Tabletop Fun

[Jay 2K Winger]

So Mysteries of Albia took a week off, since DM Mike needed more time to prep our next case. So Bob DM'ed a Level 18 one-shot for us.

My favorite line from the session came from my bard--

"I'll sing the song of your bravery-- I mean, foolishness-- I mean, bravery. No, I mean, foolishness."

[Nunavut Pants]

Gaming happened this past Saturday. I missed it; Da Boss and I came down with a cold or some such and were stuck at home, mostly napping.

2/5 stars, do not recommend.

[Jay 2K Winger]

From Mysteries of Albia--

A basic run-down of what happened this week...
* Roleplay! Shopping episode!
* A frank discussion about why the cockney neighborhood Charlie's from stays poor. (Basically, no one will hire cockneys for the higher paying jobs.)
* The Gang Gets Involved In Politics Whether They Like It Or Not
* A railway magnate makes a Titanic-esque "new era/man triumphs over nature" speech before his new train's maiden voyage across an channel-spanning bridge.
* An Irish Druid goes into a bar and drinks it.
* Murder on the Trans Channel Express!
* Who could have seen this coming?!
* Everyone. Everyone saw this coming.

[EricKei]

I normally summarize my game for my players on our discord, as we meet weekly. While I usually go into some detail, I was tired this week. Thus, entirely out of context:

Summary of this week's game:
- Moist.
- Giant turtles (good). Dwarves (good). VeloAtrociraptors (bad).

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

It's Murder on the Trans Channel Express!

* The Iron Monger Shot In The Back!
* The Widow Who Spiked His Drink!
* The Illegitimate Son With A Grievance!
* A Jilted Lover And Her New Paramour!
* The Former Business Partner With A Grudge!
* The Femme Fatale With An Agenda!
* The Mechanical Man Enraged With Grief!
* A Secret Weapon Silenced And Stolen!
* Who Among This Cast of Characters Has a Connection To The Mysterious Lightning Guild?
* ...Not To Mention the Cult of the Dragon!

All this, and The Gang Decides To Do Some Industrial Espionage.

[Jay 2K Winger]

One Night in Waterdeep--

Did a little one-shot with a new group and a new DM (to me), and for like the first third-to-half of the session, we were all rolling pretty badly. But it all came together in the final encounter, when our rogues got a string of critical hits on the boss. Including an honest-to-god DOUBLE NAT-20. The DM decided that for that 1-in-400 chance, the player could either roll triple the damage dice, or he could decree something else would happen from the attack (which would still get double damage dice) which would impose a temp penalty on the boss. The player decided to blind the boss, was told to roll a d4 to determine how long the boss would be blinded. It was only for one round-- but since the Double Crit happened during the surprise round, it meant that the boss never got a chance to attack before the remaining crits depleted all of their health. (That's what happens when you have two Rogue Assassins in the party, along with a pretty tanky paladin, and a warlock.)

The one-shot was basically How We Saved Christmas, as the Clauses had been kidnapped by Santa's sister Eldara, who had made some pact with Coldthulu. (Actually the name, from the module.)

Some of the bad rolls at the start of the session resulted in my warlock being drunk for the first third, rolling with disadvantage on everything.

drunk!Warlock: "Hey, you make the best worst decisions when you're not entirely sober. (Ask me how I know.)"
Rogue: "Also, the worst best decisions."
drunk!Warlock: "That's true!"

While investigating the crashed sleigh, the rogues found Santa's sack of gifts, but it had been corrupted by Eldara's magic, so opening it blasted out cold air that froze things, and it only gave people frozen coal. My warlock hadn't been paying attention while they were investigating it, so when he turned around to see it, they told him it was a bag of coal. But then one of them decided to try to up-end the bag and shake it out, resulting in the cold blast freezing part of the ground. Which led to ...

drunk!Warlock: "I thought you said it was a bag of coal, not a bag of cold."

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

This week, Camilla, our fifth player, was back! ...for just the one week. She's finished her schooling and she has a few weeks before her new job will start paying her. Explanation for her PC's appearance was that her ongoing investigation into the leaks within the detective agency had led her to the same town, and a quick communication to the agency had her hook up with us for our case.

