Roll20 is a great, free, in-browser virtual tabletop. I believe you get some additional features for being a donator like extra file upload space and such but as far as I've seen it's perfectly serviceable without those (and most of them are really only tempting for the GM so players can pitch in for that if you really want them).
Compared to the alternatives (maptools, fantasy grounds, openRPG), Roll20 has the advantage of being free, ease of use and accessability, relative good connectivity, and very beginner friendly. It would probably be my go-to recommendation for the situation.
Edit: It also has some semi-unique goodies like webcam integration and a virtual jukebox that may or may not be deal breakers for you. I was never too hot on some of the extras (prefer a more robust macro system, personally, though I hear they're working on that), but they can certainly be major points in its favor, especially for a group used to meeting face-to-face.
Thanks...I will try that. It recieved good reviews a few other places I have looked. I have been tasked with finding easy to use tools and teaching everyone how to use them in the next couple of months if we are going to pull this off.
Easiest way to use a virtual tabletop is to just treat it like a fancy dry erase board, use the tokens as plain old miniatures, and stick with basic dice rolling instead of trying to do fancy stuff. You can do an awful lot of neat things with macros and such, but they are in no way necessary to get the job done, just cute extras if your GM feels like putting in the time to learn them.
Edit: That said, learning how to import maps is a great way to save time and keep the game moving smoothly instead of waiting for the GM to draw things out line by line. I did a lot of pre-made modules when I was GMing and the ability to copy-paste in maps out of a pdf was a great time saver.
One of the most vital things I can recommend is 100%, absolutely, always, always schedule a quick check-in some time before the actual game is set to start. Have everyone sign on at the same time a day or two ahead of game day, even if it's only for fifteen minutes, just to make sure everyone can a.) connect without issues, b.) communicate with each other, c.) familiarize themselves with how to do dice rolls and read the UI, and d.) see everything they're supposed to see and not see the stuff only the GM should see.
Trying to do troubleshooting last minute while someone is trying to forward ports or download a fix is horrible when you're supposed to be playing already. Roll20 in particular gave me some issues with its webcam functionality, and it took me a while to figure out I had to disable a google chat add-on to get it to work properly. So much easier and less frustrating to take care of these issues beforehand.
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HawkstoneDon't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things. Somewhere outside of BarstowRegistered Userregular
Ideally I want to get all the associated laptops that will be used in the same room and run a session or two before he moves away just as a proof of concept...we may even gather the players at one house and throw the whole thing up on a big screen. If need be we could even another VOIP program for the communication. I think you are spot on about just using it as a map and mini's tool. Heck we have gamed together for years, I could still still rolling physical dice...there is enough trust there.
My friend bought an RPG called something like Ragnarök/Fate of the Norns. Apparently it uses runestones drawn from a bag instead of dice for conflict resolution.
My friend bought an RPG called something like Ragnarök/Fate of the Norns. Apparently it uses runestones drawn from a bag instead of dice for conflict resolution.
Looking forward to it.
It's pretty dope, combat is less "do I roll high enough to kill this thing" and more "do I sweep the leg or summon the power of wind to throw the dude off this cliff"
For the first time in a long while, one of my best friends, Lee, has been in town and he has heard about our Shadowrun game and is really excited to play on Friday, and we hung out on Monday and, among other shenanigans, rolled him up a guy. He made an amnesiac ex-corp soldier based on the agents from Syndicate (his favorite game when we were kids); his character, "Cage," is a heavily-augmented (ortho skin, datajack and internal cyberdeck, skilljack, wired reflexes, cybereyes, internal oxygen tank, and hydraulic legs with thigh holster (only dogs could hear my squeal of delight when I saw that was an option)) infiltration and gun specialist.
And then Lee ended up being free again today so we called up our friend Shawn and got dinner and decided to run an impromptu session to get him used to the ruleset. So bear in miond that everything that happens here is basically, not quite winging it, but I was running off a sheet of notes I hurriedly typed up in half an hour while we were eating takeout pub burgers (mine had blue cheese and bacon omgggggggg).
It's been a few days after the last session and Cole the grizzled PI awakes to find Byron the dwarf fixer dinging his commlink. "Is this going to make me money?" he barks.
"I wouldn't be calling if it weren't," answers the dwarf, matter-of-factly.
Cole heads down to Byron's usual watering hole just outside Touristville - a new independent dive called Category Z. Byron is in his usual booth, sporting a tiny waistcoat and fob watch, and seated with him is a tall, pale, visibly augmented man wearing a long black armored duster and blank, expressionless stare.
"Cole, meet...uh, Cage, wasn't it?" Byron says. The man gives a barely-perceptible nod. "He comes to me recommended by an acquaintance on the Matrix. And I think we'll need him for tonight's run...if you're in."
Cole grunts noncomittally.
"I'll take that as a...ahhh, here she is," Byron's face lights up with something like genuine warmth and also an edge of nervousness. Framed in the doorway of the dive is a tall, well-muscled razorgirl in full spec-ops regalia. The only things on her that aren't black are her impossibly pale skin and neon-green hair. "Byron," she says, snagging a stool with her boot and dragging it over to the booth in one smooth motion. "We heard you'd fallen from grace, but what, you recruiting from the retirement home now?" She smirks, without real malice, at Cole's seamed face and shock of white hair.
"Can we not talk history in front of the hired help?" Byron says with a peevish edge. "Boys, this is our prspective client. Amber Blaze, one of the hottest runners in the metroplex. She's subcontracting."
"Go on," Cole says.
She clears her throat. "Look, I'm a runner like you, and I feel like us runners gotta have a code. So I'm not gonna bother with the Johnson routine and I'm going to give it to you straight, or as straight as my team has it, anyway. We've been tapped to bring in an Awakened that someone wants real bad back in CalFree, alive preferably but dead is okay too. He's been holed up here in Redmond. Target's name is Theo Cloutier, a French-Metis from old Canada, and our legwork suggests he was involved with some terrorist shenanigans in California and that our Johnson is some flavor of Free State law."
She waves a hand, and a floppy-disk icon appears in Cole and Cage's AR vision as a file is shared to them. Only Cole knows what it means. "Our surveillance has placed him near the Rat's Nest, in an old DuPont plant up by the riverbank. He's hired a small band of Rust Stilettos" - a gang of orks and trolls from the more toxic parts of the Barrens - "as his guards. They've got some ghetto-ass security setup, too. The plan is simple: I want you two to make a lot of noise and really get the gangers' attention from the landward side of the factry. Put on a real fireworks show, enough that our target will try to slip out the river side. We'll be waiting there to scoop him up."
"This sounds like some soldier drek," Cole says. "What the hell you need a run-down private dick for?"
Byron coughs softly. "Mr. Cage is a gun specialist and will do most of the shooting, I imagine. And I, uh, couldn't get Bashurr on the comlink."
A text message pops up in Cole's AR from Byron. "You can read people. Keep an eye on the new guy and tell me what you think of him. He's got some weird kind of damage. If he's gonna get your crew geeked, we should probably know now."
Amber offers 5 g's apiece; Cole tries to talk her up but whiffs the roll. She takes pity and gives them 3 up front apiece.
