The Battle for Newport: Minbari vs League

The scene:  Imperial throne room, League of Non-Aligned Worlds: 

Prime minister:   “My Emperor, it is my solemn duty to inform you that the Minbari infidels have violated our most sacred time of reunion.  I present to you the personal log of Captain Bluescale of Sunhawk 23, on extended patrol in the Newport system.  He was recording a message to his granddaughter in his personal log, which recorded the attack…    

The log Plays…

“My granddaughter, we are orbiting  (Planet name) in the Newport system.   I am sorry that I cannot be with you on this rare holiday.   The duties of war are very demanding of an old Drazi like myself.  We can only hope we will be victorious, and that I may resume my retirement and return to you soon.   I hope to be there when you graduate from school…(voice of a deck officer breaks in.)  “Captain, jump points opening ahead and astern!”

Captain:  Evasive Maneuvers!  (Speaking aloud to himself) Who would dare?  Weapons officer, Identify them!

W.O.:  The signatures are… Definitely Minbari… Four ships: Tinashi, Leshath, Tigara, Sharlin…   By the Gods!  We have positive IDs on them.  That’s the squadron from Volk’s Star!  How did they get here…

Captain: (finishing the thought) “From so far away”…  To himself:  “We are clearly overmatched, but cannot let them have a system so close to home.   Com: Put me on speaker to the crew”… “The infidel has come to our very homes!  For the preservation of our nation and the lives of those we love, we cannot retreat.  We will hold them here as long as possible, and strike when we can!”

“Com: Speaker off, Launch log buoy”…

The visual changes to an exterior of the battle as recorded by the buoy… The battle is mercifully short.  The Sharlin fires a single neutron beam into the dodging Sunhawk with deadly precision, returning Sunhawk 23 to the dust from which she came.

Log playback ends.

Emperor:  Prime minister, go and prepare the people for an audience.   Tonight we embark upon a dark journey, one of Jihad!  We will exterminate every Minbari to the last man, woman, and Child.  Only our death as a people shall stop us! They of all the infidel races we had believed to be a civilized people, capable of respecting our religious beliefs.   It is proven not to be so.  To my people, I pledge our military will find them wherever they may hide and destroy them!  

And minister, dispatch the Home Fleet to Newport.  Draw as much support from the outlying systems as necessary.   What was ours shall be ours again. 

PM:  So it shall be done.

Emperor: (Lost in his own thoughts) “Why did they attack such a small world?  They could have chosen any number of more important targets.  And yet, they came here.   Certainly it is close to home world, but insignificant at that.  I wonder, could there be outside influence like the Vorlons?  They certainly have a hyperspace mastery that would explain the jump from Volk’s Star to Newport in a single jump.  They could new technology also.”

The Emperor summons a common assistant.   “Take a memo to the PM, the science minister and archeology minister.  They are to prepare an expedition to Newport, have them coordinate the operation through the PM.   He is to arrange military escort.  Schedule the mission for A.S.A.P. once Newport has been taken from the infidels.”

Thanks to Marc for the nifty fanfic writeup.

A Tabletop Trip into Phlan II: Beck vs Raymo

Last night, the intrepid adventurers Wulf, the fighter, Jerkxes of Cormyr, the sorcerer, The Cleric Who Had No Name But Later Adopted One From Call of Duty 4, the cleric, and Aeryn Completely Different From The One On Farscape, the “independent entrepreneur”, ventured back into the slums of Phlan in search of gold and glory.

After spending the night at an extremely shady inn and while acquiring new supplies at an equally shady merchant (lots of things in Phlan are shady…it’s like Lankhmar if Lankhmar were a little town in Michigan), Jerkxes discovered that said shady merchant had an extremely fine dagger for sale clearly marked with the noble crest of the Cadorna family, who are very powerful in New Phlan. After some discussion, Jerkxes purchased the dagger and brought it to Phlan’s City Hall, hoping to give it to Councilman Poryphrys Cadorna, who the group knew by name only. Poryphrys accepted the dagger (he said it was his mom’s) with good grace, a vague promise of support, and an evident desire to stop talking to the party and start drinking (the party later discovered that Cadorna had quite a reputation as a dilletante).