From the session:
* Reginald Porter. Ambassador. Ex-Detective. Master of Disguise.
* Crystalpunk World's Fair Expo, brought to you by Fantasy Christoph Waltz.
* The Gang Takes Part in Not Even The Olympics
* A Bizarre Philosophical Discussion About Napkins?
* Wait, Our Rogue Dipped into Warlock Multiclass?
* Prepare for the Crystal Maze!

[Jay 2K Winger]

D&D AL: Descent into Avernus--

I've playfully tried to roleplay a rivalry between my Aasimar Celestial Warlock and another player's Dragonborn Fiend Warlock, because of their "opposing" patrons. He has always flatly turned it down, and I finally shrugged and stopped trying, respecting his wishes.

Then, this week, my Aasimar tried to read our map of Avernus, which always requires a WIS save, or the person suffers a short-term madness. I failed the save, rolled a d100, and was told by the DM that my character was Frightened of the map for the next 100 minutes. Cue Dragonborn's player declaring that he would "torment" my character during the drive across Avernus to our next destination by pulling childish "hey look over here!"/"stop it!" antics.

The DM then realized he'd read the wrong madness off the table and retconned it that my character was basically catatonic, between bouts of screaming and sobbing. Dragonborn's player was disappointed...

Me: "I've been trying to play up a rivalry between your guy and mine for weeks, and NOW you're finally down for it?"
Him: "I wanted the imbalance of power in place before I would commit."
Me: "...y'know what, that's fair."

I respect that character choice, cuz it fits with his warlock's schtick.

[Nunavut Pants]

Nice...

Went to a Board Game Cafe with a friend last night. A group of us played "Poetry for Neanderthals" as a "player-summoning game" to start the evening. It's a guess-the-word team game, but all clues given have to be one-syllable words. And, of course, you can't say the word (or part of the word) that you are giving clues for. If you break those rules, you get bopped by an inflatable "caveman club". You can string together sentences, as long as all of the words are only one syllable. Each card has a short word and either a longer word containing that word or a two-word phrase containing that first word.

My turn as the clue-giver, my team did very well. Some of my teammates were very good guessers, and I was able to use the sentence rule after some initial stumbling. After trying "flat" and "food", I was finally able to use "flat as a", and a couple of people called out "Pancake!" Which was the right answer. For the longer one, I said "not red fruit", and someone picked up on "blueberry pancakes" right away. It's a fun social game that is simple to learn.

After that, the group split into individual games. I wound up in a group playing "Wingspan", which I had heard of but never played. All five of us had also never played, but one of the store's employees had, so she taught us.

It's an "engine-building" game, where you use resources to purchase the ability to get more resources, and pick up victory points along the way. There is also a "hidden VP" mechanic where you can get a modest amount of VPs for meeting specific conditions, and the end of each of the four rounds has VP scoring for having the most X (in our case, one of them was "number of eggs in a specific kind of nest") with lesser rewards for 2nd/3rd/4th/5th place.

In Wingspan, you start with nine actions per turn. Each person takes one action, then the next takes, one, and so on. Each round, you get one fewer actions. Your actions include playing a bird card from your hand to the board, getting food from a set available in a dice tower, getting eggs, and getting more bird cards. Each bird card you play goes into one of three environments (forest, prairie, wetland, each one row on your tableau) and has a cost in food to buy. There are six columns in each environment, and you fill them from left to right. Each environment is associated with an action except for the Play a Bird action, and if you take the action associated with Forest, you go through each bird you have in the Forest and use its special "activation" ability--if it has one. Some birds have a "when you play this" action, and others have an action that is triggered by other players.

We stopped the game after three of the four rounds, as it was getting late and the cafe was going to close. I was able to put together enough birds and enough end-of-the-turn points to take victory, which is always nice. But as I said, none of us had played before.

[Nunavut Pants]

Game afternoon at a friend's house today! My half of the group played "So Clover", which is another word-guessing game. You get four square cards with four words on each, one facing each direction. You arrange them at random on a two-by-two grid (shaped like a clover leaf, hence the name). Then you look at the paired words on the top of the grid (one from each of two cards) and write a one-word clue for both of them. Repeat for each of the four sides of the grid, so you have four clues for eight words total. Clues can relate to each word separately, or both together, or sometimes just to one. Cards and writing are all hidden so nobody else can see them.

