Call of Cthulhu (Game Trailer)

This looks kinda cool.....

Secrets of Enzada: The Sunken Temple of Vorkath

I have dozens of these on the hard drive, in note books, stuffed in folders.....instant mini adventures for that right moment:

The Sunken Temple of Vorkath

The Ruined Expanse Juts from the water off the shore of Southern Erasmar, looming over the beach like a dark and dreadful shadow.

Encounter 1: The shoreline before the ancient ruinous temple just off the coast is guarded by three maddened albino apes. Unknown to the PCs, the maddened albino apes are the degenerate, transformed survivors of the last shipwreck to crash on the coast after a failed attempt to steal the treasure of the temple.

Encounter 2: the slippery steps of the ancient temple are a danger to traverse (Climb check DC 12 to avoid slipping and falling for 1D6 damage). Midway up, four harpies nesting at the top near the well-like entrance will fly out and then dive to attack. The harpies shriek "Blood for Vorkath!" as they attack and also appear to be mad with rage.

Encounter 3: At the top of the temple a heavy capstone can be found sealing the pit entrance to the temple. (two people must succeed at Strength (Athletics) rolls DC 15 to lift). The pit is deep and slippery, and a climb check DC 16 (advantage if using a rope) must be made to descend safely. If the task fails then the climber falls 1D6X5 feet (taking 1D10 damage per full 10 feet fallen).

Encounter 4: The deep heart of the temple is guarded by an ancient immortal minotaur, who will seek to take advantage of the darkness by attacking any light source/bearer first. The minotaur has maximum hit points, is resistant to non-magical weapons, is 1 CR greater than normal, and wields a great axe +1. 

Encounter 5: The temple is loaded with gems and jewels, in the amount of 500 silver pieces and 1,600 copper pieces. There are four jewel-studded golden statues worth 100 GP each. The treasure is located in four basins, each a votive bowl to the enigmatic Vorkath. His statue in the darkened inner chamber appears to be of a great beast with the head of a bull, wings of an eagle, clawed talons, chest and arms of apes, and holding a trident. If any fail to offer a prayer of supplication or sacrifice (such as the minotaur's head; Religion check DC 18 to perform a proper ceremony) before taking the treasure a great storm will roll in outside, and the sea will rise to flood the temple and shatter the PC's ship (if they have one) against the island's rocky coast.

The Blog Returns to Enzada

My world of Enzada has been visited a few times in recent years, but not as much as I wanted to. Since I have some serious time issues coming up in the next month, I've pre-loaded a metric ton of content on Enzada for the next month or so. To get caught up, here's a link to the new index that I will update as the new articles arrive:

World of Enzada Index (plus handy link in the right column!)

Enzada was built for Pathfinder but has since transitioned with minimal fuss to 5E, so if you see any artifacts of one system or the other, you will know why. I also have one document in 4E (inexplicably) which I'll convert some day when I have time.

Enzada has best been described with the following quick bullet points for my elevator pitch:

1. Western civilization never survived its dark ages and a mercantile culture of quasi-vedic pseudo indo-aryan imperialists rose to take it's place and unite the world. With them came a unique caste system and a polytheistic belief that absorbed and embraced all religions.

2. There are thousands of gods, and two have taken a personal interest in your character's success or failure. Despite this, none of the gods may be real. Or some of them might, but they are the bad ones!

3. Nothing is really as it seems when it comes to how magic works, and all standard D&D tropes are deliberately broken, especially when it looks like they aren't.

Anyway.....enjoy!

Ranking SF from Hard to Soft

I stumbled across this post on tumblr and thought it was worth sharing:

 

http://its-a-geek-haven.tumblr.com/post/158090934694/scale-of-science-fiction-hardness

 

Advice for the new Savage Worlds GM

A recent post at rpg.net was asking this question about advice for the new Savage Worlds GM/referee, and after writing a response I decided this would make a great post for the blog, too.

I had issues with SW for many years and then one day the system finally "clicked" for me and I've been running it regularly for the last three-four years. Here are my suggestions:

Wild Cards are Special: Go easy on wild cards. Treat the "big boss" as a wild card, but take your time. The first time you do use a wild card, it should only be one wild card. Once you have a better sense of the system, you can start to experiment....but give yourself at least 3-5 games first.

