Circle of Dar Janix

Thanks to  +Carlo Bottiglieri  and  +Richard G  for the links to their work on nautical battles. I have completed my research and started my actual work. Besides their work I looked at: Pirates of the Sea of Fallen Stars Spelljammer OD&D BECMI Expert Set Pathfinder: Skull and Shackles AD&D 1st ed DMG I feel like I will wind up taking at least something from most of them. I want to use hex maps and I want wind direction and momentum to really matter. I have also decided that I don't want to use a hit point-type system, instead I will rely on a critical hit chart and sinking/breaking up rules. There still will be a bit of hit point-type activity when it comes to breaking up, but I want it to have a different feel than man-to-man combat.  You can watch my progress over the next week or so here . 

Last weekend, I went to TridentCon and had a blast.  +Erik Jensen  really knows how to put on a great local con. This was my second year attending and I can't wait for next year's con. I started my Saturday by running Savage Rifts. I was a bit nervous about this game as I have never run it before (it just came out). I have run Savage Worlds (although it has been several years) and I have run Rifts (at least twice as long ago for this one) but never the new version. It turns out that I had no reason to be concerned. I stuck with Savage Rifts standard conceit, the players are members of the tomorrow legion. I brought the pre-gens that came with the Kickstarter and the players picked the glitter boy, the cyber knight, and the burster. The combination worked well. The setup of my adventure was that the Tomorrow Legion has detected that a rift has pulled a chunk of pre-Rifts earth into the world and sends the party, the closest unit, to investigate and help any people that may h

I am going to need some good nautical combat rules for one of the features I am adding to the Conquistador's Tomb. I am not interested in rules that are really only intended for one-on-one battles. I am looking for rules that will allow me to run naval battles that involve several ships, sea monsters, and possibly forts on the shore. The ships involved will be armed with black powder weapons. I have pulled some resources together. Right now I am looking at: OD&D Naval Combat BECMI Expert Set Pathfinder SRD Ship Combat Rules AD&D 1st edition DMG Spelljammer Ship combat is strangely absent from the 3.x core books. It is apparently in the Arms and Equipment Guide, which I have misplaced or lost over the years. The rules in Stormwrack , an excellent book, will not work due to their narrative nature. The .pdf for A&EG is fairly cheap if those rules are any good. Can anyone think of something I am missing? I thought LotFP had extensive rules, but there wasn't

Cleric Tibbers Fighter Frank the Enforcer Monk Rex Ruthor Paladin Unknown Wizard Unknown Barbarian Gorge Rogue Sir Bacon My Stonehell session at TridentCon this weekend was wild and a great deal of fun to CK. I ran Stonehell, using Castles & Crusades, for a table of seven, very fun, active players. Little did I know that this would be the most unusual session of Stonehell I have ever run. While it started as a standard dungeon delve, it took a turn for the dark and became a tale of madness under the earth. Madness and murder. The party began by heading north from the staircase room. As they approached the intersection where the “Da’ Dragon” sign traditionally stands, they saw a severed red dragon head on a stake in the middle of the hallway. A trail of blood led from the head into the natural caverns to the west. They decided to explore to the east and encountered the endless battle between the ghosts of Aeorn, the dwarf, and the cobra

The party decided not to risk its luck with the Hunter’s Lodge again this time and instead decided to explore a sublevel they discovered last year, but never explored. They knew of two entrances to the sublevel, one in area 1A28, and another in area 1A31. They had determined that there was a dome underneath this section of Stonehell with a radius of about 100 feet. The entrance under the Altar of the Laughing Skull was a shaft that opened into the center of the dome. A grate in a cistern led to a tunnel that opened into the side of the dome for the other entrance. While on their way to the new area, they passed a large statue of a lizard person that they had encountered in the past. There was a bucket full of silver coins at its feet. Previously, they had attempted to take the silver coins and the ceiling collapsed on them. There was still some rubble on the floor from the last collapse. This time they threw a coin into the bucket. The stony skin of the lizard person began to flak

My prep for Tridentcon continues, I expect to be done by the end of the weekend. I have an outline for my Star Wars game, and I might just keep it at that. So far, no one is signed up for it, so I might just come armed with the outline and pre-gens to run it in case I need it. I don't see any reason to sink too much time into it at this point.  Refresh my Savage Worlds rules knowledge Refresh my Star Wars rules knowledge Make pregens for Savage Rifts Make pregens for Star Wars Write Savage Rifts adventure Write Star Wars adventure Play test?  Find Savage Rifts minis Check Stonehell pregens I plan to use TokenTool for the Savage Rifts minis. I was planning on bringing my Star Wars minis, but I may just go theater of the mind for that to reduce prep work.  I have been fooling around with Dungeonographer in order to make the maps for my final version of the Conquistador's Tomb. It has way more features than I need, and they kind of get in the way of just throwing s

This Stonehell session went well. The party started by checking out the repaired stone head. They determined that the head now could answer more than three questions, provided new, cryptic responses, and seemed to be more unreliable. While leaving the head area, they saw a kobold work crew hauling off a large stone block. They found that the room they had previously used as a secure sleeping area had been converted to a staircase heading up. The staircase headed up about 60’. They began investigating the Hunter’s Lodge above. They fought some animated columns in the entrance hall and began exploring to the east when they heard some moaning coming from that direction. They opened the door to find a bathroom with a large man in flagrante delicto with a crystal gnome statue. They had a brief encounter with the naked hunter who wielded the gnome statue as a club, but he escaped by jumping into one of the pools, which seemed to teleport him elsewhere. They followed him to the pool an

When I posted again for the first time in a year, I listed some items that I needed to complete prior to TridentCon in October. I have been making good progress so far. Refresh my Savage Worlds rules knowledge Refresh my Star Wars rules knowledge Make pregens for Savage Rifts Make pregens for Star Wars Write Savage Rifts adventure Write Star Wars adventure Play test?  Find Savage Rifts minis Finish Final Fantasy V Finish Pokemon Yellow I have also made some progress on finding minis for my Savage Rifts game, I plan to use the Token Tool and just use tokens. I used to use Token Tool all the time for Savage Worlds, but I completely forgot about it. Now I just need to find some good pictures and get to work. I haven't made as much progress on the video game front. I have not touched Final Fantasy V, and I have barely played Pokemon Yellow. The main culprit here is the arrival of Dragon Quest VII for the 3DS. I pre-ordered it, but thought it came out in October for

The first video game I bought with my own money was Squaresoft's King's Knight for the NES. This was a time when you had to rely on the laminated cards in Toys 'R Us to determine whether a game was going to be good. Sure there were game magazines, but there was no guarantee they would cover a game, and they could be owned by the company trying to sell you the game anyway. King's Knight looked like a Zelda-style game, it was not. It looked awesome, it was not. King's Knight was a forced-scrolling shooter with terrible jumping thrown in. Most of the game play was getting crushed by terrain at the bottom of the screen. While I have no data, my guess is that after the release of Final Fantasy, a lot of very confused kids bought this piece of junk. Now in an attempt to rehabilitate Final Fantasy, which has had a rough decade, Square Enix is tying the return of King's Knight to the upcoming Final Fantasy 15.

If you play in my Stonehell game, do not read this entry. Tomorrow I am running another session of my Stonehell C&C game with my regular group. Last time, they had an amusing foray into one of the sublevels I created. I was very pleased with how it went. You can find a pdf of the level here . I used ChicagoWiz's One Page Dungeon Template to make itI placed this level where room 10 in level 1A used to be. There is a staircase that goes up 60' to this sublevel.  For me, the most amusing part of the game was their combat encounter with a naked man. 

So, I am about halfway through my reread of the Savage Worlds and I forgot how much I loved this game. I played a lot of Savage Worlds back in the mid-aughts, but I haven't touched it much since I moved for law school in 2008. I basically used Savage Worlds for everything for a while, it seemed like everyone was at the time. Of course the Internet was a bit more fragmented in those days, broken up into a lot more forum based communities, so it could have just been the Fear the Boot forums that we're going crazy with it (Savage Worlds Woooooo!).  Over time I moved away from Savage Worlds in favor of games where the mechanics were more tied to the theme of the games. I had played so much Savage Worlds that I could always see the man behind the curtain. Fantasy started to fell the same as scifi, which felt the same as superheroes. This is a danger for all generic systems, and a good argument for not using them for too many different campaigns back-to-back. I think this was even mo

So it has been a year since my last post. I never have been any good at updating this thing. I have had a pretty busy year and done a lot of gaming. I have a large amount of gaming related things going on in the short term, and I hope to use the blog to force myself to keep moving. I am running three games at TridentCon in a month. I will be running: A Castles & Crusades Stonehell session. This requires almost no prep on my part as I use both the rules and the setting for my regular game. A Savage Rifts adventure that I am writing. This is going to be the most trouble of the three. I have played a lot of Savage Worlds, but I have not touched it in about 5 years. I backed Savage Rifts, and I have read through the .pdfs. I need to go back through the Deluxe Rulebook and actually write the adventure. I also need to come up with suitable miniatures, paper of plastic. A WEG d6 Star Wars adventure. I have not run this game in a very long time, but it is simple, and I ran it every