"The op's at oh-one-hundred," she says, walking out of Category Z. "It's sixteen hundred now. We'll be in touch at midnight."
Cole and Cage pile into Cole's Americar and begin picking their way through the slums toward the Snoquomie River, keeping their guns prominently displayed.
Cole puffs an e-cigarette. "So what's your story, chummer?"
"I don't have a story," Cage says. "I woke up on a slab couple days ago. My memory's locked up." (He's amnesiac, and his memory is kept in a Johnny Mnemonic-style datalock.)
"But you figure you'll just start running, no questions asked. Fucking Byron," Cole groans. "So not only do I not know what you can do, neither do you?"
"I know my way around guns. Infiltration. ...Other things."
"I'll believe it when I see it," Cole says.
"Then pull over."
Cole does so, bemused, as Cage gets out of the car and begins striding towards a pair of squatter gangers sitting on a ruined brick wall, combat knives displayed prominently.
"Eyy, man," one says. "The fuck you think you're going? You gotta pay the fragging toll - "
Cole scrambles out of the driver's seat. "Hey, wait a minute, I didn't mean for you to-"
In one effortless move, Cage leaps atop a dumpster, then from it to the top of a small burned-out gas station. One of the gangers whips his knife at Cage and it clatters against the wall. Cage's thigh opens up and he swiftly withdraws an Ares Predator, which barks three times and leaves the hapless ganger a bloody ruin. The other ganger charges Cole with a tire iron, and the PI grimaces and halfheartedly fires his Ruger into the kid's thigh. "Aw, jeez, I didn't want this to....run, kid! Get the fuck out of here!"
The living ganger limps away, into a back alley. Cage leaps from the top of the station and walks calmly back to the car. "You asked for a demonstration."
"Well, you definitely demonstrated something," Cole spits.
The two continue their drive to the rusting hulk of the old 20th-century DuPont chemical plant. It matches the dexcription Amber Blaze gave them; a pitted old parkling lot provides minimal cover for fifty yards on all sides. The Rust Stilettos have set up a small encampment, and there seem to be four of them: a thickly-built troll woman in leather and a halter top, a gangly, stringy-haired ork man in black denim, a squat ork with a vacant stare, sitting motionless in a lawn chair, and in a makeshift tent that seems to be the command center, a huge, hulking shape under a canvas tarpaulin. Cole also spots three home-made turrets - heavy-caliber rifles mounted on tripods - concealed amidst a few burned-out cars and random junk piles.
"Those cars won't make good cover from the turrets," Cage says. "We need heavier weaponry."
Cole agrees, and they make the drive back to Touristville, Cole calling one of his contacts.
The contact, a fat ork named Kowalski in a polyester uniform, turns up half an hour later in the Category Z parking lot. He produces a trunk full of "slightly-used" weapons, some witht he last owner's blood still caked on the magazine, a set of dented bulletproof vests, and so forth. The fruits of the Lone Star low-priority evidence lockup. "Since Knight Errant got the Seattle contract, nobody really cares if a few pieces go missing," he says by way of explanation, then launches into a lavish, passiionate description of the calibers, ranges, and sotpping power of each piece in between slightly fawning questions of the shadowrunners. He's clearly the Sixth's World's answer to the mall ninja.
Cage buys a fully-automatic rifle and Cole buys a clutch of grenades. The two then head back in the direction of the chemical plant.
"I think we could use some backup," Cole says. "Or at least some info. Maybe those squatters in the Rat's Nest know something."
The North Seattle Refuse and Reclamation Facility, called the Rat's Nest owing to the small group of rat shamans who call it home, is a mile upriver from the plant. THe evening shadows are lengthening as Cole and Cage pull in, and a young black girl standing lookout hollers their arrival to the squat. "Mrs. Mateo! Mrs. Mateo! Two drekheads with guns in a car!"
A large, middle-aged Filipino woman comes out of a corrugated shed, her faded dress not entirely covering a set of bulky augmentations. "You're not here to shoot up the place," she says levelly, "so you want something. Tell me."
"We're here about the Rust Stilettos," Cole says, and her lips quirk. "Specifically, to deal with them."
"Well, then," Mrs. Mateo says. "I might be able to help. Girl, run and get Carlo and Mandy."
A little while later, after a few very successful negotioation rolls, Cole has secured the services of Carlo and Mandy, a pair of hot-to-trot teens who act as guards for the squatters, to serve as backup for the attack on the plant for a couple hundred nuyen apiece. Sub-subcontracting. The squatters also tell him about the Rust Stilettos - the leader of the small band is a giant, heavily-aug'ed troll named Thrash, who was kicked out of his last band of Stilettos for being too unpredictably violent.
"They say his reflexes are permanently wired," Mandy says with a shiver.
The troll girl is Sapphire, and the thin boy is New Logan, who was brought in recently to replace the late Old Logan. "Logan's not even New Logan's name," Carlo adds, "but nobody's gonna contradict Thrash."
The fourth member, the ork in the lawn chair, is Burny. "Not Bernie like Bernard, Burny like he got burned," Mandy says. "He just sits in that chair all day and sometimes they pour glop down his throat."
The crew begin formulating a plan. Cage will vault the fence out of sight of the turrets and climb the two stories to the ceiling of the building, then take out Burny first, who they reckon is probably controlling the turrets. "I'd hack them, but I don't have a deck," Cage explains. Then Cole will ram the car through the far gate, shoot a lot in the general direction of the Rust Stilettos, and peel out again, luring them away from the factory so the primary team can nab their guy in peace.
Amber calls at midnight to make sure they're ready. She patches in the two other members of her team: Tex Talos, a dwarf rigger from the CAS with huge mutton chops and a down-home accent, and Grunfeld, a pensive-looking elven magician with a German accent. Pleasantries are exchanged, then Cole lights one of the incredibly precious real tobacco cigarettes (Red Apple brand, of course) that he keeps around to smoke before missions where death is a real possibility.
An hour later the plan begins. Cage rolls really well on his checks, beating Burny's Perception and scaling the building silently. He withdraws his rifle, takes a long moment to aim, and perforates Burny's skull. Directionless, the three turrets begin spinning wildly on their gimbals. Cole smashes the Americar through the rusted fence and he, Mandy, and Carlo spray fire in the general direction of the gant. Thrash - a truly huge troll, and seemingly half made of metal, begins charging the Americar with terrifying speed, bullets pinging uselessly off his hide. Cole fishtails the car and surreptitiously drops a live grenade in the car's wake as he speeds back out the gate.
New Logan throws a grenade at the building roof. Cage hits the deck, avoiding the brunt of the blast, but is hit for two of his ten physical condition track. Sapphire fires a burst from her machine pistol but only succeeds in pulverizing some masonry.
"We see him!" Amber Blaze's voice echoes over Cole and Cage's comlinks. "We're making our play!" From the other side of the factory, the river side, a day-bright flare shoots up into the sky, and they hear the sound of a vehicle-mounted gun spitting lead.
