Magic @ OTH Sat 7/17/04

I started planning the details for this about a month ago, when I got the itch to do something with Magic: The Gathering again. What I figured was that there would be some other people who would enjoy a booster draft, people who missed organized Magic games since Area 51 closed a couple of years ago. With Richard at Old Town Hobby (Shelton, WA) carrying gaming stuff now, I knew that was the place, since there's a meeting room upstairs. He's a great guy, and was all for it. Originally, it was going to be $12.50 and he dropped it to $10, with good prizes, did an in-house flyer and a couple of ads in the Journal. I called the guys two weeks ahead, a couple of days ahead and a couple of guys on the day of to remind them.
    We had eight players, plus me to judge and score, armed with a fresh copy of Scrye. It took a little while to get going (sign ups began at 10, initial play at 11:15), but everyone seemed happy to be there and willing to wait a bit for a couple of guys. The boosters were Dark Steel, Mirrodin, and Fifth Dawn. Richard also threw in one free dice from his jar for each player. I randomly determined table seating and initial pass direction. Drafting took about 40 minutes or so, and deck assembly took about another half hour. 
   After 3 rounds (Swiss scoring) of intense competition, the rankings were pretty close to settled. The final four ended up as Zach, John, Carson and Ian. The 5-8 ranked players were Jon, Chaun, Beau and Sam. I had a great time, and there were very few occasions where anyone needed a ruling. I had John act as 2nd judge, since he has kept current with the new cards. Thanks to everybody, we all had a great time, see you on the 3rd Saturday in August and September! - Dave

Second Saturday in July

7-10-04, 12-6 pm. Well, it must be summer. Of my 10 players (give or take), only 4 made it to the D&D game. A concert, work, no answer, a family vacation and life in general are happening this time of year, and I understand. But it was a great session. Roddy, Robby, Carson and Shane played Revan (3rd Lvl. H Pal), Joseph Prax (3rd Lvl. H Cler.), Taito (3rd Lvl. H Mnk) and Flegal (3rd H Rgr). The party had finished the previous month's session in Moporia, one of the biggest cities in my post-Tenneous Aarde campaign. For this group, I haven't driven home just how nasty the Purple Order (high elf invasion) can be, and I've still got a ways to go. Revan had the greatest suspicion of Priestess Tillaplum (The Plum Priestess) of the Amaranth temple when she offered to teach the party any crafts or skills they wanted for nothing more than a bit of help making things, since the elves there were few, but with lots of skills and much to do and make, just needing some extra hands. The party agreed to come with her, above Revan's initial impression. "She's a WITCH," he said for no apparent reason. But Taito wanted to learn about Brewing, Joseph was interested in Armory and Blacksmithing related skills. Flegal wanted to learn more about herbalism and apothacary supply. So Revan was convinced he would learn a skill, and he decided on Rope Use. The NPCs, Geena (3rd Dw. Ftr), Telpin (2nd gn. Brd) and Mick the Gangly (2nd H Ftr) went along with the rest of the party, into the temple. Everyone learned some skills, a rank or two, though it was more difficult for those without the Int bonuses, such as Taito. Only later, after a week or so, was the problem discovered. The elves would not allow their "indentured servants" to leave. And each of them was armed with wands of charm person, which they used repeatedly to keep gaining the benefits of free labor, the fruits of which were products being sold in several neighboring markets. Those who could resist were told they would be allowed to leave the next day (or anything they wanted to hear to keep them until they fell asleep), given beer and wine (and maybe a Forget spell or two), and the next day, they woke up in jail cells. From the jail cells, a few were taken (in their sleep) for experimentation by evil elvish wizards and clerics, or tortured. Revan was transmuted into a female elf, and unspeakable acts were done to her by at least one of the guards. Joseph Prax finally prayed for 3 shatter spells (his god is good, but also a god of vengeance and destruction and grants shatter). Three guards used their wands of charm person on him, but he resisted. He then cast sanctuary, an underrated spell. Now they needed to make saving throws to attack him. Because they had not yet stripped armor off of the prisoners (so as not to wake them when they put them in their cells) even the attacks that could be made on Joseph missed. He then shattered free 3 of the others, they fought the guards, took their maces and keys, and eventually battled their way to freedom. They captured the transmuter who had changed Revan into a female elf, and after some consideration of advantages and disadvantages, Revan was convinced to use the opportunity to change back into his original human male self. Telpin and Mick the Gangly are now 3rd level, and the party found multiple potions of undetectable evil, several wands of charm person, and monetary treasure that worked out to 900 gp per person.

