Weekend of Gaming

I had an extremely pleasant weekend Relaxing and playing games.

Gav gave me a copy of his new book, full review to follow. Age of Scorpio I am currently about half way through it and it is excellent.

As Saturday was #Tabletopday we played Hordes and had an ace 4 player game.

Then in the evening I ran Day After Ragnarok (a game that you should look at just because of this map) Over dinner I got each of the players to text me something they wanted to see in the adventure.

I got: Iranian Car bombing, Antartic expedition and Fighting Nazi’s/Occultists in a Norweigen Fjord.

So I started my Adventure in Tehran with the players escorting a German Mystic/Scientist who was defecting to the Commonwealth. I blew up the front car in the convoy and then started a massive combat scene with A Giant Snake an Angry Mob and lots of disguised German troops.

Several Grenades a Satchel bomb and a short chase scene later the players followed clues leading them to a secret German U-Boat base in Norway (unsurprisingly in a Fjord) Where they infiltrated the base, set explosives and unleashed a massive Wolf creature frozen in Ice.

All in all the session was brilliant.    

We also played the first Achtung Cthulhu Scenario (Their kickstarter just finished but you can still last moment pledge if you want) Dan ran that session and we bungled through the mission with quite a diverse and unfocused skill set.

Finally on Monday Gav and I played Warmachine over a board made of my Dwarven Forge which looked Epic.

All in all it was an awesome weekend.

What did you get up to?

Dragon Age, Terrain and Diet Bet Victory

This morning I weigh 14st and have won my Feb Diet bet. I’m doing another one in March, this month I bet that I will be able to do 100 Push ups by the end of the month.

Last weekend we played Dragon age, with our friends from across the pond Charles and Tammie over a G+ Hangout.

I loved the Dragon Age stunt system, the resolution system is 3d6 with one of them a different colour, the Dragon Die. If you roll doubles you get stunt points equal to the roll on the Dragon Die which you can spend on doing interesting things in the fight; Knocking people back or over, extra damage or ignoring armour. It’s a really interesting critical hit mechanic.

Dan ran us through the intro adventure and one of the things that stood out for me was that each of the fights featured some sort of terrain, and each time it came into play because of the stunt system.

**Spoilers for the intro adventure below.**

The first fight was an ambush by a gorge where the rope bridge had been cut by Darkspawn seeking to trap us against the ravine. During the fight I got knocked down the ravine along with several of the darkspawn.

The 2nd was on a steep hillside with a switchback road leading up to it, and we started on the wrong side of a gully, everyone had to get across the gully and get up the hill in time to save the defenders from a massive Darkspawn attack.

Playing through it reminded me of this article from Criis perkins: Things I learnt from various editions http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4dmxp/20130117

In it he mentions that the thing that 4th ed brought home for him was making sure there was some sort of interesting terrain in each fight.

The fights in dragon age all had some cool piece of terrain I them, even if it was just big pits. combined with the stunt system that meant that everyone gets to do the cool cinematic style fights with knocking opponents over or pushing them back and things like that. It made all the fights more interesting.

It is something i’m taking ino my This is Thracia adventures, making sure I put fights in locations more interesting than a 20ft by 20ft room.

What is the most interesting terrain you have put into a roleplaying adventure?