Force Rules and "Wise Teacher" rules

Ok, so you may recall my Force Point rules from earlier, as well as the after-action.

One thing I am definitely doing away with on reflection? The idea that your Dark Side score innately adds to your Use the Force Checks. It worked well in d6 (where I got the idea from), but I think the "free force point whenever you're willing to embrace the Dark Side" is a much more effective lure. Thinking on it, however, I do have a slight change to make.

If you succumb to the Dark Side, things switch around. Instead of 1 red chip and 3 (or 4, with the feat) Blue, you will gain 3 (or 4; just take that as a given, now) reds and 1 blue. Spending a blue? That lowers your DS score by 1. But you can have as many of those as you want, provided it's in the service of the light side of the Force. If your side "switches" during a game, you don't "reset" until the next game... so if you go Dark, you can delve REALLY deep into the Dark but, likewise, it's possible to expunge a lot of Dark Side points at a heroically appropriate moment.

I'll post that on the Giant; there's likely some problems that need checking on my idea.

Several Sessions Ago...

Oh, boy, we've had a busy month with a lot of playing, leading to me getting way behind on session logs.

Soon after our time at Falcon Tower, we decided to head west to check out the pregnant woman's story of a den of orcs (and also wanting to investigate rumors of kobolds who robbed some miners). We headed west down the road, but found only a long-abandoned camp of kobolds. We briefly met with the "witch", Valdershenk, who told us that she knew the kobolds well enough, but that orcs were always trouble. She also gave us a bit of a potion, that most of us survived pretty well. We headed further west, past the river that marks the county border and into the mountains.

It was a fairly difficult trek, especially with the number of greenhorn travelers we had along. Being the strongest swimmer, Sevlan tended to lead our way across rivers, while the rest of the party would follow on a rope he carried, or ride a log downstream. There were some rough bits, but we made it to a small, protected cove beneath the cliffs, where we figured our lady must have come from.

Quite frankly, this is one impressive trek for her. She climbed down a sheer cliff, hundreds of feet tall, crossed two rivers, and walked down the road, all while heavily pregnant, with inadequate clothes and no shoes. We suspected that her captors were up near the top of the cliff, but we couldn't make it up safely, so we decided to head back to town and circle around. On the way back, we met Valdershenk again, still strolling happily through unsettled lands; she informed us that she had some cures and such at her hut near the old Has road, which we promised to keep in mind.

Since we were planning on heading back west, we talked to our friend, Captain Reymond, the captain of the guard at the Palisade, asking if he had anything that needed to be run out to the towers to the southwest... figured we'd get pay and the short-term use of a mule out of the bargain, and continue our good relationship with the captain. Before we headed out to Karpar peak, we retired to some rooms we'd rented in the keep itself... while cheaper to stay at the hostel in Quarrytown, I also worried about security, especially when we start picking up money (aaaaaaannnny day now, I swear). However, we got attacked by giant rats. Huge rats. Rats the size of medium-sized dogs. Ava, our priest of the Bear, got bit and fell ill. Since Balan was unable to cure her disease, and the disease wasn't fatal or contagious (so long as she didn't bite anyone), we chose to keep adventuring, figuring it would clear up and a few days on the road would give her time to heal. Then, we were going to go into the sewer to wipe out the rats.

We started to run supplies down to the tower, and Sevlen noticed someone picking one of our pockets. We caught him and presented him with a proposal: He could adventure with us, or we'd turn him into the guard. He was enthused by the prospect; he was Amnet, and his family was tradesmen, but died soon after arriving at the Keep. He'd been on his own ever since, stealing bits and, while never quite joining the Ravens, he was occasionally dependent upon their charity. We got him some armor and he came along with us on the supply run.

The supply run was... interesting. The Karpar tower is rumored to be haunted, so Grimwulf was interested in investigating it in his position as a dedicant on the Eternal Lantern. When we got there, we learned it wasn't so much "haunted" as "rumored to be a lousy duty station so those assigned there could party." Good food, good drink, even a prostitute out there. We partied with the Karpar guard, and they offered us a chance to join a "secret society", though they weren't clear about the nature of it.

After a good night (and looking west, since we're still worried about orcs out there), we headed back to the keep with an Ava whose symptoms were getting worse. Determined to exterminate the rats, we headed down below. We knew of several entrances to the keep sewers, but started with one well away from the privies. The first was a small complex, draining directly to the river below, but with one-way doors that we couldn't get open... but rats could. Heading to the lower bailey sewers, we found a vast complex... what seemed to be the remains of the old keep. We found a kennel, a jail (with evidence that someone named "Dirk" was executed by someone known as "Sir Trigger"), some storage and a great hall. The hall, Fredi told us had giant tapestries, some of them quite valuable, but all of them quite old and delicate. Exploring further, we found evidence of the rooms of several of Sir Trigger's "fingers", including Dirk, the Pointer Finger... who seems to have been the one executed. We thoroughly mapped the area, with Amnet (that thief we caught) finding a few traps, and Ava getting further diseased. This second one was more severe, but would clear up just fine... provided she went to spend a few months in the desert. Ava chose to leave us, then, heading south to the arid lands and her health.

