Session Roundup #16

Two weeks out of date, alas! But with good reason-- Shieldhaven and I were out of the country for a weekend, and friends getting married on a tropical island do take precedence. Not that there's been much to report, game-wise... I've gotten to disc 2 of Shadow Hearts, and Haven and I, with the help of one of his co-workers, Spirofin, managed to make it to the 3rd tier of depth in Spiral Knights. Which is a ride we are not even a little bit tall enough for. Time to work up to that 5-star gear, which will require a profound investment of time, money, or both. Which is a difference in philosophy between Haven and I-- he will Never Ever Pay Real Money For a nominally Free To Play Game, while I will apply Arcade Logic: that is to say, I am having a good enough time that I would totally feed quarters into this if I were in an arcade, so dropping 10 bucks on energy to craft faster doesn't bug me. I want to write about micro-transaction models and De Biz more, but... well. Time. We'll see.

Thank goodness it's not pinball. My Biggest Weakness!

Also, there was Arcana Evolved the weekend before last, a short session. We spent the first half-hour or so of the game addressing the question of whether we'd be charged, and how much, for using the Library of Eradnos (sp?), to which we'd finally made it last session. The answer was that they'd accept payment in trade, which, luckily, people who weren't Basel took care of, because I think they have Magisters to do... well, pretty much everything she can do.

We didn't have time to trigger the fight with the Rune Reaver before Haven and I had to leave for the Eclipse One Day, though we came up with some pretty nifty plans to fight it (three cheers for access to seventh level spells, and the Dragon Template!), so we spent the rest of the time chatting with the Rune Angel who had come to help us fight it. There was some discussion of whether or not she'd give us info as to the plot macguffin that brought us together, which boiled down to... well, sort of but not really. Self-directed... stuff isn't really the point of this game, though. It's more... well, here's the stuff that is happening, and we can react to it or not, mostly through where we decide to go. That said, helping to defeat this Rune Reaver thing is pretty cool, while I'm still at a loss as to the whole spreading cold and what we can do about it. Though we've apparently done some! Which is good! Stupid ice devils.

Which brings me to the Eclipse One Day! That was pretty darn excellent, all told. They rented Safety Wolf; a paintball facility in Conyers, GA. It used to be a cheap-o hotel, and now is a creepy, multi-room, no air-conditioning hellhole that was the perfect place to take down a horrible terrorist and yes. Of particular note were some utility boxes they set up, where mucking with them with a number of skills, including Security Counter measures, Energy-tech, and the like produced different results, and combined with info from a computer that the hackers had to get into. It was _awesome_. And there was much fighty. There had been a conversation earlier that day about how NPCs didn't use guns often enough; yeah, that was definitely not the case here. So many guns! The only thing that would have made it better would have been the lights flickering, instead of just being turned off.

Also, kneepads. I am wearing kneepads to every event from now on. My knees love me so much for it. And I need to get gel-pads for my boots. So badly.


Spacepunk Samurai Knees.

No Mage tonight, as there is too much writing to do-- this post being one thing, and much belated Website Updates for Dust to Dust. And Culture Packets. And, if I can manage it, any of the other posts I want to do. Meh.

Session Roundup #9

No formal games this week, but Shieldhaven, Stands-in-Fire, and a couple of other friends and I went to MACE West: Cudgelcon last weekend, instead of going to the Eclipse campover. It was a lot of fun, as Haven describes here, and in addition to renewing my fondness for Magic: The Gathering, I picked up a few rulebooks.

Fiasco: looking forward to this one! The game is a rules light, GMless game played with D6es. It is intended to recreate the experience of a Cohen Brothers film. Check it out here, and I'll provide a more thorough update once we've had a chance to play it.

Savage Worlds, and Savage Worlds: Suzerain: Haven't had a chance to read these yet, but it does give me a chance to pimp the awesome Aaron Acevedo, whose art decorates the Suzerain book, and many other Savage Mojo games. Savage Worlds, incidentally, is apparently hot shit in Western NC! I was impressed.

We also played some Core 11/Besieged of Magic: The Gathering. I'm iffy on the Besieged set, mostly because I was very spoiled by the Alara block. I mean really-- thorough multi-color support, super fast deployment of creatures... omg, merfolk. It's just happy. That said, I made a pretty decent Infect deck, having played a bunch of Wither in Alara. In case you were curious Infect does the following:

Creatures with Infect deal damage to creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters, and to players in the form of poison counters.