When everyone has written their clues, you pick up your four cards, add a fifth random one in, and shuffle them. Then each player has a turn: Their clues are revealed and all five shuffled word cards. That player cannot say anything at that point, or communicate at all. The other players then try to figure out which four word tiles fit on the grid, and in what orientations. Once they have guessed, and are satisfied with their guess, the clue-giving player either tells them they have everything right, or they remove any cards that are not in the right spot turned the right direction. The other players get one more (well, we played that we got two more!) chances to get everything right.

It can be really difficult to come up with good clues, but people will surprise you with how well they follow your train of thought sometimes. There's also a lot of comparing the words on the sides of the card, since each card is associated with both the clue on the "top" of the grid, and one space on the "side", so that can help work things out.

It's a fun, fairly lightweight, social party kind of game. We did a half-dozen rounds I think, and everyone enjoyed it. It is one of this group's regular games, though.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Mysteries of Albia--

We had the Labyrinth Game, a sort of England-vs-France/Germany competition. Very Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire inspired-feeling. And then we did a speedrun. Between a talking animal companion and an owl familiar flying over the maze, we couldn't get lost, and Caradoc the Druid just wildshaped into a moorbounder and used its 70-foot jump to let us bypass obstacles. And then, when we reached the center and needed to grab the Cup to win, we found it was hanging around the neck of a steam-powered clockwork dragon construct, which promptly flew 80 feet up. So the moorbounder!Druid just leapt within 30 feet of it, dropped wildshape, then used Misty Step to get to the Cup and grab it. Instant win.

There was some roleplay stuff that followed the next day. Rewards for deeds accomplished, learning of more intel and plot developments, NPCs being met, and our church-raised Fighter having a one-on-one private word with the Archbishop. And I do mean one-on-one, as the DM asked everyone else to leave the table.

We got to tour some of the world's fair expo exhibits, with the players all cracking wise, half-IC, about some of them. We met the setting equivalent of Marconi, showing off the radio, which we all agreed, "Eh, that'll never catch on!" and playing up our inability to understand the science and believing it involved magically shrinking lightning elementals or something. There was a Ferris Wheel, to which my character, London-native Charlie, remarked, "I can't see myself clappin' eyes on that in [London]."

I did manage a couple of great rolls during the session, however. While an Irish band was performing-- good, non-offensive, non-controversial folk music-- one of the musicians got fed up, started playing a pro-Ireland ballad, which got the Albian ambassador furious, demanding he be arrested and beginning to fulminate about what'll happen to him, but Charlie stepped in and asked him to calm down, "Let's not do this in public, eh? We don't want to besmirch Albia's good name." The DM asked for a Persuasion roll, which (thanks to burning an Inspiration I had) was a dirty 20. The Ambassador calmed down and the rebellious musician was spared, though he refused to continue performing.

But then, at the end of the session, while attending a circus performance in a private box with the Ambassador and the Director-General of Frankric (setting union between France & Germany), the Director-General (read: President) advised the Ambassador of a recent movement picking up steam in East Frankric, one that might turn militant and with military backing, which seemed to be calling for secession. A movement that centered around one word: Deutschland.

--at which point, one of the Director-General's personal security detail drew a gun, stepped forward and declared, "Deutschland will be free!" And tried to shoot him in the head. Except Charlie has the Alert feat, which means he cannot be surprised. I declared he would intervene, and the DM asked for a DEX save. Natural 20!

The would-be assassin, we then discovered, was already dead. No, not from a cyanide capsule. He was dead before he drew his gun; someone had injected something into his heart, and used the Danse Macabre spell to bring him back as an undead. And this had been done within the last hour...

And that's where we ended the session.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Descent into Avernus (via AL)--

We met this evil paladin of the evil dragon goddess Tiamat, a dragonborn called Arkhan the Cruel. Critical Role fans will remember him from Campaign 1, as Joe Manganiello's PC from the final arc. We needed to make a deal with him so as to acquire a macguffin we needed to trade for another macguffin, to trade for another macguffin...

Any rate, Arkhan the Cruel is a high-level NPC (he has a challenge rating of 16, meaning a well-equipped four-person party of Level 16 adventurers should find him a challenge) with a number of powerful artifacts. Not least of which is the Hand of Vecna, a powerful necromantic artifact. We were all Level 10, apart from one Level 7.

