The Long Dark Teatime of the Blog

Hey don't worry, internet pals! I'm still alive. What's good with you? That's great! What's good with me?  Uhh, we're playing a pretty fun extended "campaign" of 5e/DCC/Holmes/PbtA/ItO - pretty regular, rulesets vary but the setting and vibe is pretty much always the same. "Thrend" is a mixed-genre thing with Mutants and Magick and Weird Technology and Feudal Fantasy Americana/Oz/Tolkienisms. Mostly an excuse for us to get together and have pizza and beer every few weeks and laugh hilariously. I've been mulling over really putting the screws to my players and making them count arrows and torches and encumbrance etc. but uhhhhhhh I don't know. I sort of like the vibe we have. Think: Wizard of Oz crossed with Shadowrun and Star Frontiers. Picaresque, characters totally disposable but hilariously memorable mostly.

Sort of stole this, sorry OP, but it's close

The order of play is:

1) Sit down, catch up, order pizza, drink first beer.

2) Roll on my stolen-from-Oriental Adventures 1e monthly and weekly and daily events chart.

3) Interpret each roll in the context of the friend chat - interestingly my players are totally down with even half-hearted abortive jokes being used as canonical truths in the game narrative. No joke is safe from becoming interpreted into the campaign world.

4) Roll for carousing. My one player whose name rhymes with "Will" has a 3rd level Holmes human magic-user with an 18 charisma so his reaction roll is pretty disruptive to my plans and he's leaving markers and IOUs all over town. But luckily the carousing results prompt all sorts of events and hilarity.

This is how every game starts for the group, basically.

5) Do we make it to the dungeon? Yes - we are playing Zach H.'s refit of the Holmes starter dungeon, in preparation for running "Things Better Left Alone" which is Holmes' actual home dungeon and appears partly in the Boinger and Zereth novels - get thee hie to find if ye've not done

6) Use loose Holmesian rules to play, loose Moldvay order of combat/explore (including reaction rolls always), DCC vibes to vibe it, and Dungeon-World/PbtA/Perilous Wilds when adjudication needs, uhh, adjudicating

Example: last week, an incursion of haughty winged elfin refugees from the Sky Islands onto Portowne's southern farmlands and the deaths of a few innocent plebs required intervention. Carousing had already happened, mysterious amounts of money done spent, and obligations and complications discussed. The party, with new orc and goblin bar-back hirelings in tow, falsified the deed to the cliffside above the ocean on the dungeon and the elfs were too dumb/proud/irritating to check, so off the whole tribe went in a flash. I guess they will contend with the pirates, Dagonites, and Amazonians that are in the vicinity already, so that's fun. Then they went into the caves, murdered some pirates, bullied some Dagonites (who all hit the road back to the reef and probably tattled). The party DID NOT make it into the Dagonite mini-ziggurat, but they DID fight some weresharks and the fighter(paladin?) of G.I. Jesus contracted a suspicious fever, so they hot-footed it back to town and were quested by the Temple of The Red Mother's abbot to root out and destroy the Dagonites in the caves. They were given an Amazonian Spear +1 to put a dent in the weresharks, and I guess we needn't rely on the only magic weapon (a +1 dagger) they have to get much further into the dungeon.

So the Aerth is on fire, the current architects and administrators of the land are rabid hateful gibbons, upheavals everywhere, and superstition and barbarity are the order of the day. High technology is ubiquitous - almost magickal! And magick is making a resurgence. Androgyne elfs and robots stalk the land. 

Wait, is this my campaign, or is it the Waking World? The answer is: YES!

Luckily, I am playing things I don't share too much or often - you Dear Reader might be amused by the hilarity of my group. I beat Tears of the Kingdom last month which was practically a religious experience.

Wintermute is going to take my job and kick my shit in for all those LogicBomb 3.0s back in '87

Reading when I am able. Tearing apart/putting back together guitars and making weird instruments often. Collecting the tools I will need when Artificial Intelligences (blast them!) actually do take my job. Printing and painting the occasional mini - Cawdor warband, greenskin army, and a Rogue-Trader era Nurgle Genestealer Cult are on the bench but there is literally no pressure to ever finish those. I also have an orky Blood Bowl team always in progress - last week I printed out some bases and stripped some BB2e models I found for a steal.

Things are okay, but blogging ain't a priority at the moment. I'm still here tho!

It all comes down to this - Mordheim with pals

My buddy Gene made a big-ass, beautiful Mordheim table and pronounced a month-long campaign!

So I figure my hobby life, modest skill-building, and acquisition of tools and material goods and social connections have probably led up to this moment in a sense. My heart is glad and I will post pictures from tonight's last Thursday's game with a secret guest-star from the G+ days!

editore's noatationes: The secret guest star was Eric Hoffman of HoffCon over from Black Powder/Black Magic and other ttrpg ventures from DCC! but I posted the pics to FB/instagram. I had not seen him since 2018!

The night was full of foolhardiness and in one game I made so many armor saves I lost count. Krazy Karl the champion dove at a witchhunter's wardog from 2 stories up but garnered an Old Battle Wound, instead. The dog went on to badly maul the Youngblood Hanzy - who sadly got Multiple Injuries - leading to Survives Against The Odds and Hand Injury, so Hanzy is now the crossbowman trading off his spear to Friedrich. The rest of the team did about as well as could be expected, with lots of armor saves against witchhunter fire and ire. What started out as a chance to shoot the head witchhunter and his dogs like fish in a barrel turned hilariously awkward as they happened to be hiding in the very hilltop mortuary acropolis from which my team was shooting! So took my two casualties and bugged out, as his dogs woulda chewed through my archers pretty darn quick.

Afterward, we found an old trinket Shop in the ruins and a Lucky Charm but nothing else inside (still a nice roll of a '6'!). Used the money from the sale of wyrdstone to purchase Holy/Blessed Water and 10 Garlic, since I anticipate running into Undead or Chaos (although there are plenty of Sisters, Witchhunters, and other Mercs around).