The Cheat Sheet is Essential:  Make sure you and your players have a copy of the Savage Worlds combat cheat sheet, it will help them understand the combat nuances in SW that aren't typical of other games (and always remind them ganging up is a useful strategy)

Start in Modern/Future: I found that it was easier to start off with games where pistols and rifles were more common for combat initially; SW handles ranged combat beautifully. It is possible to start with fantasy, but I did try it that way and stalled rapidly because I didn't catch on to the problem of melee combat where combat rolls are close to parry defense, and damage rolls are close to toughness. One of the worst games in SW I experienced was a new GM running a fantasy game with heavy melee combat in which we were swarmed with 20+ skeletons and a couple wild cards. It was an excruciatingly long slog and no one knew what they were doing. The game would have been much more fun (I now understand) if he had just put in, say, 1 skeleton per party member and given us the opportunity to figure out tactical options with a smaller set of foes and no wild cards. Later I ran a game of space marines vs. mutants in SW and immediately noticed that most of the issues in that prior game evaporated with the joy of ranged combat, so I stuck to modern and future games for a good while before dabbling in lower powered melee.

Don't get me wrong: melee in SW is just fine, but the more essential process of melee combat gamers tend to be used to (stand there and trade blows) doesn't really work in SW. SW is best when it uses the dynamic elements of the system....including its tactical combat options (see that sheet I linked to) and bennies in surplus. Speaking of which....

Bennies are meant to be Spent: Encourage your PCs to use their bennies early and often. They can learn to horde them later on, but for the first few games, let them take advantage of bennies to keep them in the game, and offer a bonus bennie here and there for good deeds if that's what it takes to convince them this is a resource you want to deplete before the session is over.

GM Bennies are Special:  Even though a GM gets bennies, you should use them sparingly in your first few games, and in fact might find it easier to only use them when you are trying to make a wild card foe a major encounter. You are under no obligation to spend them, so I suggest saving them for those "really special fights" you want to make memorable (in a good way).

Don't Forget:  Remember: a regular monster/foe that is stunned twice is now wounded, and therefore out. I've seen more than a few new SW GMs forget this. Also, don't forget that +1D6 damage for getting a raise on the attack roll, and don't forget: DAMAGE DICE EXPLODE too!

Big Parry/Big Toughness No Nos: As mentioned earlier, remember that more "normal" foes are a better fight in a SW game than one or two high parry/high toughness foes. Avoid high parry and high toughness foes unless you know your PCs are high enough in rank, skill and firepower to make the fight interesting.

If you stick to these basics, you should find your first few Savage Worlds sessions provide a fine bed for learning the game. After that, as you get used to the nuances of the system, it will become increasingly intuitive and flexible, and you will find that the game provides hands-down some of the best multi-genre action adventure gaming you can get, period.

Daring Tales of Adventure Codex print edition for $44.99

The Daring Tales of Adventure Codex for Savage Worlds is apparently a compilation of all four of the prior books in this series, in a hard cover 8.5X11 format. That's cool enough in and of itself....these are sixteen great adventures, and while I haven't owned the pulp editions of these books I do have the scifi compilations and the recent Chivalry adventures from Triple Ace Games, which is enough for me to want these. But the price....what's up with that?!?!? $13.98 for 360 pages of content....I can't help but feel like this is some sort of error....(UPDATE) okay it is $44.99 now, which sounds like the correct price to me. Still worth it! Triple Ace Games are great books.

Anyway, if it's not (and hell, right now it doesn't really matter: that's the official price it's listed at) I strongly suggest any Savage Worlds fan (or pulp adventure fan) secure a copy....

Dungeon Boardgame - the Ultimate Gateway Drug to D&D (plus lots of house rules for the world's simplest dungeon delving game)

My son is obsessed with Dungeon right now. The classic board game of my youth has a current version which is basically the same game with slightly fancier parts, and I taught it to him over the weekend. He was so into it that he got up the following morning and proceeded to play it "solo" which is rather to say he played a four way game with himself and his three favorite stuffed animals as co-players. Very meta! A player playing three players playing characters. 

This was the game my sister and I played obsessively for months while the Dungeons & Dragons Basic game sat around waiting for us to figure it out. In the end it was Gamma World that "taught" me how to play an RPG, but Dungeon most definitely lay the groundwork. I was about ten when that happened, so my son is getting a five year head start on me, it looks like!

