Fantasy AGE in public, part 2

First time I ever played Fantasy AGE, was in a local gaming store, after we played Swords & Wizardry WhiteBox at all-you-can-eat-pizzeria (here's the write-up). Today with my buddy +Kookko Jaskinen we did it again, now at a grill-lunch joint near my place called Köffi. Laptops spread, rulebook wide open, character sheet in front of me and dice scattered, we continued my homebrew lizardman Cleric's quest to this evil northern tower...

I am wearing my brand new lumberjack shirt (from drift store) which is damn awesome.
Kookko decided to be classy with Spider-Man.

Last time we killed some zombies we found venturing forth the tower, what was used for a kind of a rapture thingie, where dead bodies souls were sent to heaven and bodies left down the earth. Now there are zombies coming out of the tower, and my lizardman Cleric, Styx Purplescale has been sent to investigate.

Last time I found this prison camp, and got few NPCs to follow me. They think I am someone else I don't even know who he is, but it's okay, they follow me. Hah! Have I worried or even considered what'll happen when they find out I am not the guy they think I should be? Nope.

So, more zombies, we kill them. Then we get to the tower. Lots of traces, no clear where zombies come from. About four floors high, upper floor (third, maybe, hard to say) has a faint light inside. Only one entrance inside the tower, but guarded by goblins - small, nasty, stupid, cowardice... We attack them from both side, and soon those who are alive flee!

Next time... inside the tower!

As you can see, we didn't have that much time to play. But it was fun. Fantasy AGE is a good system, even though I still think everything has too many hit points! An average low level monster has over 20 hit points! My dude does 2d6+1 damage with fire blast spell, and 1d3+1 melee damage. One dude does 1d6+1 damage. Well, our two handed sword fighter dude does 3d6+2, but that's crazy (and great). So, average damage of 4-5 points versus 25 point monsters is too much for me to handle. Sure, there are stunts, but you need a pretty decent stunt score to get an additional attack or +1d6 extra damage.

Kookko told me that running the game was a chore, at least this time. I do understand, when you compare stats to OSR (what you need are AC, HD and damage, most of the time for combat). Next time I shall take all NPC info and roll everything for them, and check their numbers myself. This time I did help rolling NPC stuff, but needed to check the bonuses etc. We will play this again, it's quite fun, at least in player's stool.

Gaming in public: Swords & Wizardry and Fantasy AGE

I live 45 or so kilometers away from next decent sized town. I haven't visited it that much earlier, because I haven't needed to. But now that I have gaming buddies there, I've been there more often. Me and +Kookko Jaskinen (Jaakko) decided we should do some gaming because he has a summer vacation. So we did!

ROUND 1: Swords & Wizardry at Rax

My long time dream has been to play roleplaying games at all-what-you-can-eat pizza joint Rax, because that's what we did when we were younger gamers and it was a blast! Gaming, pizza, infinite amount of soda... that's fantastic! I wanted to run my dungeon Temple Of Greed (available HERE) and chose Swords & Wizardry so Jaakko could try out some old-school rules based on '74 Dungeons & Dragons.

We created two characters for him. Brother Colt, the Cleric and Jared, his Fighter guard. Backstory was simple. This religion of one-and-only-truth had discovered an ancient, forgotten temple. They wanted to loot it because religion is greedy. They sent Brother Colt to investigate and get all the treasures he could!

Spoilers of the temple ahead!

They got the key to the temple from their supervisors and ventured to the temple. Door opened easily, and inside they went. On the inner door there were pushable panels with letters V, R, C, A, A, E and I and plate reading:

To enter, one must know greed.

They weighted the puzzle for a good amount of time, and Brother Colt tried to push them to form a pseudo ancient word of greed. C-R-A-E... you got the point. But there were two buttons left that didn't stick to the bottom when pushed, so he ordered Jared to push them. Bad for him, as Jared pushed the last plate down, he lost two fingers to a razor sharp blade, and the buttons reseted. Oh the pain and DEX lost! But they were on a mission, so they had to try to open the door to not to return empty handed!

Here I helped a bit. The right answer is "avarice", synonym of "greed". Neither of us are native English speakers, so I asked Jaakko has he got any ideas what the answer would be and I let him roll INT checks for both of the characacters. They succeeded to solve the puzzle.

Inside was a room with two doors, one on the right wall, other to the left wall. On northern wall there was a plate:

Greed is everything. Greed is RIGHT. Greed is a DOOR to success. Greed we worship. Greed saves.

