Housekeeping
New Site
I finally migrated off Squarespace and I’m very happy to have done so. This site is now using Astro to build a static page off Markdown files. It’s hosted for free on Cloudflare, I’m just paying for the domain name. This was all done via Codex and I highly recommend everything I just mentioned. Still some things to clean up/improve/figure out, but for now it’s looking better and I’m very happy with the change in editor from Squarespace’s CMS to VSCode.
I think existing links should work, unless I missed some. I think the next thing I need to do is add Disqus should anyone want to comment.
Legions Imperialis Unit Guide Published
I published what is really the first draft of a strategy guide for sapce marines units in Legions Imperialis. I plan to have more of these but this is the starting point. It was a fair bit of work but I enjoyed writing it. Find it here Legiones Astartes Review.
What I Ran
The Black Drop - Trail of Cthulhu
Partway through the month we finished up The Black Drop, a Trail of Cthulhu scenario. This was my first time running something in the Cthulhu mythos and it felt like a real learning experience. I like the scenario a lot, being based in a real-world location with real-world politics going on is a really great setting for the adventure.
Spoilers follow.
We left off with the players having been ambushed as they slept by cultists. One player had to leave slightly early but that worked out really well, we picked up this session with the fate of that party member and I was actually really happy with how that worked so I’ll play out the scene a little.
The player in question is woken up by a scream (her host in the next room dying) and she decided to hide. She was successful so we had a short scene as the murderer came into the room and walked around while the PC hid in a wardrobe not able to see. This worked really well, there was a lot of tension, this player had missed the other murder scenes so didn’t know what was going on. Because the PC hid I decided that the murderer in question (a teenage girl) would return home and feign innocence.
Really that was the high point of the session for me. After this we ran into one issue I see in the adventure now - one of the tensions in it, that I love is that there is a party of Germans including a literal Nazi who are trying to stop the cosmic horror from escaping. And the tension is, will the players believe and help the Nazis? And when it came down to it that decision seemed pretty clear. I think if running this again, or if you’re running it, give more reason to doubt the Nazis. The other issue is Gumshoe and RPGs in general. My players just used a skill to see if the Germans were being honest, and I could more or less only say “yeah, more or less.” So I think give more reasons to not trust the Germans (play up the Nazi being a Nazi), and think about how you’ll handle a skill check revealing if the Germans are lying.
We were running low on time, this was played over 2 3-hour sessions and I think if we’d had 2 4-hour sessions that would have worked better, but we were playing in the evening. As we were running low on time I somewhat fast forwarded through the trek that happens near the end of the adventure. The idea is to stage a series of ambushes as the remaining cultists try and stop the party. And I really like that part of the adventure but it keeps things pretty free-form and I realized I should have planned some of these more carefully. Partly because of that and partly for time reasons a couple cultists never reappeared.
The ambushes ended up taking out the party’s prisoner and another German so the players had to step up if they were to prevent this eldritch terror from entering the world. It was clear this would mean death and in the end an NPC and one of our players stepped forward. I narrated the end of the adventure as the ritual’s success.
Overall I think there were some really good moments, but do feel like I came up short in some other areas. I needed a better plan for the later parts of the adventure, the beginning is fine to be very free-form and loose, but later on you need things a little tighter. Overall I loved the adventure but didn’t love Gumshoe. The large list of skills, the weak combat system, and it’s focus on reducing how much you roll dice all fell flat for me.
The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford (Dolmenwood)
We had two sessions of this well-reviewed OSR module. I’m running it with Dolmenwood rules and ostensibly in that setting, though I didn’t spend time trying to update all the NPCs to fit perfectly.
And I think it’s going really well, this is a very good adventure. The town has some fun plot lines the PCs can follow and pull at, or kinda ignore. In two of the more notable ones they decided for a non-standard solution to a problem (in that they didn’t solve it, but got something out of the troublemaker) and to mostly ignore another. I liked both results a lot.
After leaving town they’ve run into a lot of different things, the giant’s house is cool but ended up feeling like a bit of a let down. The party spent a long time planning but couldn’t really come up with a satisfying plan, so they went with a very basic one, which did work. But it’s always something of a bummer to spend 10 minutes talking about a plan only to settle on “I guess we just sneak in and hope the giant doesn’t wake up”.
The tomb was also fun, I think this is an area with room for improvement in the adventure. They skipped an early room which mostly prevents finishing the dungeon, but a player game up with a good idea for a backup solution which I allowed. I think I needed to be a little more aggressive in forcing them to fight, I’m generally a GM who is more than willing to help players avoid a fight and that was on full display here.
My favorite bit in the dungeon was when they stumbled on a table full of potions and just started downing them. After one player fell asleep after drinking a purple potion and failing his save another player reached for a purple potion and downed it. Much to my annoyance he made his saving through but had wanted to “see if something different would happen when you made the save” which uh, did turn out to be the case as his PC didn’t fall asleep.
