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Monday, May 27, 2019

Play report isle of dread session two

We had left off with the players looking for enough funds to purchase a ship. They had a shady deal with the radu clan on the table.
1500 gp plus 10% of the proceeds or
2000 gp and 5%

They had also talked to ramses (old scallywag), who offered them a boat for 1850.

Unfortunately they didn't have enough gold to purchase it, but had heard a rumour about a werewolf on the loose in the poor district.

The next morning (the day they were supposed to meet ramses) they headed off to the poor district.

Realized they needed to silver some weapons, tried to find a blacksmith.

Rounded a corner and got into a fight with some thugs.

Finally met up with the blacksmith, charmed him and got some silvered weapons.

They talked with the blacksmith, who offered them food and drinks. He told them that a man at a brothel had a lady of the night die, who he was quite fond of. The PC's headed off to the brothel. Which was coincidentally close to the market.

They didn't get much useful info from the John named John.

Staked out the alleys near the market and brothel using one character as bait.

The werewolf snuck up on one pc, and attacked. He became inflicted with the disease.

The player managed to kill the werewolf, and they collected the bounty from the guards in the better part of town.

The cleric decided to take everyone for healing at the local cult temple of havlav.

There the diseased player was cured using up a lot of there money and choices.

The next day they managed to broker a deal with ramses for the boat for
1750 and 2% (which will probably go to pirates).

Of course there was a lot of discussion about what to do money wise etc.

They finally sailed off in an old rickety, barely sea worthy boat.

Got attacked by sharks four days into a seven day journey.  I kept banging the table.

And so ended the evening.

Note : I way overprepped.

Thursday, May 23, 2019

AFF discussion over at Known World, Old World

If you are a fan of Advanced Fighting Fantasy, I'd suggest heading over here:
https://drbargle.blogspot.com/2019/05/aff-your-adventure-starts-here-part-one.html

I've written a lot on the subject as well.

http://3toadstools.blogspot.com/search?q=advanced+fighting+fantasy

It's a wonderful game, one that I'll eventually run again.

You can get a copy of the quickstart rules here:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/108092/Advanced-Fighting-Fantasy-Quickstart?term=advanced+fighting+

The Advanced Fighting Fantasy system was re-released as a second edition in 2011 to great acclaim and received great reviews.

Although we are unable to offer a pdf version of the full rulebook, we are now able to offer the quickstart adventure to enable everyone to try this great game.

Even inexperienced ropleplayers can be up and running in 10 minutes with the pregenerated Heroes included, and a classic dungeon awaits.

Veteran gamers will get a taste of a very fast and adaptible system, well suited to long-term campaigns.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Isle Of Dread Dino Minis!

My wife saw these at the dollarstore yesterday.  I'm going to get her to grab them.  She figured they were a bit bigger than regular minis, which should work out perfectly!  I doubt that they will stand up, so I may cut up a cereal box and see if I can glue them somehow.  I mean for $3 why not right!

Over the years I've found some pretty cool stuff.  I picked up about 20 D6s one time.  I grabbed a bunch of coloured blocks that I've used as "spell slots" when I played 5e.  Basically "green" was first level, red second, etc.  As I spent spells I'd just put them back in my bag.

Obviously loose leaf, pens, yadda are all handy to pick up when you are there.  If I was running a long campaign I'd even consider grabbing a notebook for everyone.

Oh I almost forgot, duotangs are infinitely handy! I've printed off a bunch of charts, tables, adventures, and rules that all get stuck in some random duotang.

If you get a chance go to your local dollarstore and see what you can see.  Think outside the box, you never know what you will find.  My wife said to me "they had star wars characters, but they were bigger than minis".  Me:  "That's fine,  I'll run some WEG Star Wars D6 at some point.  Size wise it doesn't really matter".  Turns out they were fairly cheap!  So I think I gotta do a run to the dollarstore soon and go on a spending spree! hahaha.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Repost: In defense of old school armour class

James West posted this on facebook (well the image).  I kindly asked him to post a blog with it so I could cross post:
http://doomslakers.blogspot.com/2019/05/in-defense-of-old-school-armor-class.html

The reason for this was, because I think this is awesome! and a perfect way to explain it.  Especially for people who have only ever played with ascending. 

A little while ago I was playing with my 5e group, and one dude named Scott (whose been playing for a long time) said "I hit AC 14".  When he said that I realized that this guy had played old school games.  We hit it off right away lol!

Anyways, if you need some help explaining it to a newb, or someone whose only ever played the newer way, print this off. 

I'm going to print it and stick it in my hand out sheets to my players.

Thanks James.


Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Wednesday RPG update thingamabob blog postie

I apologize if I've been a bit quiet lately.  I keep thinking "I should do a blog, or do another podcast".  But by the time I sit down to do it, everything pops out of my head.  I suppose that happens.  In all honesty I think that it comes down to the season.  It's finally getting nice out in the land of Winter!  So there's other things to do.

I'm hoping to get the old school group together soon, to run session 2 of the Isle of Dread.  There will be a play report after that.  I'm also slowly working on a blog detailing the machinations of the Isle NPCs.

Example: 
meet Ramses, old sailor npc that the PCs met while in Specularm. He was quite happy to accompany them, as it had been a very long time since he had went on adventure. He's really a jack of all trades, he knows a few spells, is quick with a sword and can pick a lock. He has a score to settle with the pirates near the isle and the merchant clans in kamareikos.
Image via :Old-Pirate by Grafik.deviantart.com


HEXCRAWL

The other thing I'm working on is a small hexcrawl.  I had posted on mewe asking for help filling out a hexmap that I built using:

https://campaignwiki.org/text-mapper/smale

Thus far there is twenty two entries, out of one hundred.  I figure fifty entries is probably sufficient.  Currently I'm code naming it Weird Wayfaring.  Whenever it's done I'll post a link to a google drive document.