HA, this is obvious thought Brother Colt but was quite certain this was a trick of some sort. Too obvious. He ordered Jared to the right door, the obvious answer and went to the left door himself. On a "go!" they opened the doors simultaneously. Jared discovered a hallway, Borther Colt poison and death.

Jared ran to his master's corpse only to find an old skeleton next it. He took adventuring equipment from his deceased partner and looted the skeleton for some gold, a ring and golden teeth. Onwards.

The corridors behind the door joined together in the end, behind the north wall of the previous room. There was a door, from which another hallway opened - to the left, and to the right. He went right discovering a room and a dead end with a door with some plates. Jared had bad memories of plates, so he checked the room first.

Inside the room there was an empty altar room, except of the altar with a plate:

He who gives everything for the gold-lusty god of greed shall receive.

Okay, he did nothing but went to observe the door. He took a risk and started to push the door panels. When a right panel was pushed, it made a mechanical noise behind the door and stayed pushed. But if you pushed a wrong tile after it, all reseted. It took some time he took pushing the tiles and finding the right order (disclaimer: you can discover the right order... somewhere) and got into a small room with a squirrel statue and a peek hole on the other wall. The squirrel statue was holding a stone nut.

Jared took the nut, nothing happens. Put it right back, nothing happens. Tried replace it with sling stones - nothing. Tried to stick the nut into a peek hole and put stones on the squirrel's palms. Nothing. Hmmm. Then he gave the ring he looted from the skeleton for the squirrel statue, and something happened somewhere within the dungeon. Then he went back and took the other hallway.

Walking down the hallway he discovered a secret door. Inside was an altar and lots of gold pieces (1,300 in total). He made some calculations and bagged everything and dragged them back to the door that led to this hallway. He was lucky to take everything at once... He returned and continued the hallway to discover a statue. And he immediately knew what to do with it! But there was a problem. To get to the statue you had to walk down a short hallway where obviously was a wall wide pressure plate! He grinned and jumped and discovered later, that the pressure plate on the floor was a diversion. The real trap was a scythe that cut him bad when he jumped the pressure plate! He started with 1 HP, and lost it. Also he lost 25% of permanent HD. And two points of CHA for missing half of his face! Bleeding, almost dead (at 0 HP I decided he is barely alive and could only crawl and not take any kind of actions) he crawled back where he left the gold sacks he bagged earlier.

Hugging the treasure he found he fainted only hoping someone would find him before he bled to death...

If he survives he will be called Jared The Unlucky. It would be fun to run this 1 HP Fighter with Dexterity penalty and Charisma lost to charring and -25% to HD through all kinds of death trap dungeons! But for now his time was over. Temple Of Greed won, no treasure was dragged outside.

ROUND 2: FANTASY AGE AT FLGS

Belly full of pizza and one adventure done we headed to our FLGS (Porin Pelikauppa). We met there earlier before we ventured to Rax. There was only this new Star Wars RPG and four WH40k roleplaying game supplements available. No other roleplaying games and their dice variation sucked too. They are focused on video games, Warhammer, Magic: the Gathering and other tabletop and board games. Good thing is they have tables there you can use for gaming! We were lucky to get a table because there also was a X-Wing tournament starting!

When we played D&D 5E last time Jaakko showed me his copy of Fantasy AGE. It looked interesting. He had already played it but I wanted to try it too! Character creation was quite simple and quick with some fun options. I created a lizard-man Cleric (homebrew stuff) because it felt most interesting compared to your usual fighter-mage-dwarf-elf-human and so on D&D stuff. And I wanted to be an adventurer!

Gods were forgotten, and only us lizardmen had Clerics and religion. Well, there were few from other races that believed, but not that many. I was sent to find all kinds of ancient religious artifacts and other god-things to the big main continent-island. To the icy wastes my travel took me, where a tower acted weird. This tower was used to rapture style soul ascension in the old times, but now there was disturbance. The disturbance was zombies!

When traveling I found this ragged guy who led me to his camp. I discovered that the camp was actually a prison camp and he was a prisoner. The staff wanted to challenge me (enter combat rules test) and I had to fight this huge warrior! But with spells I could do it damaging him and eventually teleporting him to a cart full of zombie corpses. That'll show him!

