Duergars

Kobalds!!!

More to come

Duergar Guards

Kobalds!

Needing a break from painting three of everything I painted a miniature that my brother bought for my birthday.  I tried to do some shading…not sure if I did it right….but the beauty of painting is it doesn’t matter the process all that matters is the result. 

Howdie!  I’m new to painting miniatures and I am having so much fun with it I thought I might document my adventures with beginning painting.  Since I got Wrath of Ashardalon at Gencon 2011 I have wanted to paint the  crap out of them.   I finally gave in to the temptation to paint and bought some paints and brushes and just went to town.  The thing that surprised me the most was just how fun and relaxing painting miniatures can be, and I hope this blog will inspire those of us that want to add another dimension to our gaming adventures.

Below you will see the minis that started it all….every night as I would fall asleep I could hear these minis from within the box, crying out to be painted.

For my first minis, I went with the cave bears because they would only be one color scheme to deal with. I’d love to get some feedback on them, as I am new to the hobby and could use all the constructive criticism I can get!  Oh and the reason there is only two…my friends cat got a hold of one…I guess Felis domesticus can beat cave bears!  plus I have not finished any of the bases yet because I am still experimenting with colors to match the tile floors in the game.

Next minis that I decided to tackle were the snakes, because they would have a two color scheme that would help me advance from a single brown bear.

Next to go under my brush were the orc smashers.  I kinda just jumped in with these and here is the result.

From these I went on to the legion devils….I tried to go for a charred red look for these guys.

next was the Deurgar Captain

and the grell were begging to get some color….went kind of Portuguese man of war with them…

the next minis I think I will paint will be the deurgar guards.

An Echo, Resounding: Lordship and War in Untamed Lands is a resource book for managing  Labyrinth Lord and similar Old School Style games when they begin to outgrow their little starting town and the players start to take leadership roles in the realms.  As such, it is an interesting and very well written gaming guide, which comes as no surprise, as the author, Kevin Crawford, also wrote Stars Without Number.  And just like Stars without Number, there is a love of random tables, an incredibly well thought out method of map creation, and some very complex rules for managing domains and resources.  I’ll break my review down into parts and attempt to show how I plan on using this resource in my gaming.

The Review

The best aspect of the book is the section on Creating Campaign Regions.  Kevin has created a system of quick rules to flesh out your map, and give it balance.  First, you place your cities or major population centers.  Then, place your towns and villages, 4 for each city.  Throughout this process he gives you suggestions on where to place them on your map, and the reasoning for that placement. I like seeing the reasons why certain rules or recommendations are made, as it helps me understand the goal of each rule, and what might happen if I feel I need to break a rule.  Then place a number of ruins, places for the players to explore based on the number of cities.  Then place resources and lairs, and then give each place traits (which he has a handy random table for) and names.  Next, you’ll give each city, town and resource an obstacle, something stopping it from being successful.  And then finally, establish domains that might control one or two towns or cities and resources.  The section ends with lots of ideas for traits and obstacles for each location.

The next section concerns domain management, which provides a very detailed set of rules on how to flesh out domains and how to resolve actions taken by domains.  Both PCs and GMs can use the domain actions to deal with a variety of issues in the game world, including insurrection, overcoming obstacles and attacking other domains.  It’s a great set of rules, and could easily turn into a Civilization type game with all the variables to play around with.

The following section deals with special rules for heroes who are protectors of their realms.  I honestly was hoping for more, but the powers presented do provide a lot of great rewards to players who swear fealty to a domain. This is the only section that appears to have rules that are specific to Labyrinth Lord, the rest of the book is very rule agnostic.

The last section shows a sample campaign region called Westmark, which I admittedly skimmed over, as I was so excited to begin building my own campaign region.  However, I did find it useful to see what kind of locations and domains these rules would create.

How I plan on using this book

I plan on using this section extensively in creating the map for Bellona, a Broken City Recovering.  While it will take place in a ruined city, I can think of cities as larger settlements of people, and towns as smaller enclaves.  I love the idea of how to create a map, and this will definitely help me in making sure that there are reasons for players to visit different parts of Bellona, as different parts will have different resources.  Also, I plan on having a number of gangs/tribes in the city, and the domains (developed more in the next section) adapt well to that idea.

I think the domain management rules might go off in the wrong direction for the type of game I foresee my players playing.  I need a set of rules that will show the players what sort of resources and tools they might gain for their PCs when they gain control of locations, rather than being able to have their domain take care of the issue.  The same goes with the mass combat, as I don’t think my setting would really provide many opportunities for large armies to be massed and fight.  I think that has more to do with the setting I have imagined, and less with the rules themselves.

Overall

I highly recommend this book to anyone who sees the play at their table going beyond simply gaining wealth and renown and moving towards changing the landscape of the world.  It’s not very ruleset specific, and as such would be helpful for any kind of gaming play.  As you can see, I’m planning a post apocalyptic campaign and still there was a lot for me to use.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

So it feels like this is as good a time as any to begin ending my campaign in Fallow’s Vale. Fallow’s Vale has been great, it’s allowed us to play some D&D while I was living in Nashville with friends from around the US, and it’s played right into the sweetspot of 4E D&D, which is points of light exploration.

