New on Desk #42 — Another Gamey Week

I’ve been doing fine this week — enjoying life a little bit, even. Nothing particularly interesting has gone down, but there was an unusual amount of gaming happening. Thus, “gamey” week. I’m so funny.

Monday: Coup de Main #18

Coup de Main in Greyhawk has been advancing apace. The players can clearly smell the blood in the air now that they’re delving into a dungeon that is probably — maybe — a pretty easy peach for them. After saving the children from the kobolds last time, the party could barely take a long rest before getting back into the town foundations again, keen to learn more about what was going on down there.

The session ended up revolving around a few relatively simple encounters. Let’s see…

The weird hermit was something the party found holed up in a side room they’d passed by earlier. The hermit, one Goronmon the Sage, seems to be a suspiciously well-informed yet ugly fellow dressed in robes, with a big-ass book, and willing to answer questions in exchange for money. Waylost the party Ranger is, as befits the occupation, leery about possibly inhuman denizens, but Rob the Thief seems to be happy with the mysterious yet civilized occupant, so the party didn’t decide to murder the sage quite yet.

The two pits were a cunning scheme of pit traps that were foiled by Rob the Foil Thief being on the top of his game. The conceit was that the party would avoid the first, open pit, only to fall into the second, well-hidden pit trap. With Rob being wary, the trap was foiled. It was amusing how the party decided that the easiest way to get over a 10 feet deep pit trap was to climb down into the pit and then climb back up on the other side. That’s how it goes, indeed.

The giant centipede room was a disgusting bog that may or may not be some kind of dungeon monster toilet, but is definitely suffering from a cracked foundation syndrome where the naturally marshy Yggsburghian soil has been seeping into the underground room for who knows how long. Plus there were dozens upon dozens of poisonous giant centipedes once the crew managed to provoke them. (This is funny because this is the third time that the party encounters giant centipedes in the campaign, and they always live in these large trash piles and only attack when provoked.)

The centipede fight was potentially disastrous for the party, but the let’s say alternative armor class rules that the campaign is using played to the PC’s advantage here: the giant centipedes have relatively small jaws, which makes it difficult for them to bite through light armour, which means that most characters were sporting reasonably solid protection against them, what with being covered up pretty tightly. I’m happy with this game-mechanical conceit myself: the orthodox D&D combat math favours light weapons too much even in circumstances where they simply couldn’t hope to penetrate effective protections. Characters dressed in heavy leathers and similar thick clothing should be relatively protected from small biting insects. To say otherwise is to claim that beekeeping is impossible in the D&D world.

With the baby giant centipedes having a hard time finding purchase against most characters, the party survived the encounter with minimal bites. Sven the Barbarian was the most affected, as he’d lost his chainmail on the last trip against the green slime, but he’s so hellishly tough that the centipedes had real difficulty making him care about their poisons. Sven was, if anything, enjoying his time with the centipedes; with his new personal quest Sven is gaining extra xp for encountering new types of monsters, and the centipedes here qualified, so Sven took home a neat little bunch of xp for vanquishing their terrible swarm.

We’re planning to continue from where we left off in the dungeon the next time, so the mysteries of this Yggsburgian under-town cellar-dungeon will probably be resolved one way or another then. After that the party will… well, we’ll see what they’ll do — there’s new information coming in from all directions, they will have choices to make about where to go and what to do.

Tuesday: Playtesting Herotable

On Tuesday we playtested Herotable, this little miniatures skirmish rules system I pulled together over the weekend and wrote about last week. My brother Markku was visiting, so it made for a pleasant enough diversion while meeting with some local friends.

Herotable worked generally pretty well — it was a modestly positive surprise for functioning as well as it did. The simultaneous action execution is a bit awkward, but it does achieve what it sets out to do, and there’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed with development work. We ran through two simple fights and it’s generally working the way I imagined it would.

The main weakness of Herotable is that it’s rather lacking in forward impetus in the form of a game in need of a combat system; I don’t currently really have any serious projects that’d need a boardgamey combat system like that. Seems like this one’s going into the desk drawer until I think of some use for it, as it’s the kind of game that isn’t ultimately very interesting without some specific world to embed it in.

Wednesday: a dash of boardgaming

Excited over the Heroboard night, the crew decided upon a continuance on the next night with some more finished boardgaming. The choice settled on Mystery of the Abbey, a classic deduction boardgame from the mid-’00s. I’ve played the game on occasion over the years, but it’s been a while, so it was a nice fresh change of pace.

The clever part of Mystery of the Abbey compared to old 20th century deduction games is that the players are very free in making their queries on each other as they attempt to retain their secrets and gather those of the others. The players have card hands, are trying to figure out what other players have, and can ask any question that doesn’t outright require identifying a specific card. This makes for an interesting “fruitful void” of language and logic that isn’t present in most boardgames. It’s not massively large, but it is an interesting little thing.

