I've decided to abandon the backlog of these posts (Oct 2021 to Jan 2022) and to pick up on a very busy month gaming, which saw my return to face-to-face sessions (if you ignore a Hallowe'en one-shot).
I'm amazed to see that I averaged a session every other day!
- 1 Feb - "The Beast of Errinsford" (OSE) - on-line
- 5 Feb - "Wasters" - Elite Level - (Cyberpunk OSE) - on-line
- 10 Feb - Board Games - face-to-face
- 11 Feb - "Wasters" - Elite Level - on-line
- 12 Feb - "Amazing Aliens" - (Stars Without Number) - on-line
- 13 Feb - "Wasters" - Normal Level - on-line
- 15 Feb - "The Beast of Errinsford" - on-line
- 16 Feb - Board Games - face-to-face
- 18 Feb - "Wasters" - Elite Level - on-line
- 20 Feb - "Wasters" - Normal Level - on-line
- 21 Feb - Board Games - face-to-face
- 25 Feb - "Wasters" - Elite Level - on-line
- 26 Feb - "Amazing Aliens" - on-line
- 27 Feb - "Wasters" - Normal Level - on-line
The Beast of Errinsford
This is an Old School Essentials game I'm GM-ing, loosely based on the module The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford by Chance Dudinack.
- 1 Feb
The second session - a full report is here.
In this session the party continued to question the townsfolk about the Beast, gaining some useful information both about its current activites and its past incarnation. They had a hiring session at the local inn and ventured out into the countryside in search of the lost caravan.
- 15 Feb
The third session.
The party took their first long trip into the wild forest (though aranging it so that they were back in the village before nightfall). The purpose of this was to go and see the Wise Woman who lived there. (Everyone in the village told them she was a witch, but did they believe it? No.) On the way, they came across mysterious standing stones and a dead elf which was being feasted upon by giant centipedes. The creepy-crawlies despatched, a minor dispute arose over what to do with the body (our necromancer wanted to take it home and boil it down to a skeleton) before they buried it.
Finally getting to Vivian's grove (where she cheerfully admitted that she was a witch), they learnt lots from her about the nature of the Beast, including its probably origins and a couple more ways they could gain an advantage for when they eventually confront it.
Wasters (Elite)
The playtest of Wasters contunies, here at 'Elite' levels (ie, Level 9 or 10 PCs).
- 5 Feb
Our mission to raid a police outpost and recover data drives continued from the cliff-hanger where we'd left it.
Ripps, my Sneak, had infiltrated the outpost while the rest of the party staged a distraction out in the street. He had recovered one of the three computer drives and cornered a group of techs who told him that the others were on the floor above. Unfortunately, after he ushered them up the ladder and through a trapdoor, they slammed it shut behind them and locked it...
The gunfight in the streets oustside had reached epic proportions, the police being reinforced by a mecha and a SWAT team. However, Ripps was in deep trouble. He had managed to get on the top floor, only to encounter a group of security bots - he barely got back through the trapdoor with his life. All question of sublety gone, he called for back-up, asking the rest of the team to storm the building. Fortunately, by then they had gained the upper hand (and even managed to hack one of the police sentry bots). The disks were recovered and the job was completed, but it was a messy one!
- 11 Feb
A new job for our elite players. This time to disrupt a block occupied by haywire bots (seemingly so a gang could take over, but we don't ask questions, we just takes the money).
Most of the session was taken up by our careful progress to the remote block, carefully avoiding any signes of trouble. However, almost as soon as we got there, we encountered a group of four nano-clouds. These were particuarly nasty. We were very luck to knock one out in our first round and disable another, but after that it turned against us. Only our tech users and the half of the crew with energy weapons had any effect on them. Eventually, we overcame them, but we were knocked about very badly and still have a mission to complete...
Nanoclouds are the cyberpunk equivilent of the fantasy Shades. Their main attack is level-drain, which we decided is a bitch! My two PCs dropped from Levels 9 and 10 to Levels 7 and 8, and another PC went from Level 10 to Level 6!
- 18 Feb
Our mission to distrupt this block of Haywire Bots continued. Luckily for us, we'd already encountered the worst the block had to offer, but we still had a hard go of it. At the last minute, we decided to press on 'for one more room', only to encounter a swarm of nanites (the little ones are the worse!), which managed to consume some of my more treasured tech. All in all, a nasty mission, and we were glad to make it back (mostly) alive.
- 25 Feb
These Elite missions are deep into the Wastes, and last session we had to leave behind some very nice gear behind (including combat bots we could have salvaged), so to cut down on travel time and increase our loot capacity, our Elite Crew have invested in a van (immediately christened 'The Mystery Machine'). This allowed for some testing of the vehicle rules.
