Chicago Gameday 41: Earthdawn

Despite playing numerous fantasy settings and rule systems, Earthdawn is one that I never got into. I never read the fiction or owned any of the various supplements. There might have been some reading many years ago based on friends recommendations, but actual play?

That changed a few weeks ago during Chicago Gameday 41. Gameday is an opportunity to play with new people and try new systems. Depending on what's being run, you can even find games you're already familiar with and want to dip a toe in. I generally use it as a testing ground for games I haven't played before.

Earthdawn scenario is described as the following: Your caravan returns to Bartertown to find that your patron has gone missing. Meanwhile, a sinister organization plots the downfall of a kingdom. Do you have what it takes to rescue your boss as well as your paycheck? (Characters provided, rules will be taught).

The pregenerated characters were cleanly written and easy to understand. The GM did a solid job on the sheets. The book itself? Not a fan of the format. It's one of those off sized shapes and in softcover. It's so thick that I can't imagine that it'll hold up long under constant use. It's a book that looks like it could easily have been broken into two or three separate books if they were going for that size. 

Our first combat was an introduction scene against some peasants stealing from us as we made our way to Bartertown and then the actual adventure itself started. It was a good method to use in order for us to get the basics of combat down without a huge fear of poor tactics ending us.

The adventure was fun. I wound up playing a female smith, the 'serious' merchant lord. The GM wrote out numerous bits on how my character felt about the various other characters including her brother who she tended to look down on. I used that to ham it up a bit with my bard brother whose player did an excellent job of making him a whiskey drinking, bar hopping womanizer. 

The system itself is a little swingy. Dice explode. On some actions, you can be roling a lot of dice. The more dice you roll, the more opportunities for an explosion. It's great when it works for you, which it did for the group a surprising number of times.

Not so great when it works against you. Which as my problem with criticals, is that the Game Master is ALWAYS going to be rolling more dice then you. 

Earthdawn was enjoyable and I'd play it again. My friend, +erik labelle has run it for my fellow gamers in the past and if it comes up again, I'll have to take a swing at it. Apparently 4th edition 'fixed' some of the problems like bypassing armor. I've heard that this was a huge problem as you already get penalties for wearing armor in the first place so if someone can bypass it... Not familiar enough personally to say how that works in the long run.

Afterwards, I wandered through Games Plus and picked up a few nick nacks like some Games Workshop Trees, the three 'new' Games Workshop paints and some other bits. I wanted to see what the main difference was between the old and new paints. Haven't delved into that much yet as I haven't used a lot of gold since I bought them. 

Anyone else check out conventions for the opportunity to see how games play? Any great stories come out of that? Any horror stories? I have to say, in terms of horror stories, I've been lucky. Very rarely have I had any issue, either when playing, or running. It's like the people I'm playing with game there to enjoy the game and play it as opposed to being terrible people.

Anyway, thanks to Games Plus for hosting and I'm looking forward to hopefully going in the future. 

The Pain of Adepticon

I may have mentioned before that I enjoy miniatures.

Often the companies making them are making them for use in role playing games or I can draw inspiration for my role playing games from them.

One of the local conventions is Adepticon.

They moved the convention this year, much closer to me. I used to live in Mt. Prospect so it's new location was in a regiion well known to me.

The hotel has some nice art outside of it as well as some nice ponds.

But the place was rammed.

And that meant walking.

Walking when I have a bad back.

Ugh.



This year, among the vendors, was +Scale75mm , +Games Plus , #GamesandGears, +CoolMiniOrNot and numerous others.

Games and Gears sold out of the brush I was looking for. I backed a few of their Kickstarters. At the convention they were very humble, talkative and friendly.

Scale 75 sold out of all of their fantasy colors in their new paint range except for Steam and Punk. They mentioned that they had distribution in the United States now and I suggested they hook up with Games Plus among others since Games Plus is one of the local stores.

Wyrd Miniatures was not there in their own booth, but had their own section in the Coolminornot area. The Coolminornot, CMON, is really just almost an advertising venue for their Kickstarters at this point with a ton of Wrath of Kings, Dark Ages, Sedition Wars, and of course, Wyrd.

There were a LOT of games going on. Lot of people playing. Some fantastic scenery, some fantastic paint jobs. I snapped only a few because every minute of standing was unpleasant. These are from #Antimatter Games who do a Shadowsea and Deep War, games based off of #Ganesha Games and their Song of Blades and Heroes.

I like messing with different things so I did buy some pigments and fixer from #SecretWeapon as well as a few other bits.

A few other places I stopped, say to get some scenery, didn't have exactly what I was looking for. THAT one item I said, "Gee, that looks cool" was sold out. This happened when I was looking for some stencils too.

