Monthly Archives: September 2019

Update on planning session 2 #2

D&D, RPG, session planning

SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the two settlements I have to populate for the second session. The first being the Northlander village and on Mintarn itself Queen’s Cove.

For this campaign I’ve decided not to use a pre-existing settlement from a published adventure. I had thought about Phandalin. I really like what WotC have designed there. But I want to save that and the others for another time/campaign.

These will be the first settlements I’ve created from scratch. Luckily there is a lot of great advice online and in the DMG.

The DMG gives us the following questions that we just might to think about when designing our own settlements.

“Consider the following questions as you create any settlement in your world:

  • What purpose does it serve in your game?
  • How big is it? Who lives there?
  • What does it look, smell, and sound like?
  • Who governs it? Who else holds power? Is it part of a larger state?
  • What are its defenses?
  • Where do characters go to find the goods and services they need?
  • What temples and other organizations feature prominently?
  • What fantastic elements distinguish it from an ordinary town?
  • Why should the characters care about the settlement

The guidelines in this section are here to help you build the settlement you want for whatever purpose you have in mind. Disregard any advice here that runs counter to your vision for a settlement.”

The omnipotent Matt Colville in his Running the Game series has these couple of relevant videos.


Another YouTube video I like is by Dael Kingsmill.

In the rest of this post I’m going to use the questions from the DMG as prompts to help me create the Norse inspired Northlander village.

After some semi-light googling on Norse names/words I’ve come up with the village name Sealby. -by is the Norse for farmstead, village, settlement And considering that there is a seal colony on the far side of this island that the Northlanders living there would name the settlement along those lines. And considering how the Norse named the Faroe Islands (Sheep Island) I think that the Northlanders would have named this island along similarly and call it Seal Island or Sealay. With the -ay being Norse for island.

What purpose does it serve in your game?

This is a settlement that the party visit after getting through Angrath’s lair. It allows the party to “recover”/rest and get a lift via boat to Queen’s Cove on Mintarn. The boat journey is also a chance to give information to the party about The Red Rage of Mintarn.

How big is it? Who lives there?

The population of the village is 40+. This is a Northlanders settlement. It has a crew for the Knarr ship (see notes), plus light guard for settlement whilst ship is away.

What does it look, smell, and sound like?

Like the Vikings that inhabited The Faroes the island is treeless. So the homes are built out of rock and turf. Livestock has been bought to the settlement, basic cattle, chickens, sheep.

Who governs it? Who else holds power? Is it part of a larger state?

This is the “embassy” of the Northlanders with Mintarn and the Moonshae Islands. Plus Angrath the pirate. Whom the Northlanders have a truce/agreement with.

The settlement is governed by its jarl, who also acts as the ambassador for the Northlanders. The ambassador answers to a council of jarls that represent the various islands that make up the Northland kingdom.

What are its defenses?

Semi circular earth works, guard tower by the west gate. Gates at east and west of village.

Where do characters go to find the goods and services they need?

The islands’ economy is very dependent on livestock and harvesting the products of the sea, particularly fish, whales, seals and birds. So the characters will have no problem getting food, and goods that are by products of the hunting. They can get equipment repaired.

What temples and other organizations feature prominently?

Not applicable this time.

What fantastic elements distinguish it from an ordinary town?

Not applicable this time.

Why should the characters care about the settlement?

This settlement will get them to Mintarn and particularly Queen’s Cove.

I created the following map for Sealby based on the Foteviken Museum viking village map.

I can’t stand it, I know you planned it

first look, game night

Mid week I got a pleasant, but big surprise, when my Kickstarter copy of Sabotage arrived.

I really was taken aback when the delivery driver handed over the package. It was massive. I had not been expecting a game this big.

When I opened the box and looked inside you can’t help but be bowled over by the high production values of this game. The 20 cardboard tokens are really thick, chunky things. Probably twice as thick as ones I’ve seen in other games. Which translates to a satisfying feel when holding them. The inclusion of two game trays, the really cool minis. I think the only company that equals this sort of quality is Stonemaier Games. These two companies are setting such a high bar for others to match.

Although there is a minor blemish on the Sabotage production, there is a misprint on a character card, and text missed off the spies player boards. Plus some boxes don’t fold out fully when used. But stickers are being sent out to correct this. Along with a video showing how to correct the box issue.

