Fallout 3: New Vegas, Completed

Possible spoilers below

Over the weekend I decided to finally finish off Fallout 3: New Vegas. I had been close to the end for over a month, just running around and completing side quests. I had already reached the max level for my character and was slowly going through all the bullets in the world. It wouldn't do to wait until I was out of ammo before trying to finish things off.

So I headed back to Vegas to continue my chosen path (in NV you can side with, essentially, four different factions). When I got there, I realized there was still one more minor mission I had to complete before I could continue. I wasn't really interested in sneaking around, talking to people and getting information to blackmail one of the powers in the city, so instead I walked in with guns blazing and shot everyone in the casino. Evidently that worked - they were no longer a threat for power in the city. So I jumped in to the final mission(s) which were actually pretty cool. The path I chose meant that I wasn't really on anyone's side in the final battle. I had to run through a massive war where both sides would shoot at me if I was caught, sneak around and do a bunch of tasks, and then ensure neither side was able to fight after the war. Playing a sniper made this latter part a bit easier as I was able to pick off some of the key members from the safety of a hill opposite them.

Overall, I enjoyed the game. It had a lot of things that I loved about it, but there were plenty of things I did not enjoy or features added I just didn't care about.

THE BAD:
1. Glitchy - good lord, was this game glitchy. There were times where I nearly stopped playing in frustration because the game would crash on me. I ended up inside rocks that I couldn't get back out of. I found myself trying to follow storylines that I had to abandon because if I advanced along them anymore, the game would crash. Without a doubt, this was the most frustrating part of the game. If it hadn't been a Fallout game, I would have abandoned it long ago.

2. The new "create your own items" idea - I get the concept, and it sounds all fun and good, but being able to combine a bunch of items to create new ammo or new healing potions was actually fairly boring to me. It meant I ended up with hundreds of useless items in my inventory because they were all ingredients to something else.

3. The early game - I came to a point fairly early on where I feel like I explored all of the places I could actually survive, and it took me grinding out a few more levels before I could actually venture out further. Made it kind of boring a little early on.


THE GOOD:
1. Allies - you could do a lot more with them, and you could have more than you used to. In the course of the game, I ran around with three different allies, but there were another half dozen out there, I'm sure. It was nice to run through a particularly difficult mission and know someone had your back.

2. Super Mutants and Deathclaws were tougher - in the first game, I felt like these guys were tough, but with a little effot, I could take them down. In this game, they utterly whomped me until I hit really high levels, and even then, if I stepped wrong, the Deathclaws would evisorate me.


Overall, I'd rank this game below the first Fallout 3, mostly because I think the first one felt bigger, and the game didn't have as many bugs. But still, a solid addition to the Fallout line. Now if only they'd fix the bugs so other people could get through it too.

Dungeons & Dragons Promotes Gang Violence

Evidently it criminals in jail are no longer able to play Dungeons and Dragons because it promotes coopration and gang mentality. You see, there's a Dungeon Master who tells everyone else what to do, which is just like being in a gang, and that's not safe for prisons.

Check it out here.

Lesson to nerds everywhere: stay on the right side of Johnny Law and your games won't be taken away from you.

Experiments in Gaming

I was listening to a podcast on the way in to work (Thac0 – a fun popcorn roleplaying game one where they just banter about random topics – done by the same guys that used to do Fell Calls) and they had an interesting topic: experimenting in roleplaying games. What things have people tried that either succeeded or failed in their games. I figured I’d think back over some of my games and came up with a list of a bunch of things I tried. They didn’t always work, but they seemed like good ideas at the time. Sometimes the campaigns were a decent success while the experiments themselves failed too. Here are a list of a few I could remember. Let me know if you’ve tried any experiments in game too and how they went for you.



Fear (Dungeons & Dragons – physical props in room)
Back in high school, we ran a world called the Kingdom of Starting Point (which was a fantastic experiment in which we created a generic world that anyone could run through and we’d keep our characters – a rousing success at the time). For one period of this campaign, I took on one-third of the storyline and worked on crafting a series of frightening stories while two other GMs did the same in their own styles. For myself, I started delving into trying to change the atmosphere in order to induce more fear. I would hang sheets in the basement so that it was partitioned into smaller rooms that I could isolate people in as the group split up. They could still mostly hear what was going on, but not completely. I’d also play with lighting, turning off lights at appropriate times, and using candles to reflect the limited light the characters were using. Occasionally I’d blow out the candles at opportune times during the story.

