Spes Magna Games

Well, it’s been too long since I last posted. I’ve been Doing Other Things, a lot of it related to my day job, but also a lot of it just not having anything to do with this site. (Ironically, despite the dearth of Spes Magna activity for weeks and weeks, my on-line sales are up.) So, what have I been doing that’s gaming-related?

I’ve been gaming, mostly via virtual meetings, but some face-to-face as well. Every other Saturday, Terry runs a post-apoc Savage Worlds game set in and around Hot Springs, Arkansas. We’ve got two players: me and Eric. I’m running the Kid Avenger, an athletic teenager who has learned just about everything he knows about the pre-apoc U.S. from reading his grandfather’s collection of comic books. He has a shield, recites the Avenger’s Oath, and has become very concerned with doing process because he’s heard “do process” was an important part of the Bill of Rights. Eric runs Slate, a pre-apoc android doing “his” best to understand humans and maintain a facade of normalcy. This two-person Hot Springs Avengers team has been aided a bit when my wife Katrina and daughter Adrienne sat in a couple of sessions, but they’re not regular players. So far, most of the action involved defeating a degenerate cannibal cult in Little Rock and establishing diplomatic relations with a society of intelligent gorillas.

Every other Sunday, we play 5E D&D with everyone except my son Christopher joining in remotely. Christopher sits across the table from me. I’m the DM for the Sunday game. It’ll switch off to another DM after a few more sessions. We’ve got a homebrew campaign slowly emerging from vague hints to concrete details as the heroes travel around, trying to do good. The group I’m running has five players ranging in ages from about 12 to Much Older. I had been running the players through AD&D’s Slave Pits of the Under City, but the heroes met their match, and each of them died, butchered by orcs.

We picked back up last Sunday. Three players opted to have their characters some survive. The other two players made up new characters. All of the characters woke up covered in sacrificial sigils related to Wastri, Lloth, and Blibdoolpoolp. Along with them were several captured townsfolk. Everyone was naked and without equipment of any kind. They were also stranded on a small rocky island, which Morgan the Warlock figured was somewhere in the large central lake of the campaign’s setting. Then the froghemoth attacked.

Most of the NPCs died horribly. Christopher’s druid took some serious damage and only escaped the froghemoth’s clutches by wild-shaping into a crocodile. The survivors escaped down a staircase hidden at the base of a strange altar, and they’re now encamped at the edge of a huge cavern system some distance beneath the lake’s bed. They’ve also escaped into another AD&D module, which I’ll not mention at this moment, but making it the fourth AD&D module used for our 5E D&D Sunday game. (Terry ran a one-shot one Sunday that might have been AD&D-related originally, but I couldn’t attend that session because I was down with an insomnia-induced migraine.)

I’ve also GMed remotely one session of a superhero game using a homebrewed system that started heavily based on TSR’s original Marvel Super Heroes but which has now mutated to include an action resolution system glommed from the third edition of the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game published by Mayfair Games in 1993. I’m also pulling in at least one element from TSR’s later Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, which is the one that used the deck of cards for action resolution and hero creation.

The heroes the first session were Christopher’s Owlman and Terry’s Starlight, who teamed up to destroy Chemo after that DC Comics monster-villain showed up during a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Houston’s Hermann Park. Our next session is scheduled for this coming Wednesday evening, during which Owlman and Starlight will likely be joined by the mysterious Presence (played by Eric).

What else? Well, there’s Sunnesci, a semi-Stone-Age campaign setting that is still system neutral. Check out the adjacent pictures, both of which embiggen when clicked.

Sunnesci sits on what might be a peninsula between an ocean and a gulf. It is populated by humans and humanoids races based on alligators, flamingos, and nutria. I’m going a sort of scrapbook route, drawing and coloring the maps into a graph-paper composition book and cut-and-pasting word-processed text into the book. It’s not exactly coming along like gangbusters, but I find the activity strangely relaxing. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with Sunnesci. It might end up getting used for a game. It might just remain a side project. Maybe both? If I ever get it done, perhaps I can raffle it off, and some lucky person can end up owning the only copy of Sunnesci in the world.

Interwoven in all of this has been the end of a stressful third quarter and start of the final quarter of the 2020-2021 school year. My 7th and 8th grade boys are reading their final novels, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, respectively. I’m looking forward to the end of the school year. We’ve been on-campus almost all of the school year, working within the parameters of some sensible COVID-based restrictions, but even sensible restrictions begin to wear on the nerves after several months. The administration has done an excellent job, and the students have handled the weirdness of the year like troopers, but everyone looks forward to a return to normalcy.

