With the best of intentions…Homebrew, table top, R.P.G super soup.

With the best of intentions…Homebrew, table top, R.P.G super soup.

This is going to be kind of a disjointed post, I apologize ahead of time.

With the best of intentions I have tried to put up Monday, Wednesday, Friday posts without too much filler. With work and the holidays, my unfortunate nba2k14 addiction, and actual gaming this past week I found myself lacking proper inspiration for today post.

Let’s get to the Homebrew goodness.

You ever think that game design is addicting? When I get something that’s really clicking I can work on it for hours and hours and the time just flies. The only other time I ever get like that is when I used to draw and paint regularly. It’s a similar endorphin rush. The other side of that same token however, is if things are not clicking I get grumpy and drop into a depressed mood.  (Not depression really, just a shitty mental state, depression is serious business and I don’t want to make light of it.)

So it is with that in mind that I find myself in a conundrum. I find myself working on side things, when really I should be concentrating 100% on Shards of Thimbral.

Focus, ya see, has never been my strong suit, and R.P.G. ideas are a bit like crack to me.  So I spent Sunday reformatting and clarifying rules for “The block game” which we played on Saturday.

The block game was great fun as it always is, but as I have said before, Here:

Block game: not fit for human consumption

The block game is a beast with a thousand heads, I would need a team of professionals to fix all the holes in that sucker and the fact is I think it would be less fun for the effort.

I need to stay focused and get some setting tidbits up on this blog and hopefully get some more people interested.  Right now I just have some play test notes, A setting framework, a rough as sand paper character sheet, and good intentions.
Considering I only have a few months to get something solid going before I try to hit local cons, I need more hooks than what I’ve got. (Not being negative, just realistic.)

Speaking of settings: (we Were!) If you have not please check out Mike Evan’s Hubris setting for Olds school games.
Hubris HERE! (click me you will not be disappointed)

It’s pretty spectacular, non nonsense, good.

On the tabletop:

so what Have I been actually playing?  Glad you asked.

My wife and I tried a game of “Summoner wars” last week, and I really enjoyed it.  She beat me so naturally she enjoyed it as well. I played Dwarfs and she played elves, we both went though our whole decks and it came down to a few choices at the end. (I need to figure out how to get those war priests into the fight without getting them picked off.) The game looks to have some real strategic depth, and given we bought the master set with about 6 factions, there is enough to keep us busy for a while.

We also rocked some old school AD&D2ndED in our adventure to kill Krampus. My friend Jay ran a dungeon crawl style game with one goal, “Kill Krampus before he eats the children.”  What kind of hero can turn that down?

This game was relived in two posts on this blog form the point of view of my character Brandr the Barbarian.  (My writing skill makes even a barbarian sound dumber than he really is.)

Brandr part 1

Brandr Part 2 "Deeper into the Krampus"

It’s a lot to retell so I’m not going to go into that again. 
I will say is that Roll20 is pretty damn great for this kind of thing. We don’t use the built in voice IP functions we use Skype, but besides that the ability to write on the map, use tiles, swap tokens, health bars , etcetera is just really cool. I am an at the table guy, but for online play this is the best tool I have used so far. I have been considering opening up my wallet, feeding the moths, and getting a year full membership, just so I can dick around with the API.

After the game Jay decided that he enjoyed running dungeon crawls enough that he wants us all to make 4^th ED characters to use when he wants to run a game. I agree with him it might be better for us to have spate characters simply because the “Krampus” group were all involved in my 2^nded old school campaign, getting someone killed in a side quest would be counterproductive.  I have my least amount of experience with 4^th edition D&D, so this should be interesting. (Does it matter? I always make fighters.)

Finally as mentioned above we broke out “the block game” on the 28^th.  
So here is my guilty mind working, I have been trying to write out and install a random loot system for the block game for a long time now.  Every time I get it going something stops me. I don’t like the format, the charts don’t work, I grind away for twelve hours on an NBA game. Whatever the reasons the fact is I wanted to do more with the block game for this get together and I just didn't. 
Next time will be better, because next time will not be two days after the busiest holiday of the year.  
For what it’s worth I got to use some of my cardboard scenery and the back side of some wrapping paper to make a pretty large game. The party rolled some orcs and goblins and I thought it was going too easily until one guy blew himself up and the toughest fighter of the bunch got surrounded by goblins and took some strong hits. I sat out of the player side of the game and just ran the monsters, there were enough players that having a facilitator was the best way to go. One more player figure on the board would not have helped or hindered.

used some scenery with the blocks this time, that blood bowl orc is gonna get it.

The party confronts an orc, a goblin and  two  cave slimes... time to get messy

Speaking of my 2^ndED game,(we weren’t) it continues tonight; nothing more to say about other than I’m glad to be to picking it back up so soon after Christmas I thought it was going to be a while.

I got invited to play Numenera, so that will be a thing pretty soon. I’m looking forward to it.

Then there is DeadZone. I did an un-boxing video and there it sits…. I think I’m intimidated by it, all the gluing…… the endless gluing.

The RPG Soup thickens!
See you on the New Year

As always thank you for reading.

Questions

Comments

And Shenanigans  welcome!