Overall, I have to say that my use of the atmosphere ended up as a success. While I may have gone overboard on a few of the things, it really did teach me a lot about how to adjust the atmosphere that the players are in to help get them into their characters a bit.



The Moonstone Campaign (Dungeons & Dragons – Co-GM)
During one summer around college (I believe… can’t quite remember when this one happened), Jon and I decided we would co-run a long D&D campaign for the group. Both of us have strengths and weaknesses as GMs, and we both felt we could help complement each other. We started working together on a lengthy campaign where the characters had to find a set of seven moonstones to create an artifact to defeat the bad guy.

Together we crafted a large story, and for the beginning were able to hold together as two GMs. However, in the end I think both of us wanted a little more control over the stories than we were having when we shared that task. We ended up splitting the story in half and working with each group separately.

I think while the Moonstone campaign was fun as it was happening, the particular experiment of co-GMing did not go as I had hoped. I learned something about myself: I don’t work well with others. I want to have more control over how games are going.

However, one thing that did benefit from this is that I learned how valuable having another person to bounce ideas off of can be. Often I still find myself doing that, heading to talk to some of my old college buddies about a game I’m running at home to get some ideas or work through a difficult plot point.



The Desert (Dungeons & Dragons – Doppelganger)
The desert campaign was actually a part of the Moonstone campaign. I had always wanted to run a doppelganger or a shapeshifter in one of my games, and while I had tried it before by telling the PC victim of the doppelganger before and letting them act a little shifty, it never quite worked the way I intended.

So for this time I had one of the characters replaced during the first session, but did not tell her. I left a few clues around from time to time that things were not as they seemed, but nobody picked up on it, and the net result was that the player who was playing the doppelganger ended up acting exactly like the doppelganger should – exactly like her character. On the rare occasion that something would come up that the doppelganger wouldn’t do, I’d just interject. So if the character was recalling something that had happened to another player that the doppelganger wouldn’t know, I’d just cut off the player and say, “You don’t actually remember any of that.” It would cause some awkward situations where the players knew SOMETHING was strange, but not what.

The payoff came around session four or five when the players came to the climax and they nearly killed the big bad, only to have him pull out his ace in the hole – the real character, and threaten to have his minions kill that character if they tried to do anything to the big bad. The ensuing argument between the players of “who is the real character” and the mistrust that erupted could not have gone better, especially when they finally realized it was a doppelganger and then tried to piece back just how long they had been infiltrated.

Overall, great success, but it’s not something that can really be done more than once. It loses something of its charm after that.



City of Lies (L5R – city based campaign)
When I got to college, I was still in the standard gaming pattern of a traveling adventure. The characters had a goal and they traveled from one place to another, accomplishing that goal. But one thing the players rarely needed to do was face the long-term consequences of their actions. They could overthrow entire societies and wreak havoc everywhere they went in campaigns and never worry about it because they’d be gone by next session.

So I decided to try to run a completely different style game for myself. I wanted to try a city-based game. We were heavily into Legend of the Five Rings at the time, so I pulled out the one of their boxed sets, the City of Lies. The characters were magistrates in the city and basically had to deal with all the mysteries that happened in the city.

I put together an extensive outline based on each day they were there, then split the days into morning, afternoon, evening. Every day would have essentially three encounters from me, plus anything the characters wanted to do. I also figured that a city would not be broiled in a single mystery at a time. Things would come fast and furious. Before too long, the group was embroiled in a half dozen different crimes, plus trying to navigate the tricky politics of the city. One of my favorite points of the campaign was when Serious Mike, who had been silent for most of the session reading a journal they had found in game, stood up in the middle of an unrelated case and said to Josh and Adam, “I know how to get the city out of this chaos. We need to restart the opium cartels.”

In the end, I think I went too heavy in the various cases. It became a challenge to keep them all straight for the players, and they never had enough time to do everything before the next crisis came up. The story could have been better served with about half as many subplots happening.

On the plus side, the idea of running a campaign in a single city with a mostly-fixed cast of NPCs has stuck with me since then and I’ve run a bunch of these kinds of stories. They may well rank among my favorite to run because everything the players do matters.