10 MONSTER SETTING

Another fun thing, there's a new entry in the 10 Monster setting:  https://savemycampaign.wordpress.com/2019/05/13/10-monster-setting/

I'm enjoying how this idea has picked up some steam.  For the complete list you can go here, and for the information about the idea here.

WRITING RAMBLE

Other than that, I've had a few random writing ideas that I've been working on, but I'm at the point of scraping some of them (as they are exciting me less than they were).  At some point I'd like to write down my small campaign world that I used for our old school group.  It may end up being a small hex crawl.  It was very traditional fantasy (almost high?).  You can read the play reports here.  "Shanes silly fantasy campaign".  This was the thought that ran thru my head last night when I couldn't sleep.  I always find when I'm having difficulty writing something to stop the big project, and work on a smaller project.  The problem becomes that I never finish the big project.  (honestly the list is endless! Remember when I was writing a mega dungeon LMFAO!).

BLUEHOLME 

There was a discussion on the Blueholme Mewe group regarding the following:


I know B/X is the bad boy on the block and S&W seems to be the OSR mainstay having long dethroned OSRIC.... I believe many of these recent Kickstarters are missing out by not using BlueHolme as the basis for their OSR product.
What is the roadblock? What can we do?

My personal thoughts on this are:

1.  Michael is an awesome cat and if you are looking for a license for Blueholme, look no further:  https://dreamscapedesign.net/compatibility-licences/

2.  There is always a "Flavour of the month" when it comes to the retro clone scene, there's not much to be done about it honestly.  Authors can take a more system neutral stance if they like (include ascending and descending AC for example).   I think part of the reason that S&W is so popular to write for is that you can pretty much use any module with it, without too much farting around.  (I'm currently running Isle of Dread with S&W Whitebox).

3.  I've done my best to try and bring attention to Blueholme, with the Baron series and Dusty Door.    I am unsure if my efforts have been met with resistance, or have fallen on deaf ears.  The possibility exists that some of the stuff I've written/worked on might be a little bit outside of the box.  That said I'll continue to write for Blueholme as I really enjoy it.  Specifically I really like writing for the Prentice Rules, because I find writing for 1st to 3rd level is very much in my wheel house.

Drama (or lack therof)

Last night, I fell down a rabbit hole of awful.  I went to a popular OSR blog site, read a post, then followed the rest of the conversation on fb and twitter (well one side of it).  It's human nature sometimes to read thru the drama.  In the end (after about a half hour of fucking around) I realized that I'm very happy that I'm seeing less drama nowadays from the circles that I spend time in. 

Partially the reason that I'm seeing less drama is that I've curated my mewe list better than my G+ list, and the fact that the OSR really did split completely when G+ died.  The only real issue I'm having nowadays is that I follow people on Twitter, FB, Mewe, Instagram and now discord! ACHK! I once again need to sit down and decide what the reason for my participation in social sites.  An example of this is I really need to trim down people on IG (because I see the same post on fb).  In all honesty I should delete IG.

Yup that got really rambly....

I hope you have a good day!







Monday, May 6, 2019

Not RPG Related - Quick brain checkup

I'm honestly doing quite a lot better mentally.  Pretty sure I spent a good two years being depressed on and off.  The depression cycle is strange, when you look at it.  Things seem to go well for a bit, and then it starts to creep up on you (the trick is catching when it's happening!)  Then you get the utter uselessness feeling, then the shit hits, then you are better.

Leading up to the "big move" for my business I was really in a daze.  And part of my therapy was figuring it out.  Now though, with some hindsight I'm quite happy about a few things (despite my boss bringing them up on occasion).  One of them is that I've really made my peace as far as no longer being a recording engineer, and all the shit that went along with it.  Recently a friend (former client) hooked me up with another possible recording session.  In the end the session isn't going to happen.  I'm actually quite thankful, as I found my anxiety starting to increase because of the possibility of it.  Which leads me to believe that I am officially over it. 

and that's a good thing. 

While I haven't been doing as many creative things in the evening, I am spending a bit more time working on myself.  I'm trying not to be hard on myself because I didn't:  Draw a map, write stuff, etc.  What has been giving me purpose is slowly working on ideas for my isle of dread campaign.  And honestly that's enough. 

Eventually get my shit together and put some new toadstools stuff out.  As it stands  I've got about 10 projects that are slowly being written.  I've decided to attempt to complete a "first draft" on a project, before doing any kind of editing.  Basically writing diarrhea. 

Grand scheme of things I am doing a lot better than I was.  I've been telling people instead of having a "Mid life crisis" I decided to have a "mid life depression".  (Honestly not as much fun as buying a corvette!).

As a sorta side note, I'm going to start working on a guitar rebuild repair project.  I'm probably going to create a blog that will have updates to the process, pics etc.  So if you are interested, I'll toss the link up here when I finally get started.  I'm currently sourcing parts for the project. 


Thursday, May 2, 2019

One Page Dungeon Contest Entry

It's been a few years since I remembered to do the One Page Dungeon Contest.  The contest submissions have ended for this year (May 1st, mark it on your google calendar for next year if you didn't participate).

Mine is called
"Tales of Tenacity"
Rumours spread fast.  Below the Three Toadstools Inn & Tavern, a gang of malicious alchemists brewing up a new drug called “Tenacity”.

here is a screenshot.