My next session is the Wednesday group, in two days (Wednesday 7/14/04 6-9 pm). I need to put my brain back in underdark mode and get a good session ready. Until next time, keep hack'n & slash'n... - Dave

More June sessions

So Crom lived. Maybe you think he should be dead, being that he was at negative 14 hit points or something like that from the giant beetle. Well, Crom's g-d Io didn't want him to be dead. Crom was to stubborn to die, Jon didn't want Crom to die, and I didn't want the campaign to lose the only lizardman paladin it has ever seen. No, the party didn't have the money or connections to get him resurrected, especially in the underdark. I could have thrown a magic item their way that would take care of this little problem. Ultimately, because he had gained enough experience to level, and the new hit points would keep him from dying, I awarded XP early in his case, and told Jon that Io had refused Crom entrance into the kingdom of the dragons.
And I replaced the fallen Daybill, the halfling bard giant hamster rider, with Nightsong Sharpfang, a female kobold with very similar skills, including an uncanny ability to ride Lomax, Daybill's now-lonely mount.
The group is getting a bit bigger. For a long time, it was just me, Jon, Rob and Alex. Then Phil started coming. Now that school is out, Shane plays too. Most of the Wednesday characters are 4th level now. There's Crom, Nightsong, Aiko (Penny's dwarven monk), Shianji (Alex's dad Rob's monk, the only character besides Aiko to survive the campaign from the start), Alex's samuri and Phil's new character (a gnome sorcerer, I think) plus whatever Shane brings next Wednesday (I think he's working on a rogue). Sometimes Carson makes it, and he has a half-orc barbarian who is only 3rd level, but should hold his own.
Currently, the party is trying to locate and destroy a psionic artifact, a ballista of the mind flayers. Things are going to be tough for a while, especially with everybody in the underdark.
Every other Wednesday, Alex runs Star Wars, and he is an excellent gamemaster who knows the rules well, can put together a good story and spends time and hard work on mapping, npc's etc. My Twilek Scoundrel is no longer posessed by a Sith, and my Jedi Counseler, Quern Bomon just levelled to 11th. It's too bad Pieda died, but oh well.
The Saturday group keeps plugging along. Chaun brought a new player, Shawn. It's a good sized group that meets just once a month on the second Saturday. Since we started new characters just a couple sessions ago, the highest-level characters are 3rd level, I think. Roddy plays a paladin, Robby has a cleric, Penny has a dwarven archer, Carson has a monk, Shane plays a ranger, and Jesse replaced his wizard with an orcish barbarian, I think. I have a couple of NPCs, Mick the Gangly (a fighter) and Telpin (a bard). Phil plays a rogue, Chaun and Shawn play fighters, I think. I'm probably forgetting a bunch of stuff. Most of the party is human. The campaign focus is on an invasion of very motivated "moon" elves bent on taking over the Aarde.
I have talked to a few people about doing a Magic: The Gathering booster draft tournament at Old Town Hobby on the 3rd Saturday of July, August and September. 3 boosters and a 10 am-4 pm or so tournament with prizes for $12.50. I will run it and judge it (and play the "bye" games to keep people from getting bored). The perfect number of players would be 8. I have to go now, more later.

5/26/04 and 6/2/04 Sessions

Things have been tough for player characters the past couple of weeks. A week ago Wednesday the 26th, Alex ran Star Wars and half of our characters were possessed by the Sith ghosts. We finally left the tomb of the dark siders, but Koyi Komon, my scoundrel, will unfortunately discover that when he returns to his senses, more than half of his considerable fortune (about 50,000 of his 99,000 credits) will have been spent on carousing and an old bounty hunter enemy who was hired by "Koyi" (actually the possessed Koyi) to wipe out rivals in a town on the mining world Selfor.
Then last night, I ran my Aarde D&D session. Happily, I have my new 3.5 edition DMG, and I was also armed with some good notes and ideas for the game. The party is in the Underdark now, and Ani (Alex's ranger) pushed the canoe off downriver. So they have been down there for about four weeks and run through their torches and rations. Most of the party are humans, but luckily they have a couple of magic weapons that give about 5' of light to see by. They're exploring deeper into the caves, mainly because they are tired of eating Hydra meat (see notes from the last sesssion). With lots of water everywhere, they focus on the drier caves. Jon's paladin, Crom, being a lizardman, has darkvision, which is helpful when the party encounters 5 Fire Bats, which they dispatch somewhat easily. Phil shows up late, and we hand him Xymo (a human fighter). Daybill (the npc halfling bard), Aiko (Penny's dwarven monk) and Crom uncover a pit trap which Shianji (Rob's human monk) jumps across with the party's only 50' rope. Daybill begins to cross and falls 30' onto spikes -- and lives! Ani falls while climbing to rescue Daybill, and also lives, then cuts open a boulder-sized egg sack with a giant beetle inside. Upon hearing other beetles making their way to him, Ani and Daybill scramble out of the pit. The 10' long Giant Rhino Beetles attack the party with a vengeance. At the end of the encounter, Daybill, Ani and Xymo lay dead. Aiko is unconscious, and Crom appears to be dead (but it turns out he isn't). More next time, gotta go.

