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Shadows of the Ruinous Powers – Session 1
Session 1
The Enemy Within
- Kazgar [Gunner]
- Larry [Bawd]
- Othmar [Bunko Artist]
- Gottlieb [Hunter]
- Wilfried [Bawd]
- Magnus Gunnar
- Oscar Jager [Body Guard]
The session begins with the adventurers gathering on their way to Altdorf where Crown Prince Hergard von Tasseninck of the Grand Principality of Ostland is hiring adventurers for 20GC or more per day for “a most perilous mission into unexplored regions of the Grey Mountains.”
They arrive at the Coach and Horses Inn run by Gustav Fondleburger and hire their way onto a coach from the Ratchett Lines of Altdorf which already has a few people riding it:
• Gunnar (Drunken Coachman)
• Hultz (Also Drunken Coachman)
• Lady Isolde von Strudeldorf (Young Noble)
• Janna (Lady Isolde’s servant)
• Marie (Lady Isolde’s one-eyed Kislevite bodyguard)
• Ernst Heidelmann (Physician’s Apprentice)
• Philipe Descartes (Bretonnian Gambler)
They played several games of cards with Philipe (everyone coming close to breaking even in the end) and acquire a few rumours at the Coach and Horses Inn:
• The road to Altdorf is troubled by bandits. Only last week a coach failed to get through. These are troubled tmes and it’s about time that the Emperor started looking after the common folk.
• The village of Teufelfeuer was recently burnt down by Fabergus Heinzdork, the witch-hunter. Fabergus had discovered that the villagers were in league with demons – something to do with them eating raw meat!
• A small village in the Shadow Woods is having some trouble with wolves. Seems their militia can’t even handle a few mangy dogs!
• The roads are getting worse because the Emperor is not bothering to maintain them anymore – he is too busy spending money on the Imperial Army.
• The weather is going to take a turn for the worse. It’s going to rain tomorrow and for a few days after.
• A merchant returning from Grossbad was attacked by a small band of Goblins. He managed to flee but his consignment of ale bound for Regensdorf was stolen. Still, at least the Goblins will be so drunk that they won’t pose a threat to anyone else!
• The roadwardens are all corrupt and can’t be trusted.
• The Mayor of Grunburg was burnt at the stake a few months ago for being in league with “Chaos Spawn”. He had been overheard talking to his cat and feeding it human blood in its milk. More than one witness proclaimed that he had heard the mayor telling his cat to “Drink your bloody milk!”
• There’s a dark rumour going around that children are being sacrificed to foul demons near some wee village in the Forest of Shadows – Regensdorf I think it was.
The trip the next morning is a disaster, with hungover coachmen, wheels flying off the coach, people vomiting in Lady Strudeldorf’s impressive box of hats, and finally a mutant ambush that includes Rolf Hurtsis, a thief who was known to Othmar. The mutants were cut down and all characters received 75XP.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Shadows of the Ruinous Powers – Intro
For the last year I’ve been running a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1e) campaign running through the classic “The Enemy Within” series (with a little bit added or subtracted here and there).
We play almost every second week, and are almost 30 sessions into the campaign now (and our math indicates we’re looking at another 46 sessions to get to the end).
Some time (18 months?) ago, Cubicle 7 had the full Warhammer FRP 2e collection up on Humble Bundle, and it came with the 1e rulebook too. And they announced that they would be releasing the Enemy Within in PDF also. Excited by the chance to pick them up, I decided I would run it finally (after being part of a botched playthrough once as a player). So I started shopping around online and somehow now I have just about the whole 1e collection in print.
One thing with the Enemy Within – it is a pretty open-ended campaign where the players can easily “go off the rails” and stop running through the campaign as written and run off and do their own things instead. This is something I love as a GM – but I also really want to run the campaign in its entirety. So that was the deal when I put out the call for players. We would be playing WHFRP1e as written, and we would try to keep things on track to stick to the adventures in order to play through them all.
With that social contract in place, we’ve only had one occasion where we’ve actually had to stop play for me to tell the group that I love their plan, and I would run with it and have a great time, but it would mean ditching the adventures as written and moving into running whatever the party gets into at that point. So the party took it as a “if we lose now, we know that we really survived this already with our main plan”, and then metagamed a few ideas as to why they would stick it out instead of skipping town that night. A few other times we had a bit of metagaming regarding their next step (I’ve never had such a hard time getting a group to take a free vehicle to segue into the next adventure!)