On their way to the slums, the party hooked up with the infamous Beck Darkmantle (played by Cameron, who sat in for a session). Beck was originally a character in my Iron Kingdoms game, where he was notable for acting before thinking, carrying his own sizable supply of alcohol, and not being a “people person”. Transposed into a 2nd Level Realms character, he accompanied the group into the slums after annoying the guards at the gate so much that they actually paid the party five GP to convince him to leave.

Once in the slums, the party continued their exploration mission, uncovering a wight lairing in a grocery store, several burned out houses, and a drunken bum who turned out to be a werewolf. The party really seemed to bond with this werewolf despite being suspicious enough not to let him travel with them. After careful consideration I have decided that this was because I was essentially running him as Ray from Chris Onstad’s webcomic supreme achewood (he is now officially Raymo of Phlan). Sadly, when Raymo eventually ambushed the party and attempted to devour Beck and Jerkxes and steal their alcohol, Beck smashed his head in with a maul.

All in all another good night. I have, however, reluctantly decided not to use the Bendy Dungeon Walls set I picked up a few months ago anymore. While it does look really neat on the map, the connectors that hold the wall sections together have a nasty tendency to snap off when pressure is applied. After losing four wall sections that way, I’m going back to flat maps. 

Belkar FTW! We Play The Order of the Stick Adventure Game

Marc stopped by tonight and we played a “quick” game of Ape Games’s The Order of the Stick Adventure Game: The Dungeon of Dorukan.

 OOTS is based on the incredibly funny gaming comic of the same name (if you’ve never seen it before, you really don’t need to waste your time reading this. View Rich Burlew’s work and be entertained in ways I can’t even begin to compete with). It’s constructed on the same model as Talisman, Runebound, and even Munchkin: a bunch of adventurers wandering around a dungeon killing things and taking their stuff. OOTS takes the questing element of the first two and combines it with the humor and backstabbing of the third, and the result is a very entertaining but often very long game. We played the “short” version: three levels plus Xykon’s Inner Sanctum. It took us about four hours. I shudder to think what an 8+ level game must be like.

Marc drew Durkon (crusty dwarf cleric) and I got Belkar (psychotic halfling ranger), and we descended into the depths of the Dungeon of Dorukan in search of loot, short women, and the evil but amusing Xykon the Lich.

Multiplayer OOTS is a haggler’s dream: you trade the treasure you acquire for help from the other players. Two player OOTS is more a straightforward acquisition race: amass as much stuff as you can to trade in for bonuses (it’s almost impossible to beat tougher creatures like Xykon, Redcloak, or The Monster in the Darkness without aid of some kind). It’s also a much more unrestrained environment for cards that mess up your opponent, as you don’t need to worry much about building alliances and maintaining goodwill.

Belkar’s built for combat, albeit primarily combat against other players (as I said…he’s a psychotic halfling ranger), so I had a fairly easy time negotiating the first level of the Dungeon on my own. Durkon, who has good healing abilities but little combat capability at first found it tougher going. Because of this I got and maintained an early lead on loot. Eventually though, Marc figured out how to properly finesse the aid system and began to catch up. Once Durkon gets the Thor’s Hammer schtick (which Marc did), he can compete fairly well with most of the combat geared characters.

Belkar had significant problems dealing with Redcloak and a Lumber Hulk, and Durkon got stomped on repeatedly by Zzt’dri and some kobolds, but eventually we made it past the hordes of supporting characters and into Zykon’s inner sanctum. Belkar dispatched The Monster in the Darkness and Xykon’s Orc Bodyguard, while Durkon took on a horde of zombies and eventually slew the Lich himself. The final score at the end:

Belkar:

• Loot: 26
• Schticks: 15
• Total: 42

Durkon:

• Loot: 15
• Schticks: 11
• Bragging Rights for Killing Xykon: 8
• First Out of the Dungeon: 1
• Total: 35

A handy victory for the Halfling, though Durkon got a major boost for destroying the Lich. It’s a fun game, and the general hilarity of the cards and the need to contribute monsters to battle your opponent eliminate a lot of the downtime which plagues Runebound. It is, however, a long game and definitely deserves to be on the “all-nighter” shelf next to Twilight Imperium and StarCraft: The Boardgame.