It was with some amusement that I realized that I couldn't even play Dungeon today without house ruling it a bit. For example:

The Kid Rules: don't make the kid do hard math (he can add dice fine; adding 10,000 GP worth of loot is a different matter entirely!) Each of his characters needed to find 3-5 treasures to win, for example.

The Cooperative Rules: you can play more than one character (he wanted to) and they can travel together as a group. This makes sense to me. I had never noticed until now that Dungeon is essentially about a dysfunctional group that immediately splits the party. Weird!

If you play two characters, they each get a turn fighting, but they have to choose which one gets the treasure. They have to earn as much treasure as both characters combined to win.

Cooperative Heroes: two players can also cooperate like above, but the one who rolls the highest damage roll wins the treasure too. Alternatively, they could choose to split the treasure by taking lesser treasures totalling the level value of the bigger treasure (so a level 6 treasure can be split as two level 3 treasures if there are cards for it).

If cooperative heroes want to move together, they can defer to the last hero in the turn sequence and all move on his turn, but only if they are adjacent to each other.

Cooperative Monsters: if you allow cooperative heroes, then monsters also work together. In chambers, instead of three consecutive monster encounters, you get all three monsters at once, working together.

Healing Clerics: once per game a cleric can choose to undo the damage roll of a monster if he so desires. He must be within 5 spaces of the encounter to help in this way.

Ganging Up: heroes may gang up. If they do, then they choose one main hero to lead the attack (usually the one with the lowest target number to hit) and each hero assisting adds 1 die roll to the total. They must be within 5 spaces to help like this, and the lead hero always gets the treasure.

Party Wins: In this version, the party plays as a group and wins when the total GP value of gold for all heroes is collectively gained. In this mode it is suggested that the stakes be higher (so death is the loss condition for any one hero): when you "lose a turn" and get an hourglass icon, you also get a gravestone. When you get three gravestones you die. You can remove one gravestone by going back to the main hall and resting for a full turn, expending one gravestone (and you can only do this once).

Cyberpunk is here and it is Wetware

So CRISPR technology has been growing for a few years but it's essentially here. There's a great Vox article right here on what CRISPR is and what it does...and why we should realize that our fundamental understanding of the future of life has irrevocably changed (we just don't realize it yet). See also this Gizmodo article.

Short vesion: CIRSPR is a very efficient, very cheap and very fast gene editing/splicing technique that basically makes pretty much anything involving gene editing and splicing possible. We're looking at the infancy of transhumanism with CRISPR and I don't even think I'm exaggerating.

And now there's this: conversion of computer data to biodata and back. Poor Johnny Mnemonic and his 128MB data limit. They should have been etching code on to your DNA!

They key issue with the story above appears to be how efficient the process was: there's enough room to effectively etch lengthy programs, videos, virus....you name it. More impressive than etching this data onto DNA was the fact that it could be read back and converted with no loss of data.

Yes, the cyberpunk future is here. It's just a bit wetter and more transhumanist than we might have thought....

Confession: I might be an Ubisoft fanboy

It just dawned on me last night, as I was wondering when my Gold Edition Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands key was going to show up from Green Man Gaming, while playing The Crew Completed Edition and Tom Clancy's The Division that I might....just might!.....be an Ubisoft fanboy. Or Drone. Or slave. Whatever works.

I'm not sure how it happened.....somehow, Ubisoft managed to produce a lengthy series of games that all, without exception, have grabbed me in a way where I just happen to enjoy playing them pretty much in to perpetuity. My PC and PS4 are littered with Ubisoft titles: Rainbow 6: Siege, Far Cry 4, Far Cry Primal, and Assassins' Creed Syndicate on the PS4. The Division Gold Edition on both the PC and Xbox One. The Crew, Watch Dogs, Watch Dogs 2 and For Honor on the PC.

I've finished EVERY Assassin's Creed game released except for the 2D scrollers which annoy me and Syndicate, which I am plowing through.

I watched the AC movie unironically.

I love The Division so much that I have plowed through three character levelings in that game.

I'm currently playing The Crew and thinking about how it's more fun than World of Warcraft, and how it's basically like WoW if you could drive in to an auction house and knock everyone over. (Secret: it's not really that much like WoW, I just like the idea).



What the hell happened to me?!?!?!?

