RPGaDay Day 5 - Most Old School Game Owned

#RPGaDay

Day Five – Most Old School Game Owned

I’m going to cheat here, and write about a game I own by proxy rather than a game I own myself. I own some old World of Darkness; I have a seemingly permanent loan of WFRPs (1^st Edition); and I own/have loan of 3^rd Ed ShadowRun, but none of these are particularly old school (or maybe I’m just older than I think).

I was tempted to cheat using Hero Quest. My Grandada used to run the game for me and my younger siblings – I was always the elf, my brother always the wizard and my sister happy with either barbarian or dwarf – and he used to bring a ‘roleplay-lite’ element to the game. We found a copy in a charity shop and bought it because we loved the game so much, but it was never quite as fun with anyone else in charge. The game sits in my Dad’s board game cupboard now. It’s not necessarily old school, isn't technically an RPG and probably should have been mentioned on Day One instead, but I didn’t think of it then!

Husbit’s brother, an avid gamer, sadly died last year and we inherited all his roleplay books. There’s a fair few, mostly Cthulu and Dungeons & Dragons. Including some pretty old D&D bits and pieces. So that’s my ‘most old school RPG owned’: AD&D – many supplements, 2 players’ handbooks, and I believe the core rule book. I haven’t ever looked through it, though. It still makes me feel a little - not sad, as such; melancholy, maybe? - to see the books because they make me think of Jules and all the sorrow there.

With thanks again to Autocratik. His Day 5 is here.  

PS: trying to catch up! This should have been posted yesterday but was chilling out after an awesome circus session. Made real progress on a move on the silks I'd been struggling with, which was very exciting to me. Annoyingly, didn't have time to go a second time to be filmed, so can't share. And no circus for a fortnight now! 

#RPGaDay Day Four - Most Recent Purchase

#RPGaDay

Day Four – Most Recent RPG Purchase

Technically dice. Lots of dice. I’ve been having a hankering for some ShadowRun so have just topped up my D6 collection with some pretty blue pearl dice from Ebay that arrived the same day as my #shinynewtablet, which made Friday a very exciting day for me! And before that I needed many D10’s for Aberrant and Tritex Games were lovely and helpful there.

But the last book I bought was Abney Park’s Airship Pirates.

I think it's pretty

Abney Park were a goth band who gave themselves a steampunk makeover. Husbit discovered them and I think they’re great so when I discovered there was a roleplay game based on their steampunk backstory, I got very excited and used Husbit’s birthday as a convenient excuse to buy it for myself.

I haven’t had a chance to play it yet because it turns out that I was the only one interested. I really like the story in it, though – the world feels like it has a lot of depth and I remain hopeful to find time and players to have a go at this.

With thanks again to Autocratik. His response to Day 4 is here.

I had a bit of troubling getting the book off the shelf to photograph it... We inherited a lot of Cthulu, D&D and misc shortly after I bought it and they've taken over my shelf!

 

RPGADay Day Three - First RPG Purchased

#RPGaDay

Day Three – First Game Purchased

The first core rule book I had was WFRPs (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay). I was actually given this by some friends before I joined the Buffy game discussed in Day One. This book was being leant to me because they wanted to play and needed someone to GM and thought I’d do. The game never happened. I still have the book; Ed (I think it was Ed’s), if you ever want it back please let me know.

The first game I ran, ShadowRun, was also run on a borrowed core rule book (Jon, if your brother ever wants it back I do still have it. It’s possible people shouldn’t lend me books…) but I did pick up some of the supplements – Man and Machine and Magic in the Shadows. So they would make up the first RPG purchase I made (excluding dice).

Because so many of my friends are much more experienced players/refs and because I tend to play rather than run games I don’t have that many books of my own. Husbit, on the other hand, has a fairly respectable collection. Mine takes up one tiny corner of the bookshelf that overflows with his.

With thanks again to Autocratik. His response to Day 3 is here. 

#RPGaDay Day Two - First Game GM'd

#RPGaDAY

Day Two – First Game GM’d

ShadowRun (3^rd Ed).

From Day One, the second game I played was ShadowRun and I loved it – particularly the mix of cyberpunk and fantasy that I know is some people’s biggest reason for disliking it.

When I met the Husbit, I knew I liked him but lacked the confidence and experience to just ask for his number and needed a ruse. I knew he gamed, so convinced my brother and one of his friends to join a ShadowRun game that I would run – and invited Husbit and a couple of other people in his group (so’s to not make it look suspicious…).

I don’t remember much of the game. The idea was they were low level group trying to carve out their own little patch of gang territory before moving on to earn money by running. It didn’t work out that way.