 

True Tales of Weeding: A Cherry Tree Party

What with all the craziness and many projects going on in my life, it’s been tough for me to find time to read good books, much less bad ones to talk about here. Nevertheless, True Tales of Weeding makes a triumphant if limited return for Presidents’ Day with advice from 1904’s one-stop guide to parties Entertainments for All Seasons , constituting probably the worst party idea in the history of the world. Note the parts I have emphasized:

A Cherry Tree Party: …At this point a small tree was placed in the center of the room. Its trunk was made of brown clay, and it was labeled “A Cherry Tree”.

The game consisted in seeing who could first succeed in hacking it down, each person going in turn, blindfolded, after being turned around three times. This was no easy task, and when it finally fell beneath the hatchet, the hostess, with a great assumption of sorrowful surprise asked:

“Who cut down my cherry tree?”

“It was I. I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.” proudly replied the perpetrator of the deed.

“It’s what I have expected,” gravely announced the hostess, “ever since the school-books made so much of George’s little act; therefore, I had the cherries picked and made into conserves as a reward for thy truthfulness.”

As the recipient bowed low over his box of cherries, he vowed always to chop down cherry trees and tell the truth.  

Perhaps this is simply a case of cultural distance, but giving people axes, blindfolding them, spinning them around, and then shoving them in the general direction of a clay tree has “potential lawsuit” written all over it. The hostess could easily have ended up asking “Who put an axe in Augustus’s skull?” Cherry conserves, tasty though they be, don’t really cover that kind of damage.

Entertainments for All Seasons contains gems like this on almost every page and I can’t possibly do it justice in one True Tales of Weeding. You’ll be seeing more sketchy party ideas as the year progresses.

Shipyards Cease Production: Mongoose Ends ACTA Miniatures Line

Mongoose Publishing announced today that they would no longer be producing or selling miniatures for A Call to Arms after March 31st.

This is disappointing but not entirely unexpected. Given the problems Mongoose has had getting their new in-house press running, and more importantly the failure of Battlefield: Evolution (which not only ended Mongoose’s foray into prepainted plastic miniatures but also simultaneously derailed Starship Troopers and War Without End) costs needed to be cut somewhere. And when the choice is between paper and metal, it’s obvious where the axe will fall.

Sadly, whatever promise ACTA 2e had will now never be fully realized. Most of the new units will never appear, and the game will cease to attract new players as minis become more difficult to find. On the bright side, Mongoose is selling their stock direct at 20% off, giving ample opportunity to stock up before the line stops.

It’ll be interesting to see how this affects Mongoose’s plans for ACTA rule spinoffs, such as the “Mysterious New License” they announced last month. 

As for us…well, we’ll finish out our campaign. After that, I might need to change the name of the blog.

Forgotten Realms 4e: Winds of Change

In a previous post, I compared the Forgotten Realms to a metaphorical psycho ex-girlfriend I had reconciled with. Having read the changes WOTC has planned for Forgotten Realms 4e, I would now say that the Realms more closely resembles a psycho ex I made up with, only to watch as she dyes her hair, has her incredibly cool House of Elendil tattoo lasered off her lower back, and joins the Church of Scientology.   

A college friend of mine, sadly no longer a gamer, once came up with a neat campaign concept. He called it Ifan: the Ever-Changing World. He envisioned a world wracked by “changewinds”, roiling vespers of concentrated chaos that would literally rewrite reality. The PCs would have to struggle against the changewinds and their effects, knowing full well that all their efforts might be overturned in an instant.