Dark Ages Vampire (DAV – destroy home town)
This was another college game I ran with the fearsome foursome. It was short-lived, and probably for the best. During the first session, we all asked questions not only about each others’ characters, but also about the village in which they all lived. We ended up with an absolutely rich and awesome setting.

And then I proceeded to have it attacked and destroyed by raiders in the first session and ran a game with the characters on the run. Terrible idea. The entire first session was basically moot and all the hard work that went in to making the setting was wasted. I saw the value in investing time on the setting, but I also learned that if you’re going to invest that time in a setting, use it.



The Rokugan Campaign (L5R – play by email)
I had already played in one PBEM at this point, and I had started one that faltered right quick. But my second play by email ended up far better. I revised the group that I was working with and started with a setting I was far more familiar with: Rokugan. I crafted a large, in-depth story and got started with it.

Having a setting that diverse meant that I could have the stories be told from many different angles. And having the game be run as a PBEM meant that I could have the characters split up and not worry about it – the story would run fine. As time went on, I learned more and more I could do with the format. I could have characters on opposite sides of conflicts. I could have characters of vastly different power levels and the game would still handle just fine.

I also learned the value of showing a campaign as more of a large story than just the player characters. Sure they were pivotal, but as I started writing other fiction in the world not directly tied to the characters (interludes), the characters got to see how what they were doing fit into a larger scale. They could see the aftermath of their actions, they could see what the bad guys might be doing, and they could get clues to the various mysteries of the world beyond their own characters.

While the Rokugan campaign did not last very long, experimenting with the PBEM format was a tremendous success and has led to a campaign that’s still running and started back in 2004: Rembaldi.



Halloween (Call of Cthulhu – holiday-based one-shot)
Several years ago, I decided it would be fun to run a horror one-shot on Halloween. My game-plan was simple. Everyone would create each other as Call of Cthulhu characters and I would run a zombie survival game where the players, playing themselves, had to escape from Brian’s house and through northern Virginia to find somewhere safe. My outline was even simpler. Keep throwing zombies at them until they died.

The game was fun enough, and people had fun trying to figure out how to get out of Brian’s house safely and then where to go, and how to keep alive with zombies and survivors both trying to chase them. They needed supplies, gas, and a location to stay safe.

But the idea of a Halloween game every year caught on in our group so much so that this year we ran our fourth Halloween-themed game. We’ve been rotating the GM and everyone has been adding their own flair to the games. But the premise is always the same: some kind of horror and it’s got to be finished in a night.



Post-Apocalyptic Chicago (no system – no characters)
I had heard this idea for a game a long time ago and never really got the opportunity to run it until a few years back. Someone told me about a game they played where the players all sat down and the GM handed them a manila folder and told them their characters were inside. When they opened the folders, they had a blank piece of paper… and then the game started. I decided to try something similar.

Everyone sat down to start the game and I told them they all woke up in a room together, all wearing robes. Investigation found them in a vault underground, and found lockers with some clothes in them. They found some IDs that told them their names, and then headed up above ground to find themselves in a city that had been destroyed by… something.

I kept an eye on what the characters were doing and decided that whatever their instinct was to do would be the way they’d be predispositioned. If they tried to look through the various instruction manuals to something they found, they were probably in a profession or had a hobby that made them instinctually do that, so I boosted their book learning and their mechanics a bit. If they looked through their set of keys when they got to a door, maybe subconsciously they remembered that they worked in this particular building and had a key to it.

The game was fun for a little while, but got tedious as people did not regain memories very fast. In retrospect, I should have pulled back from my idea of an entirely free-formed game and given a little more structure to it, but for the first session or two, it ended up being an interesting walk through a post-apocalyptic waste.



Alpha/Omega / Hot War (various – photographs)
Last year I ran a game for a couple of people that ended up spanning several systems as I could not seem to find one that made me happy. The system ended up being irrelevant for the story, so thankfully my dissatisfaction with what I was finding didn’t ruin the game.

The game was another post-apocalyptic game based on the Alpha/Omega world, but would be based in a specific city and had large influences from Supernatural in it. There were demons and angels and corrupt governments and down-trodden slums. All the good stuff.

The experimental part of this game was when I went online and found a couple hundred black and white photographs and printed them out so that hopefully when I described a situation, I could hand over a photo and say, “this is the guy you see outside your window” and things like that. It was intended to evoke a 1940s type feel and people would use the crime photos or what have you to get into the world.