Arkhan was amenable to trading an artifact we had for the macguffin we needed, "if we proved ourselves worthy." He was clearly intending to fight us all with his backup (an evil cleric, a minotaur barbarian and some ghouls), when one of our Warlocks said, "I'll fight you for it."

We all looked at the player, who had admitted he wasn't familiar with Critical Roll, and knew nothing about Arkhan. I asked him, "Are you sure you want to do this?" The DM asked him if he was serious. He was. He wanted to 1v1 Arkhan.

The rest of us backed off, and I turned to the Bard. "You might want to start composing a song about his bravery. I mean, foolishness."

The only reason the fight lasted more than 2 rounds is because, after tanking a Finger of Death, the Warlock cast Banishment on Arkhan, sending him back to his home plane for 1 minute (10 rounds). When he didn't return, the evil cleric just sighed, went, "I'll be right back," and teleported to Arkhan, then teleported him back. Arkhan promptly beat the Warlock down to 0 HP, knocking him unconscious. Warlock failed one (of three) death saves, and then Arkhan attacked him while he was down, an automatic two failed death saves, thus killing the Warlock.

The cleric revived him, and Arkhan handed over the macguffin, saying, "Thank you." Because, as the DM explained, in order to keep the Hand of Vecna from killing him, Arkhan has to kill one innocent person every day.

...

In other news, we finished our chain of macguffin trades to get the information we needed to save the city of Elturel from Hell, and the DM allowed us 2 levels of advancement (making us Level 12), and also said we could use some of our level-up awards from doing Adventurers' League (you get 1 level of advancement for completing a session, plus 10 days of downtime which can be used for various benefits, one of which is another 1 level of advancement) to bump our levels, as long as we didn't go above Level 16 and exit our current tier.

So now I've got a Level 16 Warlock ready for action.

[Nunavut Pants]

Lots of gaming this week for me!

Wednesday was with what I'll call Group G, at one member's lovely house in the foothills around here. We played an opening round of "Just One" (which I have described here more than once, I believe) as a way to kill time until more players arrived. We then broke up into two groups, but I can't for the life of me remember what we played. It was new to me, but it just hasn't stuck with me. We finished up with "So Clover", another favorite that I have also described.

Thursday was with Group A, which is always hosted by someone I will call A. After some socializing, we broke up into two groups. One played "Outpost", which is a big favorite of many in the group but which I don't care for that much. The rest of us played "Dos Rios", which was new to all of us. It is a game where you try to claim locations along two rivers, gaining you money or wood to build dams. The dams allow you to change the course of the rivers. I was able to get a whole bunch of wood early on, and to claim a lot of spaces on the Rio Marron which then collected several times in a few turns. I was able to play some dams defensively to keep the other two players from moving the rivers away from my river spaces, and was able to build three Casas and one Hacienda, in river spaces, winning the game.

Since Outpost was still going (it takes a while!) we played another new game, "Wacky Wacky West". This game involves building roads/railroads/rivers on a board, potentially knocking down buildings on the board. Each player secretly owns one color of building, and tries to keep the roads/etc. from knocking down his color of buildings. J won that one very handily, because the only building he lost was his highest-value one and the other two of us lost the highest-value and one or two others as well.

Since Outpost still wasn't done, the three of us played 6 Nimmt, which is another popular quick and simple game that involves placing cards down on one of four stacks and picking up any stack that gets to 6 cards tall. Cards all have some number of "penalty points", and the player with the fewest points wins. I won very handily.

After that, J and AB left, and the Outpost game finally finished. I stuck around after that just long enough for a few rounds of "Just One", which were a fun way to end the evening.

I'm heading back to A's in a few minutes, now, and will probably head over there again tomorrow!!

[Nunavut Pants]

More gaming at A's house!

On the 30th, I wound up in a Power Grid game. We played this one on the US map, but when we selected the play zones we wound up not picking the Midwest so nobody could use that area of the country. I was able to pick up some end-of-game power plants early on (plants that power 5 or more cities) but wound up unable to buy enough cities to win by the end of the game. JH won as expected--he and AP like the game immensely and have played it a lot. I came in 4th out of 6 people.