Well if the value of an idea is tied to the prominence of other people who come up with it, this one was clearly golden.

Some time ago, when I was perusing the new Races and Classes preview for D&D 4e, I wondered what Wizards planned to do with the Forgotten Realms setting given the massive changes that were about to ensue. The answer appears to be: bring on the changewinds! In this case, the changewinds are a “Spellplague” brought about by the death of Mystra, Goddess of Magic:

Despite its name, the Spellplague was much more than a disease. For one, it did not restrict itself to mere flesh. All things were meat to the Spellplague’s insatiable hunger—flesh, stone, magic, space, and perhaps even the flow of time was suborned. The world of Toril, its lost sibling Abeir, and even the planes themselves were infected with a plague of change. -Countdown to the Realms: Magic in the Forgotten Realms (Dragon #362)

Pretty slick, no? The Spellplague lets them rewrite the entire setting to suit 4e, even letting them stick in races like the Dragonborn which didn’t exist at all under the old rules:
Along the shore of the Alamber Sea, old Unther was swept away by a catastrophic outbreak of the Spellplague. Where once ancient Unther stood now stands an arid mesa-land inhabited by draconic humanoids calling themselves dragonborn. This is the realm of Tymanther. The dragonborn have proven to be a proud, martial race, and in the decades since the Year of Blue Fire they have slowly tamed the ruined changeland from the Riders to the Sky all the way to the Black Ash Plain. -Countdown to the Forgotten Realms: The Realms of 1479 DR (Dragon #361)

Yeah…those of you with campaigns in Unther and Mulhorand are going to need some new source material in 4e. You’re probably not going to get much use out of Shining South either: among other things there’s now a massive crater where Halruaa used to be after every spell and magical effect there fired off simultaneously.

It would be pointless to parrot too much more of the Dragon articles here. Suffice it to say that the 4e Realms has a heavy post-apocalypse feel with a little Cold War action thrown in as Cormyr and the restored Netherese Empire battle it out via proxies over what’s left.

A recent review of the Worlds and Monsters preview book on RPGNet describes it as “a brief walkthrough of how a small design team took 30 years of a game’s sacred cows and gleefully shoved them into a blender.” I’d say what I’ve read about 4e Forgotten Realms amply supports that. I’m a big fan of postapocalyptic grit: David Brin’s The Postman is one of my favorite books of all time. I’m just not sure there’s a real reason to apply it to the Realms other than to conform it to the 4e rules. I was hoping for something more along the lines of the Time of Troubles-some Gods die…some borders change…some classes get nerfed (remember when your assassin became a thief after Bhaal died? Wasn’t that fun?), but the essential cheery renaissance faire atmosphere remains the same. Eberron’s already essentially a “magical post-apocalyptic” setting, as is the new default 4e setting - did they need to apply the template to the Realms as well?  

Then again I could just be bitter because Maztica got magically scrubbed from the face of Toril by the Spellplague and replaced by an entirely new continent. They better not touch Shou Lung, or Rich Baker and I will have to have words.

Fractal Madness!

Last Friday, I noticed that Noble Knight had a copy of ProFantasy’s Fractal Terrains in stock. I was eventually planning on picking it up anyway to use for the Battletech 2759 campaign, and since I still had plenty of store credit I grabbed it immediately.

Battletech has over 600 canon worlds, and only a fraction of them have maps. I’m absolutely horrible at mapping, myself (I’ve been able to hide it with Campaign Cartographer 2 for many years but trust me…I suck) so naturally the prospect of a decent worldmap generator was too good to pass up. I’ve been playing with it for a few hours and this is what I came up with:

This is my first-draft map of the infamous Von Strang’s World.

 And that’s The Rock…site of the first appearance of the Clans in Battletech fiction.

One good thing about Fractal Terrains is, as you can see, that it’s possible to convert the planet files it generates to the icosahedral view that Battleforce 2 uses. Unfortunately, doing so turns it into a JPEG, to which I don’t yet know how to add a hex grid. I’m thinking I might copy the blank icosahedral hexfield from the Battleforce 2 maps onto a transparency and simply lay it over an image printed to the appropriate size.