I ended up only using it a few times. I kept having trouble adapting the story to suit the photographs I had available, so eventually I just stopped using them. I think they worked well when I did have them, but they were pretty infrequent with pulling together exactly what I wanted. I doubt I’d do it again. Maybe one or two, but not many.



So there you have it – a bunch of different things I’ve tried in games. I’m currently running another one that’s a bit experimental for me, but as I’m in the middle of it, I won’t say too much about it. I’ll just say that it has to do with an ever-changing reality and trying to thread together a coherent storyline across several different versions of reality. It’s a bit tricky, but we’ll see if it holds together well.

Movies I Like That No One Else Seems To: The Mist

Spoilers below...

So last night I was looking through some of my movies and got to the M's and caught sight of this one. It made me think about how pretty much everyone I know who has seen the movie dislikes it except me - I love the heck out of it.

The movie hits a lot of my high points. A horror movie that's more than just a slasher flick or something like that. It focuses more on the way people react to the situation than on the evil bad things themselves. It has a touch of sci fi to it, a touch of post-apocalyptic-ness. Plus the music at the end (Host of Seraphim, in case you're curious) is just creepy as all get out.

Yet the few times I've shown it to other people, I tend to walk away as the only one who likes the movie, or part of the minority.

The reason most people seem to dislike it (as I understand it) is the fact that it's depressing as heck or that the main characters seem to do a complete shift at the end when they give up and essentially commit suicide after fighting so hard for survival.

I can understand the first complaint a bit more than the second - if you don't like depressing movies, you don't like depressing movies. End of story. I can't argue with that, and I can respect it. I just have trouble with the second issue, the complaint that it seems to break the characters. My feeling was that the suicide was essentially the end of a long road that, at every turn, was met with setback after setback. Every encounter with these creatures had been met with death and dying. It was easier to deal with in the supermarket when there were dozens of people around. But by the end, they were down to just the handful of them. They could see nothing beyond their car, and they could hear the strange creatures closing in. Given the idea that it was the end of the line, what's the other choice? Go down fighting (and therefore dying painfully) or end it quick?

A bit of a shame I'm in the minority on liking this movie, but that's okay. I'm not trying to convince anyone that doesn't like the movie to like it with this post or anything - just figured I'd say a few words about it. If you liked it, give it another watch! If you didn't, pull down a different movie and give that one a viewing instead. Movies are just good fun.

Gamer Resolutions

I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about Gamer Resolutions, so I figured maybe I should come up with a few of my own. I'm not usually big on New Year's Resolutions, but what the heck, this could be fun.

1. Run Grimm through to completion. I have a tendency to start campaigns and not finish them. Of late, I've been doing well at breaking that habit (Alpha/Omega, the Ice World campaign) and I'd like to keep up that trend of actually finishing the games I start.

2. Run Rembaldi at least six months out of the year. I know myself well enough to know that I won't continue Rembaldi the entire year. There will be breaks in the middle of it where I need to decompress. But I would love to see the story continue. It's coming closer and closer to the planned ending, and I have my next campaign world already in mind, so I would like to see Rembaldi reach its conclusion at some point. Best way to do that is to keep it going.

3. Sell either my Cygnar or Legion (if not both of them). I already got started on getting rid of my Cygnar, but I still have a lot of both armies I could off-load. I have far too many games at my place, and I really would like to downsize them a bit.

4. Play at most three miniature games at a single time. This means I can only collect three lines, etc. This one should not be hard, as this is already what I do. But it means since I currently have Malifaux and Firestorm Armada, both of which I want to continue to play, and have recently bought into Pulp City (which it remains to be seen whether I will keep up with), I am at the limit of my miniature gaming.

5. Purchase no more than four computer games over the course of the year. I'd like to ensure that I finish games I get, and if I limit the ones I can purchase, it will improve my odds of doing so, and also save me money. Good deal on both counts.


I wanted to add something about going to a convention, or something about playing/running another campaign (be it Descent or Firestorm or what have you), but I'm still on the fence about those two. I also wanted to add something about being sure to play a dozen games of Firestorm Armada (which doesn't sound like a lot, but I only played 18 games last year, and 8 of them were in the campaign), but I'm honestly not sure how easy that will be given that essentially only Dan and I play that game anymore.

But the themes of my resolutions seem pretty solid: finish what I start, limit the games I play, and downsize the ones I no longer play.