For me? The whole thing was a mild disaster. If Scale 75 had their full range of Fantasy & Games paint, it would've been worth it. See, I have a pinched nerve in my back. Walking for any length of time? Disasterous. Leg, knee, and foot get numb. Had to take several rest stops.

Now on the other hand, if Scale75 is able to take advantage of there being multiple local vendors there, because the #DiceDojo was also there... Then I wouldn't have to order them online and my desire for instant gratification could be meet!

Seriously though, everyone was great to talk too. The whole Kickstarter event environment has made everyone more 'neighbor' like in that you don't want to poison the water in such a small environment. Lots of great products.

Just hopefully next year, you know, they'll actually bring them to the convention!

Afterwards one of my friends saw how bad I was hurting and took me to Buno Beef. Got a combo with an Oreo shake! Almost made the pain worth the trip.

No, not really, but it was a good beef and sausage anyway.

Warhammer FRPG Thousand Thrones Snack Attack Recap

This week was particularly strange. One of my gaming friends died. His mom called me up because my number was in his phone. The memorial service was... not to my taste although I can see it's benefit to the mom. Hung out with several friends way too late and because it was a work day, didn't have a drop of alcohol.

Heck, because of the last attack of gout, I haven't had any alcohol in about a month now. Ugh. Sobriety is not to my liking.

A few of my gaming amigo's friends got together after the memorial and talked about the guy. It was interesting in that for a few of us, including me mind you, that he was so quite, there wasn't a lot we could add to the conversation. For me, it was interesting to hear about the guy's life and what he did when he wasn't around.

In terms of the type of gamer he was, he was a min-maxer. Mind you he learned, as many people do, that what looks fantastic on paper, doesn't necessarily work out in the game. I remember a 'side quest' the group was running during a Shackled City campaign I was running for 3.5 that allowed people a lot of free range in what they could use. He had a mojh magister. This is a dragon man spellcaster and he had some unique bits to him.

In this side quest, it was one of the Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics where I put a magic item that the group was researching. In a random encounter the party encountered some drow with a pslelcaster and the drow won initiative, the spellcaster hit out with a fireball that did almost max damage, and well, that magister was toasted.

Stuff like that never discouraged him though. He just went back to the drawing board to work out what his next masterwork would be.

Some thought him a little... rule lawyer like too. I particularly never had that issue with him, but at the 'peak' my my 3.5 days, I could probably recite whole passages of the game system without needing to reference the book. I also made sure to have handouts of what the changes were to the core rules at the start of the game so there were rarely moments where someone would go, "I didn't know you did that, otherwise I would have..."

One of the reasons so few of us knew anything about him, is outside of making characters and showing up to game, even in the game, he was quite. It wasn't that he couldn't role play or that he didn't engage when spoken with, he just didn't volunteer a lot of that of himself at any particular time. If an NPC had questions for him, he had answers and had no problem role playing out the encounter. If someone asked him how he was doing, he'd talk about it, but they were short answers. He was there to game, to see the mechanics of one part of the system clash with another part.

It sound stupid I'm sure, but one of the things that I'm going to miss about him is seeing him apply that analytic mind to the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

It was nice to have his other friends around to talk about him and the characters he made and some of the goofy mistakes he made and for me, it was great learning a little more about the man behind the mechanics.

Still, even without alcohol, being out past ten lead me to be exhausted the next day at work and the following day, which was game day. So I pulled out some different snacks to help me overcome.

Now this was one tasty beverage. One of my friends brought a coconut coffee something or other last week and it was good. This wasn't as sweet being far more espresso and coconut, which in and of itself isn't really that sweet, but hey, two of these and I was good.

And here we have some of the snacks. I had gone to Dick Blick art store in Evanston to look at the wet palletes they had. They are  far too big to use at my standard painting area. So instead I wandered over to the nearby Costs Plus World Market and picked up some snacks.

The wasabi soy almonds were tasty but the first bite always had a little more kick that I expected The sauce in the middle is a fresh habanero hot sauce. Very good on chips. The salsa is a hot chipotle that was more paste like than chunky, but I enjoyed it. Not shown are the chips and the chocolate covered espresso beans. The beans made it through the game, but the chips were gone in a matter of minutes.

We were short two players for the game. My dwarf was still badly wounded. Our Empire Bright Wizard, not badly wounded, but injured. Our elf bowman in great health. The benefit of being an archer when nothing actually gets up to you. Our 'hedge wizard', who in like twenty sessions we still haven't seen directly cast a spell, was in fairly good health.

We continued our exploration of the grounds with a few random encounters here and there and traps. One of the traps was exploding mushrooms. The insanity points were flowing fast and freely at the den of Nurgle. I got like five in one blast of mind warping insanity that caused me to forget everything. That was fun to play as I went about type listening to one player after another tell me what my character was like and being aghast at the whole thing.