We ended up not being able to finish so have a 3rd and final session scheduled which will presumably involve a showdown with the titular black wyrm.
What I Played
Legions Imperialis
Game 1 - 1500 Point Learning Game
Legions Imperialis was my big focus this month. Started in the first week with a learning game with a friend. We played 1500 points with me on Blood Angels and him Solar Aux. First time I’d played as Space Marines and they certainly feel quite different from Aux.
We were both light on infantry and suffered some large early losses to our infantry. This combined with me making a mistake on turn one (get on the objective idiot) lead to my opponent taking the early lead which I could never really catch up to.
This game really showed the power and swings of Engine Killer. On turn 1 his Shadowswords killed 2 of my Typhons. On turn 2 my Mastadon killed his Warhound. On turns 3-5 my Mastadon shot at the Shadowswords, each turn a 56% chance to kill one, both Shadowswords survived to the end of the game.
The other thing this game showed is most important having ruins/ruined buildings for when stuff gets destroyed. Being able to swap an intact building for a destroyed one is just a lot of fun, and makes the resulting cover feel very natural. Character sheet for Nurrrghhhh, a Grunter
Game 2 - 2300 Point Game
This was kinda a practice event for the upcoming event (though my friend can’t make it) and we both brought 2300 point lists with no infantry. And oh boy did I get my face kicked in. The very last shot on turn 5 tabled me.
This really showed I think two important things about the list I brought and had been considering for the event: 1- Solar Auxilia have better tanks - Key here are the Leman Russ Vanquisher, it’s extreme range was a problem for me all game, they’re extremely hard to threaten and do a lot of damage. The other tank that I really looked at with envy was the Shadowsword. Engine Killer is a very impressive keyword when superheavies are rolling around. In both these cases marines don’t really have compeition. 2- Planes are really good. I took out his bombers on turn 1 but a pair of Lightnings caused me issues all game staying out of range and pelting my units with missiles.
I’m very glad I played this game and it dramatically changed my list, leading to more last minute painting.
MALICE IV - 3 Game Event
Held at Your Hobby Place in Alexandria, VA this event was my third LI event and I had a ton of fun. I’m going to talk about this more in a seperate post so I’ll leave it here for now.
Land of Og
We finished up Og from last month. Our second session was a bit shorter, our party of cavemen found a woolly mammoth stuck in a tar pit and while contemplating this large quantity of inaccessible meat a t-rex came upon us.
Nurrrrghhhhh met his end to that t-rex. He jumped down on the t-rex and got on its back for exactly 5 seconds before being thrown into the tar. Not one to die in a tar pit Nurrrghhhh eventually struggled out so he could be eaten by the t-rex.
End of the day I don’t like Og much. The communication restriction isn’t fun to me and that’s really the whole game. The RPG system tacked on to the restriction is extremely light but also just not very fun or engaging. Our t-rex fight saw a series of turns where characters forgot how to do key actions.
What I Hobbied
This month was all about prepping for the Malice event so I painted up a lot of Legions Imperialis stuff. I find hobbying for this game incredibly rewarding because things paint fast and look good when done. These are most of the Blood Angels I finished but the bulk were actually Solar Auxilia tanks.
What I Bought
OSRIC 3
I late pledged for physical copies of the OSRIC 3 books. OSRIC 3 is a retroclone of AD&D and I have a huge amount of nostalgia for AD&D, for video games as much as TTRPG but I’d really like to run some AD&D in one of its classic settings at some point, and if I do I think this is the best option for it. This is a speculative purchase but Mythmere Games does good work and I’ve taken a look at the PDFs and they look great (the game is free on DrivethruRPG!).
Hard Wired Island: Second Gig
There are a million Cyberpunk games and I think that generally speaking they are some level of interoperable. I think Hard Wired Island is really cool and does something special. I think if I were to highlight two things here, it’s a more hopeful take on the genre, and then it’s fucking set in space. Setting your cyberpunk setting/game in an O’Neill Cylinder rules. The book was $63 US for a hardback expansion which is pretty rough for a Kickstarter that hasn’t charged shipping yet, but it may be hard to find later and this is a game I want to support.
A bunch of Legions Imperialis
Working on stuff tends to spiral for me, so I picked up some more stuff for my armies. Do want to keep working on these.
Crisis Protocol: CP154 Kang the Conqueror, Iron Lad, Iron Monger, & Rescue
I was in the game shop and saw this and picked it up. In part because it seems like a very good deal for the current MCP line. You get 4 characters for $60 and one is huge. Having assembled these I’m very excited to paint Iron Monger, the Kang sculpt is also amazing. I’d love to get back to playing MCP but one thing at a time…
Coming Up Next Month
Next month is very busy for non-gaming reasons, with a trip and three or four concerts. To be determined if I’ll run any RPGs in the month, trying to schedule some things now.