The X-Men Family Tree

I just saw this on another blog I read and had to repost it. Quite funny if you follow X-Men at all. I was surprised how many of these things I could figure out just by following the relationship tags. "Well, so-and-so married what's-his-name and gave birth to XYZ who is a nemesis of someone who works with Apocolypse, so that means this person must be Homer Simpson!"

Card Games

When I was back in high school, I was just getting into this whole gaming thing. I learned about Dungeons and Dragons and began roleplaying, and I got a deck of Magic cards to play with my cousin, Beau when he was in the area. Soon I found a group at high school and started playing Magic with them. After a while, we started branching out into a number of other games.

I have played a bunch of different games. I have to say, I really liked playing card games. They were easy to transport, quick to set up and play, and the interaction of cards usually appealed to me. I liked creating combos and figuring out how to get the most out of a deck.

What ended up closing it off for me was the fact that nearly every card game started moving into a cycle release style. Every two years or one year, or what have you, you'd end up having to buy in to the game all over again as a new base set came out. It ended up becoming too costly for me, and slowly I lost interest in the games altogether.

But still, I had some great times back in the day. Here are some of the card games that stuck with me the longest.



First was Magic, the granddaddy of them all. I played this through high school and it was from here that I started to learn how to play these games. I wasn't overly good at it, but I enjoyed it. I started a few weeks after Legends came out, and ended up quitting just after Ice Age hit the stores. During that time I had played in a few tournaments and the like, sometimes even placing. My personal best was hitting third place in a local tournament even though I was the only one in the top four without any Moxes or a Black Lotus.

I did come back to the game briefly in college, but mostly with a bunch of my buddies who were looking for a cheap way to play some games. We compiled a bunch of our old cards, mixed them up, created new boosters, and had booster drafts every couple weeks.



Also in high school I was brought into Legend of the Five Rings by Jon. This game did wonders for my gaming horizons, breaking me out of the stranglehold Magic had on my card games and D&D had on my roleplaying games. This game probably stuck with me the longest. I took it with me to college and got a few others to start playing. When I came back home, it fell by the wayside too until Lotus edition came around and I got back into it with a bunch of friends. The game went strong for us until it came time for me to buy back in again. I decided it wasn't worth it for me to do so and let it go.



Also in college, I picked up Warlord, another AEG game. This one was following the whole d20 craze and essentially was Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition in a card game format. It was a bundle of fun and was the game I took back home from college with me. I kept playing against another buddy of mine from the area here, but once he and I stopped hanging out as much, that game too fell off. I always enjoyed the world of the game, but the addition of a d20 to the format never struck me as a good idea.



Between my college days and the newest era of gaming for me (which I mark by a sharp increase in miniatures) was a period where I would head out to the gaming store every week to play Lord of the Rings TCG with a bunch of guys there. It's probably the only time I actively sought out a group that was playing a particular game rather than going with someone I already knew to play a new game. Honestly, I consider this to be the height of my enjoyment of a card game. The mechanics were solid and the theme was prevalent throughout. It's one of the few card games I can look back on and say, "I could see myself getting back into that game."

The problem the game ran into was that it eventually ran out of new material, unsurprisingly. After the third film came out, the designers had to figure out what to do. The game was selling well, so they didn't want to cut it off. They ended up re-tooling the game so that each new block would cover all three games instead of each individual game. At that point I lost interest and stopped playing. But for the 2 1/2 years I played it, I really enjoyed it.

I did end up convincing Dan to pick up some cards on the cheap at one point and we played with older cards. But with only two players, it never really stuck.



Being a fan of Star Trek, I decided I'd try to get into the new version of the game when it was coming out some years back. But I needed opponents. Brian also liked Star Trek and I convinced him to buy into it as well, and I think we got Jay to buy a few decks too. Unfortunately playing the game never really materialized and it dropped into oblivion too. Too bad, I had a fun "morally ambiguous" Federation deck to try too.



And the last card game I played that took up any significant amount of time is probably my second favorite, behind Lord of the Rings. We got into the Game of Thrones card game and had a decent set of people who would play it. We had a great time with it until everything clicked with me for Lanister and I learned how to use the control aspect of their faction. Lanister, it seemed, gained an edge and it became less fun to play.

The game moved away from the collectable aspect and into the Living Card Game model (where a set pack of cards comes out monthly, and buying that pack gets you all the new cards, so there's no chasing really good cards). I really like the concept, but by this point, miniatures games were much bigger in my gaming life, and I ended up closing the chapter on card games.