My theory is this: while many, many other games focus on a range of fantastical elements, the fantastical bits in Ubisoft games are tempered by an effort to ground the action in some version of "reality," and for some reason this approach really appeals to me. The Division, for example, is proving to be deeply more satisfying to me than poor Fallout 4, which while I enjoy it, the visceral "in the moment, this could happen in the near future" feel of The Division is much more immersive to me than the logic-straining alternate retro 50's future of Fallout. The Crew is am amusing nonsensical car adventure, and it's probably the least realistic of all the Ubisoft titles, but it still manages to be an open world adventure in a way no other car game has come close to (except Horizon 3, which is a whole other level of awesome).



Every Assassin's Creed game, assuming you buy in to the play mechanics, style of game, and "hidden weird history" themes, is a way to have a swashbuckling adventure that doesn't have to involve unrealistic magic and anime swords. Compare For Honor's fighting mechanics to....say....any Final Fantasy title. Nuff said.

Given that every Ubisoft title can take dozens or hundreds of hours to finish, I could technically just buy Ubisoft at this point and never lack for good gaming. I mean....even the Ubisoft Uplay app has been dramatically improved over the last few years. It used to be genuinely awful....these days it's just a mild annoyance, another Steam-wannabe that at least is slightly more functional than Origin.

Well, that was my revelation for the day.....

Dungeons & Dragons 5E at High Level - Weirdly Fun and Familiar (and challenging my sense of tradition!)

A year or so ago I started a high level D&D 5th edition campaign with each PC starting at level 10, and we ran it right up to everyone hitting level 14. That campaign was put on hold for a while but recently I returned to that setting with a mix of the old and new players gained since then, and the game has been progressing from 14 to 15 at a reasonable pace.

One of the fun things about high level play in D&D is just how easy it is, but there are some other notable bits worth deliberating, too: key among these observations is just how different high level play in D&D 5E feels compared to high level gaming in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder. In the older editions, it was almost inevitable that once you reached some point between level 10 and 14 that the DM would (barring being one of those special DMs who loves that high level play and has lots of free prep time) burn out, badly. The time and effort necessary to prepare challenging or meaningful encounters in 3.5/PF is a major issue, and the only way around it for time-strapped DMs is to purchase as many pre-made stat blocks as you can, or use online tools to auto-generate high level foes. You then run in to an "investment" problem with pre-made stat blocks, though.....at high levels there is a LOT of information on those stat blocks and the DM who has limited prep time often has limited time to think about how to best use the information for a tactically interesting challenge.

Anyway, with 5E the experience is completely different: you will spend about the same amount of time prepping for a high level game as you do a low level game. Monster stat blocks for high level foes do have more information to absorb, but here's the thing: it's right there, and the mechanical effects are almost all spelled out --except for spells, ahem. Those you as DM will just need to get used to either memorizing or referencing. My tendency is to jot down a couple notes on a copy of the sat block about the spells I anticipate will come in to play, for example.

Beyond that, high level play in 5E mainly requires the DM to think about what their characters can do: that is to say, keep in mind if you've got spell casters with teleport circles, or banishment, or plane shift. Make sure your planned adventures and encounters will function regardless of whether or not such spells are used. There are fewer "adventure bypass" spells as I like to call them in 5E, which makes consideration of such effects much easier in 5E than in PF and 3.5, too. Many of those spells still exist in some capacity, but they require components or conditions that the PCs need to pursue first, which means that you can't accidentally prep for a lot of content and then watch all of it get bypassed by the PCs in two seconds like can accidentally happen in PF/3.5. Sure, you can try to account for all variables in those editions, too....but it's hard. Besides the fact that there was a lot more material being out out for 3.5 (and still being out out for PF!) the variety and range of racial and class options for PCs meant that keeping up with it all for most DMs was a losing battle. 5E has fixed that by tightening up how much content is out there, and that means as DM you can remain pretty much familiar with all of the official resources you like, and cherry pick the dmsguild resources to your heart's desire.

5E has also managed to somehow find a sweet spot with "powerful but still vulnerable PCs." One of my players observed that she was impressed that in one encounter when the PCs were breaking free of a slaver ship, she could legitimately consider razing the entire vessel with fire as a parting act of vengeance, but at the same time the PCs felt a need to get out of there because they knew 100 seasoned pirate slavers were going to be an overwhelming fight for them. Even if the slavers were mostly lower CR creatures (say 3-7) that would still be an intense and likely losing battle for at least some of the PCs given the circumstances.