"Jesus," Cole bellows as he spins the Americar laterally. "Everyone bail out, take cover, and focus on the big guy!" He rolls a Leadership check - and since I didn't want to take the time to look up the rules, I said his successes would give Mandy and Carlo extra dice on their next rolls. They piled out and sprayed the charging troll with suppressive fire, which, along with the primed grenade finally detonating nearby, forces him to take a knee in a deep pothole in the ruined parking lot.
New Logan makes a break for Burny's cyberdeck, trying to reactivate the turrets, but Cage is faster, riddling him from the rooftop for ten of his eleven condition tracks. Logan crawls to the console and presses a button, laughing as the turrets switch to computer control, seeking the intruders. Saphhire takes another shot at Cage but misses again.
Thrash raises an enormous shotgun and fires a spray of lead at Cole, who's tagged for two wounds. The windows of the sedan shatter. Cole grits his teth and fires back, scoring a lucky hit that knocks off half of the big troll's condition boxes, causing him to bellow and leak machine fluid everywhere. Mandy and Carlo keep pouring it on, doing a box here and a box there of damage.
The chaos from the other side of the factory intensifies. From his perch, Cage sees a green ball of toxicity narrowly miss a hovering drone. Cloutier is a toxic shaman, apparently.
Before the turrets can lock on, Cage decides to take drastic action and leaps down from the roof - his gymnastics skill and hydraulic legs mitigating all falling damage, he races to the blood-stained cyberdeck and quickly tries to change the guns' targeting protocols. Lying there three feet away, New Logan takes a point blank shot at Cage but with his die pool reduced so severely can't score a single hit. Sapphire pulls a wicked-looking knife and charges Cage with a scream, but it's too late. The guns are now on the runners' side. One of the three unceremoniously drops her to the ground without a head. The other nearby turret riddles Logan as he writhes on the ground. The third begins spraying Thrash.
Under the onslaught of Cole, Mandy, Carlo, and the turret, even Thrash's 22 die pool for armor has to give out eventually, and the big troll jerks spasmodically as elecric arcs fire off from his shattered machine parts.
Just then, a scream comes over the team's comlink, and there's an explosion from the other side of the factory, followed by a long, impossibly loud, inhuman bellow of rage. Something sludge-green and four meters tall stands atop the river waters, a single hole in its dripping, fetid mouth.
"DIVERSION TEAM!" Amber's voice cries over the com. "WE'VE GOT A FREE TOX SPIRIT! WE NEED EVAC NOW!"
"Come get these turrets!" Cage orders, and Cole, Mandy, and Carlo dive back into the car and race across the parking lot, picking up the tripod guns as they go.
"Can you meet us at the bridge a hundred meters downstream?" Cole radios.
"I think so," Amber replies.
"Take the wheel," Cole tells Cage. "i'm better at hacking, anyway." He grabs the deck and hurriedly begins writing new automation for the guns. Cage speeds over the broken rubble of the street to the bridge downstream. The green sludge creature is firing gobs of caustic fluid at anything that moves, barely missing the car. Mandy and Carlo and Cole get out and set the turret guns along the bridge, and, fully automated and with a huge target, they begin pumping hundreds of rounds into the toxic spirit, which seems unharmed by stymied, holding up its unrefined, dripping "limbs" to shield itself from the onslaught.
Amber staggers up the embankment, leading Grunfeld by the hand and carrying Tex's limp body over her shoulder. "We've gotta get out of -" she pants.
"N..no," Grunfeld says. "We can't leave this unfinished. The creature is..." he grimaces in pain, "distracted. I have to try..."
He grits his teeth and pronounces a spell of banishment. A blue bolt of pure mana strikes the toxic spirit, taking it completely by surprise. A huge volume of its torso is converted back into pure mana, falling away as glittering blue snowflakes, before the entire creature just deliquesces, its substance crashing into the river like water from a burst balloon. Grunfeld flops to the ground.
Mandy and Carlo drag the other runners into the car - it's a cramped fit but do-able - and Cole makes a beeline for the nearest street clinic.
A little while later, Cole is standing iwth Amber, peering into a decontamination room where Tex and Grunfeld are being treated. Satisfied that they are no longer in imminent danger, she leans against a wall and exhales a long, shuddering breath.
Cage stands in the waiting room dispassionately, looking as if he could stand there in that exact pose for a decade or more.
"They didn't tell us he was a tox shaman," Amber says to Cole. "Fucking sicko didn't even care that we'd geeked him. He thought he'd let his slime monster out to play just out of spite." She rubs the bridge of her nose. "That'll be leverage, when we next speak to the Johnson. He'll cough up something extra. He'd better." Her voice has a dangerous edge. "And I think you and tall, dark and creepy over there earned your pay tonight, and more besides. Gimme your credsticks." She slots them into her PDA and tacks on a couple of extra g's.
"Thanks," Cole offers.
"Looks like Byron's maybe got his nose for talent back," she says. "If he moves back Downtown and takes you with him, I wouldn't mind running with you again."
"Yeah, well, count me out of any toxic shaman drek," Cole says with finality.
She attempts a smile. "Can't blame you there," she says. "See you in the shadows, runner."
After a week of pissing about I've finally been able to access D&D Insider (turns out that when they say user name they mean email).
This will make managing my party a lot easier, and the newest guy didn't have to stick with the PHB1 choices of race and class. As a result, the party now has a Githyanki Swordmage.
For the first time in a long while, one of my best friends, Lee, has been in town and he has heard about our Shadowrun game and is really excited to play on Friday, and we hung out on Monday and, among other shenanigans, rolled him up a guy. He made an amnesiac ex-corp soldier based on the agents from Syndicate (his favorite game when we were kids); his character, "Cage," is a heavily-augmented (ortho skin, datajack and internal cyberdeck, skilljack, wired reflexes, cybereyes, internal oxygen tank, and hydraulic legs with thigh holster (only dogs could hear my squeal of delight when I saw that was an option)) infiltration and gun specialist.
And then Lee ended up being free again today so we called up our friend Shawn and got dinner and decided to run an impromptu session to get him used to the ruleset. So bear in miond that everything that happens here is basically, not quite winging it, but I was running off a sheet of notes I hurriedly typed up in half an hour while we were eating takeout pub burgers (mine had blue cheese and bacon omgggggggg).
It's been a few days after the last session and Cole the grizzled PI awakes to find Byron the dwarf fixer dinging his commlink. "Is this going to make me money?" he barks.
"I wouldn't be calling if it weren't," answers the dwarf, matter-of-factly.
Cole heads down to Byron's usual watering hole just outside Touristville - a new independent dive called Category Z. Byron is in his usual booth, sporting a tiny waistcoat and fob watch, and seated with him is a tall, pale, visibly augmented man wearing a long black armored duster and blank, expressionless stare.
"Cole, meet...uh, Cage, wasn't it?" Byron says. The man gives a barely-perceptible nod. "He comes to me recommended by an acquaintance on the Matrix. And I think we'll need him for tonight's run...if you're in."
Cole grunts noncomittally.
