Venus Flytrap

Saturday March 7, 2015 at 8:00pm fate core, venus flytrap, game session notes, ruchtcon Comments (1) »
Venus Flytrap Image

RuchtCon V, Retrograde, FATE Core

In which a team of explorers venture to the second planet to re-establish contact with a wayward botanical research station and discover a damaged satellite, energy-eating plants, violent lightening storms, a german u-boat, an enourmous predator, and hallucenogenic wasps.

Thistle & Thorns: Nareena's Curse

- A group of ferrets had been sighted north of Lockhaven near Thistledown, and a patrol was sent to expell them and to check up on Thistledown.

- As they entered the area and investigated the situation, they found that the town had had a rough year as unprecedented flooding had ruin much of their store, and a dramatic infestation of thorns which had grown quickly and relentlessly since early spring was interfering with life in the village.  Their bad luck seemed to have started after they expelled a crazy old witch-mouse, and some believe she placed a curse on the town.

- The group ultimately discovered that the flooding and thorns had been the direct result of intentional acts, and suspected that the witch-mouse had somehow enlisted the help of the roaming ferrets.

- The group was finally able to track down the ferrets and drive them out of the region, but the witch-mouse was nowhere to be found...

It's All Fun and Games

Thursday October 11, 2012 at 2:47pm video games, gaming, pirate party, ootscon, ruchtcon Comments (1) »
 Hannah, Doug and Nerf
Hannah, Doug and Nerf

Well, in terms of recent free time anyway.

Up, up and away

So Tony and I finally reached the end of Skyward Sword.  Well, Tony did anyway - I never actually beat "Ganon", but I made it as far as to triumph over "Green-eggs-and-ham" immediately preceding.  The game was solid, though I might have had a little trouble "getting into it".  When you only play for about an hour a week, the experience doesn't gather as much momentum.  On the other hand, it was a lot of fun it go through the game with a friend, and there were definitely some fun times there.

As for how it compares to previous games:  The gameplay is great most of the time, and the motion+ gives it a leg-up on Twilight Princess.  On the other hand, I think the latter's story was more interesting.  Overall, I'd say they're pretty comparable.  Fi was not as entertaining as Midna, however.

Sidenote: upon reaching the end of the game, during part of the dialog, Fi tells you that she needs to 'repeat something she's said many times before'.  Sheri assumed this would be 'Master, the batteries in your wimote are dangerously low'.  I mean, that's mostly what she said to us...

The Classics

Having completed our quest (to a greater or lesser extent), we decided on a new game for Crackle Night: this time, we're playing the old snes game Secret of Mana.  This is one of my all-time favorites and Tony said he'd never played it - an oversight I felt compelled to remedy.  The fact that it's a simultaneous multiplayer game is also a plus, and we're having a lot of fun with it.

Linking

In addition to the crackling, I've been enjoying a couple of PC games recently.  

I mentioned Minecraft before - as of this point, I've built three massive keeps on the first map, but, unable to find much besides snow anywhere reasonably close on that map, I decided to start a new game and go in search of an NPC village.  It took me about 20 minutes to find one, and I am now in the process of building a castle on its outskirts.  Verily, I shall be lord of the land.

Also, I have started playing through Myst IV.  Since I borrowed the game from Chuck about a year ago, I figured I'd better either play it or give it back.  Part of the reason for the delay, however, was getting it to run on my Mac.  The installer it shipped with apparently doesn't play nice with modern versions of Java on OSX, so I had to find a workaround.  After a few hours of attempting, I ended up finding a workable third-party installer that got the job done.  Once installed, the game plays great, and I'm enjoying it as much as I have the previous 3 games.  The addition of an in-game camera/viewer is fantastic.  

As I've been playing this game I have, of course, been reminded of how cool the setting ideas are, and how much I think they could be used to make an awesome tabletop rpg - and i've put some more thought into that.

A Sea of Possibilities

My Savage Seas game is continuing to go well.  I'm really liking the Savage Worlds system, and the nautical theme is turning out to be as much fun as I thought it would be.  I was also (unexpectedly) given a metric ton of ships from the old Pirates papercraft tabletop game (now out of print) to use for ship miniatures.  That will be fun.