After a couple weeks of training, and thoroughly exploring that remnant of the old keep, we decided to tell some of the authorities about it. And for this, we were torn. Did we tell the Earl, responsible for the keep and arguably the one who could inherit the treasures below? Or did we tell the Prefect, responsible for the protection of the keep, who would surely like to know about the passage between the lower and middle baileys? In the end, we chose to tell Greytar, the mage who was present for the last keep, and a possible friend of Sir Trigger. We kept some information from him, however... like the library below. Sevlen'd finally pieced out the Orcish writing in the diary we'd taken from the Orc priest, and had learned a different history of the keep... one that included Sir Trigger, the Grel Wizard, who had attacked the keep before he helped rebuild it. We weren't sure of Greytar's actual loyalties, but bribed him with a bottle of valuable wine to set up a meeting with the prefect and the Earl (figuring that telling them both at the same time would avoid appearances of favoritism, though Greytar clearly favored the Earl).

The Prefect react with bluster and anger to news of a complex beneath the keep, and the Earl with cautious optimism to word of artistic treasures below. We shared this discussion, and promised to spend more time mapping the deeps.

Alien Intelligence for Rifts

Yet another thing imported from my old blog. I tend to make these imports when the posts become part of a conversation elsewhere, and I want to direct people to my blog.

As many know (especially if you are on the Palladium message boards), my least favorite book in the Rifts line is Rifts Conversion Book 2: Pantheons of the Megaverse. I feel that it's poorly researched and that it avoids one of the biggest pantheons around: the God of Abraham, and all the various permutations that he's undergone since the Old Testament. This is something of an attempt to exorcise my hatred of that book... to lay it to rest by doing what I feel was left out of that book. However, it will make the most sense if I indulge in a bit of definition, first.

Palladium has two types creatures who are nearly equal in power: Gods and Alien Intelligences. The difference, so far as can be determined, is that Gods are dependent for their power on their worshipers; if they are no longer worshiped, they will still be powerful, but they will cease to be deities. Alien Intelligences seem to possess this level of power naturally. They are also frequently capable of creating quasi-independent fragments of themselves; beings which possess a portion of their power, and are capable of acting independently, but still are part of the whole, and partake of (and contribute to) the knowledge and power of the whole. They are, in effect, one being with many bodies.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

I should warn you that there's a group of people who're probably going to find this really offensive; I'm putting it all behind a cut, but I want to warn you in advance... caveat lector.

Busy Busy Busy! Four Quests!

I have tendency to write these just before our next game; helps to remind me of what transpired, and speaks to my overwhelming laziness.

Our brave party (Elwyn the Elf, Fredi the Fearless, Ted the Terrible, Grimwulf the... Grim, Sevlen of the Journeymen, and Ava Cado) ventured forth to Vespin Tower, this time not encountering any pregnant escaped slaves, and instead running into some fire beetles, who scared the crap out of us, but failed to do much more than eat Ted and Fred's spell points. Upon arriving at Vespin tower, we found that the guard detachment there had been killed by goblins, who we quickly dispatched. Returning to the keep, we collected our silvers and started poking around town (though we've been keeping our main residence in Quarrytown... cheaper, and with easier access at the end of a long day).

We used a couple days of downtime to get Grimwulf's friend into the guard, and looked into the crime of Raishtlyn, who had tried to claim a bounty on a centaur's head (mistaken for a man's by the keep). We found the corpse of the centaur, and his hound, and brought back a guard to witness that there was, indeed, a creature with a body of a horse and the top of a man, as Raishtlyn described. We gave him a bit of healing, and he set out.

Also leaving town was Grond, who found out about the trick played on him by the scribes... and proceeded to trash the scriptorium. We got the commander of the watch to agree to keeping him overnight, and releasing him in the morning, given the harm that had been done to him. He left town, though we'd thought about giving him a job as meat shield.

Lastly, we saw to the matter of the totem at Falcon Tower. The foul creation was dedicated to the Strifelord, and would reassemble itself each night. The guards at the tower had been severely lashed for allowing it to remain, though they insisted it sprung up on its own. We tore it down, then laid in wait for the totem to rebuild itself. Instead, we got a quartet of orcs appear, including a shaman, all of whom we beat savagely. Taking them briefly prisoner, we learned that the spot was sacred to the Creator of Strife; since revealing that we'd taken down the totem meant the lives of the men guarding the tower, we're keeping mum for now... their lives are worth more than our fame, and it's nice to have folks owing us.

Heartbreaker

Heartbreaker

(This is something I roughed out in 2011. And, yes, a lot of it is stolen.)

The year is 2097, and the last eighty-five years have not been kind to the world... but, then, when were they? To keep this brief, I'm going to pick up world history at the turn of the century.