However, I’m feeling ready for a different type of gaming, and I think Bellona will make a great campaign world.

The elevator pitch for Bellona is that something has happened in this city and now everyone is just trying to scrape by. The PCs however, have bigger plans. Perhaps it’s like New Orleans after Katrina, a city struggling to rebuild after a horrible disaster. Or maybe it’s like Gotham in No Man’s Land or New York in DMZ, with larger than life characters vying for control of various parts of the city. Or maybe it’s like it’s namesake, Bellona from the book Dhalgren by Delaney, a city so broken it’s memory has been forgotten by the rest of the world.

I see a major component of this campaign being the map. Each gaming session, the players will look at the map, and try to determine which faction or section of the city to put pressure on next. They’ll be forced into treaties with unsavory groups and individuals, and slowly they will build their own army of followers to do with as they see fit.

Perhaps their goal is to reform the city into a working community, possibly with the PCs at the top. Or maybe they just seek to plunder the riches of the city and try to find buyers outside the city. Or maybe they just wish to settle old scores and finish what the Gods/man/nature has started and burn the city down to the ground.

He comes down pretty hard on the Great Wheel as a place that wouldn’t be very fun to adventure in. Having been a huge Planescape fan, I might have to disagree. While I agree that many of the places he mentions (the elemental planes, the positive and negative energy planes) won’t be fun to adventure in, I think that’s kind of the point. The idea is that, is a player supposed to be able to go every where in a campaign, or are there places they just can’t go, no matter what.

Ultimately, I tend to view D&D cosmetology to be very malleable. The players are never going to walk from Sigil to one of the evil planes, or from the plane of water to the plane of earth. Instead it’s going to be through some form of magical means that they will arrive at a new location.

So how it’s organized matters less to me, than how I can apply it to my story I’m telling as a player or as a DM. Sometimes that includes having a villain threaten to send a player to the negative energy plane to die. And sometimes it’ll include the players adventuring in the Feywild or Astral Sea or in Sigil or Bytopia. Ultimately, the planes are meant to encompass all possible belief and possibility, so if things don’t always make sense to the players, I feel like it isn’t supposed to, berk. (Just a little planescape reference…)

Thanks to a post on Wizards, David Guyll over at Points of Light has written about fighters and multiple attacks. He has a lot of requests to improve fighters, which include no penalties for multiple attacks, no feat taxes and a bunch of other ideas. I have to admit, I never liked the 3E fighter, because it seemed like you had to play the feat game and plan out exactly what your character was going to get at ever level, which seemed to make the actual adventuring mean less.

Over at Syntax Error, Sage Latorra has a lot to say about the latest poll from wizards. Not so much about the choices, like keeping THAC0 and gender penalties, but rather how the open design approach might backfire. There is a idea called the Parkinson’s Triviality Principle, which states that the smaller a project something is, the more input you’ll get. Since almost everyone who has ever played with a tabletop game has likely tried tinkering with the rules, even the most trivial of rules will get a lot of input from the public. So, Sage is worried that the game that WOTC is designing might very well get derailed by all the input by the public. We shall definitely see as the process moves forward.

Haven’t seen as much commentary out there these days. My guess is that many of the people who might be commenting are under NDAs. Anyone see anything interesting? If you’ve seen some insightful forum posts, I’d like those too. I find myself reading fewing and fewer forums these days, partially because of time, and partially because every discussion seems to become a edition war.

Take care and happy gaming!

I definitely go back and forth thinking about what I love in RPG. Ultimately, I think it is just quality.

What are the best adventures made of?
The best adventures have a number of common features for me. First, they aren’t too long. While I love hearing from my friends who buy them synopsis of adventure paths, I have no real desire to buy or play them. I know that there is no hope with the groups I play with to ever complete one of them. Instead, I like sort, quick adventures that hint at, but doesn’t enforce, a setting. In fact, some of my favorite adventures were the sets of adventures that TSR released with some of the campaign settings in 2nd edition. They could be tied together if you wanted to, but each adventure was self-contained. Which would be perfect for the people I play with, as we all have lives and most of us have kids. We want to roleplay, but we just don’t have the time to play long drawn out campaigns.

What do the worst adventure do wrong?
I think this is pretty simple for me: non-sensical story or encounters, railroading and overly long adventures.

What kills an adventure before it even gets off the ground?
Playing a game system that no one wants to.

What’s your favorite system? What are the things you love about it most? WHY?
My favorite system is the one my friends are playing. Secondly, I value simplicity and fun. I don’t want to be bogged down while creating a character by complex options and plans, but I like to have the options I make at character creation have both mechanical and roleplaying implications.

With D&D Next on the horizon, I’m sure you have an opinion regarding what the next edition should or shouldn’t be once it’s out.
I don’t really have a ton of opinions on what it should be, other than I really hope it gets more players into this great hobby of ours.

I could totally see my players freaking out when the first embryonic magical beast pops out of the black pool. And then spending the next 2 hours trying to figure out just what is going on.