Do I really need to keep saying the following on these types of post? Shouldn’t it be taken as a given?
But just in case here is the boilerplate disclaimer.
SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign/session. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.
I’ve been looking through the pages of my copy of kobold press’ Tome of Beasts 2, and I’ve been really enjoying the experience.
The art for the monsters is amazing, and brings them to life. And really fires the imagination.
I am building up a menagerie of creatures I want the players to encounter. I already have the monster and npc stat cards from the Monster Manual in my DM folder that I plan to use, or can fall back on for a random encounter or two.
I really should look into getting the pawns that kobold press sell to go with this book. I think the only problem I have with this sort of product is you usually only get one of the monsters. Which isn’t very helpful when you want to run multiple of the creatures in an encounter.
Talking of 2D standee stuff there are also a couple of Wizkids 2D standee products I want to get my grubby hands on. Those being the Player Character Pack, and the Shipwreck Isle set.
At the last session Anthony very generously gave me three pre-painted Wizkids minis, the Viper Vine, Witchfire, and Gate Hellknight.
As pre-painted minis go I quiet like the look of these. The paint job isn’t going to win awards. But they are perfect for the table top. And more importantly I don’t have to paint them.
I believe these minis are for Pathfinder and the Maze of Death adventure (?).
So I need to get the Pathfinder stats for these minis and then convert to 5e.
But the players will be seeing these sooner than later.
With a free week the party spent the time on some self improvement, studying, practicing, and even some research.
Outside the streets of the lower reaches were a buzz with the news of a heroic party rescuing a family from a collapsed villa in the Second Reaches.
Outside on their way to Adele’s Emporium the party were approached by Esme a rival of Adele. Who tried to bribe the party to spy on Adele for her.
At the Emporium the party found a note on the door saying Adele was in the Second Reaches investigating the ruined villa.
So the party made their way to the Second Reaches looking for Adele.
Eventually they found Adele, but not before upsetting a few locals and attracting the attention of an officer of the Silver Talons.
At the ruined villa they met Adele coming out of a cave entrance that had been revealed when the villa collapsed. While talking to Adele Tantalos joined them. He’d been helping Adele.
Adele and Tantalos left to return to the emporium to research the newly revealed chambers.
The party entered the tunnel and immediately went up some steps into a chamber that they soon discovered had two young unkept, spooky looking children at the end of it.
We leave the party in the chamber having defeated the spooky children.
Behind the screen
Session notes
Post Mortem
Yep it’s that part of the post where I share my thoughts on the session and ideas for future ones. So I need to say this.
SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following part of the post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this part of the post and join me in a future one.
The session itself was about two hours of play, and about twenty minutes of finishing off character levelling up.
It would have been nice to have a longer session, but time constraints with my dog-sitter put a dampeners on that.
For this session I had used the Tome of Beasts 2 from Kobold Press for most of the potential monsters to use in the encounters.
I do like this book as an alternative to the Monster Manual. It really does make encounters feel fresh and mysterious. Especially for the players.
For the NPCs that the players encountered I used the newly arrived Monte Cook NPC cards plus my Pathfinder ones I had already been using.
I love the art on these cards, plus the extra info on the back of them.
That extra info on the back really does help during the session to help (however poorly) flesh out the NPC at the table. And I don’t have to make up a name either.
During this session I did feel like the DM who says no.
Like pointing out that a red Slaad is from a different plane and wouldn’t be known on this one.
I really like to say yes and see where we go with it. But it was hard today because the choices being made were based on information that the characters would not know.
This was a very heavy role play session. Something I’m not great at. So not sure this was a fun session for the players.
For me and I’m not sure if the players felt this way too, that they were being railroaded to the ruined villa and the mysterious chambers it revealed.
There was a hook to go after a wanted criminal they could have done instead.
For the map for the mysterious chambers I used the goblin caves map from the “old” D&D starter set. It seemed the right size to start exploring. Although in future I’d love to use larger more complex dungeons.
In the meantime with this repurposed map I have to populate it with appropriate monsters, which for this dungeon is using appropriate monsters from the tome of beasts 2. Well ones that look really cool.
This was also the first session that I used the DM Screen from the Dungeon Kit instead of the DM Screen Reincarnated. No one even noticed the switch!
This morning I joined the Jamey Stegmaier signature club with the arrival of the latest Rolling Realms promo packs.
Admitting this will open me up to much ridicule at this Fridays club night. But I’m looking forward to the banter between friends.
Sadly the card I got wasn’t a Scythe card, for the obvious reason. But it was a Viticulture card which is also a favourite game.
I should point out that when you put a signed card in your basket on the Stonemaier online shop you have no control over the card you get. It is a random signed card from one of his games that gets sent to you.
So if you want a specific signed game card then you need to rely on luck and any specific deity you believe in to hopefully get a signed card from that game.
It almost has that MtG pack opening feel when you look to see what rare you got, and if it’s full art or foiled when you get your signed card.
I can see it being just as addictive as you hunt that specific game card.
