These guys are in for a hard day I can tell. I'm not sure which unit these panzergrenadiers are from but by the one overwhite jacket and the splinter pattern smock it's winter '43 at least. (Duh! read the German archive dates. Feb 1945)
Ever read "The Forgotton Soldier" by Guy Sajer? No, you should.
In totally unrelated news.
We played our first game of Earthdawn tonight! First RPGing from me in a year and a half! My rolling was crap as usual and it resulting in my near death, as usual for my characters at first level.
All is good in the world.;-)
Been a while since I've heard of the Earthdawn rpg. Never played it, but I remember seeing it in game stores in the 90s. Post-Apoc, alterna-Fantasy?
ReplyDeleteExactly, Shadowrun ruleset I think, alterna fantasy. Orcs, Dwarves etc still of course though.
ReplyDeleteHella fun so far.
Apart from being run down like a dog anyway.;-)
Glad you had fun, Adam.
ReplyDeleteEarthdawn is the Shadowrun backstory - in fact, despite pretending to be all dark and post apoc, they sure did spend a lot of effort detailing politics, organisations, what the dragons were secretly up to etc.
When I was racking my brain for what type of D&D to run - it occurred to me that if I dropped all that metaplot stuff, I could run Earthdawn as a sandbox, have a hexmap, and see what the players come up with.
That kind of setup can be a little lethal but I reckon Chris has the right idea for how to approach it.
I appreciate that this is your/our build.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you mean by Chris' idea for an approach though?
I used the setting but wound back the clock about two generations.
ReplyDeleteAll those hours Chris wasted finishing every last bit of Baldur's Gate II has conditioned him to try and find all the 'easy' xp for as long as possible. I bet that if I started giving out xp for finding five sacks of flour for the baker or carrying a message between two lovers, he'd never want to leave town! Since I wont even let you guys in the starting town, the next best thing seems to be to check out everything in the vicinity and see what seems straightforward, in order to grind the early levels/circles before risking things like Dungeon environments.
Then why is he trying to get in the frickin pyramid? lol!
ReplyDeleteI think that when you guys ignored the suggestion to go check out that tower elsewhere, the other devil on his shoulder took over. It's the same devil that led him to put a hand in the sphere of annihilation in the TOH.
ReplyDeleteIf this sandbox has areas of greater and lesser hazard that are not scaled to character level then it makes sense to look for easy targets. The ziggurat area (aka Shadar Logoth) is clearly higher circle. I bet the doors slam shut once we're inside. Easy to get in, hard to get out. Our third session will probably start with a new group of five adepts being sent out after yet another scouting party failed to return.
ReplyDeleteIs Kassafeh right though? Wasn't poking around at this Pyramid Grima's idea and if so, is this the 'beat the world' angel or the 'misfortune is funny' devil?
ReplyDeleteAnd it is a disservice to all the good fantasy that has been written that somehow Robert Jordan springs to mind when players are in that situation. Howard or Lieber did that better and more memorably!
Grima wanted to do brief searches of small buildings looking for treasure and then he wanted to get out of the town before it got dark. He didn't suggest going into the pyramid but once he saw the group was going to go in said "We're in the pyramid". I'll have to come up with a set of character values and behaviours for Grima as I see that I am actually always playing the same character.
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