Wed. Session Notes

Wed. 5/19/04 Dave, D&D
Last night's D&D game had a lot of action, with Red Trail and Applejack Brandy escaping the party's big finish, while Four-Foot Pete and Umatil Lou bit the dust. After exploring Anne's Grove village, the group bought a canoe and voyaged underground, where they defeated a 7-headed cryohydra. Aiko and Ani both levelled to 5th. Daybill almost lost Lomax, Xymo did some tracing for a scribe to pay off a debt to Ani, and also got robbed. Shianji's flurry of blows speaks for itself. Crom fought off hybernation and a short swim to make an impressive showing against the hydra. Now that the canoe is gone, it looks like an Underdark setting for a while...

Coming up:
Wed. 5/26/04 6:30-9:30 Alex, Star Wars
Wed. 6/2/04 Dave, D&D
Sun. 6/6/04 12-6 Dave, Mordheim (call to confirm)
Sat. 6/12/04 12-6 Dave, D&D
Wed. 6/16/04 6:30-9:30 Dave, D&D
Wed. 6/23/04 Alex D&D or Star Wars
Wed. 6/30/04 Dave, D&D
Sat. 7/10/04 12-6 Dave, D&D
Wed. 7/14/04 6:30-9:30 Dave, D&D
Wed. 7/21/04 Alex, D&D or Star Wars

Aarde -- And Back

Tonight's campaign setting will be Aarde.

Some background
Back in the day, I've run some other campaigns. I played my first game of D&D in 1979, when 1st edition was new. I still have my first D&D book, the Monster Manual my dad bought me, which I promptly memorized and ruined with sticky tabs for quick reference. My first character was a paladin, and he was killed and robbed in a party battle while being used as a trap detector by a higher level evil cleric in the party. I was hooked though and within a year I was DM'ing. I ran some modules but mostly made up my own stuff. It was the cold war and D&D somehow fought off the recurring nightmares for me. My earliest campaign was Rotalia, built from a city designed on concentric circle graph paper from physics class. Greyhawk was such a big influence that it was a continent on the same world and you could sail a ship from one campaign to the other. My old Kelnorn map includes Rotalia and also has the Jinell Jungle on it and so many countless other places. You could sail off from somewhere and end up anywhere; it's an incredibly huge world basically made of lots of campaign worlds mushed together that allowed for anything to happen. Rick R. played a druid named Glenstorm who once did Plant Growth on a salad until it consumed a tavern he didn't like. Todd G. played dwarves, and once wrote a persuasive essay to convince me and TSR to allow dwarves to go unlimited levels as fighters. Matt L. played gnome illusionist-thieves, or monks with halberds and was an incredibly smart and insightful player who once analyzed the game and concluded that fighters were the best class because they could dish out and take the most damage, plus do whatever any spellcaster could do if they had the right magic items. There were plenty of other players too (keep reading) but this is the earliest group I remember. We used to hang out at a comic book and game store called House of Fantasy. I was never into drugs but I was sure hooked on games. We used to play Traveler, MegaTraveler, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & other Strangeness, Star Fleet Battles, Risk, Stratego, Killer and so on. B Shane P. was my first DM, and he loved JRR Tolkein before that was hip. He was in that first group and so was a different Rick R. who was a bit older than us. Jim C. worked at House of Fantasy and was also a player. I rode my skateboard to school or my BMX bike everywhere but what I loved most was D&D. I had a paper route so even though our family were not rich I always seemed to be able to afford the books, dice, minis and modules that I wanted. Other players included Art F., who couldn't roll a dice to save his life; Dave H., who liked illusionists so much he invented spells for them, and others. Later I traded a skateboard for a stack of modules and so I've run and/or played (or both) most if not all of the 1st edition modules (B1, G1-3 etc.) at least once and in many cases multiple times. I learned a lot about format and style, yet there is a lot of variation even in these areas between modules. The problem was, my players bought the modules too so they could beat them so I ended up writing a lot more adventures if for no other reason than to maintain a surprise factor.

Circa 1984-1986: I began running a new campaign with Spencer C., who loved Star Wars, Robotech and all things Japanese, gnomes, elves and GM'ing; Jason, who played elven rangers a lot, including a character named Finarfin; Tim I., who played a half-ogre; Ivan A., who was a good player. We fought every monster in the monster manual, in every possible setting. I ran impromptu adventures a lot using the monster and treasure assortment supplement. We traded DM responsibilities a lot even then so we could each get a chance to run as well as play. I had a grey elf wizard name Deston, and a human cleric named Razal. Somewhere around this time I memorized 2nd Edition (well, for the most part anyway).

