.  We were attacked by pirates, met the Majestrix, and tried to find clues to the mysterious island where a pearl that allows someone to scry at great distance (and presumably help the Majestrix defeat her enemies) can be found.

Emma took a turn behind the GM screen this last Friday.  Emma is one of our young adult players, the daughter of the other players in the group.  Emma wanted to run a little interlude adventure for the D&D group that just liberated Grimfest, but in a weird twist had everyone playing their PC's as if they were the opposite gender (the explanation being that this was a parallel universe to my campaign's universe). The set-up?  A kingdom's day of celebration is interrupted by a bitter arch-mage with an axe to grind about the king and queen.  After monolouging he stole the city's giant magical gem that provides health and well-being to all. For a first adventure it went really well, with some fun non-combat gameplay and real effort to involve everyone.  The only problem was that the story went pear-shaped when instead of staying on track my PC (a human barbarian named Maartje who was making her first appearance) didn't ask the dragon where the arch-mage's...

With my not running anything these days I have time to just cast and paint and make more dungeon tiles, like these. 

I'm I had decided this would be the last time I would run 5E for the gaming group.  That meant they had to take out the last gang in Grimfest, the Parliament of Bone.  It also meant I needed as GM to do two things: have it go out with a bang, and navigate ten players (as it turns out, I only had nine). So I came up with a plan, one I will admit made the game session seem more like a gaming convention than a typical home-based RPG session, but I had a big challenge. First, I asked one of the players to co-GM for me.  Rob S. (not to be confused with me) had been running a mini-D&D game with his wife Rachel for a few months, so he had learned the tricks of the trade.  Then I devised a series of linked scenarios through which the PC's would move in two groups. Scenario A had the PC's protecting lizardmen children (they had befriended the tribe awhile back, and the lizardmen were frequent NPC's) from an attack from the Parliament.  Succeed at the group woul...

A friend recommended that I write about what I think about D&D 5E, having now run it pretty consistently for a year now.  What I initially thought about the game still really stands, namely that it has this quality of feeling like the "mode" of Dungeons and Dragons.  Not the average, not the median, but the mode--the most common example in the sample set.  There are, I know for a fact, people who play D&D in some pretty innovative and creative and pretty gonzo ways out there that might skew a sense of "mean" or "median" when it comes to some hypothetical sample pool of what people play fantasy RPG's, but if we look for how likely the game is to be played by everyone, this is probably the ruleset for that play.  To wit: elves, dwarfs, and humans; classes and spell slots; kobolds and copper pieces. I do not feel like that is a criticism, that somehow the game is lessened by that quality, but merely that it is an observation. In fact, the pl...

So pretty much since this gaming group began, all those years ago when I answered a flyer in my FLGS, there have been two GM's: myself and the guy who comments on this blog as "J Evans." Not too long ago, my son decided he wanted a crack at running a game, first using a Free RPG Day module and then his own one-shot of a "Fallout" game using d6 Space.  Shortly thereafter, J Evans' son decided to take a crack at running an actual campaign, a D&D 4E campaign that has been meeting about once a month for the past few months. That seemed to open the floodgates.  My daughter decided she wanted to run a fantasy one-shot, just to see what it was like, and despite being the youngest person in the group they went for it.  I served as her assistant, helping her run combats and citing relevant rules when necessary. Then, Rachel, another member of the group, wanted to try a mini-campaign of a totally different genre: a "Walking Dead" style...

It's a coach of blood-chilling terror The last session had been a little rough, but nothing helps get me back in the right frame of mind for gaming like a long conversation with Adam from Barking Alien , which I enjoyed the afternoon before the game.  One of his best bits of advice was to talk to my players about where I was in terms of how I felt about the campaign.  I'm really needing to wrap this up, but I also don't want to just see it fall flat--there's been too much time and energy invested in it for that. So last night was one of our gaming sessions where I'm gaming with the adults, and one of the youth was GMing the other youth players.  I was feeling a little more confident than last week when it came to set-up, and with a particular emphasis on interesting set design and some fun roleplaying the game went off pretty well.  The group took down (with more than a little help), the #2 gang in Grimfest, the Children of the Third House, which only leaves ...