gamegrene.com

Update: The 'Pussyfooting' adventure got put on hold, just as it was about to get going in earnest too. Sadly, and irritatingly, the referee flaked out on us - we took a break for Christmas and then we couldn't entice him back to the table afterwards (another formerly excellent roleplayer becomes a drone in the Blizzard collective - we are meeting at his house, and he just sits upstairs at his PC raiding, unable or unwilling to tear himself away - which is what he does most evenings now so far as I can gather).

I will be taking the reins and continuing the Pusyfooting storyline on his behalf at some point. But for the moment I have a storyline of my own to see to its conclusion. A link to 'The Rescuers' journal will be posted shortly.

More Rescuers

In which we learn a little about certain people's motivations

http://www.community.fogonline.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopi...

Rescuers (next bit)

Well, I'm going to press on regardless...

http://www.community.fogonline.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopi...

Rescuers (yet more)

http://community.fogonline.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=...

Again, Rescuers

Phew. One day soon I'll catch up to where the party is at....

http://www.community.fogonline.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopi...

About 6 sessions / episodes. We're on a temporary suspension, though, due to various RL factors. Play will re-commence in two weeks time, by which time I hope to have caught up the journal.

A few points I thought I'd mention, peering 'under the bonnet' as it were:

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Rescuers Returns

http://community.fogonline.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=...

Yep, I'm still here. Been pretty busy lately. The campaign's still going strong, just behind on my write-ups!

More Rescuers

For those who are interested...

http://community.fogonline.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=...

Rescuers Forges Onwards

http://community.fogonline.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=...

Happy New Year to you all...

Rescuers - Another Serving

http://fogonline.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1599#1599

Rescuers Keeps Coming

http://fogonline.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1601#1601

Time for an update on the latest happenings in Gherkin’s Greyhawk. I am presently running a large-scale battle - involving thousands of troops - as an adventure. The challenge with this is to keep the action focussed on the player characters while giving them the feeling of being part of a huge battle that is going on around them.

The PCs’ involvement occurs through a series of ’scenes’ which depict particular combat engagements or missions that they find themselves in. The players are told what their objectives are and how this will affect the overall progress of the battle if they succeed.

The first scene - retaking a village that had fallen into enemy hands - took a couple of sessions to conclude, but since then I’ve been aiming to make each scene last one session. As a group we are lucky enough to have a large collection of figures (that’s ‘minis’ to you youngsters) so we can lay out a large number of combatants on the tabletop. However, in order to speed up some of the larger-scale combat engagements, things happening on the periphery that do not directly involve any of the PCs are run in an abstract sense only - in other words, I make it up as I go along rather than making hundreds of dice rolls, knocking down kills and moving the battle lines forward or back to provide the flavour of what is happening.

The ‘bad guys’ that the PCs are facing here are mostly orcs, ogres, trolls etc. That may sound a little mundane but actually they don’t often come up against these mainstays of fantasy villainy, so it makes for a pleasant change. They have axebeak cavalry and a squadron of wyvverns. The PCs tend to find themselves up against the enemy’s elite forces and commanders - although they do sometimes find themselves up against opponents that they significantly outclass and they then get to enjoy the pleasure of putting them to the rout with contemptuous ease. I think you owe it to your players to give them these sorts of encounters once in a while.

I have made good use of the 3.5e ‘Heroes of Battle’ supplement for this adventure. The authors suggest constructing a battle adventure flowchart and a complete set of diagrams of all the potential battlefield states corresponding to flowchart outcomes; I toyed with the concept but realised that this would be a huge amount of work and much of it would be wasted as only one actual path through the flowchart would be followed. (I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried using this method exactly as the book suggests). Maybe if I were writing an adventure for publishing, this amount of rigour would be required. Instead, I have taken an incremental approach, drawing up a plan of the battlefield and the location of units for the players, then running them through a scene or two, then drawing up a revised plan based on the outcome, and so on.

Battle of Westkeep - Phase 1

Battle of Westkeep - Phase 2

Battle of Westkeep - Phase 3

I started by drawing out the terrain and then overlaid a sheet of acetate and used OHP markers to draw in the units; a wet cotton bud is used to erase a unit prior to repositioning. (I totally have the skill to do all this on a computer but it’s so much more fun doing it by hand…..)