"I'll take that as a...ahhh, here she is," Byron's face lights up with something like genuine warmth and also an edge of nervousness. Framed in the doorway of the dive is a tall, well-muscled razorgirl in full spec-ops regalia. The only things on her that aren't black are her impossibly pale skin and neon-green hair. "Byron," she says, snagging a stool with her boot and dragging it over to the booth in one smooth motion. "We heard you'd fallen from grace, but what, you recruiting from the retirement home now?" She smirks, without real malice, at Cole's seamed face and shock of white hair.
"Can we not talk history in front of the hired help?" Byron says with a peevish edge. "Boys, this is our prspective client. Amber Blaze, one of the hottest runners in the metroplex. She's subcontracting."
"Go on," Cole says.
She clears her throat. "Look, I'm a runner like you, and I feel like us runners gotta have a code. So I'm not gonna bother with the Johnson routine and I'm going to give it to you straight, or as straight as my team has it, anyway. We've been tapped to bring in an Awakened that someone wants real bad back in CalFree, alive preferably but dead is okay too. He's been holed up here in Redmond. Target's name is Theo Cloutier, a French-Metis from old Canada, and our legwork suggests he was involved with some terrorist shenanigans in California and that our Johnson is some flavor of Free State law."
She waves a hand, and a floppy-disk icon appears in Cole and Cage's AR vision as a file is shared to them. Only Cole knows what it means. "Our surveillance has placed him near the Rat's Nest, in an old DuPont plant up by the riverbank. He's hired a small band of Rust Stilettos" - a gang of orks and trolls from the more toxic parts of the Barrens - "as his guards. They've got some ghetto-ass security setup, too. The plan is simple: I want you two to make a lot of noise and really get the gangers' attention from the landward side of the factry. Put on a real fireworks show, enough that our target will try to slip out the river side. We'll be waiting there to scoop him up."
"This sounds like some soldier drek," Cole says. "What the hell you need a run-down private dick for?"
Byron coughs softly. "Mr. Cage is a gun specialist and will do most of the shooting, I imagine. And I, uh, couldn't get Bashurr on the comlink."
A text message pops up in Cole's AR from Byron. "You can read people. Keep an eye on the new guy and tell me what you think of him. He's got some weird kind of damage. If he's gonna get your crew geeked, we should probably know now."
Amber offers 5 g's apiece; Cole tries to talk her up but whiffs the roll. She takes pity and gives them 3 up front apiece.
"The op's at oh-one-hundred," she says, walking out of Category Z. "It's sixteen hundred now. We'll be in touch at midnight."
Cole and Cage pile into Cole's Americar and begin picking their way through the slums toward the Snoquomie River, keeping their guns prominently displayed.
Cole puffs an e-cigarette. "So what's your story, chummer?"
"I don't have a story," Cage says. "I woke up on a slab couple days ago. My memory's locked up." (He's amnesiac, and his memory is kept in a Johnny Mnemonic-style datalock.)
"But you figure you'll just start running, no questions asked. Fucking Byron," Cole groans. "So not only do I not know what you can do, neither do you?"
"I know my way around guns. Infiltration. ...Other things."
"I'll believe it when I see it," Cole says.
"Then pull over."
Cole does so, bemused, as Cage gets out of the car and begins striding towards a pair of squatter gangers sitting on a ruined brick wall, combat knives displayed prominently.
"Eyy, man," one says. "The fuck you think you're going? You gotta pay the fragging toll - "
Cole scrambles out of the driver's seat. "Hey, wait a minute, I didn't mean for you to-"
In one effortless move, Cage leaps atop a dumpster, then from it to the top of a small burned-out gas station. One of the gangers whips his knife at Cage and it clatters against the wall. Cage's thigh opens up and he swiftly withdraws an Ares Predator, which barks three times and leaves the hapless ganger a bloody ruin. The other ganger charges Cole with a tire iron, and the PI grimaces and halfheartedly fires his Ruger into the kid's thigh. "Aw, jeez, I didn't want this to....run, kid! Get the fuck out of here!"
The living ganger limps away, into a back alley. Cage leaps from the top of the station and walks calmly back to the car. "You asked for a demonstration."
"Well, you definitely demonstrated something," Cole spits.
The two continue their drive to the rusting hulk of the old 20th-century DuPont chemical plant. It matches the dexcription Amber Blaze gave them; a pitted old parkling lot provides minimal cover for fifty yards on all sides. The Rust Stilettos have set up a small encampment, and there seem to be four of them: a thickly-built troll woman in leather and a halter top, a gangly, stringy-haired ork man in black denim, a squat ork with a vacant stare, sitting motionless in a lawn chair, and in a makeshift tent that seems to be the command center, a huge, hulking shape under a canvas tarpaulin. Cole also spots three home-made turrets - heavy-caliber rifles mounted on tripods - concealed amidst a few burned-out cars and random junk piles.
"Those cars won't make good cover from the turrets," Cage says. "We need heavier weaponry."
Cole agrees, and they make the drive back to Touristville, Cole calling one of his contacts.
The contact, a fat ork named Kowalski in a polyester uniform, turns up half an hour later in the Category Z parking lot. He produces a trunk full of "slightly-used" weapons, some witht he last owner's blood still caked on the magazine, a set of dented bulletproof vests, and so forth. The fruits of the Lone Star low-priority evidence lockup. "Since Knight Errant got the Seattle contract, nobody really cares if a few pieces go missing," he says by way of explanation, then launches into a lavish, passiionate description of the calibers, ranges, and sotpping power of each piece in between slightly fawning questions of the shadowrunners. He's clearly the Sixth's World's answer to the mall ninja.
Cage buys a fully-automatic rifle and Cole buys a clutch of grenades. The two then head back in the direction of the chemical plant.
"I think we could use some backup," Cole says. "Or at least some info. Maybe those squatters in the Rat's Nest know something."
The North Seattle Refuse and Reclamation Facility, called the Rat's Nest owing to the small group of rat shamans who call it home, is a mile upriver from the plant. THe evening shadows are lengthening as Cole and Cage pull in, and a young black girl standing lookout hollers their arrival to the squat. "Mrs. Mateo! Mrs. Mateo! Two drekheads with guns in a car!"
A large, middle-aged Filipino woman comes out of a corrugated shed, her faded dress not entirely covering a set of bulky augmentations. "You're not here to shoot up the place," she says levelly, "so you want something. Tell me."
"We're here about the Rust Stilettos," Cole says, and her lips quirk. "Specifically, to deal with them."
"Well, then," Mrs. Mateo says. "I might be able to help. Girl, run and get Carlo and Mandy."
A little while later, after a few very successful negotioation rolls, Cole has secured the services of Carlo and Mandy, a pair of hot-to-trot teens who act as guards for the squatters, to serve as backup for the attack on the plant for a couple hundred nuyen apiece. Sub-subcontracting. The squatters also tell him about the Rust Stilettos - the leader of the small band is a giant, heavily-aug'ed troll named Thrash, who was kicked out of his last band of Stilettos for being too unpredictably violent.
"They say his reflexes are permanently wired," Mandy says with a shiver.
The troll girl is Sapphire, and the thin boy is New Logan, who was brought in recently to replace the late Old Logan. "Logan's not even New Logan's name," Carlo adds, "but nobody's gonna contradict Thrash."