Another player of mine summed it up like this: when the PCs are coordinated and focus-firing on their foe, they are deadly and unstoppable. But when they are caught in separate, smaller groups even lower challenge groups of monsters can quickly overwhelm them. Thus as a group they could disintegrate a gorgimera in like two rounds, but three of the party were separately ambushed by six drow elite warriors and two of the PCs almost died.

He's not wrong at all! Our favorite rogue player who regularly wanders off into dangerous scenarios on his own loses a PC almost every other session.

That gets to the last interesting bit I've noticed with high level play in 5E: character mortality is still a thing to keep in mind. Death comes slightly less quickly to high level PCs than it does to the fragile level 1-5 crowd, but it is still always on the table. In the time I've run the high level game, since going from level 10 to 15 the group has lost at least two PCs and almost lost two more last night. Death is still a viable threat in high level 5E gaming, which means that the game still carries a sense of high stakes urgency when fights start.

The main difference is that higher level PCs have more resources to intervene before an ally dies....so near death encounters in which an ally is pulled from the brink are not uncommon and often a lot of tense fun. This is an element similar to 4E design, which many liked; 5E has that "risk element" baked in, and a coordinated group can pull their asses out of the fire with some good teamwork. You also see this in PF and 3.5, to be fair; but the main difference is that you'll feel "at risk" more often in 5E, where challenges are more like actual encounters should be. In PF/3.5 similar situations usually felt more like gimmicks..."let's see what's on our character sheets that are effectively Get Out Of Jail Free cards for this encounter," type moments, if you will.

My experience with 3.5/PF went something like this: even the most monumental foes were easily defeated,  most of the time, so long as the PCs had ample defense and attacks that exploited or countered the enemy. In such cases they were essentially unstoppable. But once in a while some foe would show up with some attack or feature that the PCs had no prep for, and usually that followed an unexpected near-death moment or instakill. My PF players usually were more annoyed and felt slighted by such events...how could they not have been prepared for it? Their characters were like walking tanks, so to run in to the rare creature that was tougher than them felt almost like the GM was hitting below the belt, and throwing too high a CR foe their way. This was always an annoying element of grappling with challenging encounter designs.

5E, to contrast, lets DMs manage to take foes from CR 5 on up to CR 20 and construct encounters that a level 14-15 group will find challenging. A single CR 15 foe might be scary but still fall faster than a gang of CR 7s, for example. It's really interesting seeing how threats at high level can remain both exotic and more conventional, with minimal effort by the DM to need to carefully balance it to avoid either a cakewalk or certain doom.

My goal here isn't just to praise 5E and trash PF/3.5 though. It's to talk about why I like 5E and provide some context for why the same levels of play in prior editions were problematic for me. I know of a number of great and dedicated PF/3.5 GMs for whom high level play is an exciting challenge. But in my defense, those guys were REALLY dedicated to mechanical mastery, and the simple truth is: for me, I'm in it for the story, the adventure....and I want the rules to support that, but otherwise fade in to the background as much as possible.

We have one player who spent about 15 minutes on a combat round, highly atypical of 5E combat pacing (if you spend more than 5 minutes on a 5E combat round you're probably doing it wrong, or you may not be very familiar with the game or your PC). We were joking that he had moved in to Pathfinder standard round pacing. There's a lot of truth to this: the extra levels of complexity in prior editions can be overwhelming with variables. Last night's game had four major encounters and three notable exploration/role-play events. We accomplished in one session what would likely have taken two-three games in Pathfinder, simply due to the extra level of complexity (and also likely need for maps and minis to navigate combat effectively).

I'd still happily run Pathfinder, don't get me wrong. I just see it as a game that works best from levels 1-10, after which the net gain of fun vs. the loss of enjoyment due to needless layered complexity starts to grow disproportionately relative to one another. Think of me as an "E10" kind of guy with Pathfinder.

Anyway, we're all in this campaign for the long haul, to reach level 20. Once we get there, I may just have to take a look at the Epic Level books currently on offer at dmsguild.com to see if we want to keep going! I can safely say this is the first time in many years that high level play has felt like fun, and less like a drag.