Whatever fix I use, this program is going to simplify the mapmaking portion of the campaign enormously. I might even be able to use Battleforce 2 to determine the course of the planet-level campaigns the PCs will be experiencing as background.

Campaign Design Journal – Stage 4: Lifepaths

Every RPG seems to have some design element that rapidly expands beyond the designer’s control. Every new sourcebook adds more of it. D&D2e had kits. D&D 3e has prestige classes and feats. World of Darkness has Merits and Flaws. Rifts has…well…everything (it isn’t the only RPG to sell separate index books for nothing). Classic Battletech RPG has Lifepaths.

Lifepaths first appeared in GDW’s classic Traveller. Basically, they flesh out your character’s backstory while providing random events that can help or harm him or her. Traveller’s original tables were so harsh that it was actually possible for a PC to die during character creation. CBTRPG’s tables aren’t quite so bad, but there are a lot of them if you count in everything that was added in sourcebooks. You can download the Master Lifepath Table from Catalyst yourself and see what I mean.

I had basically two goals with my hack of this document:

1. Change the lifepaths to better reflect Star League era Battletech.
2. Cut down some of the fluff-specific lifepaths to avoid confusing new players.

 I didn’t feel very guilty about that second one. Most of the new lifepaths are various academies, many of which either weren’t in operation or VERY different in the 2750 era. Also when it comes down to it, do you really NEED a separate table for every military academy in the Federated Suns? Especially when there’s already an excellent generic Military Academy table?

Beyond cutting down the academies, most of the work involved changing the existing paths so they didn’t lead to paths I’d deleted. Some paths had to go entirely (the ComStar and Word of Blake paths, for instance), and others needed some modification (Clan War Orphan became Hidden War Orphan and got some flavor changes while the NAIS path became the SLDF’s War Triad (Sandhurst, War Academy of Mars, War Academy of Aphros) but remained the same except for the name).

I also added three new paths. I replaced CBTRPG’s Tour of Duty: Inner Sphere path with two new ones: a revised TOD: Inner Sphere and a new TOD: Periphery. This reflects the fact that at the time your service experience in an SLDF or House unit depended a lot on if you were stationed in one of the relatively peaceable Inner Sphere Member-States or in the wild-and-wooly Periphery Territorial States. You might compare this to the vast difference between serving in a “fashionable” regiment of the British Army at Home in the 19th Century, and service in India.  

I also created an entirely new path for the SLDF’s famous Gunslinger Program, which I’m sharing below. Comments are, of course, welcome.

GUNSLINGER PROGRAM

Originally developed in the late 27th Century as a crash course to counter the individual combat superiority of Kuritan MechWarriors, the Advanced Combat and Maneuvering Skills (ACMS) program continues to train the SLDF’s best and brightest in the finer points of BattleMech combat. Graduates gain the right to wear the highly coveted Gunslinger’s crossed pistols on the lapels of their uniform.

Entry via event roll only
Time: 1 year
Traits: Sixth Sense or Natural Aptitude: Piloting (‘Mech), or Natural Aptitude: Gunnery (any one) This trait is specifically allowed as a second natural aptitude if the character already possesses one.
Skills: +3 to any 4 skills in the MechWarrior field.
Next Path: Police Academy (3), Covert Ops (4, Special Forces or Scout-trained characters only), Ne’er-Do-Well (4),  Tour of Duty: Periphery (4), Tour of Duty: Inner Sphere (4),