Husbit played a mage with a mad Mexican dwarf who lived in his hat. It was a bit too silly, really, but I didn’t know how to stop him and wasn’t too bothered. I don’t think I’d let him do that now. My brother’s friend played a human with a bit of a cat fetish – she had whiskers and a full facial tattoo to make her look like a tiger. I liked her character. I don’t remember anything particular about the others.

There were some amusing moments. I remember one character botching a stealth role and it was decided he was trying so hard to be stealthy he was being rather obvious – hiding behind lampposts; ducking whenever the target turned around; that sort of thing. It lead to a song – the “I’m SNEAKING” song, complete with ‘being stealthy’ poses.

The game wasn’t great; I was a pretty terrible GM. But the group – in one form or another with several hiatuses – has continued and is now our Pathfinder group. Of the original members, strictly speaking only Husbit remains because I took a break for uni and rejoined. 

Aerial Hoop - Tummy Drop

So way back when (well, back in June) I posted about circus class and failed to upload a video. And then last week I managed to post a load of other videos and pictures and finally that first one.

There's a move I mess up at the end of that first video and I now have footage of me succeeding at that move!

So, video one:

and video two:

It's not brilliant: I failed to pike properly as I came through before hocking on to the top bar - but I did a better job of bringing my legs through together rather than one at a time (every week I get a little better at it!) You may then notice I re-straighten my right leg after hocking on: my calf cramped as I pointed my toe and it made me a bit anxious to do the tummy drop so I stretched in the hopes of releasing the cramp. It didn't work, but never mind. It happens to me sometime - I don't know if it's part of being unfit, part of being hypermobile, or something else.

After that, I then messed up the backward lean out - this is partly because I haven't done it as often as the front lean so it feels a little awkward still. I also didn't put as much stretch into it as I would have liked to because I was a bit worried about the cramp.

I think I had the bar in the wrong place when I did actually drop - I think I normally have it in the place I started it in and normally stretch my back out to move my head away, rather than move the hoop away from my head. Not sure - it's several weeks since I last did a drop but it did feel a bit different compared to before. I know I didn't land in the right place, which is why my front balance (one of my favourite moves) is such a mess and I stagger before coming off.

Still, it was nice to do a tummy drop again and I'm very pleased with my steady improvement in getting up onto that top bar. I really like working up there.

#RPGaDay Day one - First Game

#RPGaDay

I’ve come a bit late to the game (various pathetic excuses), but now going to start on the rather lovely RPGaDAY. I did consider waiting to September, but that only has 30 days and I’ll be too busy come October, so I’m starting mid-month instead. To be fair, some of my responses are going to be so short that they’ll be joined together in blog posts. Others will require one all of their own.

Day One – First Game Played

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve mentioned this briefly before, but will go into a bit more detail now.

I was a gangly, spotty, 16 or 17 year old and the only girl regular at my local Games Workshop. I’d been going down for 2 or 3 years, since my little brother had got into the hobby because Dad wanted someone to accompany him to the store. Through this, I became close friends with the staff and other regulars and when my brother lost interest I didn’t.

One day, one of the full-time staff members, Andy, asked if I wanted to stay behind and join their Buffy game. I was a huge fan of the show (still am, actually. It got me through my teenage years) and he thought I might like roleplay. It sounded like fun and it was a massive confidence boost (something I badly needed) to be invited to something outside of GW. My Dad was a little wary: he’d known students (he claimed) who’d become so involved in roleplay games that they missed exams. I’m not certain I believe him now, although I absolutely did at the time and that may have been the point of the lie – to appeal to my need to achieve academically to keep me from taking a game too seriously.

Anyway, however it ended up, one evening after the shop was closed I helped tidy up (a few of us most trusted regulars would from time to time, in return for lifts home or just cos it meant we could carry on chatting. The staff would probably have been in serious trouble if Head Office ever knew, but it was one of many ways the staff made us feel important and helped us through the hell’s highway that is puberty) and we went upstairs to the stockroom.

Andy sat me down and we created a character based on me – with a few alterations. Oz was my favourite character (I still secretly imagine he and Willow get together again. Willow and Tara are probably my other favourite characters. But it's close), so I wanted to take the werewolf flaw, and Andy said that would work as a way to bring me into the game (but ultimately we never used the flaw and it was more like I got free character gen points. A bit of a shame, but never mind). And I wanted to have magic because, well, magic is cool! So a few points there. But otherwise, I was playing me, living in my home town with my friends and my family.

The other players joined us and the game began with their Watcher introducing me and saying he was going to be keeping an eye on me (what I knew but the others didn’t was that he’d saved me from a werewolf attack). They were surprised to see me but quickly caught me up on what they’d been doing and the ways the world was ending (which was why the Watcher was in town even though there was no Slayer locally).