I decided I need some backup to my journey to this tower and had the ragged guy, a warrior and an elf lady with me. Only because they thought I am someone else they were excepting! Well, nothing wrong with that, because I'd be long gone in frozen wastes when, and if, they discovered I am a wrong guy. We started our journey and found some zombies at a distance. I decided I want to kill them to try combat rules once more. Easy targets, eh? Thanks to my spells I could keep distance from them, but the others took some damage. Most damage suffered was that warrior I already had beaten. What a waste!

CONCLUSION

SWORDS & WIZARDRY: TEMPLE OF GREED

1. Temple Of Greed is a challenging module that can kill a campaign, because the casualties can get high. But hey, you don't have to go there. You don't have to be greedy!
2. I should use The Black Hack for one-shots. Even though I love Swords & Wizardry there was unnecessary things (attribute derived bonuses for example) that didn't improve gameplay.
3. I am looking forward to Jared The Unlucky's next adventure(s)!

FANTASY AGE

1. Quick character creation but variation in characters.
2. It felt old-schoolish even though the system uses 3d6.
3. We had a rules misunderstanding of how stunt dice trigger. I thought that the damage system was weak (roll vs ac and damage reduction. Most things did 1d6 damage and my weakling had over 20 hit points). The trick is, that even though basic damage against hit points is weak, stunts are when you hit hard and kill stuff!
4. Can't wait to check out the tower! Seriously, it's been a long time I've encountered zombies in a roleplaying game and I am currently watching Z Nation.

D&D 5e game night + birthday presents I gave

I got to play Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition with my friends for the first time face-to-face. It was also almost Dungeon Master Jaakko's birthday and my birthday was recently, so there was minor celebration going on, too!

I wanted to gift Jaakko something, so here's what I gave to him!

Custom "Ravenloft Bootleg" booklet I created using pictures from WotC Facebook stream.
Pamphlet 2: Dystopia, my latest publication. PWYW at RPGNow.
Ikiseutu, my one-page-dungeon contest entry, PWYW at RPGNow.
D30s from my store.

Here are pictures of Ravenloft Bootleg content. Not all pages are photo'd, only few samples:

The game we played was Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and scenario was Lost Mines Of Phandelver. +Kookko Jaskinen (Jaakko) had actually started the campaign earlier and one of the players (Human Fighter) had played earlier. Two of us just stepped in. Jaakko has this idea of running a mega campaign, where different players can join at different times, but the story will go on.

The characters were:

• 3rd level Human Fighter with plate mail and big-ass fancy axe.
• 1st level Human Druid, forest hobo look. Ex thief (background) I figured out.
• 1st level Aarakocra Barbarian who looks like a turkey (my character).

My gaming equipment:
Dice and a dice cup (D-oom and other designs available at HOLVI).
Character sheets (found here).
Custom notebook for character.
D&D Basic Rules Lulu print with Petri Hiltunen's art.

In the beginning of session I (Aarakocra) and forest hobo druid had arrived to Phandelver where we went to a tavern (what else would we do, eh). Inside walked a warrior with freezing armor, who started to suggest that the forest hobo should leave, so he could have a word with this female fighter. I used my military background and officer rank to cool the situation down.

What catched my eye was an egg artifact the forest hobo was carrying. When I was just an egg, I fell through a rift from my home plane to Faerun, Icewind Dale. There barbarians raised me. I thought this artifact egg (druid's somekind of magic booster thingie) could be something related to my race. So I wanted to stick with him. Forest druid thought I am a bit weird wanting to follow him, but it was okay (motivation for my character to stick with another character achieved).

Outside we went to find out four red cloaked goons were toughing up people and stealing their money. When the fighter came out of the tavern, forest hobo charmed (spell) one of the goons and reassured him to give the money for him if the fighter who obviously had already done good deeds in the city wanted to search them. And the fighter went to interrogate the goons.

Aarakocra, as an ex soldier, decided to get near the fighter to possibly back her up if the situation would heaten. And it did, when the forest hobo decided to club one of the goons. And fight begun. Fighter's wolf companion did all her dirty work and I raged with great results!

After we fought the goons... it was late and we decided to call it a day. Getting characters together took a lot of time and there was lots of roleplaying, which was fun. And I think the simple fight versus few goons was great to let some steam out before ending the session.

Here are few pictures of the evening:

To the left where I sat Dungeon Master's The Black Hack screen, dice and starter set box.