I even founded and ran a game convention at my community college, about 200 people came. I wrote modules complete with pregenerated characters for that. About that time I played with Paul K., Timmer D. and that group.

Circa 1986-1989: When I went off to finish my 4 year degree, my D&D books came with me and I ran a campaign while in my fraternity. Knowing it would just be for one school year, I intentionally made that campaign world small, in fact it was based on a small moon. Time was tight so the writing had to be also. The Sonaeed campaign (sometimes I just called it Na) began from ideas that occurred to me after taking some astronomy classes. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Diemos. The asteroid belt is such wreckage it suggests some ancient cosmic battle. I imagined a huge back story in which the moons were habitable long ago (Sonaeed is loosely based on Diemos spelled backwards, which I also did with Soboff more directly). Anyway the party had to adventure in and explore 20 cities on Sonaeed during the school year and build up diplomacy to get every nation together to fight one big baddie right at the end in a spelljammer battle in space. The bad guy, a wizard named Signatious had effectively become immortal by making potions of longevity which cost the lives of elves, whom he enslaved. Some of those players included Art H., Keith H., Nathan D. and others. I also played in Art's campaign, which a crossover D&D/Gamma World campaign. My character, Dexter, was an elven wizard/thief who took the opportunity to cast Find Familiar while in a different, more radioactive time and place. As a result, he got himself a raccoon with a double brain mutation, named Einstein. When he got back to the D&D setting, Einstein, who had advanced in level himself, did a Find Familiar and got Edison, a brownie, who in turn got himself a black cat which is more traditional. That was a very fun campaign. So that gets me to about 1989 or so.

When I got back to my hometown I resumed play with my previous groups in different incarnations for a while, before I moved for my career. It was fall of 1991 (ooh I hope I'm right) at Spencer C's house where I met my future (and still happily) wife, Penny W. That of course changes everything, but in this case less than you might think since she's a gamer too, and spent our first night kicking my butt at Cribbage. Okay but this is a gamer blog, so I'll stick to what campaigns & players go to when, just for the purposes of back story for this Blog. So a bit later around that time, as a result of who I knew I became a published game designer for Mayfair Games, I wrote "Denizens of Old Durnick Ruins" section for the Role Aids supplement, "People, Places and Things," basically filler for when parties get sidetracked. I was paid a kill fee so I don't get any residual from that and I'm sure it's long out of print now, but hey at least I'm published.

After the move, I had to put together a new gaming group. I went to local comic and game stores and had a couple of false starts because believe it or not, just because someone plays the same games doesn't mean you're going to get along. There were several one-off sessions of this and that, some D&D and Magic but kind of a dearth of campaigns for a while. I ran a Spelljammer campaign with a small group including Stefan C. for a short time. I had some other things on my mind anyway... But I did get together with the old players a couple times when I would visit my old stomping grounds. Other than a few sessions here and there, it was a bit of a dry patch. For a couple of years we gamed with Nick and Tracy M., who were (are, I'm sure) excellent gamers and Tracy was more fanatical than me about running the game. I think his depth of knowledge about everything Forgotten Realms, and his ability to create beautiful pencil drawings of adventuring parties made me a bit jealous. Magic was just getting going and Nick introduced us to the power of a Goblin deck. We had some great D&D, Gurps and D20 modern games (including a great Jack The Ripper adventure), most of which Tracy ran.

Later, Dave H. would come up and we played some Magic. That eventually led to an opportunity to be part owner of a game store in 1999, an opportunity which I jumped at but later regretted somewhat. My Aarde campaign was born around that time. In order to support the games we sold, I ran multiple campaigns, including a Star Wars group, a D&D group, Mordheim (Games Workshop) skirmish battles and Penny ran Deadlands (original rules, not d20). I tried my hand at inventing games, and I wrote and edited a gaming newspaper about the store and the games we carried. All this time, I kept my day job. Unfortunately (but in some ways fortunately) due to the departure of a business partner, personal life events and (mostly) market conditions, the game store petered out after 2 years and 2 months. But the campaign survived at the prompting of my wife, for the sake of my sanity I think. I will always be grateful that so many players stuck with me. Looking back at that time, I think at times my moonlighting at the shop very nearly ruined the gaming hobby I love by making it too much like work. At the same time, it gave me an excellent perspective on retail, gaming, marketing and so many other valuable things in my life. I count as my best friends the people I got to know when we had that shop and we still talk about those days all these years later.

So anyway that more or less catches you up to here.