The players then re-organized, and I played a game called "Trick Takers". It is a Japanese game with rules and such translated--the cards were in sleeves and the ones with text on them had English-language text printed on paper and stuffed into the sleeve to overlay the Japanese writing parts of the card. This was billed as an "asymmetric trick-taking game". Each round, every player selects a role card and each role gets special powers and ways to score. The rounds are five tricks long. There are three normal suits, plus one trump suit (think: Spades) and some special cards with special rules--one is higher than everything else, one is lower than everything else, and one role (Berserker) gets cards that are higher value than everything else in that suit but that are beaten by the lowest number of that suit. There are various ways to win the overall game, like getting the most points, meeting specific victory conditions for the role, by taking the most tricks (without ties) twice, or by taking zero tricks all three rounds. JH won that twice, and A won it once.

Last night, everybody played Outpost. It's far from my favorite, but basically everybody else wanted to play so I went along with it. As expected, I sucked. This is another game where we have several people who really really like it and play a lot, so they tend to do very well. Outpost is an "engine building" or "economy building" game, where you purchase facilities to build stuff that is worth money and use that money to purchase more facilities (which are also worth a couple of victory points) and extra cards that give you specific abilities or discounts on other things and VPs. One interesting mechanism is that each good that you produce is actually a draw on the appropriate deck of cards for that good, and each card has a monetary value that varies from card to card, with rarer goods having generally higher values than more common ones.

I feel like I was held back by the cards I drew, but I have the feeling that everyone who doesn't do well feels that way. I did start by invoking the house rule that anyone whose initial cards didn't add up to 20 could still buy a "water plant" (which costs 20), which nobody else had to resort to. Actually, host A was able to buy both the water plant and the person to run it, so he got very good cards! It turned out not to help him in the long run, as he finished in last place. The "extra cards" are bought through an auction, with a minimum bid printed on the card. I did not do very well in the auctions, due in part to my cards running lower than expected values. Both A and I were both often in the state of not quite having enough to meet the minimum on the cards that were up for auction, so we were unable to even try to get the cards we wanted. As a default, I wound up buying more and more titanium mines, which are better than water-making plants but worse than the other factories. The last few rounds of the game, my income was not enough to even try for the high-value cards that were available. My hand values were almost always below the "expected value" (you get the average for each type of card listed on your player mat) for the types of cards I held, which makes things difficult...

Anyway, JB won for the first time after having played a fair number of times. She had gotten into the yellow goods early and had a lot of them, which definitely helped.

We wound up the evening with several rounds of Just One.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Heckna's Carnival--

Since Mike the DM needed more time to prep for our next Mysteries of Albia session (holidays and such), Bob decided to run a one-shot for us using the recently released, Kickstarter-funded Heckna's Carnival campaign setting. We'd all be Level 6 (at least 1 level in Warlock, the rest in whatever class we wanted), and we rolled for our stats. Among other limitations he put on character creation was that we could not take Eldritch Blast as one of our Warlock spells, instead we would get access to a setting-specific spell called Pie Strike, which was basically an acidic pie to the face kind of thing. The reason being that our characters' Warlock patron was Heckna, in one of his various aspects. I decided that my tiefling character, Brandish, was a Rogue Assassin to go with his level in Warlock. Gave him a New York accent for lolz, and it worked since his patron was Heckna's Angry aspect. Brooklyn Rage!

After finishing character creation, we plunged in, arrive at the Revelia, Heckna's demiplane, and are sent to go challenge the carnival's wrestling champion, Hellvis. (Yes, Bob did an Elvis impression to go with all of the musical puns and references.)

We didn't manage to finish the one-shot in time (the store where we play was closing), so this may end up being a two-shot adventure.

But during our first encounter while making our way through Hellvis' lair, we're confronted with a bunch of ballroom-dancing automata, which grapple with three of our PCs. Then I get my turn, and I decide to use Pie Strike on one of the clusters of dancers that hadn't taken action yet. I point out that my Assassinate feature gives me advantage on any creature that hasn't taken an action yet, and the advantage will let me apply Sneak Attack bonus damage if I connect. And I get a Natural 20. That ended up being 10d6 of damage, and Bob the DM decreed that my Pie Strike basically turned into an AOE strike, and took out the entire quartet of dancers I'd targeted.

As he put it, "You accidentally cast Pie-reball."