It was fun! Andy played himself in the game from time to time, but his character knew nothing of the supernatural world so it could be interesting to try to keep him innocent, as it were (Andy as GM was keen that Andy as NPC didn’t get too involved because it would be complicated for him). I learned more about the neighbouring town (the one with the nightclubs and, actually, where I now live) from the game than from going in real life – and my first clubbing experience was so that I would know what they were talking about because the local metal nightclub – The Villa – was the venue for a lot of the action. (It’s probably part of why I ended up working there, actually. It was a brilliant job, so I’m pleased.)

Playing ourselves meant I didn’t have to get into character, but using lateral thinking and working inside the game lead one of the other players, Tom, to invite me to his ShadowRun game “for something a bit more serious – I think you’ll enjoy it” and the rest, as they say, is history.

 With thanks to Autocratik for the idea. You can check out his response to Day One here.

Pathfinder - The Crusade part 7

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6

With Jerribeth defeated, we quickly ransacked her room to find some codes and secret signs the Templars use (should help the efforts of the Crusade) and some other oddities, including a necklace that screamed of magic but I couldn’t figure out its purpose. Pocketed for the future because I’m not sure it’s safe.

Checked the rest of this side and found, beyond the cells, an icky room with two humanoid-corpses and writings carved into the back wall. Those with better knowledge of anatomy than I realised the bodies had been alive when their organs were removed. Made me feel sad and ill together. Evander looked at the writing and something in him snapped – it was wrong, all wrong; unfinished; didn’t make sense; not right. Alexei used stone shape to destroy the wall: as best we could tell from Evander’s expletive-laden rant, it was the beginnings of a spell to loosen all natives of Golarion from this plane – to make it easier to teleport us to other planes.* That didn’t seem like a good thing to leave half-finished in a demon stronghold.

After that, we headed back to sneak to the other – but the demons guarding the cathedral in the centre spotted us as we tried to figure a way to sneak past and charged. Didn’t take long to deal with them.

The cathedral was impressive – pillars lining the way to a large altar with another statue to the demon lord Baphomet. The high, vaulted ceiling was painted with stars. Two small rooms lead off from either side – one, strangely enough, seemed to be marked with a magic circle against evil… The other, a meditation room of sorts, with cat-o’-nine-tails and other creepy things, most notably, a creepy book written in Abyssal – pocketed with the necklace because I could hear discussion outside in the cathedral itself about removing the Baphomet statue. And the next moment, a deafening, shattering crash as Evander took his flail to the statue’s leg and managed to topple it.

As the sound died away and our hearing began to return to normal, we knew the noise would have drawn the attention of every remaining accursed demon in the place. We took up defensive positions and waited for the onslaught. It was not long in coming.

I started by setting up a mind fog on the stairs to the room. It was swiftly dispelled and I hid** as the mages in the first wave stone-shaped away a section of the wall… the fighters – Kieran, Aaron and Evander – quickly dispatched the Templars who rushed through. Some kind of noxious magical smell left Aaron vomiting in the corner and nearly took out Alexei as well – in defence, he threw up a blade barrier, circling the stairs. Demons rushed through it, several falling as the blades sliced through them. Those that made it were quickly taken out and Kieran ran through the blades – fending them off and letting his shiny, shiny adamantine armour deal with the worst of it – to take out the few demons remaining. I used my shiny new Sceptre of Heaven to Holy Smite the group, and Alexei summoned a demon of his own to help.

It was hard, with Aaron nearly being killed by a barrage of magic missiles, but at the end we were victorious and no wounds we couldn’t patch up. This should make the rest of our explorations a bit easier, at least! But it’s a shame we didn’t manage to take any alive for questioning.

 *I may have misunderstood – Evander is controlled by Husbit as Alexei’s cohort but he was voiced by the GM with the instruction from Husbit (who’d been sercret-noted what Evander learned) to “relay that info but as if you have tourrettes”. And I was tired and neither I nor Svetlana has much knowledge of the planes and I had several people trying to explain so got a bit muddled. I *think* the spell would turn all natives into outsiders, but that’s a bit of a guess.

** Svetlana is not very good in combat – particularly in comparison to Kieran and Evander. It did bother me for a while and everyone blamed the fact she’s multi-class, but I’ve realised she’s very good outside of combat and I’m focussing on that. It can mean that combat-heavy sessions (like this one descended into) can risk being a little dull, but I got Husbit to let me roll some of the damage for his blade barrier shield so at least I felt a bit involved. I’m sure there are other ways I can continue to do that whilst keeping Svetlana safe (and in reserve if the party need that sneak attack surprise!)