The terror attacks, and responses, of the first decade of the 21st century lead to a very unstable world. Massive public debts were contrasted to increased corporate autonomy. Improved medical technology meant that people lived longer, but the slow collapse of the financial infrastructure meant that they were working longer, keeping jobs longer... and keeping the young from advancing, if they could even get employed in the first place. The problems in first world economies meant that third world economies received less constructive investment; investment tended to be corporate and task-oriented. Rather than build a new port facility to support their natural resource extraction, corporations would erect short-term, pre-fab facilities that could be dismantled when they left. Governments, crippled with debt and increased factionalism, were unable to regulate corporate actions effectively, and corporations responded by taking on more governmental duties, building corporate enclaves where their employees could live and work in relative peace, but leaving much of the rest of the world to rot. The result is extreme balkanization among many major nation-states; the old United States is divided into no less than six nations, a process which ended about 2073 with the secession of Texas from the rest of the Southern Confederacy.

Leveling Up, Surprise Pregnant Lady

So, we play again tonight, but I forgot to update on what happened in our Hackmaster campaign last week, given the frentic orgy that is finals week.

A good portion of the party was ready for a level, either 2nd or 3rd, so we sat down and worked through that. Since most of the group is not familiar with the system, that took a while to raise attributes, refigure things, and spend BP. For his part, Sevlen picked up the basics of blacksmithing (I figure he's been making a living as a tinker since he left home; blacksmithing is part and parcel of his General Repair), plus some more languages, religions, and the Local History proficiency for the Earldom of Reyifor. Since I'm familiar with the module, I've purposely built Sevlen so he can metagame about the setting a bit without cheating. I'm usually dropping a BP each level to learn about churches we encounter... I've got the party's religions covered (due to some fortuitous penetration, I now know the Bear's religion better than my own), and plan to pick up the Caregiver, as we interact with him a bit.

After that, we debated what we should do to get into the keep, but it seems our adventures against the vampire earned us a friend; we got a note saying that looking into Vespin Tower might result in enough favor to get let into the keep. So, with Evlyn and Fredi having sold our stuff, we started up the mountain, just the seven of us (Grimwulf, Fredi, Ava, Sevlen, Evlyn, Tedi and Grimwulf's cook, who we don't trust being left alone in a town full of rough men). We set out towards the tower, but late on the first day, we encountered a woman.

She was bloody and beaten and very pregnant. She raved that the child inside her was a beast and, as we calmed her, we learned that she and her family merchant caravan had been taken by orcs late last fall. Her family had been killed, but she'd been kept and raped. She'd escaped in a harrowing climb to freedom when a cloaked man had come for her (for reasons she did not know). We decided we couldn't leave her there, nor let her walk back alone, so we started towards town, and dropped her with a Brandobian cleric of the Caregiver... and learned that the keep had opened in our absence, as they'd found someone to blame the assassination attempts on. We decided to enter the keep, and got ourselves registered as an adventuring company, the Bleeding Hearts, because most of our other name ideas were stupid. ;-)

Fudge Fudge Fudge Fudge Vampire: Hackmaster Campaign Log

"Only I didn't say 'fudge.' I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the 'F-dash-dash-dash' word!"

So, we reconvened for Hackmaster, and it was an abbreviated group; Ted the Wizard and Elwyn the Thief were both absent, so we began to explore Quarrytown on our own. I went looking for lodging, finding a hostelry with a talkative hostess and a pretty reasonable price per evening (nine copper per evening, which is pretty reasonable when you've got seven people and get two beds and a meal for each of them out of it). Fredykia told stories in the marketplace (Oratory, Monster Lore, and Ancient History), and we picked up some rumors, including the theft of a bronze statue from the Lynx Gate, and that the Pallisade stockyards had been suffering some depredations. We opted to put off the trek to the nearby tower (where a rumor said an evil totem had been found), and instead investigate the Pallisade.

I (Mark) worked REALLY hard to not metagame, since I know the normal adventure involves a pack of leech-men. But scouting around, we found a set of human-sized tracks leading straight up to the wall, and all the dead animals have two puncture wounds in the neck. We decided to stake out the place, sleeping through the day at our hostel and constructing a blind in the field for the evening. We waited a number of nights for it, and then we saw a lone person stumbling drunkenly along the same track we'd followed before.

I was all for confronting him outside, but Fredi and Ava decided to see what would happen. He walked to the wall and smoothly climbed up it, so Ava tried to tangle him with a spell; he broke free without seeming to notice it. He then ensorcelled the guard, and as we fired our weapons, turned into a giant spider and disappeared into the Pallisade.

We, as brave fools, gave chase. I boosted everyone up the relatively short wall (only 10'; really easy), then scrambled up myself. A horse was down, and we gave chase through the Pallisade; the spider disappeared and was replaced by a rat, which ran to the smithy; a bird then exited the roof of the smithy and flew away... getting a massively overpumped Magical Projectile slammed into it, which it shrugged off as it flew away.

Before that, we were kind of hoping that we were dealing with something else. However, after some discussion (and a lot of cursing), we decided we were gonna start buying a metric fudge-ton of garlic.