Our new job was to kidnap a Corporate Executive. This meant travelling deeper into the Wastes that we'd ever been before (something we wouldn't have managed without the van). It also meant going into some pretty nasty territory, both environmentally (we experienced the Radiation Zone for the first time!) and because of the nature of Corporate outposts and compounds. Even with the van, it took almost the whole session to get to the target block, where we immediately ran into heavy security.
Wasters ('Norms')
- 13 Feb
At a less rarified level, our crew of 'Normal' Wasters reluctantly signed on again for the job that had cost so many of their colleagues' lives - to clear out the mutant test subjects infesting a corporate lab. There reasoning was that the job was now easier as the techs had been rescued and many of the mutes had been killed on previous visits. More importantly, the reward for the job had been boosted and this time, they were going to be accompanied by a powerful AI (who had her own agenda, of course).
The crew were familiar with most of the layout of the lab complex by now, and efficiently went through, dealing with the mutants as they found them. These were still tough opponents though.
The session ended with us preparing the enter the underwater spawning labs - unexplored territory for us.
- 20 Feb
We'd been hacking away at this job for some months now on-and-off, and it felt good to finally complete the mission. As the GM said, there was so little opposition left and such a good pay-out, it would have been criminal to leave it unfinished.
- 27 Feb
Away from the Frog Lab, we thought we'd go for a nice simple job: drive out to a block and cause some mayhem. Unfortunately, the mayham made us - in our first encounter (with wild dogs) three of our retainers were killed and a bot destroyed. After that, we went more carefully, even chatting and sharing a smoke with a patrol of police officers we met (a sizable weed stash left with them). But in the end we caused the appropriate level of damage without any more causulties, and went home for tea.
Amazing Aliens
This has been a campaign that has fallen into the black hole of my blogging backlog. It's a Stars Without Number campaign (link is to the free rules), with the twist being that we're not playing humans, but aliens created using a species generator that our GM has created: as a result there were some pretty weird characters.
We'd been stuck on a space station for some time, trying to cope with the plotting of various factions and crews, all the time waiting for tectonic activity on the planet below to reveal prospects of fining ancient tech.
- 12 Feb
We'd finally got off the station and down to The Remnant. There we had a less than friendly stand-off with one of the other crews we'd been dealing with, before we both encountered an even bigger threat.
It ended with us grabbing the loot and barely escaping the planet with our lives (our badly injured pilot giving the security officer instructions on how to launch from his sick-cot!).
- 26 Feb
A very short session, in which we decided to sell the artifacts we'd receovered to a rival prospector. This gave us enough money to repair our ship and be ready for future adventures.
Amazing Aliens Conclusion
And there we left Amazing Aliens, mainly because our GM had far too much on his plate. I think we all agreed that Stars Without Number is an interesting system with potential, and that we'd like to continue with it as some point. The problem we had was that the modules we'd been using (written for High Space) were pretty shonky and under-written: the investigation on the space station was a little tedious and never really came to much (now that we've finished, I've read the module), and that on the Remnant (although a nice concept) apparently required a lot of work from the GM to make it playable.
Board Games
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| The store library at The Games Table |
A friend and I finally got around to a long-postponed ('cos of plague) plan to have regular sessions at our Friendly Local Games Store, which has a library of over 400 games.
Links below are to the games' pages on BoardGameGeek.
- 10 Feb
We played three games :-
- Azul. The game of collecting tiles to create Alhambra-style patterns. I don't think I've played this to its full potential - we've always concentrated on finishing a row rather than on getting a high score.
- Star Wars: Jabba's Palace. This card game was a new one to both of us (in fact it is a new release, that had only arrived in-store that day). I wasn't overly impressed. However, there were two issues that affected play: first, that there were only two of us; and, second, that we were playing (as recommended for first-time players) to the most basic goal - to end up with the highest score in our hands. This meant that, in effect, we were just player to knock the other player out. With three or more players (and the other achievement goals), this game would be more strategic. It's a quick game, one that I can imanage playing on a train journey. My opponent was happy enough with it to buy a copy.
- Pandemic. A perennial favorite, always reliable. We managed two games of this, one in which were we overwhelmed and another in which we were sucessful.
- 16 Feb
We only played two games this afternoon, but that's because we ran out of the will to live on Mars.
- Pandemic. This was a long session, but we eventually got there!
- Terraforming Mars. A game that we had both wanted to try. We spent some time reading the rules (which could have been better written), but eventually ran out of energy. We left it, each resolving to watch a YouTube video before we next met up (which neither of us did!).
- Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. It's the nature of the way that I write these posts that a fortnight has passed since I did the paragraph above on Azul. When we played the original (2017) game, I thought that we weren't doing so to it's full potential: the mechanisms of this (2018) version means that one is required to play in the way that I was envisioning. It's a great improvement on an already enjoyable game. We managed to get a couple of games in.
- 22 Feb
Despite our intention of trying something new each time we visited the store, we stuck with three favorites, Pandemic, Azul: Stained Glass (these two have rapidly become our go-to games at the moment) and Ticket to Ride.
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