Author: Stan Shinn (Page 67 of 112)

Shambling Throne of the Death Cult King

November 11, 2015 / Stan Shinn

The DM’s View: 1 Page Dungeon Notes

Quick recap of the ShinnCon V game. Here was the description:

“Shambling Throne of the Death Cult King”
You are about to settle in for a peaceful night at the Drunken Dragon Inn when Chaos strikes. Literally. A local cultist bursts in and demands tribute to the Chaos God, whose death horde swiftly approaches. Rumored to command a legion of undead, the Death King Nulgarbad paves a trail of destruction across the land. Dare you infiltrate the death trap of his shambling throne?

This was truly one of the most memorable games I’ve run. I had several TPK-capable creatures including an undead dragon go after the players. (un?)Fortunately the players were way to cunning for my big bad guys — turns out if you can ally with a 90 foot giant and have him lob half-filled barrels of Holy Water, you can do over 2,000 Hit Points of damage vs. the undead with one shot [yes, we did the math] 🙂

So much XP was had (literally thousands of monsters died in the aftermath) that the players advanced TWO levels and will be level 10 next game!

The Undead Army

Spinward Frontier Theme Music

October 15, 2015 / Stan Shinn

Listen to the official Theme Music of the Spinward Frontier!

[“Martian Cowboy” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/]

Also see the alien races of the Spinward Frontier.

Board Game Grand Prix

October 2, 2015 / Stan Shinn

In the first meeting of the Board Game Grand Prix, four games were played at Common Ground Games.

Splendor — winner Martin — 2 points
Splendor — winner Martin — 2 points
Star Wars Imperial Assault — Martin 1 point (for the Imperials) [Robert 1 point, Nick 1 point, Brooks 1 point, Patrick 1 point]
Ticket to Ride — Winner Brooks 3 points [2nd place Robert 1 point]

We determined that there should be four tiers of games, Tough, Intermediate, co-op and opening. If you win a tough game, 1st gets 4 points, 2nd gets 2 points. An Intermediate game winner gets 3 points, and 2nd gets 1 point. For co-op, the runner automatically gets 1 point. The group each gets a point if they win, and the runner gets another point if they don’t. Opening gets 2 points for the victory, but no second place points. So the tally with week one done:

Martin — 5 points
Brooks — 4 points
Robert — 2 points
Patrick — 1 point
Nick — 1 point

At Christmas time, three gift certificates will be given to the overall first, second and third place finishers. Next week we are at it again as I pushed my DnD game one week.

Star Wars: Dawn of Rebellion — Episode 04

September 26, 2015 / Stan Shinn

It is a dark time for our heroes.

In a rush to rendezvous with Skelly Kandos on Thrin, the crew of the O.R.C. Tyrannus takes off—without checking their ship for deadly, hissing space-assassin-ninjas.

It proves to be a fatal mistake.

Halfway to the moon, the crew is ambushed by five assassins.

Surrounded, A9-LX is reduced to a pile of smoking rubble.

A…TICKING…pile of rubble.

In his death-throes, the droid activates the bomb stored within him. Quick action by Isshtatha and Daymont save the ship from certain destruction. Daymont grabs the bomb, leaps through a window, sprints to the garbage chute, and ejects the incendiary into space.

Meanwhile, Dr. Tark Malin is having fun with molasses.

Vin Sai and Cornelius Vaan jump in to help Dr. Malin finish off the strangely tattooed—and now sticky—assassins.

There is no time for the meat-bags to mourn the passing of A9-LX, however. They arrive on Thrin for a hush-hush meeting with a hoarse miner and his data cube.

But Count Vidian nearly foils their plans with a surprise inspection.

Back on the ship, the zombified Garr Juun slumbers, and the data cube reveals imminent destruction for Thrin and Vor Deo. The heroes ponder their next move…

Hex Mapping Middle-Earth

August 28, 2015 / Stan Shinn

Author’s note: this page has a lot of high-res images. Be patient as they load. Don’t forgot to scroll down to see all the images and comments!

I’m doing some long term planning about an epic, multi-year Middle Earth RPG campaign. One key element my game group guys want is Kingdom building rules, so we’ll likely hack the Pathfinder ‘Kingmaker’ OGL rules to serve this purpose. Kingmaker rules presume you have 12 mile hexes, and they have rules about exploring and settling (and defending) hexes, so this should work well. But — we’ll need an epic map to make this work like I want. Here’s my prototyping so far.

First up is taking a high-res fan-made map and cropping it to fit on an 18×24″ aspect ratio. This will be our World Map we work with for the campaign.

Next up I zoom in on the top left corner. I could make this NE quadrant into an 18×24″ map if we decide we need that.

Then I overlay a hex grid over the quadrant. Each hex is 60 miles, which is the D&D 5e Kingdom scale, which will play well with setting up 12 mile sub-hexes inside them. We’ll be adventuring in the Third Age, around T.A. 1400-1600 (centuries before The Lord of the Rings adventures). This area of Middle-Earth has several MERP (Middle-Earth Roleplaying, the old 80’s RPG) modules we may want to leverage so I think this is a great place to adventure. Also, it’s close to Angmar and near enough to the Witch-King to get into trouble with his foul minions. But I digress…

So I overlay a the sub-hex map with a rectangle that will, once zoomed, make for another nice 18×24″ map, this time portrait instead of landscape.

Here’s what it looks like zoomed in.

The above topography is simple enough we can ‘explore’ in traditional hex-crawl format and draw in features as we explore using wet-erase pens on the poster frame in which I’ll put it. Alternatively we could use the uber-awesome Peter Fenlon map from the MERP products. Looks really cool. If I go this route I’ll need to fix the colors in the scans and also sharpen and possibly re-typeset the labels for legibility.

A third option would be to use a hex map that has no details at all and we draw in features as we explore or as they become relevant. Anyway, lots of cool option.

Want to track my progress? Follow me on Google+ where I’ll share out once in a while the maps and other tools as they progress 🙂