In an ideal world Jamey would be at a UKGE so I can get my copy of Scythe signed. In the meantime I’ll settle for the hunt for a signed Scythe encounter card.
Included with the Rolling Realms promo packs was a free copy of Jamey’s latest game (designed specifically to celebrate Stonemaier Games tenth anniversary) Smitten.
Smitten is a ten minute playtime co-op micro game for two players.
I’m looking forward to getting it to the table. Until then it joins the other 56 games left to play in my unplayed owned games challenge.
But wait I’ve not even mentioned the new Rolling Realms promo packs yet!
There are three previous Rolling Realms promo packs released, Terra Mystica, Libertalia, and Rolling Realms.
Which are now joined by promo packs for the following games Smitten, A Feast for Odin, and Honey Buzz.
The latest three are unusual in that they were released all at the same time. Whilst the previous ones were released by themselves.
Doing it the current way means that we save on postage when just ordering them. Previously when it was a single promo pack it was hard to justify only ordering the promo pack. Although obviously I did!
With the latest promo packs added to Rolling Realms (assuming you have the previous ones to) the number of realms you are choosing from goes from the core eleven to seventeen. And that will only grow as more promo packs are released.
It’s almost like Rolling Realms is a living roll and write.
At some point I’d like to see Stonemaier do a promo pack that adds new cards to the solo mode that make use of the promo pack realms. At the moment I think Hole 18 is the only one that could use the promo realms instead of core game cards.
Well that’s it for this post, I’ll just add once again happy tenth anniversary to Jamey and all those at Stonemaier Games. Thanks for all the fun times.
Since Gloom has had my interest reignited in it in the past week or so I was pleasantly surprised and delighted to find out there is a digital version of the game.
I don’t know why I was surprised at all.
These days it would have been more surprising if there were no app version of the game.
But still I was.
So I parted with the pennies, all £5.99 to download it. Another £2.49 of them would get me the Unhappy Homes expansion as an in app purchase. Which I didn’t part with until I had at least decided if I liked the app.
Naturally the app version uses the same art style and art of the physical game. I personally do like the art.
I love the music for the game, it kind of has that Danny Elfman Batman Returns feel to it. It’s suitably atmospheric. There are also little sound bites for each of the family members to try and give them a bit of character.
The BIG surprise for me is this is a solo game where you play against up to three AI bots. Which you can’t even change the difficulty level of. Multiplayer and/or pass and play (standard features in other digital adaptations of board games) should have been included. But are sadly missing.
Speed of play is a little bit of an issue for me. There is no way to speed up the AI turns (something you’d expect should be there from the start). This digital version isn’t going to be one of those games you turn to when you find you have five minutes to fill.
I did find it nearly unplayable on my iPhone. The cards are just too small and unreadable. This is much better on an iPad.
Personally I think some sort of card zoom feature similar to that in Epic the Card Game could have been used.
Naturally playing against the AI looses something from the physical game. The storytelling element. Even with online play against others this would be missing without some sort of voice chat. But that’d never be implemented in app. You’d have to use a third party service like discord or zoom to get the voice side of things. Without the storytelling Gloom is reduced to “just” a card game.
Overall this app version of Gloom has an alpha/beta release feel to it. It’s missing what I’d consider to be core functionality that you’d expect to be there.
It’s that time of year when people start getting ready for Halloween and all things spooky.
I’ve never been that into it. For me as a kid growing up in the UK in the 70’s it was always penny for the guy, and bonfire night. Halloween was never a big thing back then.
I have fond memories as a kid of family gatherings, fireworks, baked potatoes, hot dogs, and dark cold autumn nights lit up the flickering glow of bonfires.
I don’t know when things changed. But it seemed all of a sudden trick or treat was a thing, shops were full of Halloween merchandise and branded sweets. The Americanisation and commercialism of this time of year was complete. Yes I’ve always seen this big celebration of Halloween as an American thing that sadly made its way over here.
Maybe it’s my age. But I just don’t see the attraction. However each to their own.
In the meantime I get to be a Halloween grinch.
At least it gives me some things to write about!
The idea for this post comes from that recent Dice Tower video about their top ten horror themed games as part of their Autumn Spooktacular.
While I was thinking about my own collection thinking I had only a handful of horror themed games.
However as I started to tag games I owned in the bgstat app that figure grew and grew.
The criteria I used to add the tag was that the game had to have something associated with the horror genre, have a dark theme, be spooky!, or associated with halloween.
So some of these games tagged are very light in tone, such as Broom Service that has you delivering potions around the map as a witch on their broomstick.
By the end of the exercise I had thirty five games tagged. Although the image below only shows thirty three. I had missed a couple when I generated the images to use. Laziness stopped me correcting the omissions.
My horror themed games that I own (missing two Ghost Stories and Tannhauser)
Below are my top twenty played horror themed games that I own based on number of plays.
My most played horror themed games
I might even enter into the spirit of this commercial holiday and try and play one or two of these nearer the “big” day.