I thought that I was doing well in the game, but Abbey has a significant random factor in the form of the Library, and one of the other players had a clear edge after drawing “Mirror of the World”, a card that allowed them to outright peek at another player’s hand early on. I took a very forward-leaning stance and used a bunch of grey information to guess at the murderer, but my chief suspect proved to be the hole card of another player’s, so that was that — the fortunate librarian raced to victory!

It was enjoyable playing a boardgame for a change. We decided to do some more of this next week. The Corona situation here in Upper Savo has been staying non-existent for several months at this point, so although a face-to-face boardgaming club is exactly the sort of thing that causes exposure, the locals are comfortable with the negligible risk.

Thursday: Varangian Way

The playtesting of the quintessential viking age drama sandbox game continued on Thursday. After my first protagonist character got crushed by the patriarchy earlier, I’m currently mainly concerned with running a few storylines for other players. Here’s the executive summary:

The Black Ships saga is something of an adventure mystery that I’ve been advertising to the other players in the hopes that one would choose to bring a character to witness my steaming, tense pulp adventure full of false gods and falser wizards. The mysterious black ship has been engaging in piracy in the Baltic Sea, boldly taking slaves and collecting god statuery (“jomali”, as the Finnic tribes of the region call them) to take to their secret hideout. One of the other players established a protagonist character for the story, introducing the 10-year old girl Marjaana, who’s known as a rainmaker in her village; the black ship came and, to the astonishment of the crew, found that the local jomali was no wooden statue, but rather a living girl. It was horrible that the villagers would be willing to sell a daughter of their own for Persian silver, but that’s how it goes sometimes if you’re a moody kid prone to tantrums. I’m sure this is the beginning of a heart-warming all-ages adventure story.

The King of Finland is more of a historical political drama with a dash of Arthurian mythic flavour. In an earlier course of events two unlikely men became friends when the moody Säisä saved the even moodier Jutikka from Swedish captivity; the Swedes have started colonizing the Aura river region, which has caused the Finns to stir in a half-assed tribal awakening and an attempt at asserting their rights to the region. After Jutikka and Säisä had avenged themselves on their captors in a most bloody way in last session, the stage was set for the first scene of my royal epic: Jutikka was to be crowned the king of the Finns, but only if the fellows could unify the people and reach a compromise of kingship. Worst difficulty was beyond doubt the fact that Jutikka’s brother Mainikki tried for the crown as well, forcing the brothers to contest the crown between them.

There are various other stories and characters in the air as well, and we advance them depending on who comes to play and what we feel like doing in each session. The game’s doing its job of inspiring and regulating our process, so all good in that regard; I generally find that it’s clear what we should be doing moment to moment, and there’s always inspiration to be had if we need it.

Cultural Saloon Summary

Oh, why not. The saloons haven’t been very active lately (really, I haven’t been myself what with everything else I’ve been doing), but I do have a few notes on remarkable discussions we’ve had.

• The Baldur’s Gate computer game (which I haven’t played myself) apparently had a map of the titular city that’s landed on my desk from among the various geek cruft I’ve been handling. The map captured my imagination for how empty and ordered it shows the fantasy city to be, no doubt influenced by the desire to make it representative of the simplified urban design of the computer game city. However, what if this was the actual layout of a planned garden city built as a noble folly after fire or war destroyed the original city? It’s full of majestic vistas and grandly grotesque architecture, and little else! I’ll need to put this place into our campaign somewhere.
• The club discussed our various experiences with the X-card. The “X-card” is a storygamer affectation from the late ’00s, a technical tool intended to improve player ability to communicate it facilely when a rpg session becomes uncomfortable. (The actual card is simply a red card you place on the table and ask players to wave around when they want to call attention to it.) Many good points were made on the matter. My own angle was, I think, that the X-card’s narrow window of utility seems to lie in games that are both emotionally stressful and played among strangers (e.g. at a con). Otherwise the game’s probably not edgy enough to warrant it, or the players know each other well enough to communicate easier without the card.
• How do you translate “ogre” into Finnish? What even is an ogre? For some reason the Agora has a perennial fascination with the creature, causing us to regularly return to consider this noblest of the backwoods cannibals. The most recent discussion mainly reviewed familiar grounds, but we did learn that Pathfinder (a D&D variant of some fame) has specifically grasped on the idea of depicting the ogre as a, well, backwoods cannibal. Good for them, I think it’s a solid take.

So yeah, not much loot there. I know that there’s been more interesting discussions, like the one about ancient Roman dungeon crawls, but I’ve been too preoccupied to hang out at the saloons, so my notes are sparse.

State of the Productive Facilities

Been busy with the social life, as documented above. Maybe next week.