Not-Roundup #7 and

So, as you may have noticed, there was no Roundup Last week. This has to do with how Friday was start of the first ever Dust to Dust event, and now, I am all but a corpse.

I have quite a bit to talk about this week-- a bit about the event itself, and also a game of Technoir run by Systems Sans Setting-- and hopefully we'll get to it on Thursday, but it's possible that I will still be too corpsified for it. Mais alors, this has been your friendly neighborhood heads up.

Session Roundup #20

Brought to you by the incredible lateness of Dust to Dust Website Updates last night. You might look at the line, "Added Ancient Tales to the Codex of Dust." and think, "that doesn't sound like so much!" But if you are of that opinion, then I invite you to actually view the Ancient Tales Link and viddy what that actually involved-- namely, creating all those pages and adding the stuff. Oy. So. Sleepy.

Now, to bring you up to speed, last weekend was Arcana Evolved down in Georgia, following up the Last Session with a twelve hour marathon, in which we fought some super annoying mooks and a Rune Reaver. Full Disclosure: The mooks were annoying to me because they were also magisters, and dispelled my Clever Electrified Lair Trap. POUT. And I could have saved the 7th level slot for Spellmaster! GRAH!

Also, my rolls were crap. Fortunately, I made up the damage by giving Mirth and Ai-Wyn Ghost Weapon, which allowed them to bypass armor in their hits. So sweet.

This was especially useful, as the Rune Angel what I mentioned last time, who came to help us fight the Reaver?

Well, you might question the wisdom of enlisting the aid of a creature made of runes to fight a creature that eats runes with a touch. Well, we were too. Too late, unfortunately, to keep it from being a Rather familiar situation for those familiar with the classiest community on the internet. Still, we were triumphant, and classy enough to refrain from telling her to "OMG L2P!" to uninstall her skillset, or to cut off her hands rather than continue to heal our enemy every time she got hit, touched, or looked at funny. Instead we subjected her to over an hour of the Loresong Faen asking her world lore questions, which, I feel, was a fitting consequence.

Also! We got an item which increases the duration of Abjuration spells by 50%, which is super cool, as it could well be useful for me. Happy!

Shieldhaven has been playing Bastion lately, which has been a joy to watch, I've been playing Sudoku on my newly repaired DS, (W00t!), and we both have been playing a LOT of Echo Bazaar, which is a wonderful game with the world's shittiest server architecture. Ah well. Still worth it.

Next Friday is the First full Dust to Dust event EVAR. So if there is a not-roundup, or no roundup at all, please to be forgiving me, and I'll try to fill in the gaps with something that vaguely resembles content in the meantime.

Session Roundup #19

I actually have two gaming sessions for you this week! only sort-of because I skipped last week. But nu, I ran my game, for the first time since March, last Friday! That was a lot of fun; I had missed it quite a lot. A DM isn't really supposed to admit this, but boy-howdy was I flying by the seat of my pants on that one. Also, Mage: The Awakening tonight! So without further ado...


Tradya's Workshop: So, last session having been about a million years ago, and life being insane, I had done virtually no prep for this game. I'd left them at the first room of Tradya's library, back where they'd started. So they decided to try another path; the one beginning with 'A'.

They went down A, then R, Then B, then B again, then O, then wound up facing a huge construct spider, based on the Young Volcanic Dragon elite, scaled for their level (5) and with some adjustments...it was really completely terrible. The aura 1 5 poison damage that went to aura 3, the burning web zone that lasts a turn and deals 5 damage, plus webs that restrain, and a horrible bite that deals ongoing 5 fire, plus a triggered burst when hit with fire... yeah. Awful. I will post the stat block sometime when I am less wiped. Either way, it was a short session, but fun, and I look forward to getting back into the swing of things.

Mage: The Awakening: Followed hard upon last session, and also really good. We (by which I mean Sequela and Tommy) cleaned our evil-selves out of the gems we found, though Suriya's got out and tried to run. So Sequela commanded it to stay put while Tommy and Suriya shot Awakened Guns at it. I had... little to do in the fight, as nothing was susceptible to mind and Space doesn't have anything to attack with, so I worried about creating wards to calm down the craziness of the Fucks-With-Space labyrinth we were in. At any rate, we were able to trade the empty gems with the Indian spirits to get them to let us take the other two folks, and in exchange we would carry the spirits, in the gems, to museums that talked about their in-life tribal cultures. So that was all right.

On the way home, we called the Gravediggers to let them know we'd rescued their D00ds, then chatted with Diomedes and Madog (the other two d00ds) all the way back to Boston. Diomedes had been trapped in the labyrinth since the Clinton administration, so he had a lot to catch up on. Madog... used to be our evil-dopplegangers' apprentice. So we had much to talk about. We found out, in the long run, that the kid was from a reality where The Prince of A Hundred Thousand Leaves was the Reality. So my guess is that we're not in Total Recall, we're in Many Worlds, and that's... better. As the idea of having actually lost 3 years of memory, plus, was super unsettling.

Anyway, super cool. This weekend: AE. Foon!