I’ve been taking a lot of notes during the progress of the campaign, and instead of keeping them locked away for the players and I to read, I figured I would start posting the game reports here to the blog. The actual play reports the players get are also stuffed full of maps and illustrations from the adventures we are playing, but those are all copyright by their respective owners, so they won’t be appearing in the blog formatted play reports.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Hero Kids
Hero Forge Games – null. Envie d’incarner des enfants héroïques qui vont explorer de sombres souterrains ? C’est désormais possible de le faire en VF grâce à ce jeu fait pour les joueurs âgés de 4 à 10 ans.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Slaughter in the Halfling Village [NGR Play Report]
In our weekly Neoclassical Geek Revival game I had to make a new character because last session ended in what I think was the most perfect TPK I’ve had in ages. We actually almost succeeded at our mission (we run about a 25% success rate currently), got home, and then succumbed to our wounds – dying from disease and mutation and injury in the end-of-session “downtime”.
So I made a new character to join our brave guild of adventurers – Gerold Taskooveras (Jerry). Jerry’s background had him start as a beggar, become a pickpocket, and then spend a few years locked away for his crimes. He’s just been released from jail and has travelled into the hinterlands to make an “honest” living. He’s two parts rogue, one part fool.
Instead of going back (once again) into Elfbreaker Mountain to try to reclaim the dwarven ancestor’s corpse for her clan, we chased after a halfling who had been through town a couple of hours before trying to post a notice on the town notice board, but who left when he couldn’t reach it and no one in town would stop laughing at him long enough to help.
Next thing we know (after a quick NPC death at a “one of us lies, one of us tells the truth” riddle at a pair of bridges), we are setting up the defenses for a small halfling village (think Willow) against barbarian raiders. Thirty barbarian raiders. My foolish thief and a moderately high level elven warrior (who was not at the last session, so he didn’t die). Guerrilla defenses, tower defenses, and a lot of fighting later and we manage to hold off the raiders for two nights… but on the third night we end up in a duel between the elf and their leader. Except they also brought their three wise women to banish the foul elf from the land.
So… we can assume that the halfling village doesn’t exist anymore. We kind of hope the raiders wiped it out completely because otherwise stories might come back of how I picked up the elf and ran for the hills instead of standing to fight.
Remember that 25% mission success rate up there? Yeah, this was another one in the 75%.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Return to Dyson’s Delve!
It’s been almost nine years since Dyson’s Delve was released piecemeal on this blog. I labeled it my “mini mega dungeon” – an eleven level dungeon where each level’s map fit nicely within my small graph paper pad (nothing over 17 x 17 squares in total area).
There were a few places where I stretched the standard adventure design parameters a bit (while treasure is within the bounds of the treasure type tables of the game, they are significantly weighted towards the rich end of play in order to provide the XP needed for a party to level up at a rate of roughly 1 character level per 2 dungeon levels completed).
Over those nine years my cartography has seen a slight improvement and I’ve been redrawing the various levels of the Delve this year and posting them here two at a time.
Towards the end of this month, I’ll be posting the last three levels of the Delve’s new maps, as well as a never-before-posted map of the surface area where the delve is located.
What I’m doing right now though is collecting all those maps and redoing the layout of the adventure into a coherent whole to be reissued as this month’s Patreon-Exclusive release. Aside from the new surface area there will be a minimum of changes from the original adventure. I’m adding some development notes, and I’m working on a two-page appendix for running it using the most current edition of D&D – but the heart of this is still an 11-level B/X D&D dungeon adventure designed to take characters from level 1 to 6.
All patrons of the Patreon Campaign will receive a free PDF of this exclusive reissue – and it will remain exclusive to patrons for roughly a year before it becomes a commercial release.
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Forthright
Room 209 Gaming – Forthright. Un jeu générique mettant l’accent sur la placedes PJ dans la société qui les entoure.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
New Easy To Master Dungeons & Dragons Game (The) (Donjons et Dragons)
…
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : le jeu de rôle, l’univers, et le reste…)
Adventure Story Game (The)
Studio 9 Publishing – Treasures & Traps. Il y avait le jeu de cartes, voilà la version pour faire du jeu de rôle.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Stage Game Design
Après une première session annoncée dans nos actualités, l’association toulousaine Dé à Une Face relance ses stages de game design spécial JDR. Parmi les participants à la première session, plusieurs ont pu faire le saut du professionalisme, soit chez un éditeur soit en arrivant à finançer leur jeu, et plusieurs se sont lancés dans le développement amateur.Cette nouvelle session est organisée avec le soutien de l’université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurés et se déroulera du 1 au 5 juillet. Les stages sont gratuits et réservés aux étudiants.
Pour les personnes intéressées, il reste quelques places disponibles, sur lesquelles se rensiegner grace au facebook de l’association ou à leur page Genialy.
(Source: Guide du Rôliste Galactique : les dernières news du jeu de rôles)
Dysons & Doodles Compiled
A few years ago I tried to take on #Inktober (or was it #Drawlloween?) with sharpies and pens and managed to get partway through the month before other things interfered. Last year I decided to map my way through Inktober & Mapvember (61 maps in 61 days – that’s a hefty chunk of the 150-170 maps I draw every year!).