The fourth member, the ork in the lawn chair, is Burny. "Not Bernie like Bernard, Burny like he got burned," Mandy says. "He just sits in that chair all day and sometimes they pour glop down his throat."
The crew begin formulating a plan. Cage will vault the fence out of sight of the turrets and climb the two stories to the ceiling of the building, then take out Burny first, who they reckon is probably controlling the turrets. "I'd hack them, but I don't have a deck," Cage explains. Then Cole will ram the car through the far gate, shoot a lot in the general direction of the Rust Stilettos, and peel out again, luring them away from the factory so the primary team can nab their guy in peace.
Amber calls at midnight to make sure they're ready. She patches in the two other members of her team: Tex Talos, a dwarf rigger from the CAS with huge mutton chops and a down-home accent, and Grunfeld, a pensive-looking elven magician with a German accent. Pleasantries are exchanged, then Cole lights one of the incredibly precious real tobacco cigarettes (Red Apple brand, of course) that he keeps around to smoke before missions where death is a real possibility.
An hour later the plan begins. Cage rolls really well on his checks, beating Burny's Perception and scaling the building silently. He withdraws his rifle, takes a long moment to aim, and perforates Burny's skull. Directionless, the three turrets begin spinning wildly on their gimbals. Cole smashes the Americar through the rusted fence and he, Mandy, and Carlo spray fire in the general direction of the gant. Thrash - a truly huge troll, and seemingly half made of metal, begins charging the Americar with terrifying speed, bullets pinging uselessly off his hide. Cole fishtails the car and surreptitiously drops a live grenade in the car's wake as he speeds back out the gate.
New Logan throws a grenade at the building roof. Cage hits the deck, avoiding the brunt of the blast, but is hit for two of his ten physical condition track. Sapphire fires a burst from her machine pistol but only succeeds in pulverizing some masonry.
"We see him!" Amber Blaze's voice echoes over Cole and Cage's comlinks. "We're making our play!" From the other side of the factory, the river side, a day-bright flare shoots up into the sky, and they hear the sound of a vehicle-mounted gun spitting lead.
"Jesus," Cole bellows as he spins the Americar laterally. "Everyone bail out, take cover, and focus on the big guy!" He rolls a Leadership check - and since I didn't want to take the time to look up the rules, I said his successes would give Mandy and Carlo extra dice on their next rolls. They piled out and sprayed the charging troll with suppressive fire, which, along with the primed grenade finally detonating nearby, forces him to take a knee in a deep pothole in the ruined parking lot.
New Logan makes a break for Burny's cyberdeck, trying to reactivate the turrets, but Cage is faster, riddling him from the rooftop for ten of his eleven condition tracks. Logan crawls to the console and presses a button, laughing as the turrets switch to computer control, seeking the intruders. Saphhire takes another shot at Cage but misses again.
Thrash raises an enormous shotgun and fires a spray of lead at Cole, who's tagged for two wounds. The windows of the sedan shatter. Cole grits his teth and fires back, scoring a lucky hit that knocks off half of the big troll's condition boxes, causing him to bellow and leak machine fluid everywhere. Mandy and Carlo keep pouring it on, doing a box here and a box there of damage.
The chaos from the other side of the factory intensifies. From his perch, Cage sees a green ball of toxicity narrowly miss a hovering drone. Cloutier is a toxic shaman, apparently.
Before the turrets can lock on, Cage decides to take drastic action and leaps down from the roof - his gymnastics skill and hydraulic legs mitigating all falling damage, he races to the blood-stained cyberdeck and quickly tries to change the guns' targeting protocols. Lying there three feet away, New Logan takes a point blank shot at Cage but with his die pool reduced so severely can't score a single hit. Sapphire pulls a wicked-looking knife and charges Cage with a scream, but it's too late. The guns are now on the runners' side. One of the three unceremoniously drops her to the ground without a head. The other nearby turret riddles Logan as he writhes on the ground. The third begins spraying Thrash.
Under the onslaught of Cole, Mandy, Carlo, and the turret, even Thrash's 22 die pool for armor has to give out eventually, and the big troll jerks spasmodically as elecric arcs fire off from his shattered machine parts.
Just then, a scream comes over the team's comlink, and there's an explosion from the other side of the factory, followed by a long, impossibly loud, inhuman bellow of rage. Something sludge-green and four meters tall stands atop the river waters, a single hole in its dripping, fetid mouth.
"DIVERSION TEAM!" Amber's voice cries over the com. "WE'VE GOT A FREE TOX SPIRIT! WE NEED EVAC NOW!"
"Come get these turrets!" Cage orders, and Cole, Mandy, and Carlo dive back into the car and race across the parking lot, picking up the tripod guns as they go.
"Can you meet us at the bridge a hundred meters downstream?" Cole radios.
"I think so," Amber replies.
"Take the wheel," Cole tells Cage. "i'm better at hacking, anyway." He grabs the deck and hurriedly begins writing new automation for the guns. Cage speeds over the broken rubble of the street to the bridge downstream. The green sludge creature is firing gobs of caustic fluid at anything that moves, barely missing the car. Mandy and Carlo and Cole get out and set the turret guns along the bridge, and, fully automated and with a huge target, they begin pumping hundreds of rounds into the toxic spirit, which seems unharmed by stymied, holding up its unrefined, dripping "limbs" to shield itself from the onslaught.
Amber staggers up the embankment, leading Grunfeld by the hand and carrying Tex's limp body over her shoulder. "We've gotta get out of -" she pants.
"N..no," Grunfeld says. "We can't leave this unfinished. The creature is..." he grimaces in pain, "distracted. I have to try..."
He grits his teeth and pronounces a spell of banishment. A blue bolt of pure mana strikes the toxic spirit, taking it completely by surprise. A huge volume of its torso is converted back into pure mana, falling away as glittering blue snowflakes, before the entire creature just deliquesces, its substance crashing into the river like water from a burst balloon. Grunfeld flops to the ground.
Mandy and Carlo drag the other runners into the car - it's a cramped fit but do-able - and Cole makes a beeline for the nearest street clinic.
A little while later, Cole is standing iwth Amber, peering into a decontamination room where Tex and Grunfeld are being treated. Satisfied that they are no longer in imminent danger, she leans against a wall and exhales a long, shuddering breath.
Cage stands in the waiting room dispassionately, looking as if he could stand there in that exact pose for a decade or more.
"They didn't tell us he was a tox shaman," Amber says to Cole. "Fucking sicko didn't even care that we'd geeked him. He thought he'd let his slime monster out to play just out of spite." She rubs the bridge of her nose. "That'll be leverage, when we next speak to the Johnson. He'll cough up something extra. He'd better." Her voice has a dangerous edge. "And I think you and tall, dark and creepy over there earned your pay tonight, and more besides. Gimme your credsticks." She slots them into her PDA and tacks on a couple of extra g's.
"Thanks," Cole offers.
"Looks like Byron's maybe got his nose for talent back," she says. "If he moves back Downtown and takes you with him, I wouldn't mind running with you again."
"Yeah, well, count me out of any toxic shaman drek," Cole says with finality.
She attempts a smile. "Can't blame you there," she says. "See you in the shadows, runner."
