My personal adventure logs that anyone can read and, hopefully, find entertaining!
After playing many dungeons with Four Against Darkness (4AD) over the last few months, I decided to try something a little different. I noticed in my downloaded files section, Notequest, which I had intended to try a lot more. So here we are again. My initial thoughts on the core rules can be seen here, about a year and a half ago.
Welcome to another installment of the Forgeshields Adventures! Last time, we saw a couple party members cut down before seeing level 2. Surprisingly, the halfling and elf both made it out alive leaving their guild mates rotting corpses in the dungeon...So it's time to roll up some new characters!
Herein lies another start of a guild named "The Forgeshields." It is a record of their adventures using the Four Against Darkness (4AD) rules system and any number of expansions that I feel necessary. So buckle up, and hope for no Medusa!
One thing I never really got into with 5150 Maiden Voyage was space adventures. It just seemed like a lot of work. You had to make stat sheets for each ship when you encountered them in space, just seemed like a lot of bookkeeping. With 5150 New Beginnings, you have nice counters with the stats already on them, which makes bookkeeping pretty much non-existent. All you need to do is remember a couple things about the captain's rep and his attribute. The most you will encounter is 2 ships, assuming you just use one ship yourself.
This will be a test run with the spaceship rules, combat in space, in particular. I will restore Sven's rep to 5 (he lost one last episode!) but his other stats will remain the same, people 6, savvy 4, Crack Shot, and Nerves of Steel.
First, we need a ship. I think a trader would make sense, so I pop out the trader ship on the battle board.
Trader Spaceship token |
Last month saw Sven rising in People skill to 6, the maximum you need. Why’d I choose it? Well, I think the interaction skill is paramount in the THW “interaction era” as I’m going to call it. Especially for this version of 5150NB as you’re constantly running into people and talking to them. You can rack up the IRD in this way. This is always handy when you have an encounter go south quickly or you lose rep when the dice gods frown upon you (read on, dear reader if you want to see them in action).
This Black Friday, I splurged and bought a bunch of titles from Two Hour Wargames at 50% off. Great deal! In particular, I bought 5150 New Beginnings as well as its companion books. I was inspired by Andy Slack's blog about Arioniad using these same rules and figured, at this price I couldn't pass it up.
I quickly rolled up my first character, named after our new feral kitten, Svengoolie or Sven for short. I'm probably going to re-roll this guy up at some point, this is just so I can familiarize myself with the rules. All encounters will be the race "Basic." Here's a brief overview:
Sven |
Profession: Mercenary
Rep: 5
Weapon: P-1
Attributes: Nerves of Steel (random), Crack Shot (chosen)
Pep: 5
Savvy: 4
Upkeep: Home 0d6 \ Space Ship: 0d6 \ Vehicle 0d6
Lifetime Rep d6 Level: 0
Good evening, ghouls and ghosts! Tonight, a very special session of Future Shock filled with shambling hordes of zombies and spookiness! The scenario is very simple, survive the night (8 rounds!) or else be overwhelmed by the hordes of zombies. I'll be using the solo rules found in the Crushpop FaceBook page in the files section. The zombies will be assigned the "aggressive AI" but will not go for cover. I designed my own rule (since there are a lot of zombies!) they activate three at a time and move as a group.
From left to right: Officer Grimes, Charisma, Holly, Steve, and Tito |
I came across Future Shock while perusing Wargames Vault. At $0.99, I figured, why not? Looks like it might be good time for a buck. If you're interested, read more after the break!