So I bought some new sharpie markers (because I really like the freedom that comes with a fat black free-flowing marker) and decided I’d try drawing something, ANYTHING, every day. It started simple, with elements from the various games I was playing in.
It didn’t take long (four days?) before I was adding detail work with my usual felt-tipped technical pens and exploring elements from a variety of games I am or have been involved in.
And from that it wasn’t much of a leap into drawing stuff meant to go INTO those games and books. To try to work on a style that could be used for illustrations for games. Hell, to establish a “style” at all instead of a continued series of doodles and drawings.
So now I look back and I’ve got 113 days of these daily drawings. I started posting them to the blog in batches, but never finished the set. So here’s a post that collects most of them – many of these appear in the Dyson Logos edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival.
Unfortunately, the streak of daily drawings was broken when my schedule took a beating last fall while working on the maps for Ghosts of Saltmarsh for Wizards of the Coast.
A number of these illustrations made it into the two waves of Tshirts and similar merchandise I have up on RedBubble. At some point I’ll add to that collection with some of the works on this page, but also a number of design ideas I’ve still got rolling around in my head…
It turns out that writing notes to go with 100 illustrations starts to be harder than drawing the illustrations in question. Around this point my rough version of this post starts just having the word “stuff” between the mini-galleries of illos.
As we roll into the later illustrations in the series, they become very RPG-book oriented as by this point I had agreed to illustrate an edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival, so the vast majority of my daily drawings are specifically to accomplish this task.
I also start moving away from heavy use of the Sharpie marker as we progress through the series – moving more and more to technical pens using the Sharpies only for large black fills like the witch’s breath in the series below.
Here we reach the last of the drawings that made it into the NGR book. I had to pick a point at which to say “all right, that’s it – here’s a pile of illustrations for the book, go wild!” instead of a constant “well, here’s one more… and one more…”
And then suddenly we are in Inktober again – the project that first inspired this whole attempt at a daily drawing back in 2014.
But Inktober, unsurprisingly, was my downfall. As we hit the series of prompt words I found myself more and more strained to draw something that fit (or to try and subvert the more obvious concept pieces), and then the contract workload cranked up and I found myself without the time to keep at it.
So here we are a full year after I started this project, and I’m cramming the time in to draw something new every few days. Maybe in time I’ll get it back to daily. 
(Source: Dyson’s Dodecahedron)
Dysons & Doodles Compiled
A few years ago I tried to take on #Inktober (or was it #Drawlloween?) with sharpies and pens and managed to get partway through the month before other things interfered. Last year I decided to map my way through Inktober & Mapvember (61 maps in 61 days – that’s a hefty chunk of the 150-170 maps I draw every year!).
So I bought some new sharpie markers (because I really like the freedom that comes with a fat black free-flowing marker) and decided I’d try drawing something, ANYTHING, every day. It started simple, with elements from the various games I was playing in.
It didn’t take long (four days?) before I was adding detail work with my usual felt-tipped technical pens and exploring elements from a variety of games I am or have been involved in.
And from that it wasn’t much of a leap into drawing stuff meant to go INTO those games and books. To try to work on a style that could be used for illustrations for games. Hell, to establish a “style” at all instead of a continued series of doodles and drawings.
So now I look back and I’ve got 113 days of these daily drawings. I started posting them to the blog in batches, but never finished the set. So here’s a post that collects most of them – many of these appear in the Dyson Logos edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival.
Unfortunately, the streak of daily drawings was broken when my schedule took a beating last fall while working on the maps for Ghosts of Saltmarsh for Wizards of the Coast.
A number of these illustrations made it into the two waves of Tshirts and similar merchandise I have up on RedBubble. At some point I’ll add to that collection with some of the works on this page, but also a number of design ideas I’ve still got rolling around in my head…
It turns out that writing notes to go with 100 illustrations starts to be harder than drawing the illustrations in question. Around this point my rough version of this post starts just having the word “stuff” between the mini-galleries of illos.
As we roll into the later illustrations in the series, they become very RPG-book oriented as by this point I had agreed to illustrate an edition of Neoclassical Geek Revival, so the vast majority of my daily drawings are specifically to accomplish this task.
I also start moving away from heavy use of the Sharpie marker as we progress through the series – moving more and more to technical pens using the Sharpies only for large black fills like the witch’s breath in the series below.
Here we reach the last of the drawings that made it into the NGR book. I had to pick a point at which to say “all right, that’s it – here’s a pile of illustrations for the book, go wild!” instead of a constant “well, here’s one more… and one more…”
And then suddenly we are in Inktober again – the project that first inspired this whole attempt at a daily drawing back in 2014.
But Inktober, unsurprisingly, was my downfall. As we hit the series of prompt words I found myself more and more strained to draw something that fit (or to try and subvert the more obvious concept pieces), and then the contract workload cranked up and I found myself without the time to keep at it.