I'm still kicking around a few ideas in terms of where I'd like this game to go in a narrative sense.  I intentionally left it pretty open-ended at the start (to see what the players would do), but we're a few games in now, and I'm getting some ideas on how i can integrate facets of the setting as sources of conflict - I'm just not 100% sure which I'm going to include or emphasize, or exactly how.

Nerf, Matey

Talk Like A Pirate day was the 19th of last month, and we had our annual TLAP Party at Robb & Edie's place - complete with the obligatory nerf war.  It was good to hang out with some friends again - seems like we don't do that enough these days.  Hannah had a good time playing with the darts and the "pirate treasure", too, and I also managed to get a few good pictures.

Pros and Cons

With respect to "OotsCon", the "locals" have had a couple of meetings, and we've decided we need to get a little more serious about this thing if we're to retain our sanity.  Next year's event may well be different on a number of levels - but still tons of fun.

First talks about Ruchtcon III have been happening, too.  March of next year.  Looks like the attendee list is expanding a bit, too - which is cool.  Those are always fun.  I assume I'll be running something(s), but I haven't given it much thought as of yet.

~PS

RuchtCon II

Sunday March 27, 2011 at 8:01pm ruchtcon, gaming, friends Comments (0) »
RuchtCon II Image

Well, another local gaming mini-con has come and gone.  This makes me a little sad, but it was a great time.

This particular gathering was, from the very outset, plagued with problems and difficulties, but overall I think we triumphed over them.  Overall.

Festivities began on friday night around 7pm with the first set of games.  Casey ran a session of Dark Heresy, Doug ran a zombie game called All Flesh Must Be Eaten, and Rucht was to be running an old school Dungeons & Dragons game - we're talking 1st edition here.  The first to games got started as planned, but Rucht was delayed for a while and so the rest of us played some board games while we waited for him.  When we finally did get started though, it was a lot of fun.

I spent all day Saturday running games.  In the afternoon slot I ran my session of Little Fears, which I think went very well.  Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun and there were definitely some memorable moments.  I think we're going to try to continue the game at some point so that they can finish the story they started.  During this time Doug was running his Thundarr game (using the Cartoon Action Hour system) and Matt was running his game of Eclipse Phase.

On saturday night I ran my Savage 3025 game.  This was basically a Savage Worlds game with a custom add-on for mech combat (which I've talked about here before).  The plot was good (at least, I think so), but we didn't get more than about 1/3 of the way into it - and not far enough for them to have encountered any real twists.  I am also not as familiar as I'd like to be with Savage Worlds (due mostly to lack of experience), so I there were times where I think I struggled with that, but overall I think it was a good game and everyone enjoyed it.  While we were doing that, Rucht was running his Dresden Files game (which I understand was hugely popular) and Doug was doing Call of Cthulhu.

I was slated to run a session of Mana Burn this afternoon, but some of us got to talking and I think everyone was getting pretty tired.  In any case, there didn't seem to be quite enough energy to start the game, so we opted to play a boardgame instead.  I may try to put together a one-shot of that sometime soonish.

Between slots there were also quite a few board games played - Revolution! (which Dave introducted us to), Invasion From Outer Space, Dominion, and others.

It was great to see everyone, and I think everyone had a great time.  I'd give a "special thanks to" list, but I think that would just amount to mentioning everyone.

We did miss those that couldn't make it - it would have been even better with them.  We were also glad to have a few unexpected additions though, so that was cool.

Already looking forward to doing this again...

~PS

Penguin Dice Box

Thursday February 3, 2011 at 9:20pm cleaning, gaming, ruchtcon Comments (0) »
Penguin Dice Box Image

I am rather easily amused.  Especially by interesting boxes and containers.

Pictured to the right is my new dice container for the roleplaying games I'm in (as a player).  Someone (and I'm trying to remember who) gave me four (4) tins of Penguin mints a while back.  I've only eaten a few of them (mainly because a) i'm not all that fond of pepperment and b) these things are strong), but as I was cleaning out the office closet today, I happened upon the tins and noticed something: these boxes (about the same size as an Altoids tin) are exactly tall enough to contain a normal d20.  Upon further experimentation, I discovered that the boxes are sized such that they can neatly hold about 14-18 dice, which is enough for 2 standard sets plus an additional die or two.  The size and shape of the box also makes it easy to carry in a pocket or the blue notebook box thing I generally carry.  Plus, it has a penguin.  How could it be more perfect?