I have tried to get back into some games. Legend of the Five Rings, for example, cropped back up with the new block, but even that couldn't convince me to stick with it.

If I had to rank the enjoyment I've had with these games, they'd come out osmething like this: Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Legend of the Five Rings, Warlord, Magic, Star Trek.

At this point, though, I can't really another game coming back up. I might dust off some of the old cards I already have at some point, but buying into a new game completely doesn't really strike me as fun anymore.

Dreams From Days Gone By

I used to have fun dreams all the time, but over the past few years, they've been far between. I had one earlier this week where Laura was leaving me for Peyton Manning, and Peyton was being a real jerk about it (even beating me up at one point). I did complain that it wasn't fair - his job allowed for him to become a better physical specimin than me and he shouldn't keep kicking me, but if anything, it just encouraged him.

Dan said that there was no way Peyton Manning would have been that mean to me. If he was going to steal my wife, he would at least give me a cameo in one of his commercials in exchange.

Anywho, it got me thinking back to some of my old dreams that just made me laugh so much. Here's one from way back almost three years ago.

The Zus and I were in Congress (as representatives). But it was like an older-style congress. Everyone was dressed in like 1800's style clothes, us included. I guess that doesn't necessarily mean it was back in the day, but if it wasn't, we were all dressed pretty funny.

Anywho, Josh was, apparently, a rebel in congress and had made no shortage of enemies who wanted to stop the progress he was preaching. We had a few other allies with us, but there were some old-timers who wanted nothing other than getting Josh to stop trying to push his progressive agendas. Well, after a break for lunch, I came back into the meeting hall and the "bad guys" were all eyeing me and a few of Josh's other allies evilly. Then, one guy came up to us and said, "They found some information on Josh that they're going to try to use to have him impeached." Everyone was frantically looking around for Josh to try to prepare him for this, but he was nowhere to be found. The bad guys had some lobbyist out distracting him until the meeting was called so that nobody could get to him beforehand to warn him. I, being Josh's unspoken second-in-command, was given responsibility for making sure Josh wasn't blindsided. He was the face of the future, after all! The allies said, "Make sure that when the bad guys make their accusation that Josh refutes it with a well-planned argument. If he doesn't dispute the claim, then they can call that his silent agreement and it will be easier for them to get rid of him."

So finally, Josh walks in, but the gavel bangs all to order and you can get kicked out of congress if you're not in your seat (apparently). So I sat down and tried to get Josh's attention, but with no luck. And if I didn't warn Josh, I had to count on his New York temper to force him to refute the statement. A pretty good bet, most times, but I remember Josh has been trying to learn how to act civil, and he might bite his tongue.

The leader of the bad guys stands up and says, "For the next action, I move to impeach Josh!" There's some commotion and Josh stands up... but he doesn't say anything! So I stand up angrily and shout out, "ON WHAT GROUNDS!" trying to get him to say something that will trigger Josh's reaction. Apparently the bad guys weren't ready for me to say that, because their response was, "He's not a nice guy and he has funny hair." There was some murmur of agreement throughout the room, but Josh just started laughing.

And then I woke up. But I'm confident that with a case like theirs, we would have beaten that rap. No worries, Josh. You can pedal your progressive propaganda all you like. The bad guys can't stop you! I think he does have funny hair, though.

Dindrenzi Reinforcements Clear Space Dock

I haven't played Firestorm Armada since the beginning of November, but after seeing the topic of the newest d6 Generation podcast (check it out if you enjoy gaming podcasts), I got the itch to pull out the fleet once more. I went back through my bag and found two squadrons that had not been painted up yet, so in my home-bound illness days over the last couple days, I painted up my squadron of Heavy Cruisers and Gunships.




I have played only a couple games with the Heavy Cruisers, and only once with the Gunships, but I did post up my thoughts on them. Check them out back in this post.

After Distopian Wars came out, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed. From everything I was seeing, it looked like Firestorm Armada would end up being the game Spartan Games left behind. There were still plenty of boats coming out for Uncharted Seas, and they had just received their new book. Distopian Wars hit the tables with far more options already than Firestorm Armada currently has, and their push of that game made it feel like Firestorm Armada was being left in the dust.