I thought 'toxicity' meant this was a post about a That Guy, but I was pleasantly surprised. Cool write-up!
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
So because I am bored and because I am a nerd (a deadly combination) I have been working on a little project in my spare time. At home, when I GM games, I've always liked to assemble little Youtube playlists of music to have running in the background to help set the mood. And gradually I would get more ambitious and start creating playlists for certain settings and moods, so I could have, say, spooky music for exploring a tomb in D&D, and then fight music for when the orcs attack, and so forth. Video game music is particularly suited for this as it's already meant to be ambient and it often comes with different tunes for fights and exploration and so forth.
The frustrating thing about this is that dudes on Youtube fucking suck and are always organizing their shit badly (a "complete playlist" of some soundtrack that is missing half the tracks) or get their accounts deleted so my playlists would suddenly be full of [deleted video] tags with no hint as to what had been there for me to go find another copy of it.
So being, as I said, bored, I decided to take matters into my own hands and upload my own videos to assemble my own playlists, and naturally this spiraled out of control and has become a big new project. But that's cool, because it's fun and it's something to do and it's something I can share with you guys.
I made a new channel, RPG Moods, to store it all. And here are the playlists, organized by genre. Some are more complete than others (Urban Horror, for World of Darkness-type stuff, was kind of a pain in the ass to populate. There are fewer gothy games out there than there ought to be.) But all of these should have at least half an hour of appropriate music and some are five or six times longer than that.
Suggestions for new additions are welcome. My criteria are pretty simple: it needs to be ambient (no vocals to distract from the actual work of gaming) and it ideally will have tracks that can be easily sorted by mood. Future genres I am thinking of tackling are Space Opera and Modern-Day Adventure.
Oh, right, forgot to post over here that the Doomtown: Reloaded rulebook is up. Had a bunch of card spoilers in the rules, too, something like 60 cards.
My friend Lee is in town till this weekend so was able to join us tonight - and we have leaned heavily on him to try Skyping with us in the future, so Cage the corp special forces guy may be making recurring appearances.
Present and accounted for were him, Bashurr the ork, Cole the PI, Blixt the flamboyant elven mage ("his hair is like 80s David Coperfield, but neon"), and, after a short delay, Red the Japanese pokemon summoner.
Bashurr, Blixt, and Cage head into Category Z, Byron's dive of choice, to meet the dwarf about a new offer of wok - but no sooner do they arrive and order their drinks than the door opens again, revealing an enormously tall human covered in muscle grafts that give him an almost alien, Rob Liefeldesque silhouette. The man is wearing dark pants and a sleeveless white button-up shirt with a tie, and sports a beetling brow, enormous mutton chops, and a pompadour. He makes a beeline for Byron. The middle-aged ork behind the bar swallows nervously. "The boss isn't here..." he offers, but the hulk is only interested in Byron.
"Thought we explained it good and clear, little guy," he rumbles. "You wanna fix here, fine, but we get a cut. We get a cut of all the action."
"Slot off," Byron says, emboldened by the presence of his runners. "We're independent. You don't know what that means, go look it up. It means we've never paid the mob's vig and we're not about to start now."
"Big talk's only gonna take you so far," the hulk says.
Bashurr stands up. "There a problem here, friend?"
"Not if you and your buddies cough up the family's percentage. Otherwise, yeah, we got a problem."
"Name the place and time," Bashurr says nonchalantly. "I'll be there." They size each other up for a long moment.
"Be sooner than you think," the hulk says as he leaves.
A few minutes later, a woman in her early forties steps into the bar. She is human, medium height, and thin, with sharp features. She wears denim jeans tucked into heavy duty hiking boots and a black micropore tank top under an enormously baggy blue flannel shirt. Her hair is short, dark, and practical, and she wears thick prescription sunglasses. Everything about her says "granola," 2070s style. She looks around nervously and Byron waves her over.
"Mrs. Johnson," he says indulgently.
"Uh, Dr. Johnson," she corrects him. "I'm...sorry, I've never had to hire....you know...before."
"Hire what?" Blixt smirks.
She looks around. "Shadowrunners," she whispers at last.
Around then, Cole turns up, a bit late and smelling of booze, but he takes a seat and assumes an attentive posture.
"I represent a small, er, growing operation," she begins. "A grow-op. We grow food and..other things." She hurries on. "Anyway, our water purifier recently broke down. It's an old model and needs a replacement control board. And, uh, tha's where you come in, I guess. I know where one is, but I need you to get it for us."
"Hold on," Bashurr says. "Why not just buy a replacement?"
"Well, we don't...we want discretion. Buying it would create a data trail. Someone would have to come do an installation. The corps would find out hwere we are, the mob or the Yakuza...no, we have to keep this under wraps. Stealing one is best for all concerned. And like I said, I know where one is. It should be easy."
Everyone looks sckeptical at that one. She looks confused.
"These things are rarely easy, madam," Byron says by way of explanation.
"Oh. Well...I already did the, the background on this. What we need is a Saeder-Krupp Wasserreinigungssystem 660, or rather the control board for it. Here are the schematics," she waves a hand and shares file to everyone's PDAs. "And I've learned that Pacific Pride Family Farms up in Snohomish has one. THey're a soy farm. Agribusiness. I've got some photos I took.." She shares another file. "My, uh, my organization is prepared to pay 25,000Y for an intact working control board."
Cole coughs theatrically. "You're new," he says sympathetically, "so you might not know that that's a bit on the low side..." (he rolls Negotioation and gets three succeses to her two resists.)
She looks abashed. "That's really all the liquid cash we have at the moment," she sighs, "but after the job is done we could offer you a quantity of our product...? The Awakened find it particularly -"
Blixt's eyes snap open. "Done and done!"
The deal is finalized, and she gives them part of their payment upfront. "So I wasn't expecting to meet here," she muses, as she gets ready to leave. "The friend who told me about you, Byron, said you usually held court Downtow-"
"That was a long time ago," Byron says peevishly. "Things are...different. Good day, madam. Please contact me with any further developments."
---
For once, this is not an especially time-sensitive job, so the team decide to put in several days' worth of legwork. Snohomish is northwest of the Rdmond Barrens and is largely wild and empty, a district of hills and fields, home to several huge agri-farms but sparsely occupied in general. The largely rural population harbors some anti-metahuman sentiment and the Humanis Policlub has a thriving chapter among the ag workers.
Pacific Pride has a smallish spread, mostly given over to engineered soy cultivars, but is surrounded by a three-meter chain-link fence and seems to have several guards. From what the team can discern from the photographs, there is a small administration building, the main processing plant, and, furthest from the road, what looks like some kind of low, long building, like a Quonset hut, but strongly reinforced.
The team get a room at a no-tell motel and get to work. The first day, Cole parks his Americar sedan (its windwos finally replaced after having been shotgunned out a few days ago) on the side of the country highway near Pacific Pride's main entrance, jacks in, and gets wi-fi access to one of their administrative servers. The nodes here are tougher than he had expected but he manages to download a personnel roster, a basic building schematic, and a delivery log before a pair of uniformed security begin walking toward his parked car to ask his buisness. He feigns taking a phone call (5 successes on a Charisma + Performance roll) and casually drives off.