So Poison Counters are also a new mechanic. If a player gets 10 of them, they lose the game. Awful, right? Yeah, play a white deck with Prot. from Black and Green creatures in it, and tell me that again.

We managed to not play any Battlestar Galactica or Mansions of Madness, though they're both games I hope to pick up soon.

In the meantime, been playing all the Shadow Hearts. I love that game-- so very hilarious, and far less railroady than I remember. But doing what sidequests you can before the second disc helps with that. Speaking of which, I am very nearly to the second disc-- at 40 hours of play. Fairly straightforward play too. Huh!

The very first World Event of Dust to Dust is this weekend! After work for me!

Yes, my work is in North Carolina, and the game is in Georgia. The game starts at noon, and my work, on Sat, ends at 10 am.

Whee!

Session Roundup #7

This week was dominated by video games and by me running my D&D game last Sunday. Yay punting!

Sunday: Tradya's Workshop-- After last session with the theatre and the rats and everything, it was about time for a low/no combat session. Which was great, because I hadn't the brain to prepare any stat-blocks for a special encounter or anything, and odd, coz I had no idea where the players would go next, but being that this is a fairly old-school dungeon crawl, the options were limited by the long pre-existing map. So they were pretty much going to go explore the northern part of the first level, which they'd looked at a bit before, or were going to go south and explore the few things that remained down there. This latter is what they wound up doing, which permitted them to get their hands on another one of their quest objects, and had them find the entrance to the hidden library maze. I won't go too deeply into the mechanics of the maze, as they haven't explored all of it yet, but it might sound a little familiar to people who really like, say, Sean Connery in monk robes.

Basically, they found themselves in a large, octagonal room with four doors, one in each wall, and stacks of books of various kinds in concentric circles. They rolled skills to see what sort of books were in the room, and if they found anything particularly useful, and also marked that above each door, there was a letter-- in order, T, R, A, & J. They knew, from the previous adventure, that the dude what owned the dungeon was called Jaylamer Tradya, so they decided to take the J path, and see if the subsequent rooms would have the rest of the letters of his name. And lo, they did! Each room was a trapezoid-shaped chamber filled with books on a common theme, with varying numbers of doors and a letter over each. This was consistent until the room with the final 'R' in Jaylamer, anyway, which contained 2 doors which had no letter. They found some palimpsests (not to be confused with the city of the same name... or were they?); the Avenger was able to create a rubbing to see the note that used to exist on the page. This gave them a couple of hints as to what they could find in each direction, and they decided to go through the one at the top of the trapezoid, which said it led to 'the center'. This took them back to the first, octagonal room, and of course, going back the same way did not work. Alas!

In the course of their searching, I remembered that this was the sort of party where I could give them magic treasure what didn't have any combat application, and so they found the following trinket:

Box of Delicious Creation

An ornate silver box with a lid of black wood, just large enough to hold a mug of something tasty.

Daily (standard): Creates a single item of food or drink, which is wonderfully delicious and comforting. Use of this daily item does not count against other daily magic item uses.

Random, I know, but the players seemed to really like it, and that made me happy.

Also, a couple of other plot advancement items were accomplished that I prefer not to discuss here, but which pleased me greatly.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant-- So, I forget which day it was-- possibly Monday?-- but the day sucked holy ass, and required that I go out to dinner with Shieldhaven immediately, and also buy a video game. Instead of doing so, however, I bought a PS2, and set about playing another run through of my favorite JRPG, Shadow Hearts: Covenant. It's frigging hilarious, and also a festive testament to the Japanese obsession with Jewish Mysticism. Fun!

I also have the first one, but the second added depth and scope in a way that I've only seen in games like Overlord and Overlord 2. Here you have the perfect setup what people ask for-- give me a sequel that's a game changer, keeps what we loved about the original, but does something new and better. The full customization of the judgement ring combat mechanic, having the turn based combat care where you stand for AOEs, and the addition of a combo system were all that is awesome, and I'm enjoying my second playthrough quite a bit.

Pretty much the rest of my whole world is eaten by culture packet writing for Dust to Dust, so yeah. That.