But yesterday I came across a post on the Spartan Games website that talked a little about their plans for 2011:

Hi,

I'm sure there is going to be a lot of speculation about these books. Right now I will share the following, but the rest will have to wait until January:

2 Books
64 pages each (could be more, but use this as a baseline)
1 for the Alliance of Kurak (Terran, Sorylian and Aquan)
1 for the Xenian Alliance (Dindrenzi, Directorate and Relthoza)

The Book Contents:

Each book will introduce Alliance Races to the Firestorm Universe, races that can join forces with your existing fleets. As a player you will be able to build an alliance fleet using a core fleet as the backbone. So you could have 50% of your fleet formed from Terran vessels and build the rest from Aquan, Sorylian or one of the other 5-7 new races we will introduce for each Alliance.

New ships designs, new ship classes will be introduced to you. And in preparation for large scale planetary invasion in 2011, ships that will allow you to transport giant armies from planetary system to planetary system will arrive.

Each Alliance will gain 20 new ship types from the various races.

The books will also pull together any necessary statistic and any rule extensions for all current fleets and any upgrade models.

More information in January, but I hope that helps you understand the two books.

All the best,
Spartan Neil

Digging around, it looks like they'll be doing a few website updates this month, and then the two free pdf books will be coming out in February. I have to say it's made me excited for the game again.

Malifaux, Winter Edition

Over the weekend Bill put together a Malifaux event for the folks at Huzzah. Rather than a tournament he put forth a massive battle with everyone taking 25 points of whatever master they wanted and facing off on a huge ice-covered table where we could fight over points that our masters could activate to grab cards from a poker deck, and by the end of the game, whoever had the best poker hand would win the event.

There were also two other prizes offered. Each player started with one Red Joker and one Black Joker that they could give out over the course of the day. The Red Jokers were supposed to represent good events, and the black ones unfortunate events. Whoever collected the most Red and whoever collected the most Black would also receive prizes.



The board was designed to allow for the most chaos possible. Whenever a model moved, it would slide along the ice a random distance based on a card flip. At the end of every turn, the wind would blow and any floating models would be blown a random card flip in a random direction. There was a massive river with a few ice flows on it that we could try to use to cross to the other side of the board, but any model who slid off the table or into the water was removed entirely.

Finally, whenever the Black Joker was flipped in a duel, every model on the table had to test against a WP 10 or become Slowed. With as many models as were on the table (we had about 8 players on the table), often one Black Joker would trigger multiple more Black Jokers, and the flips would start going crazy. Most models were slow half of the game.



The game was chaotic with fighting happening fast and furious from the get-go. Alliances were formed between players and broken constantly as people tried to set up their own schemes and create avenues towards their goals. Within a couple turns, we had several multiple-player fights going on, while other people were trying to avoid fighting and reach their goals as fast as they could.

Pretty quickly, some of us figured out the easiest way to travel across the river and actually complete the objectives would be to die and respawn your force on the other side of the river (since, as Leviticus found out on turn one, an unlucky flip on the ice could turn your careful movement into a slide straight off into the river and automatic death). With movement as unpredictable as it was, people tried to find clever ways to control it. Fighting became less about killing opposing models and more about cutting paths to the objectives.




After my Dreamer in my first crew was killed when a Ceberus Tiger randomly spawned near him and leapt on him, killing him (parts of Rasputina's crew would randomly join the table, fight the closest opponent, and then disappear), I knew my crew was not long for the world. I joined forces with the nearby Pandora crew momentarily, mixing our respective Neverborn Twins for maximum damage on a nearby Perdita crew while Lord Chompy Bits ran over for a second card and Pandora tried to wrestle with Leviticus to grab her second card. Lord Chompy Bits made it to his goal but received a blast to the face from Perdita, taking him from full to dead quickly. My poker hand was pretty sad at this point, with a 9 and 7 of Spades.



Left with two Lilitus and a Daydream, I ran my Daydream to Leviticus' Teddy and asked if Teddy wanted to chomp down on him. He did. My Lilitu's, meanwhile, blew over the river and fell into the drink and died. I jumped back in with Lilith on the ice flow in the middle, ready to grab that point.



