Wooly Gazers beasts of the Wastes

A Gazing Beast

more about these to follow

City Cartographer a Review correction Cityographer

 City Cartographer a Review  correction Cityographer

I have a first impression on this software in the works I was planing to get it up here tonight but sadly I have run out of steam so I will try to get it done tomorrow

Had a dyslexic monument when reading the program's name  however a first impressions review is in process 

Last call for Episode I of Against the Robots

with the clock at T - one hour I am all ready to go but will be taking a quick power nap before heading on out to the hangout. and the game.

Against the Robots Episode 1

The Flame Flickers and dies

on the northern borders of the great Varzzaran empire the new company of Varnia rides out to the town of Angrad on a mission to see a scholar and weapon smith of their crippled masters acquaintance bearing a sealed letter to the master Weapon smith  and where the road goes from there any one can guess.

A Company of Fools Episode Twenty Four A preview

Some where under the streets of the Newtown of Vayham a desperate struggle takes place in a long forgotten annex to the new drains. Here the storied Traveller Telec and hi companions both new and old  are literally locked in battle with the forces of the Rot lords champion. As above them a larger slower struggle between man and goblin continues. What will be the outcome of these struggles none now can tell for the disce are cast and only RISK yet knows how they will fall.

Plastic People a preview

Some thoughts on the use of Historical Miniatures in general and plastic ones specifically in fantasy role playing games 

Victrix

Perry

Aegema

Warlord

Gripping beast  

Wargames Factory 

Fire Forge

Conquest Games 

Amongst others and I am looking to develop this into a full article with examples in the near future so watch this space

the Blood-Clans of Jorikk

 Website update

This goes live tomorrow  Saturday 6th of September  see the site here  and I will be posting more about it on Sunday when I have had a good nose round it 

Inside Against the Robots A sneak peak

A couple of scree shots I took on Roll20 whilst working on the game

Section of the travel map the scale is five miles to the hex

A Section of the Map of Torch showing the characters tokens and the GM's view of characters and articles in the handouts section

 

Just so you know I have not been slacking

Episode Twenty three of a company of Fools a Preview

Whilst I have been delinquent in posting all that much about the Company of fools for a while because I fear I am rather getting demoralised by the amount I have not done and its given me a sort of writers block on the subject. However the game goes on none the less and all it will take is a cracking good session to recharge my enthusiasium banks and send me affter the back log and dealing with it

Episode twenty three will do just that so as a challenge to may players to night's the night you need to role play for your lives, characters any way, to amuse an jaded gm.

Tonight will concentrate on the party clearing out the Rot lords temple and cleansing the festering pits so up and at em....

on a positive point

Cool new stuff incoming 

see here

and much more on this an on

Episode Twenty two Preview

Situation report 

Two weeks have passed since every one arrived in the besieged town of Vayham and things have gone form bad to worse in all honesty. That the first serous attempt at storming the town was beaten off but food is getting expensive and the citizens in the town increasingly restive

as a game session is is the first in which all the Player characters in the game where present in the same general area  and the first time meeting for the new ones.

We also needed to level most of the characters in the game I had already done the NPC's but some people have a couple of player characters to do and one three

A review in planning

I plan on reviewing this latter.

Initial view

It is now downloaded and it took its time over the local steam powered internet ,I have skim read it and when I have given it a through read I will report back in detail however the initial skim read looks more than promising and the maps in the appendix in particular are more than worth it on their own.

Indeed when I have a chance to study them just the thing I need to tie the Company of Fools Campaign into the official setting  which is something I had wanted to do form the start, but couldn't get a clear enough map to tie it down in any of the published sources I had at the time.

Last Call for A Company of fools Episode Twenty one

Preamble 

Whilst one group of  Hero's languish in the care of the great hospital of Vayham our tale returns to another currently waiting on the edge of a cultivated wood looking down hill at the ruins of a burned out farm and its surrounding fields and a goblin camp huddled behind a crude low stockade fence where a company of up till now unaware goblins rest form their labours in besieging the town.

In the cellar of  that ruined farm hide a pair of humans a young priest if the caregiver, sent down from the temple in Neffaria in the north and a up till recently sore wounded  house guard of one of the northern land holders who was rescued from under his slain horse by the priest the day after that fateful night when the goblins over ran the north of Vayham county and nursed back to health with the caregivers magic.

Whilst in the root cellar an eager young gnome from the far north sleeps of the fatigue of the one Gnome war he has been waging against the goblins since he crossed the border from Neffaria county and found the lands to the south plagued with the creatures. not entirely unlike home though in the gnome holds the goblins where never about in these numbers no as brazen.

However our resting travellers are not alone at the farm it would seem......