Gunslinger Program Events
2. Goose! Eject! A terrible training accident claims lives, and there are some who say it was your fault [Bad reputation (3), Combat Paralysis, STR -1, REF -1, Survival +2)]
3. Sent West. You just didn’t have what it took to make it through the program. [-2 to all MechWarrior field skills, Timid] 
4. 4AM already? Too many late nights studying tactics [Poor Vision, Tactics (‘Mech) +1
5. That’s Iceman…as in cool as. Rival pushes you to excel. [Enemy (1), +1 on any two MechWarrior field skills]
6. I aim with my eye… +1 to any one Gunnery skill
7. Sumimasen, Taira-san! One of the expatriate Kuritan instructors takes you under his wing. [Martial Arts +1, Protocol: Draconis Combine +2]
8. I know my enemy… You’ve studied the tactics of the House armies…and how to beat them [Tactics (‘Mech) +1, Protocol (any two) +1]
9. Take my breath away… An affair with a civilian instructor gives you a useful contact [Contact (2), Bureaucracy (Terran Hegemony) +1]
10. Let the word and the legend go before…Your performance raised some eyebrows and marked you out for greater things [+1 on any three MechWarrior field skills, Promotion]
11. I cry your pardon, Gunslinger! You graduate ACMS at the top of your class! [Promotion, Good Reputation (1), +1 on any three MechWarrior field skills]
12. Choose one or roll twice and apply both results

Somewhere Beneath Werewolf Island…

redcoat668: Hey there! Here I am all pink and full of meat!

Werewolf: Rage! Tear! Maim! Trendy eco-friendly rhetoric!

redcoat668: That’s right, you big, hairy jerk…just keep following me.

Werewolf: Slay! Rend! Devour! Impergium!

Werewolf: Tear! Mutilate! Ki…hey…there are a lot of werewolf corpses in this room!

Party: OPEN FIRE!

Werewolf: Crap…I’m dead.

Party: Yay! 420 XP!

Minsc: In the wind…he’s still alive.

Imoen: What’s an Impergium anyway?

BioWare Odyssey: Baldur’s Gate

Some people…sane people…resolve to quit smoking and work out for the new year. I resolved to play BioWare’s entire library of D&D games. I did this for three reasons:

1. I thought it would be cool to get some perspective on how the franchise has evolved since Baldur’s Gate was released in 1998.
2. I would like to spend as little money as possible on NEW computer games this year.
3. Since we’re talking about every BioWare D&D game from Baldur’s Gate through Neverwinter Nights 2, there’ll always be something to put on the blog.

 So without further ado, we’ll get right into the action with Baldur’s Gate.

Baldur’s Gate was the first D&D game to use BioWare’s Infinity Engine (so named for Infinity, the first game to feature it), which was a big deal in 1998 because the Infinity Engine runs real-time. In enlightened 2008, of course, that’s the default expectation, but back then all previous AD&D games had preserved the “initiative order” mechanism of the pen-and-paper game and there was serious concern that an AD&D game running real-time would lose the flavor of the original. Luckily both for us and for their franchise, however, BioWare did an excellent job of capturing the essential D&D experience while simplifying it considerably for those unfamiliar with the tabletop game.

Get used to this view, because you’ll be seeing something like it until Neverwinter Nights introduces the Aurora Engine.

Baldur’s Gate holds up very well despite being over 10 years old. While the Gold Box games have to be played with a wink to their retro charm, BG doesn’t (yet) require a lot of nostalgia for the 90’s to enjoy. The real-time pointing, clicking, and pausing is pretty intuitive, and while it helps to know how the AD&D2e rules work it isn’t vital. The essential strength of the engine is clear even in these first awkward days.

Of course you can’t get anything perfect on the first try. Consider, for example, items…

Like its cousin Diablo, Baldur’s Gate went with a slot system to determine how much your characters could carry. Unfortunately, unlike Blizzard, BioWare didn’t consider item size or volume when they worked this out…so a tiny gem or single scroll takes up the same amount of space in your pack as a 210 lb corpse (hey…necromancers have to get those bodies from somewhere). Later titles dealt with this problem by introducing gem bags and scroll cases, but in Baldur’s Gate pack management is a major hassle…especially when you’re wandering around Durlag’s Tower trying to fit as much cool stuff in as possible.

All in all, though, Baldur’s Gate is an excellent start to the franchise. While lacking the complexity and polish of its sequel, Shadows of Amn, it’s still a lot of fun.