As I partially alluded to before, I spent most of today cleaning out a closet, a filing cabinet drawer, a bookshelf and my desk.  The end results are a basically organized gaming drawer, a clean workspace, some new dice containers, and a bedside shelf.

I've also been kicking around some game proposal ideas for RuchtCon II, which is now officially scheduled for March 25th-27th.

~PS

Mid-March Pt. II - RuchtCon '09, etc

Monday March 23, 2009 at 8:52pm gaming, ruchtcon Comments (0) »

So this last weekend was RuchtCon '09 - our own little gaming convention in honor of our friend Rucht's birthday. Festivities formally started friday afternoon and went till sunday at about 6pm. It went down a little like this:

The first official 'slot' began at 9pm on Friday night. This was when i ran my Little Fears game. That was awesome. I was a little worried going in since i'd been a little sick for the previous days and also hadn't had quite as much prep time as I might have liked (largely due to VBS), but I would say it went as well as it possibly could - aside from some drowsiness on our part toward the end of the session.
The game was incredibly fun. The system is very, very simple but plays very well. The players all did a fantastic job of getting into their roles as children - which they all seemed to enjoy immensely. I think my story came off just about exactly as dark as I wanted it to, and it seemed to me that the session did a great job of portraying the quintessence of the game.
I would definitely be interested in running some more of this, perhaps beginning with the resolution to this scenario - which we weren't able to finish.

The other table on Friday was ran by Patrick doing his Star Wars game. I obviously wasn't able to play in it (unfortunately) so there's not much I can say about it, but Sheri said it was a lot of fun.

On saturday afternoon Rucht ran his 40k Dark Heresy game while some of the rest of us decided to play board games.
Specifically, we decided to learn to play Talisman - a Fantasy Flight game that my mom (yes, really) got me for Christmas last year. This presented a fairly major challenge as 1) none of us actually knew how to play the game and 2) the game is (now) put out by Fantasy Flight - a game company that's notorious for amazingly complex games. *Good* games mind you, but complex ones.
It took us about an hour to get through the rules and setup. The game really isn't that hard, but when you're trying to understand it with absolutely zero foreknowledge and using only the rulebook, things take a little while. Once we got going, it went pretty fast. We didn't actually finish it, but we got to the final phases. I thought it was a pretty cool game. I look forward to playing it again - when i don't have to be constantly trying to figure out what we're doing.

Saturday night was the first session of Rucht's Witch Hunter game and also Robb's Werewolf game. I had opted to play in Robb's game. Granted I haven't played whitewolf in quite a while (except Exalted), but the new edition seems to have streamlined some things. We didn't actually make it very far into the story, but it was still a very enjoyable game. We got to do a bit of roleplaying (though i think i was feeling a little off), a bit of combat, and all of us got to use our respective character's niche strengths.

Sunday morning was still technically part of the Con, but it was pretty informal - i think those who were present played the Battlestar Galactica board game. The official sunday afternoon slot was another session of Rucht's Witch Hunter game.
I was really looking forward to this. I'd heard great things about the system, and it was particularly cool to get to play under one of the game designers (for those who don't know, this is a game that Rucht actually helped design). I mean, that has to be the most authentic experience, right?
This game was lots of fun. It's a solid system - similar to whitewolf in some ways, but considerably different in others. Also, it has some very interesting mechanics. The premise for the world and the game is very detailed and interesting as well and the modules Rucht ran were excellent narratives. I'd love to play some more of this - esp if Rucht wanted to run a campaign at some point. That would be awesome.


In addition to all the fun games, we had tasty snacks, plenty of great people, and just a generally great time hanging out. A fantastic way to spend a weekend. Some of us have definite intentions of putting something like this together again sometime - and have even talked a little about what we might do the same and/or differently.


~PS