It took me a couple of days to get my head round the rules. Which involved a few readings of the thin rule book, looking at the official FAQ, watching YouTube videos, and reading the odd bgg forum post. So I think it would be fair to say that the rule book isn’t the best. Although the little first turn booklet is a nice touch.

Once I was happy with how the rules worked in my own head I felt confident enough to ask Jonathan if he fancied a learning game of Sabotage.

Friday evening then was spent at The Luxe with a bunch of heroic spies attempting to foil the evil plans of a gang of ruthless villains by trying to infiltrate the villains lair and destroy their doomsday devices.

Jonathan played the villains, whilst I played the spies.

The game trays make set up so quick and easy. You just hand the players the relevant tray and they have everything they need.

Boy does this game have table presence. With the box between the players acting as a screen this takes up a lot of space.

This game is either a 1v1 game where both players play 2 characters each. Or it’s a 2 player co-op once the app is out, or finally it’s a 2v2 game. Although the 1v1 option isn’t explicitly mentioned in the rules, and is an assumption I made that made sense.

The main mechanics of this game are a battleships/hide and seek/hidden movement type thing, and programmed actions. Which combine really nicely.

The round structure is simple, roll dice, plan actions, take actions, clean up. Which is nice. And it flows really quickly.

Both sides are asynchronous. The villains earn extra dice to use for actions in a different manor to the heroes, and they gain more powerful action tiles differently too. What I like is that both sides have a way to mess with the other player and get rid of those extra dice the other side are using.

Each character feels unique, having a core set of action tiles, but then unique more powerful ones to obtain.

I like that when you take actions you are giving out partial information. Some actions don’t get announced, just performed. Whilst others you announce the action name and that’s it. The other player then has to guess what you did for that action. Take for instance the spies move and scan action. The spies don’t declare the move part, but they do the scan. The area you scan, either a quad, row or column gives the villains a clue to where the spy is. But the problem is a scan action may not be just with the move. There is an action that just scans, and can be any where on the board. So it could be misdirection also.

So you are getting this incomplete information all the time. That you are trying to base decisions on. I like that.

In away Sabotage reminds me a bit of Spectre Ops, but with both sides hidden!

I liked the game, it’s fun. Would like to try it with the app, and 2v2. But it worked as a 1v1.

Luckily for the world the spies narrowly managed to disable to doomsday devices and save the day. Which means I won.

Oh the title of this post, it’s the first line of the song Sabotage by the Beastie Boys. Predictable I know but it had to be done.

Throne of Eldraine Trailer Released

magic, MtG, news

Yesterday WotC made some MtG announcements.

First up the official trailer for Throne of Eldraine was released.

I really like this trailer. It continues the high production values started with the War of the Spark trailer/teaser.

I didn’t like that War of the Spark trailer. It looked amazing. But the animation, particularly of the people in it just didn’t look natural. Plus the facial expressions, especially Liliana just didn’t convey any emotion. Plus there was a story of such but not a great one. It didn’t sell the set for me.

Now this new trailer fixes all the issues I had and mentioned above with the previous trailer.

For me this trailer almost gets up to the level of the Pixar shorts. I know some will hark to Shrek for the feel of this. But I love the fact there is a story being told, with some sort of battle going on in the background.

The animation of the gingerbread couple, and the emotion on the iced faces is really good. The human animation has improved as well.

I think the trailer sells the fairy tale element of Throne of Eldraine really well. However the Arthurian legend side doesn’t really come across.

Ok here is that new trailer…

This was followed up with the announcement of the sets that are coming out in 2020.

At the start of 2020 we return to Theros and it’s underworld. Q2 sees an all new plane, Ikoria. Which is a monster world, where we get to play monsters and make monsters apparently. Coreset 2021 is Teferi themed. And the year closes with a return visit to Zendikar and it’s original adventure world.

There was also a look at the new Brawl decks Commanders that are coming out for Throne of Eldraine. Which didn’t inspire me. They also said Brawl is coming to Arena (still dead to me) and marks playing Arena can play Brawl now.

What did you think of the announcements?

Throne of Eldraine Spoiler Plan

magic, MtG

It’s spoiler season once more in the world of MtG.