When working on this kind of thing it very much helps if you have experience of tabletop wargaming and/or military re-enactments. What I’m effectively doing here is creating snapshots of the battle in progress. These are shown to the players. In fact, their characters would not know what is going on across on the other side of the battlefield. However, showing these to the players gives them a sense of being a part of the greater whole and the feeling of the scale of the event that they are immersed in.

Plenty of description plays an important part in this kind of adventure. This locale has now seen three armies turn up and lay seige within the past three months; it’s war-torn, and corpses have lain unburied for weeks. It’s also nice to mention magical explosions that are seen and heard going off in the near distance, from the PCs viewpoint. Sometimes stray riderless mounts are encountered. Lady Ambarran, an elven healer riding a unicorn, breezes in after an engagement, escorted by her guards and protected by a banner that radiates a Sanctuary effect, and offers healing to the poor wounded humans.

The player characters are a large and diverse bunch so I split some of them off to go on a commando raid on a catapult battery, secretly ‘parachuting’ them behind enemy lines - dropping them off the backs of griffon cavalry with the aid of potions of feather fall and invisibility.

I have also given some players a chance to run some high-level NPC heroes, just for the pleasure of being really outrageous combat monsters…..

If the Keoish army is successful in defeating these forces, which seems likely, they will march upon their final objective - the City of Monmurg. The main issue with this battle is not so much whether they will win, as how dearly that victory will be bought, and whether they will be strong enough to take Monmurg afterwards.

Can't believe my last post on this thread was October last year! OK, so in brief - we have spent almost a year now in real time running the PC's-eye-view of the actual assault on the city that I discussed above. We meet once weekly for an evening session, by the way. We were on hiatus for a while due to some RL stuff getting in the way, and then I needed a break for a while so our other DM stepped into the breach for a few sessions. Nevertheless, that's still around 40 sessions we've run on this, which is approximately 160 gaming hours.

We really are close to the end of it all now, at last. Early last year (2010) I actually imagined, WWI style, that it would all be over by Christmas. Looks like I was out by a year.

I'll do a write-up on this after the dust settles.

In other news, I've just started a PhD in Astrophysics (at the age of 46, just to disprove what they say about old dogs and new tricks).

Geriatric? Well, as a wise man once said, "When 46 Years Old You Reach, Look This Good You Will Not". Or something like that :P

Good to see Gamegrene rising from the grave once more. I have been lurking on these recently active threads but too busy to find the time to chip in. I must get into that social interaction thread sometime, it's a subject I've pondered recently.

Since you ask, I'm working on computational modelling of protostellar jets. In a nutshell - young stars grow in a similar way to a human child, by adding mass through inflows of matter from the surrounding environment. And like a human child, they also - er - produce outflows as well. In the case of young stars, these are supersonic jets of gas (typical speeds are 100 kilometres per second) that escape at the poles, launched by powerful magnetic fields. I'm aiming to improve on existing computer models of this process, which plays a key role in star formation.

"We really are close to the end of it all now, at last."

Cannot believe I wrote that in September.

Gherkin's Greyhawk still lumbers onwards towards its end. I found that I really had to flesh out some events that I originally thought we would just skim over. The players became emotionally involved in the outcome of these events to a greater extent than I'd expected so I just had to do them justice by devoting some extra sessions to them. Having set out to build an atmosphere of desolation and despair, it surprised me when I found that I had actually succeeded.

But we really, really, absolutely definitely are close to the end of it all now. I mean, *really* absolutely definitely. Not the other kind of definitely.

This week, I managed to kill a long-standing and well-loved NPC, allied with the party. Uswuld Voss. The grizzled chieftan of a barbarian tribe [19th level, if you must know] who the player characters had persuaded - against his initial instincts - to lead his people to war alongside them. On the advice of one of the player characters an assault was mounted against a gatehouse - one of the last bastions of the enemy's defences. Voss led the charge. He died after just one blow [and a failed save vs massive damage - bad time to roll a 1]. He slumped to his knees, his head stoved in by a huge morning star. It seems the enemy leader, Terraktus, had decided to take a personal interest in the defence of this gatehouse, and it was none other than he who had weilded the weapon that had taken their friend's life with such frightening ease. Terraktus yanked the considerable bulk of Voss' lifeless form aloft with one hand and dangled his corpse in front of the PCs before contemptuously hurling him to the ground before them.

'Oh dear.....I think I've broken him.'

Four sessions to go. I think.