Tags: Sunnesci, superhero games

I shuffled my Atmar’s Cardography cards from Norse Foundry dealt out the top four, and arranged to form a mini-dungeon. With graph paper, pencil, felt tip pen, and an eraser, I turned the cards into the The Chamber of the Crooked Star, a 1E AD&D micro-dungeon. You can download the PDF of this mini-dungeon by clicking on the correct link.

Enjoy!

Tags: AD&D, dungeon crawls, micro-adventure

I recently blogged about prizes I’d won by entering Benchleydale and Beyond contests. Since then, I’ve received the prizes. I’ve also helped a nephew, my sister, my wife, and my son fight ghosts and hunt for treasures. I do live an exciting life, don’t I?

First up: Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! from Mattel Games. I learned about this great family game from The Tabletop Bellhop. The bellhop Moe T. writes about this boardgame on his blog. You can read his words right here. Before I talk a bit about the game, let’s look at a picture.

Nota Bene: All of the pics in this post embiggen if you click them.

In short: Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! is a hoot. When we first set it up to play, we had fun sticking the ghosts on our fingers and noticing the functional backpacks on the player pieces. At first, we were a bit skeptical about the game play. It just seemed too easy to roll the dice, move to the rooms, retrieve the treasures, and escape the haunted house unscathed. You can fight the ghosts, but the ghosts can’t fight you. But here’s the rub: Each player turn, a card gets turned up, which almost always adds another ghost to one of the rooms in the haunted house.

(A quick aside about the cards: They’re delightful; details on the cards sync up with little details on the gameboard.)

But back to the increasing number of ghosts. When a room gets its third ghost, the ghosts turn into a red and scary haunt. It takes two players working together to defeat a haunt, and if the house ends up with six haunts, that’s it. Game over. Everyone at the table loses, and the undead win. Ooh, spooky.

Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters! was great fun, and we just played the basic game. The advanced game ups the difficulty. This is one of funner so-called kids’ games I’ve played. If you’d like to buy your own Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters!, click over to Moe T.’s blogpost and use his affiliate link. Moe T. does great work with The Tabletop Bellhop, and his affiliate links help him ensure the great work continues.

A set of Atmar’s Cardography cards from Norse Foundry was among the prizes I won via the aforementioned Benchleydale contests. The cards come in a standard playing card sized box, and the cards themselves are sturdy and a bit glossy, just like I expect a new deck of cards to be. Take a gander at the pic below.

On a whim, I shuffled the deck and dealt out the top nine cards, which I then assembled into a mini-dungeon.

Note the numbers on the cards. The deck comes with a quad-fold mini-document that briefly describes each numbered map location. If you look at the mini-dungeon pic, you’ll see location 27. According to the key, location 27 has “Many fires with large cauldrons simmering and boiling.” Down in the southeast corner, that blurry 44 means a “Dining hall filled with fur tapestries. Magic torch in the center of the main table.”

(Another Nota Bene: It can be annoying how my hands shake.)

My Atmar’s Cardography deck is neat. Good production values, clever concept, and Norse Foundry has written downloadable modules based on the cards. The modules are available on their website, and are written for Fate and 5E D&D. I don’t how much I’d stick to the deck’s in-box location key, but I can see me dealing out the cards to create random dungeons. Between the number of cards in the deck and the various ways the orientations for card placement, the deck has the potential to generate quite a large number of dungeon maps.

Tags: reviews

Benchleydale Academy is (to quote the group’s description) “the NSFW hardcore gonzo 1st edition AD&D chills, spills and thrills” game masterminded by Timothy Connolly. The public face shines on Facebook via Benchleydale and Beyond. I’m more a lurker than a participant in Benchleydale Academy, at least so far. One of these days, a Benchleydale event will happen at a time when my schedule permits me to get stuck in the interwebs for a few hours.

The Academy has a number of a partners, many of whom offer prizes to Academy members who participate in on-line contests. Each contest consists of a themed challenge, a sort of mini-creative writing exercise that requires a response of exactly eleven words. Recently, I won two of these contests. I’ve yet to receive the prizes, but surely when I receive them pictures shall be shared.

I’m receiving “a sealed deck of Atmar’s Cardography”, specifically the Break Through the Icy Divide, “a 52 card dungeon crawl module for use with your favorite roleplaying game”, produced by Norse Foundry, provider of “quality products such as Role playing Game Dice, Game Mats to shield your table from any damage, and the finest of dwarven currency to carry everywhere you go.” To win this prize, I had to charm a frost giant and describe what it would do for me. My eleven-word description? He will call me George and love me and pet me.

