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| Nordic Weasel 2016 |
I had a little game of Starport Scum yesterday while on the mend from being sick the last 10 days. Wouldn't recommend it...The being sick, not Starport Scum! It's the predecessor to 5 Parsecs From Home but way more sandboxy. If you want a great look under the hood, check out Docking Bay's fantastic write up on it.
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| First three are Laserburn and the last is a more recent Khurasan. |
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!
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.
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| Trader Spaceship token |
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| Sven |
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).
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| Sven |
Month 2:
Pay the Man: Since I didn’t increase in rep/skills, I won’t list the stats. At the start of the month, you need to pay the bills with DRD (decreasing rep d6). Since Sven lives in low-income housing, doesn’t have a ship or vehicles, and has no band members, he gets 0 DRD.
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:
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| 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
NoteQuest: Expanded World by Green Little Thing has been in my cart off and on for a year or two now but I never pulled the trigger on buying it. Today, I finally did! Let me give you a bit of an overview before I do a play through.
Note: The NoteQuest: Expanded World includes the core NoteQuest rules, so all you need is to plop down a couple bucks and you're set! This overview will be covering said core rules.
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| "An 80's style solo game." TAKE MY MONEY! |
I was born in 1982, so you could say I didn't "grow up" in the 80's, I mean, I was 8 in 1990, still just a pup. I beg to differ though, as my love of 80's pop culture is strong and when I point to what era I'm from, it's firmly established in the 80's. That said, when I saw Neon Road, I knew I had to put up the money to buy it. By the way, this can be purchased on Amazon in print form or DriveThruRPG in PDF format. The book is written by Noah Patterson, well known for his Micro RPG books.
The world of Neon Road is set in alternate 1985. In 1976, nuclear bombs were dropped and the world almost destroyed. Fast forward your Betamax to 1985, now you're struggling to survive in this dystopian world.
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| For Levels 1-4 |
I finally got around to playing The Stump of Elemental Evil, which I purchased in card format. It is also available in a PDF file. Here's my review!
I've decided to create a caravan guard character for Talomir Tales Caravanserai, which I can no longer find the link for so we're going into the realm of discontinued rules until they show up in the Rebel Minis archive of Two Hour Wargames. I envision him as a late teens mercenary trying to prove himself. Since he's not a veteran in combat, like a soldier would be, his class will be warrior. As usual, I will be using the GameMaster's Apprentice Fantasy deck for character creation.
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| Rules used |
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| Drvar Rep 5 pep 5 Sav 4 Citizen Star (Pistol P-1) |
In our last installment, Drvar was nearly turned into a zombie but, thankfully, his wounds weren't caused by a bite. Maybe he skinned his arm up falling down in the ruckus with the zombie. This introductory encounter is the last of a three week series called "Escape!" After this one, I'll be able to choose between survivor and ganger. The encounter will be at night.
I've had Starport Scum for many years now and always wanted to give it a go. Finally, after digging around my 15mm sci-fi stuff, I was inspired to create some characters to hopefully play out some games or even a campaign. We'll see how it goes!
In the rules there is a section for creating characters. Either you can build your own characters with "tags" or you can have them randomly generated for you. I decided to just look at the figure and see what comes to mind, as the rules encourage you to do. I will give the heroes 3 traits, 2 positive and 1 to fit the figure's personality and then an extra pilot trait. Random names are provided by the GameMaster's Apprentice Sci Fi deck.
I almost forgot, each hero gets to roll on the "sample loot table" and for every three characters in a group, we roll on the gun table.
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| Rules Used |
Dear reader, I had intended to keep this campaign going but life intervened and a medical emergency happened. But, finally, life is getting back to normal.
This is the second week of the tutorial encounter. Read on!
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| Rules Used |
Welcome again to another adventure log. Like my fantasy version, I will be keeping track of characters and doing the light bookkeeping required for this game. Sometimes I might get into detail and sometimes not.
I decided to make an area map of my hometown, Otis Orchards, and its outlying areas to adventure in. Most of it takes place in extreme Eastern Washington except for Coeur d'Alene (cor-duh-lane), Idaho. Also, Spokane is pronounced spo-can, just to clarify. Both cities are named after Native American tribes.
For the first month I'll be using the "First 30 days," which consists of three separate encounters. It's kind of like a tutorial and all the work is done for you. In the first month you can't choose to recruit anyone. You can have a gun but I'm choosing to go unarmed. This will be in area map 1, Otis Orchards. Let's do it!
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| Area Map |
I'm going to be starting up a new campaign with All Things Zombie - Evolution (ATZE) published by Two Hour Wargames. I did a very short campaign here with three encounters of my choosing. This time, I'm going to start from day 1 of the zombie outbreak and go from there.
Let's build a horror character!
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| Rules Used |
So far it has been a heck of a journey. A lot of battles and a lot of blogging on the quest for the Eternal Father statue. So let us conclude with Shen and Phineas' adventure!
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| Rules Used |