"Dwarves send their people off to die when they make mistakes and yet are in decline? Dwarves don't sound too smart." The elf and his continued assurance that despite the fact that I wasn't as good as an elf, as a dwarf I was far superior to a human. The 'hedge wizard' assuring me that the bright wizard was nothing but a charlatan. It was great.

The final fight was VERY interesting for future games. The main thrust of the game has been the mutant child and his mutant ability to influence those around him. We were in this Nurgle manor in order to prevent the child from being bonded and controlled by a magic item.

Apparently the members in the party decided that the best way to do that was to kill the kid. Before anything else, before engaging the enemy in melee, just, you know, kill the kid. The elf missed with his bow shot, but the bright wizard completely toasted the kid.

The fight itself was brutal and I lost another piece of armor.

Before things could get too bad though, another group of enemies joined the fray, in this case, some vampires that we'd been working for and against in various parts of the campaign. They were less then pleased that we killed the boy, but in the ensuring chaos of the grand melee, we managed to escape. But the bright wizard took enough damage to burn a fate point. Two of the people who have the heal skill failed their roll and thought he was dead.

On the way out, we encountered the source of my trauma which cured me of the memory loss so I looked at the two, who have failed roll after roll in terms of making those heal checks and was like, "So... you two are telling me that the bright wizard is dead and you both looked him over?" Seeing their nods, I went back in and picked him up. Benefit of burning a fate point was that the bad guys tend to not molest you when your down.

So now the GM is reading around and ahead to see how he's going to make changes to the last portions of the book. Apparently the mutant kid is supposed to have survived the whole fight and come out with new insights.

Yeah, didn't happen.

But the weekend wasn't over!

On Saturday one of my friends wanted to head out to Games Plus in Mount Prospect. It's a fantastic store and carries a ton of miniatures, board games, card games, and other miniature related bits. As time goes on though, the physical ability of the store to carry more of the esoteric ranges of things diminishes which means I find myself going online more and more. For example, Andreas has a paint line that contains six paints of a particular color that you can use for highlighting and shading. Very handy. Another one is Scale 75. Another one is Mig or AMMO. This doesn't count the lines, like Foundry or Coat De Arms, that Games Plus has never carried.

Don't get me wrong, I know I don't 'need' any of those extra paints, but I like playing with them. For example, the store is now carrying some of the Plastic Soldier weathering sprays and primers. I've picked up the staining kit from Plastic Soldier but haven't found anything I want to use it on yet, so I held off on buying the weathering spray.

But I did pick up the Privateer Press wet palette. I've got friends who are like, "Make your own you lazy bastard or use the coupon for Michaels of Dick Blick and get a huge one for half the price!" and the 'real' one is way too big and well, I'm lazy.

I also picked up some matte black Army Painter primer. I know again people are like "Use auto primer" and a few have recommended Tamiya, but the Army Painter is usually good and isn't bad in price for the white or the black. I just finished off my Privateer Press Black Primer and I didn't like the design of the spray nozzle and it wasn't that good of a primer and it wasn't cheap so no more of that.

I also picked up some brass rod and some drill bits from Army Painter. There was a 'hobby' company bit there of drill bits, but they costs just as much as the Army Painter pack which came with the brass. An easy selection there.

After that it was off to paint for a little while. I'm showing one of the player's from the Friday game has to lay down some paint and it's more challenging that I thought it would be. Not sure if that's me being a terrible teacher or him being a horrible student. "You need to shake the paint before putting it in the pallette. You need to thin the paint. Only dip the tip of the brush in." Things that seem simple but... That's okay, learning comes from doing.

But the weekend didn't stop there. One of my friends, one who I don't see enough, was having a get together so I headed out there for some card games. We played a few hands of  Coup, a card game where the purpose is to reduce your enemies resources to zero. You only start with two and you don't get any more. There is a lot of bluffing and puzzling to do in it. It's a great and fast card game and we got several hands in. For a game I'd never played before, I'm seriously thinking of buying it because it's easy to pick up and I think can be played with gamers and nongamers with equal aplomb. Not to mention it's under $15 bones and already has some support games out for it.

We also played a game of Torches and Pitchforks. T&P is a game where you play a mob that hunts down monsters. It's a fun game but this hand was a little rough as we were all out of practice and we were very good at countering each other's ability to accumulate pint totals. I wish that Green Ronin would come out with a modern version of the game or a sequel or an add on. There's a lot of potential in it.

Outside of the gaming, it was good to have some intelligent conversation. At work it's either I'm quite because I'm in a cubicle or I'm catching up with my friends on various bits and pieces and 'real' conversation doesn't happen too often. It's one of those things where we see each other so much that b.s. is what we're best at. Seeing people you don't see that often gives you an opportunity to start spouting off and seeing where the pieces fall.

So the week started horrible and ended on a high note. Gaming for me, works best when you get to try out different games, hang out with people you haven't seen in a while, and share new food stuffs and stories among each other.

