So last time, the players decided to sneak into the cult’s temple in Illmire. Coincidentally they managed to knock out the window to the only room without cultists inside it. This session started with a happy murder of all the cultists desecrating the temple that didn’t surrender in time. Most notably the ranger found a sacred mace, that he very carefully didn’t touch with his skin and passed back to the cleric for safe-keeping.
I finally got a chance to play a game I’d been very curious about, Alice is Missing. It was organised by the very excellent @proopypants. The plot is in the title: Alice, a girl in a sleepy American rural town, has gone missing a few days ago. It’s winter 2020 and you play her friends trying to find her again.
Except only by text.
🙊
TL;DR: It’s great.
It’s Hypertellurians time again! I ran the Heart of the Atom Isa over two sessions, and it finished with the party sledging down a mountain on a moon, on a wave of alien mucus. So, if you take nothing else away from this, then you can do some very silly sci-fi.
The party’s rocket, the Atom Isa, has its heart stolen from it, and they have to get it back from Argencia, who is seen on the ship’s logs - departing for the tremendostaceans of the Zelteen nomads. The party are:
We continue the tales of the Evils of Illmire. And what I’ve learned while running it. The party start in the sunken Bastion, keeping a Black Skeleton Turned at bay while they rob his throne room. They then have a short rest, and explore the room unlocked by the key on the Skeleton’s belt. Some normal skeletons provide no trouble, but the Wraith they unleash from the cell is much more of a problem, especially when it starts raising the freshly interred skeletons as Spectres.
Jim Parkin likes making and playing very streamlined games. Really, very very streamlined games. He’s into the idea of free kriegsspiel (FK) feeding back into RPGs (the FK revolution, FKR) and summarises it well. This goes past OSR’s “rulings not rules”, and could be encapsulated as “why have the rules? Just talk through the action and agree what should happen”. This requires trust at the gaming table (no /r/rpghorrorstories), and (I personally think) a bit of confidence for the Referee.
So, last time, in the Evils of Illmire… well, it went a bit to shit. See for yourself.
Rancidius, priest of the Cult of the Illuminal Star, and the bandits defer to him. He knocks Vert, the paladin, to the ground, and then pulls a mindphage from his ear.
Useless thing, so much for control. You were supposed to have betrayed the party much earlier! Not that I suppose you needed to, you’ve been much less competent than I expected!
The monologing continued in this vein for some time. Once “Father Rand” got this out of his system, he dispatched the group to the cult HQ for sacrifice to the Fearmother. However, en route, the cult see mantismen causing problems ahead, and resolve to tip the party into the Gecko Pit and call it quits.
But they’re keeping the loot, of course.
In the last writeup, the party was surprised by an owlbear…
But before that, I got the party sketched! This was done by HodagRPG, see their zines on itch.
Clockwise from the top right, we have:
I really like the sketches, so do my players. It was about the cost of a round of beer, and in Feb 2021, that is an option I do not have. 🍻
To celebrate playing another game of Spire with Alone in the Labyrinth, I got my character sketched!
A very nice person drew him for me, find Kiril here or on insta.
My character’s a middle-aged carrion-priest, who cares for the downtrodden drow in the city of Spire from his small temple. The hyenas consume the dead and ensure the souls pass up to god.
That’s not even my character, that’s just a stock class in Spire. My actual character is that Father Friendly, who helps the needy by summoning magical offal (stock spell!) is also a ruthless hunter of those that have wronged him or fellow drow. He has a brutal prey-hook, can summon a murder of crows, and his hyena is pretty handy in a fight too.
Christmas 2019, I decided to give playing by post (PbP) a try. What I mean here by PbP is the concept of playing an RPG, by writing alternate sentences or paragraphs of text, with other people (typically not in real-time). This seemed like a great way of balancing the goal of playing with new people without having to learn how to play games over the Internet, which at that point, didn’t sound fun1.
I was surprised how immersive it was, and tried starting a game as GM myself, and then in my RPG boom around March, joined a bunch of online communities and played a few more games. AFter briefly being in too many games, I had a second resurgence towards the end of the year. Overall, I’ve been in at least eight.
And I must be honest, I struggle to recommend the format. Let me explain.
I have a spare laptop. I’m not going to spend ages cutting it up to make an actual photo-frame, and neither will I build one from scratch with a Raspberry Pi Zero.
I’m just going to put it by the TV and see whether my wife and I look at it.
Requirements: