So, what's your gaming group up to lately?

We're still playing 2-3x/month in The Enemy Within (2013 version), for which I'm the GM. We've got a short stint of EotE coming up while I take a little break after Book2 of TEW. My second group is slowly bouncing around different systems, but mostly pathfinder and 13th age.

What are your groups up to lately?

jh

[edit: I've recently been prepping some Colonial Gothic RPG and the old Masterbook: Indiana Jones RPG stuff for some off nights. Precis Intermedia bought the rights to the Masterbook stuff and put out a Masterbook EZ guide.

Colonial Gothic has given me a trove of ideas (and I've also used the Witch Hunter RPG for similar ideas) regarding plot and background. There are also several great scenarios. Witch Hunter in particular had a lot of Convention-Scenario designs for FREE download.

The Masterbook: Indiana Jones system has a neat way to use cards that I'm thinking of using to expand opportunities for use of Fortune Points. ~more on this as it develops

I ran a customized 1000 Thrones, followed by Witch's Song and now we are in Morr's Garden of The Gathering Storm

I'm currently GM'ing two separate groups, all the players know each other but weren't available at the same time. I decided to run the Olde World as an open sandbox for both groups, starting them from the same village of Fassberg (after extensive background development) just as a beastmen warherd attacks. The two sets of PC's were rout'ed off in separate directions, and due to the two groups playing a few days apart I could orchestrate the PC's unknowingly interact with each other, which was fun, as the players were second-guessing whether fleeing NPC's were actually their mates in the other group.

Paradox inducing scenarios aside, the Brash Young Fools party headed west and ended up in FAULIGMERE (TWS) and are now knee deep in more marshes halfway through 2nd Ed.The Dying of the Light. Needless to say, they hate marshes and bog octopi!!

Group 2, The Servants of Justice vowed to avenge the massacred villages and followed a cultist responsible for leading the warherd, South East. The cultists route led them to Grunwald lodge (EfaE) and my bestest Brian Blessed impersonation for Lord Rickard. They've now followed a lead to Averheim and have just started at the docks (TEW).

Normally we swap GMs and systems every 10 weeks or so, but everyone is having a blast with 3rd Ed. having come late to this edition and none of the players are asking for a swap. Happy days!!

Just ran 1000 Thrones adapted to W3, and we are now playing The Art of Waaahg.

Playing once or twice per month.

Since our playing schedule was too full, we've just decided to drop some games. We had a vote to decide two games to keep, and W3 came on top (the other game beeing Nephilim).

As we are reaching rank 5, we've agreed it would be more fun to start new characters to have a go at completely new careers (I'm going to try some magic-user after playing a stealthy character for about 3 years). The new campaign will be TEW !

I'm GMing two groups. Group A has spent the last month playing the Beginner Box for EotE and rolling characters for their main campaign. Group B is getting ready to start WFRP with An Eye For An Eye.

We're finishing up Something rotten in Kislev (The old Enemy Within). After finishing the whole old enemy within campaign we're going to play some short adventures, so that all get to GM and I get to be a player.

Then we'll start The Enemy Within (2013 edition).

Evil Edge of Night. I'm also writing a scenario for a con based around a witch hunter looking himself in theatre where everyone thinks it's all just part of the show.

Our group just completed a DnD 4e campaign. It kind of died at the end. Started out nicely but we ended up slogging through a dungeon and it just stopped being fun for everyone.

We're looking at trying out a couple new games for the fall -- testing out maybe Colonial Gothic, DnD Next, or 13th Age. I'm trying to get the group to try out WFRP. The first edition was one of my favorites.

We are in the middle of an Edge of the Empire adventure (and started podcasting it ). After a few adventures with that, we are probably either doing Shadows of Esteren (worth a look for WH fans) or back to Warhammer.

With my gaming group we were playing through the Gathering the Storm campaign. One day, due to some players missing, I GM the Escape from Mos Shuuta adventure from EotE beginner's box. Now there is no way I can move them from there, they got totally addicted to the game and we won't finish Gathering the Storm

By the way Doc, I will be very much interested if you let me know how is your experience with Shadows of Esteren. I got a copy and it looks promising, but I am afraid that I will be busy with EotE for a while.

We're finishing TGS and then we're starting TEW3

By the way Doc, I will be very much interested if you let me know how is your experience with Shadows of Esteren. I got a copy and it looks promising, but I am afraid that I will be busy with EotE for a while.

We had a blast with is, and are anticipating the next part (once book 3's kickstarter happens).

The tone of the setting is both similar to WH (dark fantasy, low magic, insanity) and different (no goofy/gallows humor, no high fantasy races, no overblown and baroque visuals).

The system is fairly simple and it has a very lethal combat system. The base stats are personality-driven rather than being traditional mental/physical attributes. They are Combativeness, Conviction, Empathy, Reason, and Creativity. They are all double edged swords, with high stats making it hard to take certain actions (for example, a high Empathy character may have trouble killing someone in cold blood or turning down someone in need).

It also has my favorite insanity system in gaming. Instead of the very standard, COC-style gain a random DSM inspired mental illness ("I saw a horrible creature and now I'm schizophrenic"), each character has a personality issue that grows in strength as they suffer mental trauma. These issues are mostly bad, but they have good elements (which further encourages the player to engage in the behavior). It's somewhat based on the idea that genius comes from madness.

For example, my character was very combative. On normal days it just meant she was gruff, but when things went bad she would start becoming pushy and would react with violence before thinking. As the behavior got worse, her Reason would lose points, but her Combativeness would increase – making her a better fighter and encouraging fighting more than thinking (which was rarely a good thing).

The end result is a system that has a group of characters whose personality conflicts grow in seriousness as they suffer stress. In play it was much more fun to work with and led to better roleplaying situations than your standard "I'm now scared of cats" insanity system.

If you want to run it, I would highly recommend running the Book 0 Prologue (which is free on DriveThruRPG) with the premade characters from the main book or Book 0. There are three great scenarios in there that make a great mini-campaign, and those characters are tightly woven into the setting.

The adventures and those characters give a better feel for the world than the core book does (I wasn't a fan of the writing in the core's setting chapter), so new players are better off experiencing a few sessions before making their own characters.

I've read shadows of esteren and while the book is awesome in some ways, I find the general mechanics of a skill+d10 against a target number to be very poor. EotE core system is very smooth, fast AND interresting. I really dislike the base system og handling checks so much that I'd never use the system as it is.

I could however imagine using it and porting everything over to using the EotE dice while maintaining the game as it is.

I agree that the sanity system is very nice however. I'd use everything as is, except the dice mechanics.

I'm checking out the old Ghostbusters game by west end games. They use a "ghost die" which, if you roll a "6", means basically the same thing as a chaos star (only in a humorous way). Should be a nice holdover until they release something new for WFRP3 http://rpggeek.com/article/14081018#14081018

jh

What's good for FANTASY rpg's that are still in production? Anybody got any non-d20 recommendations?

What's good for FANTASY rpg's that are still in production? Anybody got any non-d20 recommendations?

I will definitively recommend The One Ring and Shadows of Esteren.

We have been running my own hack for Apocalypse World as well as some oneshots. It's been quite quiet on WFRP front but I'm considering starting a new "adventure per night" kind of "campaign" in January.

A friend of mine borrowed my The One Ring..and I'll probably never see it again as he has a habit of losing my stuff (anybody find 8 of my old AD&D modules laying around?)

I'll check out Shadows of Esteren. Thx.

[edit: ok officially interested in this game now: http://www.esteren.org/shadows_of_esteren/

A friend of mine borrowed my The One Ring..and I'll probably never see it again as he has a habit of losing my stuff (anybody find 8 of my old AD&D modules laying around?)

I'll check out Shadows of Esteren. Thx.

[edit: ok officially interested in this game now: http://www.esteren.org/shadows_of_esteren/

I adopted a No Borrow policy a few years back. That makes me The A$$hole, of course, but "can I borrow that?" really means "can I have and/or lose that?" so I don't beat myself up too much about it

What's good for FANTASY rpg's that are still in production? Anybody got any non-d20 recommendations?

I've been plugging stuff into Fate Core with good results. If you're into Toolkit type things it's hard to beat right now. Dungeon World was too campfire-story-time for me and Hero is....Hero. If you don't mind a little homework to set the world up Fate is nice. Great narrative play with just enough crunch and dice fun to be interesting. Also a shout-out to Sundered Skies for Savage Worlds.

Doc wrote: If you want to run it, I would highly recommend running the Book 0 Prologue (which is free on DriveThruRPG) with the premade characters from the main book or Book 0. There are three great scenarios in there that make a great mini-campaign, and those characters are tightly woven into the setting.

Here's the link to the free 80 p Shadows of esteren: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse.php?keywords=esteren&x=-1530&y=-185&author=&artist=&pfrom=&pto=

It's got a great feel to it from what I'm seeing already and I may either mine it for ideas for wfrp or I may swap over to something still in production.

jh

What are your groups up to lately?

I'm GMing four campaigns currently (and providing round-the-clock healthcare for the injured). Mostly exhausted, in other words.

1. Warhammer 3rd face-to-face/tabletop: The Enemy Within. Players currently half way from Averheim to Middenheim. Would be further, but a real-world injury (my wife fell off a cliff and broke multiple bones) put all our gaming on hold for nearly 3 months.
2. Warhammer 40k via Roll20. PCs are agents of the Ordo Xenos, so it's kinda straddling the line between Dark Heresy and Deathwatch. The rules, however, are a hybrid of WFRP3e, EotE, and a lot of homebrewed rules and elbow grease.
3. 7th Sea via Roll20, but using Fate instead of 7th Sea.
4. Scion via Roll20, but using Fate instead of Scion.

The later two are using Fate not because I particularly like it, but because the campaigns started on either Skype or Tiny Chat before I discovered Roll20. The original systems were a little too complicated to run in just chat without being able to see people's dice pools and character sheets. If I had them to start over now I'd totally use their systems instead of Fate. Roll20 can handle it easily.

We have played Eye for an Eye and completed The Gathering Storm lately. Took us a better part of a year.

After that I converted a " Dark Eye " dwarven Adventure into 'Urbaz Varn'. The trading post on the Schlüsselschloss Map from Heros Call. Well I placed it there for our Group.

After walking the depth of this mine and finding a renegade wizzard harassing the dwarf they will go back to find some missing apprentices (Winds of Magic) in Ubersreik or the will walk to Karak Azgaraz to find some missing miners.

Adventure Hook from Book of Grudges leading to the Skaven Lair from 2nd Edition Karak Azgal placed under Karak Azgaraz.

Thanks to my harassment we have a 3 Dwarf, 1 Bright Wizzard group.

I've heard good things about Aquelerre, a Spanish Roleplaying Game getting an English translation soon. The game takes place during medieval span with a heavy emphasis on simulating the time period and the myths of magic of the time.

my group just finished a homebrewn epic campaign called "end of an era" in which they basically banned the chaos gods for a while.

so now its 30 years later and chaos is slowly creepin back in the old world, along with a new power, called the nameless, borrowed from another RPG called "the dark eye", who's an evil god just out to corrupt the priests of the old world.

pretty funny stuff up until now, but we are just messing around a little with the new low-level characters for a change. although these poor unfortunate souls managed to accidentally wake an ancient necromancer named lazarus the thin, whom they have to deal with now as being forced by an evil witchhunter who heard they are responsible for the trouble...with some nice surpises of course!

we have a break now until january but usually play every 2 weeks for 5-8 hours

we also have 2 new players and plan on running eye for an eye at some point with them, as its always fun to make players paranoid for the rest of their WFRP life!

cheers

neph