Famous rapstar Kookko Jaskinen telling something neat about his brand new PHB.

Our to-be Druid forest hobo.

SNACKS!

From left to right: Human Fighter, Human Druid, Aarakocra Barbarian.

Dungeon Master doing his job.

CAKE!

Ran Temple Of Greed for my girlfriend

Needless to say, there be spoilers of this adventure I wrote.

Available here: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/146415/Temple-Of-Greed

Preparation

I decided to use Swords & Wizardry Core. My girlfriend was playing alone, so she created four characters for herself. This took less than an hour, and she had:
Seppo, human Cleric
Teppo, dwarf Fighter
Nen, halfling Thief
Keppo, elf M-U/Fighter

Here's the character sheet I made for this occasion. Two charactersheets fit one paper.

Disclaimer Of Player's Style

My girlfriend does play roleplaying games, but she is more interested in stories, characters and that sort of thing than adventures and action. Sure she handles action and combat, but meta-level dungeoneering what needs player skills is unknown to her. She doesn't search for traps all the time, but randomly chooses when to do so. This door she might search, but weird altar nope. Also she's not too gold-lusty, so many potential treasures are left behind.

This Is What Happened (Did I Already Say SPOILERS? Yes I Did!)

I won't write everything what happened, just the highlights.

• The word puzzle on a door where you need to push letter buttons went well. No one lost fingers.
• Second puzzle was quite obvious, especially when she searched for traps. No one got gassed.
• They found the skeleton, but didn't loot it.
• Elf senses tingled and the gold at altar room was found out to be cursed. Despise of that Halfling took one cursing himself with greed, negative experience point and unable to gain experience if he's not greedy enough. Others kicked Halfling's ass for this.
• Halfing decided to check out the diamonds of the scythe trap. Failed save and scythe cut piece of his nose, left cheek and ear off! Lost 25% permanent HP and 2 points of CHA. Others think that Halfling isn't very good Thief at all!
• First statue, they raised wrong hand in purpose because were too suspicious and scared to raise the right one. No one checked for traps though. In the end they had to come back and raise the right hand.
• They figured out that if you put all your gold on the altar you get that much exp! But the gold turned into liquid and was lost! Halfing tried this but he's cursed so no experience gain for him from the gold he lost! Others kick Halfling's ass again.
• Door with plate mechanism, my girlfriend knew this from when I wrote this adventure. She knew that she needs to peek somewhere, found that place and solved the puzzle.
• Was delighted of the big diamond, but lost it for the second statue. Somehow it was Halfling's fault.
• Third statue was easy, no problem. But at this point first statue was aligned wrong so nothing happened. Back there, fix it, and a secret door opens!
• Three fail save and want to move gilded altar away from the room. Elf thinks they are stupid. Altar leaves room, illusion breaks, door opens.
• Long corridor. Slot for gold coins and engraving hinting of the amount how much money should be put in. They ignored it and proceeded, no trap-searching. Save, and dwarf jumps back when trapdoor opens on the floor and the rest fall in. 10 feet drop into liquid gold and the trapdoor closes! Dwarf tries to tinker with it a little, but the door doesn't stay open long enough so rope was useful.
• Dwarf thought, he'll proceed and figure out later how to get friends out. In the liquid gold pit Elf and Cleric blame Halfling for this and are plotting to murder him. Halfling is too short so his head is below the surface, so Elf and Cleric need to take turns to carry him!
• Dwarf finds a door and a diamond and a slot on the door the diamond fits. Dwarf didn't check the door and puts the diamond in. The door opens and Dwarf saves and doesn't die.
• Inside is tons of gold coins (10,000) and the door closes shut behind him (I decided this door instead of the front door to keep the guys near each other). Dwarf tries to figure out what's going on searching hints, but finds nothing how to escape.
• Dwarf in turns is happy for the huge treasure and sad because he's stuck in that room. Later he gets hungry and eats gold pieces. Not a good idea, he found out. DWARF DIES... later...
• Elf and Cleric start to figure out that Dwarf is not getting them out. They get tired of holding Halfling up. Halfling is first to drown in liquid gold. Elf and Cleric blame Halfling for this. They die later drowning in liquid gold.

Total loot: Well, they didn't get anything into the town, but what they kinda got was:

1. 1 cursed gp for the Halfling
2. 10,000 gp for the Dwarf
3. 1,000,000 worth of liquid gold for Halfling, Cleric and Elf