A Life Full of Adventure

Erik Tenkar of the eponymous Tenkar's Tavern is trying to get the word out on some high quality, yet little know RPGs.  He's thinking of making a point to do one a month. He's starting out this month with Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game. I have never played the game, but Tenkar states, "it's actually a very good set of rules. It's not that there is a lack of material for the system - there is enough freely available to keep your game running for years." A free product with enough material to keep your game running for years? Sounds like something we should all check out.

A while back I posted about  my friend's home-brewed world  for D&D 2e. I have some of his notes. A comprehensive page can be found under the blog banner. The Great Desert  There are various nomadic tribes roaming The Great Desert. Most of these tribes are thought to have various mountain strongholds, though this has never been proven. The Caliphate This area is held tightly by a quasi-religious warlord.  The warlord and his successors reign between 50 - 200 years before a new tribal leader gathers an army and overthrows the previous caliph.  This is usually done under claims that the overthrowing warlord's “god” decreed him to be all powerful. The Caliphate has a highly hierarchical church, which the Caliph is head of. There is no proof that their “god” even exists, and if he does he ignores his followers. There is a great deal of trade through the Caliphate's port-cities of Gar’Shasin and Shadikar. The Caliph and his agents control al...

I picked up a copy of this book while at SnowCon, which is fortuitous because I've been looking for WarHammer adventures to run at PortCon. There are some great adventures inside (6 in all). They range from first-career adventures to end-of-first-career adventures to second-career adventures.  You could conceivably start new characters and run only these adventures for them for many, many months. This is the only problem with using the book for a convention. Some of the adventures could be condensed into four hour time slots, but most of them would suffer from being restricted so. One of the adventures alone promises many sittings worth of adventure. Therefore, while I definitely like my purchase, and I would recommend it to others looking for adventures for their 1e or 2e WarHammer groups, I can't use it the way I would like at PortCon. I'm still looking for suggestions if anyone wants to help me out.

I've been really bad at getting follow-up thoughts on the adventure I ran at the convention last weekend, so I'm just going to post what I have: Ambition & Avarice by Greg Christopher 1) Combat was too easy . This was my fault. I maxed out the PC HPs, but I left the HP of the creatures in the adventure at what they were rolled. We had a 22 HP orc ranger fighting 1 HP recently spawned orcs. To be fair, all the opponents should have been at max HP as well. Now, this isn't to say that people didn't get injured. We did have injuries, and we did need healing. I'll talk about that in the next point. 2) The Cultist changes things . Once the party saw what the Cultist could do, they suddenly wanted to knock their opponents out instead of killing them. We had a hobgoblin player trying to knock orcs out with the flat of his axe blade. A couple other players told me they were specifically trying to hit with the pommels of their swords.These players wanted their oppo...

Kelvin is the brother to my primary character, Lothar . He is one of the first alternate characters I made.He has been through far fewer adventures. He has turned away from his brother's upbringing and sought out his own way in life. Kelvin is a human male rogue of neutral alignment. He is 20 years old, 5'11" tall, 166 lbs with blonde hair and blue eyes. Currently an Embezzler, Kelvin started as an acrobat. He then became a thief, and then a pickpocket. Currently he is only a few skills away from becoming a Fence. Feel free to port Kelvin over into your current campaign when you are looking for a neutral, looking-out-for-number-one type character. Current Profile: M 4 WS 42 BS 42 S 4 T 3 W 9 I 40  A 1 Dex 47 Ld 29  Int 29  Cl 33  WP 33 Fel 51 IP 2 FP 0 Skills : Acrobatics, Concealment - Urban, Silent Move - Urban, Silent Move - Rural, Secret Language - Thieves, Secret Signs - Thieves. Hand Weapons: Knife, Sword, Spear Missile Weapons : Throwing knive...

Brainstorming here: what is a really good WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign to run at a four day convention? I'm leaning toward the Doomstones because I figure I can have them find each stone in one four hour time slot. I can also run the intro on the preview night of the con. Do you have any other suggestions for con weekends and how the campaign could conveniently be diced up into four hour time slots?

Last weekend at the local gaming convention I got in on a playtest game of D&D Next. Yes, I've signed up for the official playtest and I get an email every time a new version comes out, so I'm not breaking any rules. I have two main thoughts about the game we played: It was too easy, and it was too hard.  I think one was thanks to D&D Next and one was thanks to the adventure the DM ran. Too easy: I had a cleric of Beory. I always had healing spells available of whatever level I could cast (0-3 for this playtest), and my healing spells did not count toward my limit of max spells. Effectively, I could cast any healing spell from Cure Minor Wounds (1 HP) to Cure Serious Wounds (3d8+13) as often as I wanted. This is too broken. No limit? Or rather, limited only by rounds? I liked it, as I was able to keep everyone else healthy, but it really is broken. Too hard: The first things we fought were ghouls and ghasts. If I had been attacked and failed my paralyze savi...