Our adventure has concluded!

 

The Halls of testing! This was an old time dungeon romp just like the 'good old days'.  Two players (Dwarves) wreaking havoc and almost getting slaughtered in the process. They did manage to hit almost every room they only missed the top left room. 

Undiscovered room on the left. They had entered from the top passage and move directly south and followed the path through the dungeon. The last room they entered was the crypt on the right before the keepers of the Hall let them out.

I did truncate the adventure a bit by removing the lower left room, it just seemed like overkill (pardon the expression) 

Ogres room on the left, Vampire lair & outer room on the right.

They had many encounters and were in much peril throughout, with the biggest challenges being a trio of Ogres and a rather nasty Vampire. Both of these encounters almost did them in, in the case of the vampire twice! When they first found the Vampire, they entered his lair with one of the Dwarves charging headlong from the outer chamber westward into his lair proper where he became trapped and was almost a meal.

Vampires domain (secret passage behind fireplace east wall)

They managed to escape thanks, in part, to a seal that trapped the vampire in the two rooms. It was after they had essentially escaped the dungeon that they decided to reenter to deal with one room, that they knew about but had not gone into. That room was the Ogres and the route they took was through the fire place then a dash to the northern door and down the passage. 

They were able to dispatch one Ogre in pretty quick time, but the other two were a challenge with one of the Dwarves almost getting gutted by his ogre opponent. They found an insignificant amount of gold, silver and copper not worthy of their efforts.

Then with the last of their healing potions used they worked their way back to the Vampire's domain where they hoped to use the secret door once again to get back into the exit tunnel. They opened the door a crack and saw that the fireplace was once again closed. The dwarf thief raced to the fireplace while his partner guarded the rear.. Unfortunately, no one looked up, where the Vampire was perched above the fireplace in the rafters. It dropped down almost removing the thief's head. Thankfully his warrior/cleric partner was able to summon up some radiant light that forced the Vampire back giving the Dwarves a chance to escape, which they did.

In the end they advanced to a new level and emerged with some hard won treasure. They donated a portion to the brotherhood that runs the hall, with some of the remainder being earmarked for a temple to the Dwarven God Vallya whos good grace seems to have helped them though this trial.

Scarlet Heroes

 

So, we have returned to Scarlet Heroes/D&D. Our second player has rejoined us so we have paused the retro future sci-fi game and returned to the Dwarven city of Thunderhold. But to refresh our memories and for the fun of it we are doing a dungeon crawl from the late 1970s, The Hall of Testing originally published in a magazine called the Oracle. It was created as a single player test and I was prepared to run it that way until our second  plater returned. I made a few changes to up the danger level for two players, but I kept the layout and the monsters largely intact.

We have so far had something like 4 sessions and it been a blast. Sometimes it is nice to just do a crawl rather than all that complicated intrigue that I often try to do. It has been fun trying to tie in some of the encounters to what may happen in the future. Some of the treasure they find will help them in some plans I have for future adventures. Also I have been trying to make sense of the occupants in the dungeon on the fly, trying to rationalize why there are so many divergent creatures scattered in the place. 

I also had fun translating the original line drawing map into a more 'realistic', certainly more detailed looking map (thanks to Inkcarnate) I will publish my map on this page once the campaign is over.

Another game shift

 

So we have made another shift as one of our players must be absent for awhile. So we are going to try out Rocket Age, but set in the Cosmic Patrol universe. We have  played this system before for our pulp adventures. It is the Vortex system used in the Dr Who and Primaeval RPGs. 

I had given some serious thought to using the Cosmic patrol rules, but it just seemed to have too many odd bits. I also contemplated other space games, Star Wars (West end), Buck Rogers, Traveller, Fate and a few others. However I do like the Vortex system, for the most part, and I wanted something easy and straightforward to use. The plan is to emulate the free form style of Cosmic Patrol but with an actual usable game system. Vortex provides characters enough generally defined skills and stats that provide characters with a chance to complete most any challenge. With only one or two players this becomes rather important. 

So, I plan to do a few quick adventures in the Cosmic Patrol universe, maybe even many, hard to say. I have some plans, I have been working on character images for Roll20, hopefully it will be fun and hopefully we will get back to the Call of Cthulhu campaign this year.

These are my converted maps from the Cosmic Patrol core rule book. I used Inkarnate to render the images.

Might find a place for this older Inkarnate creation

Shifted to Call of Cthulhu

 

So, we had had a rather long gap between game sessions of our Warhammer fantasy campaign. Long enough that it was going to be a challenge to get back into it. We could have tried but instead I went back to an old standard Call of Cthulhu, in this ase 7th ed. I went with 7th in part because we already had aa Roll20 game in existence and in part because of some of the updates from earlier editions.

The aforementioned game of CoC also had taken an hiatus in the middle of a campaign, Shadows of Yog Sothoth. We will get back into that campaign but I felt we really needed a win, that is we needed to run an adventure, any adventure, to a conclusion. So we went with a simple early adventure A little knowledge from the Arkham Unveiled book.

It is a simple straightforward adventure and is playable in a single 4 hour session (in our case two 2 hour sessions) We had a lot of fun playing it especially the failed rolls at the end of the game. I mean there is nothing quite so fun as shooting at a deranged hopped up reanimated maniac that is assaulting your partner only to have the gun malfunction! In two session we had a lot of failed rolls, but in the last session we had two critical failures one for the pistol and the other for a simple sanity roll (followed with a max roll for sanity loss) 

In the end our heroes prevailed despite our near hysterical uncontrolled laughing at our heroes ineptitude.

Now I am looking through my collection to find our next adventure!

Changing, no altering, games again

So, we are still playing Warhammer but I am not, nor ever been, a fan of the magic system. For many years now I have been tempted to combine C&S with Warhammer, as in my mind there is some common ground. More importantly, I have always liked the C&S magick system but found the skill rules and character 'classes' somewhat lacking. But now, add to that, there is the Arcanum game system that I also was aiming to combine with C&S, again the magick systems seem compatible. 

So the plan is to combine all three systems together, madness!