I caught sight of a nearby Colette rushing towards the middle ice flow and struck a quick bargain with her player. Lilith grabbed the ice flow point herself (drawing an off-suit 2) and then used Transposition to switch places with Colette, bringing her to the point she was trying to grab and putting Lilith closer to the fourth card point. Colette grabbed her card, and the Mature Nephilim tried to attack her. Unfortunately I had used pretty much my whole hand trying to keep a few key pieces from becoming slow when the Black Joker showed up, and failed to hit her once. Colette flew one of her birds near another point, getting ready to swap places with it. But the Doppelganger had different ideas. It copied the Mature Nephilim's Wing Buffet and proceeded to knock everyone except herself and Rusty Alice off the ice flow into the water, killing them all. I earned two Red Jokers from other players for that, and then the Doppelganger followed them off the edge, sliding into the river on the slippery ice. I was down to just Lilith out of my second crew.

Lilith started running towards the fourth activation point and soon drew the attention of both the nearby Lucius and Pandora crews. After successfully shrugging off two attempts by the Lawyer to keep her from walking anymore (that would have sucked), Pandora rushed up her way and passed her, reaching the point first. Lilith broke free from combat and reached the point, drawing my fourth card (another 7 - I now had a pair). But I was in the midst of a huge Lucius crew that had been on the board from the beginning.



Time was running out and we were down to our last turn. I looked over the board and found there was no way for me to reach the last point before the last turn, so I charged Francisco (who was with Sonnia Crid, not Lucius or Perdita). I wasn't able to kill him, so slid my way off the table at the end, ending my reign of terror.

At the end of the game, we all revealed our hands. I was one of two pairs in the game, the other belonging to a new player (I want to say her name was June, but I could be making that up entirely). Her Seamus crew fought nobly and claimed a pair of 10s, and won her the top prize of a boxed set. She ended up picking up the Lilith box. I approve of that decision.



For the Red and Black Jokers, Dan (Leviticus) and I (Dreamer/Lilith) tied in the Red Jokers with two a piece and Jay (Lucius) and Chris W. (Pandora) tied with two Black Jokers a piece. We each won a prize of one blister or deck of cards. Having everything I currently needed, I picked up a new deck of cards since that was something I was planning on getting in the next few weeks anyway.

Overall, was a fantastically fun time. The game had some wacky moments and some brutal moments. With as much randomness as was happening in the game, it helped take the seriousness with which we were taking it down several notches, and from my take, the less seriously you took the event, the more fun you had with it. After watching my Dreamer nearly slide off the table with a bad flip on the first move, then get eaten by a randomly-spawned tiger on the second turn, I realized there was no point in making long-term plans and just to do whatever seemed the most fun when your turn started. Ryan made a pretty accurate observation during the game: those who tried to do the best with their crews actually ended up doing the worst in this format. Players had to adapt to the wacky rules and just get into the mix of things.

Thanks very much to Bill for running this event - I had a great time playing and watching the craziness ensue, and I appreciate that a non-tournament event got run at the store. I look forward to the next one and hope there are just as many random rules.

Descent

On Christmas, both Laura and Dan got their own copies of Descent. As such, our gaming group has been getting the itch to give the game a try. We've managed two games that I've been involved in so far - the first two dungeons in the initial game set. Both of them ended in easy victories for the heroes, but after reading up on the game, that's not unexpected. The first few dungeons are easy for the heroes, and they get progressively harder after that.

So far I've been a hero in both games, but my love of GMing has me wanting to play the Overlord. Dan, who has been playing the Overlord, is more than happy to relinquish that role and take the side of the heroes, so starting with the next mission, I'll be playing the monsters and setting the traps.

I know our experience in the game is limited at the moment, but I figured after a couple games I could give my first thoughts:

I enjoy the game. I enjoy it more than I did the first time I played it long ago, I think. I think my dislike came from a few arguments that came out of the line of sight rules. Bar none, those rules are the most fiddly in the game, and while I still don't have as good a handle on them, at least being able to read the rules has helped out a bit.

The customization of the heroes with skill cards is nice, and the game feels very tactical with how important it is to figure out the exact order of the characters and figure out which actions optimize to get the results you want.

On the downside, right now the game feels long and easy. The dungeons come in at three to four hours, and in the most recent one, where we got more of the rules right, not a single character died. Hopefully this will change as we get deeper into the book. The difficulty, at any rate, if not the length of the game. I think it might just be inexperience that's making the game longer, but I can't really see the game being finished quickly the way it's set up.

I'm looking forward to trying my hands as the Overlord. I'm hoping for an Overlord victory sometime in the next three games or so. Might be a lofty goal, but I think I can do it...