It looks like, aside from administrative personnel and a couple dozen ag workers, Pacific Pride employs several parabotanists and a small army of security. And while it doesn't say this anywhere on their signage, their internal documents make it quite clear that they're a subsidiary of EVO.
Cole begins researching the careers of the parabotanists. That night, Bashurr, Cage, and Red (who has joined the team late) head to a nearby roadhouse to try and catch the Pacific Pride security staff on their off hours.
The mood inside is tense, and only gets tenser as Bashurr steps in. The problem is immediately eveident: at one side of the honky-tonk sit a small gaggle of off-duty guards, many of whom - emographically more than you'd expect - are orks and trolls. EVO is friendlier to the "goblinized" races than most corps.
And on the other side of the room sit a crowd of human bikers flying some of the regalia of the Humanis POliclub. The two groups, metas and skinheads, are glaring across the length of the bar at each other. "Look at that fucking tusker," one of the bikers yells as Bashurr enters.
The big ork steps up to the oldest and beardiest human biker, whom he guesses is the leader. "I'm not looking for trouble, friend," he jerks his thumb over his shoulder, "and neither are my friends back there. So why don't you just let us drink in peace?"
He rolls Intimidation. The biker leader eyes him, and then eyes Cage, standing inhumanly still at the door, and swallows. "We're humans," he says at last, jerking his chin upward. "We don't start trouble." He gives the men at his table a withering look that brooks no disagreement.
Bashurr nods and orders a drink, and a huge troll girl in a security uniform calls him over. "Wow!" she says. "I thought for sure that was gonna end badly. What's your story?"
"It would've ended badly for him," Bashurr nods. "No story. Just a thirsty biker pulling in for a drink."
"You dealt with him the like a pro, thoguh," she says, not dropping the subject. "You ever worked security? Think you might want to if someone offered?"
"A SINless biker ork work corpsec? I don't know..." he sounds intrigued.
"EVO isn't like other corps," she says excitedly. "We've got a home here. Why, you could..."
They talk a while longer before Bashurr baldly asks her if she wants to leave with him. I had him roll his 1 Charisma versus her 3 Willpower; amazingly, he rolled one hit to her zero. I guess there's no accounting for taste. This also freed Bashurr of the penalty from his "Sex Addiction (moderate)" drawback for this week.
Meanwhile, Red and Cage get a dark booth and REd has one of his spirits obscure them so Cage can pull out his cyberdeck and hack a nearby guard's PDA. He pulls an orientation memo with a list of Pacific Pride's basic security protocols. It seems they have fourteen security personnel on site at all times, two of whom are mages, several of the rest of which are trolls. There are also Doberman drones in the guard shack, administration building, and the Quonset-hut-thing, which are called the "high security labs."
The next day, the troll woman, still eager to make a convert, brings Bashurr to the Metahuman Resources office at Pacific Pride, where he does well enough at the aptitude tests to intrigue the guard commander and be given a security orientation. It is during the course of this that he learns that the water purifier is located adjacent to the high-security labs; a pipeline brings up water from the nearby polluted Snohomish River and the dirty water is sent to the labs while the clean water is piped to the main processing plant and the auto-irrigators. Red also succeeds at a Perception check to notice an aerial drone keeping an eye on the entire Farms from a hundred feet up.
Cole finishes his research (an extended action test) and shows the group what he has learned. The lead parabotanist employed at Pacific Pride has written papers about the possibility of "tailored organisms to replace security infrastructure."
The group hatches a plan. Blixt gets a hold of one of his contacts, a talismonger named ZenZen, and pays through the nose to learn the Oxygenate spell. Red and Cole shake the tree and get ahold of tox-resistant wetsuits and waterproof gear bags.
The next night, Blixt casts Oxygenate on the team and they dive into the Snohomish River. Guided by Red's "Squirtle" water spirit, they find the intake pipe and begin swimming up it, although the general grossness of the toxic river water gives Cole and Blixt some stun damage. Soon Red and Squirtle, in the lead, hear the thrumming of the giant pump that draws the river water uphill, and see whirling turbines ahead. Red produces a small ball of plastic explosive and lets the current carry the ball right up to the turbine before he remotely detonates it.
The explosion is deafening and the shockwave rattles the taem's teeth, but the pump shatters and the water in the pipe immediately begins draining back downhill. Part of the wall of the huge water storage tank has smashed through the wall of the secure labs, and Bashurr grunts and widens the hole as the sound of alarms fills the air.
The water spirit and Cage are the first out of the water tank and into the secure labs, and as they enter, big gobs of caustic acid nearly strike them and leave a sizzling mess on the wall behind them.
The secure lab is a long greenhouse, and from the planters on the floor tower five enormous plants, vines as thick as trees but topped with black blooms that belch acid - specifically the concentrated acidic river sludge fed to them as byproduct from the water purifier. And somehow they can see the water spirit in the Astral.
From the other side of the greenhouse come the shouts of security. The team works quickly. Cole rolls a highly successful Leadership check, ordering Cage and Red to cover Bashurr as the ork (the most mechanically-gifted of the team, with his motorcycle repair skill) unscrews the purifier housing and tretrieves the control board. Red chucks a flashbang grenade, blinding the Astral Fly Traps, while Blixt casts a Force 6 cold spell to turn most of the floor slick with ice. As the first security team bursts in, they slip and slide on the ice, none rolling the six hits needed to stand up, and Cage fires his rifle at a conveniently-placed set of hazardous waste barrels, coating the lead guard in caustic spray.
(IMPORTANT SHADOWRUN FACT: you cannot have an 80s sci-fi action story without toxic waste and acid fucking everywhere, cf Ray Wise shouting "Get off me, mannn!")
Bashurr rolls extremely well on the extended-action test to retrieve the control board and gets it out at the top of the second round, clearing the way for the team to begin withdrawing back down the intake pipe at a run. The last bit has to be swum, this time without the benefit of Blixt's Oxygenate spell, but the dice spirits are with Cole and the old private eye is able to keep pace with his younger, stronger companions. The team clamber out of the pipe, across the river, and up the opposite embankment to the waiting Americar, as shouts and searchlights fill the farm's side of the river. They dive inside.
And not a second too soon, as the Americar's windows explode in a hail of gunfire! A spotlight from above pinions the car. It's a drone, probably piloted by the rigger in the main building.
"God damn it," Cole moans, surveying the wreckage of his brand new windows.
"Let me drive," Red says calmly, grabbing the wheel as Cole scoots over. The car leaps forward, rumbles over some rough terrain, and then the wheels greedily seize on the asphalt of the country road. Behind them, the drone spins to pursue - then continues spinning, its pilot evidently having oversteered in his zeal (and not having rolled a single success on his piloting check).
They're home free.
A couple of hours later, the runners are Downtown, putting the Saeder-Krupp 660 control board into a certain locker at the train station near the U of W campus. A few hours later, fresh credit slides into their accounts.
And Cole surveys the reeking, stained upholstery of his prized Americar, wondering if he will ever get the stink of the Snohomish out of his seats.