D&D 5e

Some thoughts

Introduction

What follows may be a little off topic  as this bolg is first and foremost about a particular HackMaster 5e and started off being about one particular game and has spread to several others and associated topics. I did however start playing D&D with the pale blue starter box in 1976 & got My first copy of an AD&D book the soft cover players hand book for Christmas that year and moved to running AD&D first edition in early 1977 as the GMG and then the  Monster Manual came out and continued to be a player and a GM for some considerable time there after even if Traveller and particularly Runequest became my games of choice as both where less constraining character wise than the strictly class based Basic and Advanced D&D . I have played every other version of D&D/AD&D since even if I have not run a game with all of them and I liked the recent fourth edition up until the whole essentials fiasco and the killing of the stand alone character support programs which rather put me off with what I considered rather unnecessary rules changes indeed the only negative thing I could say about AD&D 4e was that it departed from the mechanics and the path of development which had started with AD&D 1e indeed it was even easier for a new player to grasp than previous editions and the core tier structure was rather nicely implemented and the introductory  adventure  Keep on the Shadow fell was fun from a player prospective. Indeed its on my list of adventures I would like to run for HM5e.

AD&D 5e

I have as yet not played this thought I am due to be playing a trial game at spirit Games on Tuesday which is tomorrow as I write this article and I have downloaded and browsed through the Basic download rules these I have to say did not grip me as the game felt more than a little bland and a bit limited but that might be just my reading of  what are when all said and done a set of starter rules and when I did the same a couple or three years back with the HackMaster Basic PDF it grabbed me by the collar and dragged me down Spirit Games to go on a hard copy hunt  and I have been an increasing HackMaster fan ever since This didn't I have to say but I am more than prepared to see how it works in practice even if I have this feeling its not going to knock HackMaster of its pedestal for me 

I will report back likely on Wednesday

AD&D 5e starter box review here

Anyway with this posted I will get back on topic

Episode Twenty - Final Preview

An Urban Interlude part Six

We will be returning to that fateful night and to the company of adventurers currently trapped in the unexpected sewer sore wounded and beset by foes on all sides. Will they endure, will they survive will they stop bickering and become a company of adventurers in truth all this is yet to be determined. However it will be over the course of tonight's game  session. 

moving on to Pod casting I still intend to introduce this but I have not yet had time to get set up for it and perhaps do a trial run to see how it works but the plan is still there its just taking longer than I had hoped to get it into action.

This Needs to be in HoB II

A small very feathered dinosaur which absolutely cries out for a set of Stats and an inclusion in the next volume of the HoB  indeed I may well give it a go for use in the Company of Fools game at some point

Adventures Elsewhere

Adventures Elsewhere 

Place holder image
Cooler one in progress

This is a solo on line game designed to fill out some of the aspects the World of Elsewhere and encourage an otherwise reluctant player into the wonderful world of on line gaming.  As it develop I will post more but at the moment it is still largely a Concept forming.

and here beginning to solidify into something with a shape

what I have so far ........

Introduction
They come to the outcaste they all know as Zen for one reason, because some one who was not going to be easy to kill needed killing. They came usually because they had sent their best after them and failed or they needed the death to be unattributable to them or the trail was so cold they felt they had lost it. However whatever variation on the tale it boiled down to one thing in the end Zen hunting down the mark and killing them. Zen was very good at this and they knew it, she was also their last resort and if she failed well it was acknowledged it could not be done at all. Except so far Zen had never failed.

So it was that the Elf queen came to the ruins in the swamp where Zen laired currently and came with as little ceremony as one so mighty could manage with a score of guards through the fringes of the lands of men not always friendly to elves and always afraid

and the start of an area map

New Monsters and Monster conversions

This is intended as something of a preview as if the game goes in one of the possible directions the players are going to come across a lot of weird and wonderful new creatures as possible antagonists the like of which Telene has not seen in an age if ever. Some of these will be conversions or adaptations of existing some completely new all I can say is watch this space

Some of the earlier ones I may need are distinctly outsiders as far as Telene is concerned and sinister ones at that 

to give a bit of a hint 

Episode Twenty Preview

Episode Twenty Preview 

For this Episode  we switch back to a few days earlier and the poor rat  beset trapped souls under the new and see if they can win free, which if they do will be just in time as we now know to discover that there town is besieged by hordes of foul goblins and no doubt worse. For surely stupid lazy creatures like goblins could never besiege a town and much less do so with any prospect of success, unless some greater power motivated them......

Watch this space for further developments and mean while a full write up of Episode Nineteen and a veritable raft supporting posts in the mean time.

Pod Casting

Pod Casting

It has been suggested that given all of the players in the Company of Fools Game have faces for radio, yes even Becca, well according to her any way., that instead of Videoing the occasional session we record all of them and turn them into a biweekly podcast. I am thinking about this one and was in any event considering getting multiple microphones to improve sound quality on the next Video which was frankly awful in the last video.  The  image quality would not be an issue any more either, it being only as poor as it was because the Video camera which John used was unable to run for a whole session on its internal battery, and unable to operate whilst charging either, so only had the endurance when connected to a laptop acting as a web camera, however this seriously degraded the image as you can see by comparing the recording of the two session. the first when the Camera was stand alone and the second when the same camera was used as a webcam. Uploading the results should be quicker and the editing before that more straightforward.

I don't think we will have this in place for episode Nineteen next week but I very much hope to manage it for the following  episode twenty. I will also get my lovely niece who has a beautiful speaking voice to record the story so far by way of a setting of the scene piece. .