It may not be family but good gamers are as close as you're going to get and in some cases better.

Kickstarter: Potential and Problems

Tavis asked an interesting question last time around. So interesting I thought it would make an interesting post.

"For my own education, Joe, what's the benefit to you of picking things up through Kickstarter rather than waiting until they're at Games Plus and you can be sure they suit your interest at that moment? There might not be one overarching answer to that, but I'd find your roundups even more useful if you made this explicit in each case."

Maybe next month, when going over what's late and what's here, I'll talk about the specifics but here are a few things that get me personally interested in a Kickstarter.

1. Price Point: While its great that several Kickstarters have some sort of retail program, that aspect will continue to fall under scrutiny I'm sure. Especially as Kickstarters are late. It's one thing to tag a person for $100, it's another to tag a store for $1,000.

But in speaking of Price point, the consumer usually gets a decent discount, or at the least, gets a PDF copy of the book. In some instances, that PDF copy may cover multiple systems. These are value added things. In other cases, shipping is free. Even if the item may not be stocked in a FLSG, like Games Plus, and I order directly from the company, I'd pay shipping fees. Some Kickstarters take that fee onto themselves. Again, value added.

But, and here's the dreaded but, time is money. If your project is going to be six months late, saving 10%-30% really isn't saving anything as I could have used that money somewhere else.

2. It's Not Going To Be Available. Tavis mentions Games Plus. This is one of the best hobby stores, if not the best, I've ever been to. Fairly knowledgeable staff. Friendly, gaming space, special orders, massively wide selection. But they still can't stock everything and somethings they can't get hold of. 1650, a miniature Kickstarter I mentioned, would be a good example of something they don't normally stock. One Kickstarter I was thinking of backing, Spherewars, falls into the same category. Red Box Games comes and goes.

When speaking of Red Box Games, his distribution is not consistent throughout the 'Net. In some places, it's strong. In others, sell offs have already occurred. When popularity hits, they stock again.

Doing a Kickstarter allows one to get in on the ground floor of a thing and to purchase items that may not be available.

For me, those are the two primary things.

3. Exclusive Items: Way down on the list, the exclusive item! For miniatures, this is especially true. Sculpts that you're just not going to get anywhere else hit my 'collector' brain.

Now I know that isn't what other people do though. From my experience in talking with people who back projects, they tend to fall into a more 'community' style backing.

For example, King For A Day and Midgard Tales, both allow a fair amount of user interaction with the content. For some people, this is immense value added. They get to be a part of something. They get to work with professional designers. They get to feel that they've added to the material and that other members of the community can enjoy that. Same is true of Dwimmermount for a long time. James was running actual adventurers for people with the material. That's a hell of a community!

Time for the ass hat.

I don't care about that. I want the final finished product as polished as if it were coming out of a professional game company. Yeah, I'm leaving myself wide open to failure there as lord knows my bookshelves are packed with "see page XX." Thank you White Wolf and AEG for the memories.

In terms of potential problems, for me, that part is about the money. Eden, Otherworld Adventurers, Freebooter, and other companies have done successful Kickstarters and I didn't back them because my funds were tied up in other Kickstarters. So for backing Red Box and getting nothing, I could've backed Eden and received my rule books and miniatures. For backing It Came From the Stars and having no book on that end, I could have backed Spears of the Dawn.

Remember Kickstarter makers, when you're late, you've not only delaying the fulfillment of your initial obligations, you've potentially taken money from someone else whose better than you and whose next Kickstarter may get that money you got first time around. Why back a company again that failed to deliver when hey, here's another company with a similar niche product that did meet their goals?

And in terms of that money, let's say I didn't back other Kickstarters with those funds. The amount of projects I've backed is probably in the thousands of dollars. Way too much in a more serious tone he said but at the same time, those are all dollars I'm not spending on existing products and not spending in a local game store.

As a company, I guess I'd ask Tavis, and other publishers, when people raise the red flag about the FLSG situation, which is already under assault from Amazon, which is already under assault from electronic books, both PDF and now e-books, and under assault from a still, at least in America, fairly weak economy, by, for the most part, taking the FLSG out of the distribution chain, how much are you effecting the gaming industry as opposed to the gaming community? Every physical product sold outside the distribution chain is one less purchase from the FLSG.

I remember post year 2000 there were a ton of new game companies doing PDF and other formats. I remember 'professionals' moaning and weeping bitter black tears about the "lower cost of entry" to the "business."

What the hell happened to those innovators eh? They discovered Kickstarter and realized that money does help eh?

Anyway, my primary reasons for doing Kickstarters are pretty base and simple and when they're late, they are sucking the air out of the room. In this case, my wallet. Hard to make an impulse purchase if you've backed something else that you 'hope' will show up.