I’m going to try something different this time. Instead of waiting until the end and sharing with you in a long and boring post the cards that caught my eye, I’m going to share on social media via Instagram the cards that I like the look of as they get spoilt.

All I will say the cards are looking super thematic and the art is superb.

Update on planning session 2 #1

D&D, RPG, session planning

SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts. To be fair I’ve not been thinking much about the next session. That may sound lazy, and that I’ve lost interest. But in reality that’s not true. It’s been more that I’ve not had that point in time of when the next session is to focus on, and drive the creative process. Which was true until just over a week ago.

Finally the players have managed to pick a time and date for our second session of the campaign. This part of playing D&D is proving to be extremely frustrating. I’m glad I offloaded the process onto the players. I was getting very annoyed with a couple of the group, and the lack of information about when they were free. It felt like, and still does when I read the attempts to choose a date, like they are playing a game of “we are thinking of a number between 1 and a billion, can you guess it?”

At the current rate our third session will be in the new year. Which isn’t acceptable really. I know that the rest of the group also feel the same. Ideally we need to get the sessions to fortnightly.

So how to handle this?

I think at the end of the second session there needs to be time given to a group discussion about this. It needs to be handled delicately, with no finger pointing and blame.

On the planning front of the content for session 2 some of that is a carry over from the first session.

The party still have to clear the third level of the pirates lair, which is a single combat encounter, and a simple trap. Then they exit through an abandoned tomb, which potentially has a combat encounter. But that is already planned.

I have started to create item cards to give to the players for items they got from the pirates treasury. I googled a card template off the internet along with images of the item to use.

Now I have a Viking fishing village to populate. Followed by the town Queen’s Cove on Mintarn.

I already have some adventure hooks created. These hooks set up session 3. So I won’t know until the end of the session which one to prepare. I just need to make sure in the meantime any ideas for those hooks get noted in my GoodNotes file.

But I know session 2 will feel completely different to session 1. The encounter focus is different. Where as session 1 was a small dungeon crawl through the pirates lair. Session 2 is more social encounter oriented. There is the group challenge for rowing a row boat across a section of water between 2 islands.

The party also hit a level up point during session 2. So I need to decide whether to leave the levelling up until the end and let the players do that between sessions, or do the levelling up mid session. And if it is mid session how to add that to the narrative of the session.

Anyway with a date set in “stone” for the 21st of this month, you will be once more getting more of these posts again.

Grifting in the foothills!

Game day, game night

So last week I did get to play some games.

Last Tuesday I finally got Grifters:Nexus to the table. With my friend Nathan being the unfortunate individual coerced into playing.

Grifters: Nexus is the stand alone follow up to the original Grifters. Although they can be combined, and they rule book explains how to do this.

So what does Grifters:Nexus bring to the table? For starters “15 new specialist cards, new mechanisms and a new job card system.”

Naturally the theme remains the same, you are still running a criminal gang in the Dystopian Universe (also shared with Coup and The Resistance) pulling off jobs. The cool down mechanic is still there (which I really like) as is the handbuilding and set collection.

The art is fantastic. I love the art, the characters feel gritty and dystopian.

The job cards are now organised as an inverted pyramid. Which takes up a bit more table space. You can only complete jobs that are completely uncovered. I prefer this to the original piles of jobs. Not all the jobs get put out each game. So this impacts the number of cards that can be collected in a set, and the sets available. It gives a bit of variety.

If I had one complaint it’s that the rule book needs a keyword/mechanic section that explains how that keyword/mechanic works. It wasn’t exactly clear how the abduct mechanic worked from the card itself. But I did manage to work out what was meant (take a random card from an opponent’s hand).

You now have the option when stealing to take the money from either the opponents stash or if they have a specialist with money on them in the hideout from that specialist.

Grifters: Nexus is an enjoyable game. If you liked the original you’ll like this.

I narrowly got the win. Nathan liked the game also. So much I believe he might of added the game to his wish list.

Friday saw Jonathan and me at The Luxe for some gaming. After getting a sneak peek at a game prototype he’s working on, we played Foothills.

Foothills is all about building railways in Wales. Oh and getting the most victory points!