Session Roundup #18

Hello kids. I am effing exhausted, so there'll be a really short Roundup tonight. Which is kind of a shame, because we played Mage this evening, and it was super bloody awesome. I mean, really cool. Cool enough that I want to spend more time parsing it before I dive into talking about it, but what the hell? Our cabal was in the midst of deciding whether we were gonna help bonus dudes escape from this misty spirit labyrinth, (see last session for sort-of how we got here-- basically, we freed some dudes with the Ghost Bees and Tigers, but there's some other guys we could free too, if we come up with a challenge...) when we, well... basically unlocked this whole nested sideplot about basically evil bits of our own souls, trapped in gems. Apparently, we are, or were, Total Recall style sleeper agents. For serious. So we got deep into trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do about that, which meant that Tommy spent a lot of the game talking to the spirits of gems with his super cool Spirit 3.

Also, I totally bought Space 3 with my xp from last session. Now we're thinking in portals!

Only, well... the paradox. :)

Anyway, we left on a cliffhanger-- we've just sort-of come up with a plan to convince the spirits in the woods to let everyone in the labyrinth go, by exorcising the gems with our evil selves in them, and offering the spirits a place in them.

I am not doing the plot, or the session justice here, for which I feel really bad. I'll try to do better later. Culture Packets for Dust to Dust are finally over, for the most, so I am relieved, but wiped. Plus, I have some other writing obligations.

Finally, I've been playing Echo Bazaar on Shieldhaven's recommendation, and I really love the feel here. It is super creepy and awesome. Personally, I love it when things are odd and deep and don't really make sense for a long time. It's deliciously overwhelming, and that says yes to me.

Now, sleep. No really. It's important.

As an FYI.

Shieldhaven posted today about LARP culture packets, what they are, ways to do them, and why we're doing them the way we are in Dust to Dust. If you're interested in LARP at all, it's definitely worth a read. Also, you'll get some small idea of what I've been doing with SO MUCH of my time lately, so that I've not been, you know... running things, or working on Dungeons, Pwnies, or anything else.

Session Roundup #18

This week was pretty much Over the Edge, and also the iphone app Alchemy, which is sad and addictive and I love it. Anyway.

So, the premise in Alchemy is that you start with Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and then combine them to make things, which you then combine to make other things, until you have bacteria and life and man and volcanoes and beer and switzerland and jedi and kilts. It's kind of awesome and hilarious. Recommended. Word to the wise-- go ahead and pay for the 99 cent app; it crashes a lot less than the free version with (poorly scripted) ads.

And now, Over the Edge. Have I mentioned how much I love this game? I kind of love it a lot. It is rules light without making one paralyzed by choice. The characters are insane and awesome, and it's great for pickup games. We had three new players, as our friend Pipistrella was in town, and also the Monkey King was down from John Waters land to pick up his Brock Samson-esque character. So apart from that, it was me and Stands-in-Fire as the Veterans, Shieldhaven running it, and Four Color and System Sans Setting as the newbies.

This one was basically a large combat with a gang, as they tried to steal the Crimson Chamber, also known as the Massive Paperweight That Spits Out Monsters. Combat is pretty much equal give and take (unless there's guns, don't let there be guns), and though it took a while, it's really fun. We managed to get the hell away from the E-Z Sleep, the shady-ass hotel where we were holed up, after discovering, at the tail end, the horrible experiments going on in the basement. Aiie. Such a random and kind of awesome setting.

Last session, since it was forever ago, is here.

Now, back to Dust to Dust Website updates.

Session Roundup #17

So, I effed up two weeks of Roundup, but there wasn't really all that much till last night: Mansions of Madness, Angry Birds, Fallout: New Vegas, and last night's Mage: The Awakening.

Mansions of Madness: Shieldhaven already did a thorough analysis here, but yeah, it's awesome. I played the Nun, which is pretty much the best choice in Arkham Asylum. And a good one here too, though it kind of hoses your buddies-- since shenanigans are more expensive to play on you, the Storyteller hoses them more often. I'm curious to try with some of the other characters, now that I know something about the game.

The oddest thing is that how our lives would have been SO MUCH HARDER if we'd gone for all of the clues. Although everyone lost, it would have been more climactic, if harder, if we had remembered to go for the next proper target. Ah well. Booze and Lovecraft...

...is just fine, actually.

Angry Birds: Effing addictive iphone games. I have nothing to say about this, but it's fun. Yes. Fun. Shut up.

Fallout: New Vegas: So, Made it to the Strip. So far, aligning with Mr. House, though that may change. You know what I love? How I'm Neutral (coz of stealing), but there's so many Good Guy options which involve coming to a peaceful solution, where no one dies. This makes me so happy. I like. Anyway, I'm probably going to go do a bunch of side-quests before I do any more of the main quest, except that I don't want to blow my free pass with the Caesar's Legion guys, while I have it.

Mage: The Awakening: Super fun session last night, involving a forest of Forgotten Ghosts and Spirits, where we went to rescue some Sentinels that had gotten... ah, lured from the path. However, our Moros and our Thyrsus clued us into the beings trying to do the same to us, and we went to the Guardians of the Forest, who challenged one of our warriors to a fisticuffs battle, with the rest of us offering support. We could cast spells on our guy, or the terrain (including the ghost critters in the area), but not on the other warrior or _his_ support. So, if it's a bareknucklething, we threw Tommy (Stands in Fire) under the bus. And then...

Well, Ghost Bees.

Ghost Bees and Ghost Wolves from me, unlucky ground from our Fate Guy, and Tommy turned plants into a Tiger.

So that was awesome.

Tomorrow night we've got an Over The Edge session, so I am looking forward to that most assiduously, and later this month, there should be the Return of My D&D game.