I also won the contest sponsored by Antediluvian Miniatures, purveyor of fine figures “[i]nspired by the lost worlds of Jules Verne, HG Wells and other illuminating tales”. From Antediluvian Miniatures, I shall receive a few figurines cast in pewter. The contest attached to this prize was to name and create a dinosaur. Here’s mine: Umbrasaurus: Dead dinosaurs come back as incorporeal spirits that haunt primordial places. (Nota Bene: The name does not count against the eleven-word limit.) See below for the monster stats of sample umbrasaurus.

Umbrasaural Deinonychus
Frequency: Very rare
No. Appearing: 1-3
Armor Class: 4
Move: 21″ (MC: A)
Hit Dice: 4+1
% in Lair: Nil
Treasure Type: Nil
No. of Attacks: 3
Damage/Attack: 1-2/1-2/2-8
Special Attacks: See below
Special Defenses: +1 or better weapon to hit
Magic Resistance: See below
Intelligence: Semi-
Alignment: Neutral evil
Size: L (12′ long)
Psionic Ability: Nil
Attack/Defense Modes: Nil/nil
Level/XP Value: V/290 + 5/hp

In life, this monster was a fast carnivore that used its speed, grasping forearms, large teeth, and fierce rear talons to bring down prey. Whatever dark necromancy transforms a dead dinosaur into an umbrasaurus has altered the form and function of the deinonychus, granting into horrible powers and a dim, evil intelligence.

The incorporeal umbrasaural deinonychus has most of its existence on the negative material plane. It still moves swiftly, but now it flies, even moving through solid matter (albeit at two-thirds its normal speed). So swift and silent does the umbrasaural deinonychus move that it surprises opponents 50% of the time. Its claws and fangs inflict icy wounds, and its bite is so cold that each hit drains 1 point of the victim’s dexterity. If a living opponent reaches 0 dexterity, the victim becomes paralyzed and helpless. Note that dexterity returns to a creature 2-8 turns after being drained.

Sleep, charm, hold, and cold-based spells cannot affect the umbrasaural deinonychus. Poison and paralyzation are likewise ineffective. A vial-full of holy water inflicts 2-8 points of damage if it hits the umbrasaural deinonychus. Treat the umbrasaural deinonychus as a wraith for purposes of turning the undead.

Tags: AD&D, monsters

Merry Christmas!

The twelve days of Christmas are almost over, which means Santa’s Holiday Bag of PDFs for 5E D&D will be going away soon. If you’ve not gotten your bundle yet, there’s still time. Also, The Lady in the Shoe, a short adventure for 5E D&D, received a four-star rating today. That’s cool. I dig four stars. I’m a bit curious, however, since it’s just a rating, not a review, but still that’s four stars.

In homefront gaming news, our Saturday game, diminished to a mere two players (excluding me as GM) finished our year-long d20 Modern/Call of Cthulhu campaign that featured time travel, mind/body swapping, space stations, the return of the Old Ones, and rocket-building followers of Nyarlathotep working with Nazis in a secret base within an Egyptian pyramid.

Grant and Kelly, the last two active PCs, infiltrated the pyramid. Using a combination of stealth, memory-clouding magic, and disguises, they made their way to the payload module of the rocket. Kelly being a literal rocket scientist modified the rocket’s telemetry so that it would not complete its decades long flight toward the Sun to create the apocalyptic solar event that started the campaign in our somewhat distant future. Grant and Kelly realized they had little chance to sneaking back out of the pyramid without being detected. So, they concealed themselves in the rocket, which blasted off on schedule. Grant and Kelly died by the time the rocket left the Earth’s atmosphere, confident that they had averted the end of the world that they had witnessed from the decks of Space Station Alpha.

Our next Saturday campaign kicks off in a couple of weeks. It looks like we’re turning to Savage Worlds with elements of Broken Earth adapted to what will likely be a sandbox-style campaign. From the Broken Earth Player’s Guide, the main focus will likely be on the equipment and the community building rules. I’ve not read through much of the Broken Earth core rules, so I don’t how much that will come into play, but since I’m not GMing, I guess I don’t need to worry about that too much.

I’ve not abandoned the Cliff of Crypts. I’ve completed maps for each level of the crypts, including ghoul tunnels leading to caves. I’ll likely use the maps for a new adventure, but at the moment I’m up in the air about the adventure’s system. Not sure where I’m going to land, but possibly my feet will alight upon For Gold & Glory.

Nota Bene: The links in the previous three paragraphs are affiliate links. If you clink and buy, I get a few pennies.

Tags: game play, maps, place of power