THOUGHTS:
- This is my first time running a legwork-heavy session and it is definitely something I need practice with. I had a few different approaches in mind but none of them were "come up the pipe," but since they didn't seem to be trying some of the other things I'd planned for (a face approach, or smuggling themselves in with a fertilizer delivery) I was like sure, fuck it, it's a six-foot-wide intake tank. And why not? It ended up being pretty fun anyway.
- Once again, they didn't really do any research on the Johnson. If they had, they'd have learned she's an adjunct professor at the U of W and a board member of a non-profit hunger-fighting co-op who has turned to hydroponic deepweed cultivation to keep the grow-op afloat.
- We were pressed for time because this was my friend Lee's last night with us and I wanted to have it be a complete session. So a few things got handwaved that maybe would not have been in the normal course of things.
- But I am definitely handwaving the rules for explosive charges, which involve taking the square root of the mass of the charge in kg. If I wanted to do bullshit like square roots I would be a successful person with a job or something. Ugh.
Jesus there are dozens of dominion re-skins with scantily-clad anime girls from different cartoons in them. Rio Grande or Donald X have totally sold the rights to whoever-the-fuck here, happy to get some cash. But not in the West.
So we were playing Betrayal at house on the hill last night, but we had one too many people, so we just added an extra explorer with one of the unused characters. This was fine for a while, but a bit after the Haunt started it became obvious that with this many explorers the traitor was woefully outmatched. While we were debating whether to have someone else go to the traitor's side or tweak the rules for the traitor to get more turns, someone stumbled upon an omen room, and got to the "Perform Haunt check now" part of the card.
So that's why we spent the rest of the night trying to banish a mummy while defusing the time bombs on our backs. Would have been much easier if I hadn't handed the Book to the second traitor immediately before he turned traitor.
ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
The new Bundle of Holding is up. Annalise, The Agency, Dust Devils, God-King, Mars Colony 3:16 - Carnage Amongst the Stars, Dog Eat Dog, Heroine, Our Last Best Hope, Sorcerer (Annotated Upgrade) are all in this batch. Current price for all of them is $18.30.
Posts
...maybe more.
Steam Switch FC: 2799-7909-4852
Steam Switch FC: 2799-7909-4852
Thanks...I will try that. It recieved good reviews a few other places I have looked. I have been tasked with finding easy to use tools and teaching everyone how to use them in the next couple of months if we are going to pull this off.
Edit: That said, learning how to import maps is a great way to save time and keep the game moving smoothly instead of waiting for the GM to draw things out line by line. I did a lot of pre-made modules when I was GMing and the ability to copy-paste in maps out of a pdf was a great time saver.
One of the most vital things I can recommend is 100%, absolutely, always, always schedule a quick check-in some time before the actual game is set to start. Have everyone sign on at the same time a day or two ahead of game day, even if it's only for fifteen minutes, just to make sure everyone can a.) connect without issues, b.) communicate with each other, c.) familiarize themselves with how to do dice rolls and read the UI, and d.) see everything they're supposed to see and not see the stuff only the GM should see.
Trying to do troubleshooting last minute while someone is trying to forward ports or download a fix is horrible when you're supposed to be playing already. Roll20 in particular gave me some issues with its webcam functionality, and it took me a while to figure out I had to disable a google chat add-on to get it to work properly. So much easier and less frustrating to take care of these issues beforehand.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Looking forward to it.
I have ideas have a norse like game
It's pretty dope, combat is less "do I roll high enough to kill this thing" and more "do I sweep the leg or summon the power of wind to throw the dude off this cliff"
Steam Switch FC: 2799-7909-4852
this is the minis type of game I'm looking for: relatively self contained, but engrossing and engaging
gotta get the other fleet boxes
anybody else have any experience with it, or any other recommendations for minis games beyond x-wing?
Hold on, is that Etrian Odyssey or whatever it's called in English?
The X's stand for toxicity!
This will make managing my party a lot easier, and the newest guy didn't have to stick with the PHB1 choices of race and class. As a result, the party now has a Githyanki Swordmage.
I thought 'toxicity' meant this was a post about a That Guy, but I was pleasantly surprised. Cool write-up!
The frustrating thing about this is that dudes on Youtube fucking suck and are always organizing their shit badly (a "complete playlist" of some soundtrack that is missing half the tracks) or get their accounts deleted so my playlists would suddenly be full of [deleted video] tags with no hint as to what had been there for me to go find another copy of it.
So being, as I said, bored, I decided to take matters into my own hands and upload my own videos to assemble my own playlists, and naturally this spiraled out of control and has become a big new project. But that's cool, because it's fun and it's something to do and it's something I can share with you guys.
I made a new channel, RPG Moods, to store it all. And here are the playlists, organized by genre. Some are more complete than others (Urban Horror, for World of Darkness-type stuff, was kind of a pain in the ass to populate. There are fewer gothy games out there than there ought to be.) But all of these should have at least half an hour of appropriate music and some are five or six times longer than that.
CYBERPUNK
Cyberpunk Ambient
Dangerous Places Ambient
Jacked in to the Matrix Ambient
Asian-Themed Ambient
Dives and Clubs
Tension
Combat
Matrix Combat
Epic Combat
Creepy and Horrific
Love & Lust
Dramatic Exposition
URBAN HORROR
Urban Horror Ambient
Dangerous Places Ambient
Asian-Flavored Ambient
Bars and Clubs
Tension
Combat
Epic Combat
Sad and Grim
Doomed Romance
Dramatic Exposition
FANTASY
Wllderness Ambient
Urban Ambient
Dungeon Ambient
Exotic Ambient
Taverns and Bars
Tension
Combat
Epic Combat
Heroic Themes and Victory
Holy Places
Unholy Places
Romance
Sad and Grim
Martial Moods
Dramatic Exposition
Suggestions for new additions are welcome. My criteria are pretty simple: it needs to be ambient (no vocals to distract from the actual work of gaming) and it ideally will have tracks that can be easily sorted by mood. Future genres I am thinking of tackling are Space Opera and Modern-Day Adventure.
thanks!
subscribed
Full visual spoiler set so far.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
looks like Inquisitor mentioned it's a reskinned Dominion
art definitely looks like it's by himukai yuuji, and you've got index corp at the bottom there, so probably
Yup it is exactly that - an Etrian Odyssey reskinned Dominion:
Info in Moon Language here:
http://ebten.jp/atlus/p/4981932507286/
http://hobbyjapan.co.jp/index_games.html
Reminds me of Japandering:
http://japander.com/japander/index.htm
That's not what Moon-script looks like at all
So that's why we spent the rest of the night trying to banish a mummy while defusing the time bombs on our backs. Would have been much easier if I hadn't handed the Book to the second traitor immediately before he turned traitor.
oh man, I have no excuse not to run a Shadowrun game
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Sixth World? Yeah, it's pretty great. I'd link it but on my mobile ATM.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
That looks like it, didn't know they put out a website version. Mostly was familiar with the PDF one.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
ver. blue got the greenlight to release pdfs of double cross
Looks like the link I book-marked has gone bad. A quick Google search points to an RPGNet thread with a link to the pdf, though.