Each player has 5 double sided action cards. On your turn you select a face up action and do that action. You then flip the card, which makes a different action available to you. The nice thing about this is that the mix of actions are not the same for each player. The actions you can take allow you to gain resources, clear subtle, build tracks or stations, use unlocked action spaces or put an action card in front of you in a scoring pile.

Apart from scoring points for clearing a space with rubble on it, or building tracks and stations the end of game bonuses you score are taken from your personal scoring pile. No cards in the pile, no bonuses. So you have to time when to add an action card to the pile. It does get replaced by an action card from a generic supply. But the two sides may not be as sweet as the card you just replaced. Or the scoring bonus might not be as much use.

As a two player game I liked this a lot. It does need space to play. Which we nearly didn’t have enough for on the table we were using.

Ours was a close game, with John winning by a single point, after he got his maths right that is. Otherwise the gap would have been bigger!

Games Played: Grifters:Nexus, Foothills

Song for my era

Uncategorized

The early hours of every Sunday, which people would commonly describe as Saturday night. BBC Radio 5 Live host Dotun Adebayo runs a segment of Up All Night called the Virtual Juke Box.

For a couple of hours listeners call, text and email in musical suggestions to be considered for the Virtual Juke Box based on the theme for the week. The song with the most votes at the end of the segment gets added to the said Virtual Juke Box.

Over the years I’ve texted in suggestions. But never had one used. I have a lot more success with other shows on the network. I even got to ask Stan Lee a question on air back in 2009.

In last nights show the theme for the Virtual Juke Box was, “what is the one song that defines your era?”

So I sent the text below in. Fully expecting my usual lack of success.

As I was listening to people’s choices, I started to drift back to sleep. Suddenly I was wide awake. There coming out of my phones speakers was the Thing on a Spring theme.

I had finally had a text used for the Juke Box.

As my tweet straight after shows, I was a bit happy.

Let me expand a little on my reasoning.

As I said in the text to the show, I could have easily chosen a heavy metal song as my song for my era. It would most likely have been a KISS song, probably Detroit Rock City or I Love It Loud. More likely I Love It Loud.

Back in the early 80’s before MTV and satellite tv, all we had in the UK were 4 channels! Seeing my favourite group on any of those was a rarity. In fact extremely rare. It wasn’t until a tv show called Entertainment USA was on the BBC (which was a Friday evening iirc) that I got to see them. And the first video of theirs I saw I Love It Loud off the Creatures Of The Night album.

However during my teenage metal years the British home computer revolution was taking place. My parents had bought me a ZX81 for Christmas one year. Which within months I had replaced with an Oric-1 (that I later on had upgraded to an Oric Atmos). From there I went the Commodore 64 route whilst my brother got a ZX Spectrum (that I would later own as well).

Some of my favourite gaming memories are on the C64. And a major part of those memories are the iconic 8 bit chip tunes created by the under appreciated genius of Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Whittaker et al. What they did in 5k or less with the SID chip on the C64 was amazing.

My era was the home computer boom of the 80’s, I am the first generation of gamer. I had to choose a tune from those memories.

The first one I thought of last night was Thing on a Spring. So instead of thinking it over, and trying to decide what was the “best” SID tune from a game (there are so many great tunes) I went with my gut and first thought.

It’s a fun bit of music. Even decades after it was written it brings a smile to my face. And when I create a SID playlist is always included. And yes I have CDs of their music from C64Audio.com and other places.

Thing on a Spring was a great platform game (ZZap64! Sizzler iirc). The titular character from the game went on to join Rockford (from the Boulderdash games) as humorous margin art in ZZap64!

How impactful was this music on me? Even now I can’t watch the 80’s action movie classic Commando without the music from the C64 port of the unrelated arcade classic with the same name.

To this day I still remember loading Hyper Sports on the C64 and hearing the Chariots of Fire theme blasting from the tv speakers as the game loaded. Or ghostbusters being shouted out as the game Ghostbusters played the theme tune from the movie.

And the C64 demo scene was amazing at extracting the music and sfx from games so that you could listen to just the music from a game. And thanks to CNet (I think it was called that) the Commodore bulletin board I had a few 5 1/4 ” floppies worth of those demos.

So you can see I had to no choice but to nominate a SID chip tune as my song of my era.

What would be your nomination for the Virtual Juke box?