RPGaDay 2016
I have been promising to resurrect this blog for many moons. What better time to actively start this process than with the advent of #RPGaDay 2016.
RPGaDay 2016 has been rolling on for the past week. I've been tweeting short bits in answer to the questions posed for days 1 through 5, but I thought I'd take the time to give some more in depth answers here.
Day 1: Real dice, dice app, diceless, how do you prefer to 'roll'?
I've pretty much always used dice to play RPGs. I started playing back in the early 90's with the D&D basic set and all the games I've run since then have used dice except one diceless game I ran using Active Exploits at Durham University's Games Society. I have owned dice roller apps, but have never really enjoyed using them for gaming, though they can be handy for quick character creation.
My love of dice has resulted in my purchase of this lovely beauty from allrolledup.co.uk. I highly recommend them for all your dice containment needs.
Day 2: Best game session since August 2016?
Only one session takes this spot and that has to be our final session of The Final Revelation, a mini campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, written by Graham Walmsley and Scott Dorward - two of my favourite RPG writers by the way. This final session covered the back end of The Rending Box (one of the best scenarios alongside The Watchers in the Sky in my opinion) and the conclusion of the overarching story of The Final Revelation.
Spoilers for The Final Revelation
Highlights from The Rending Box include: making one of my players squeamish as I had their slightly deranged character carve out their own eyes using a knife heated on a car engine; a vicar sacrificing themselves to allow the other character to flee, and being impaled and slowly digested by a hungry tendril of Shub-Niggurath; one character running foolishly back down said tendril to try and save said vicar; and the final scene as the last remaining survivor realises that all they have done to destroy this eldritch horror has been for naught.
The actual conclusion of the main story line was well received. My players had come up with fantastic character background, giving me lots to riff off. I had also inserted Nyarlathotep as a character who was twisting their experiences and causing their looping through the different scenarios. He appeared to each of them in turn at the end, in various guises, to offer the advice of going back to Jacob's books to seek the solution to the apocalypse at hand, thus restarting the loop the characters were caught in. Excellent stuff!
End spoilers
Day 3: Character moment you are most proud of?
I haven't actually been a player in games for some time, but I started playing in an Ars Magica campaign last year, which has been going strong ever since. We're in a Spring covenant on the island of Malmara in the Theben tribunal, and closely linked to Constantinople.
The moment I have chosen is one in which my mage, a English Criamon magus known as Malgerius Brevedent, single handedly opened a solid rock door whilst in a Fae regio. No magic was used in these proceedings. Just sheer brute force. And I'll state for the record that my magus has a Strength stat of -1. Hurrah for exploding ones...
Day 4: Most impressive thing another's character did?
For this, I have gone with my friend Moss' character, Sister Bertha, who ran back to save the Reverend John Bowles from certain destruction at the digestive orifice of Shub-Niggurath. Unfortunately for her, Ella McDonaugh took this as the moment to light the highly flammable gasoline and dynamite that they had packed into the tendril, ending both the Sister and the Reverend's lives. Their sacrifices will always be remembered...
Day 5: What story does your group tell about your character?
I believe the one that comes up the most is when Malgerius Brevedent stated that he would only attend to the covenant's need for him to go join them on a trip to a Fae regio (incidentally the same trip in which he single-handedly opened a solid rock door) if his sodales agreed to him receiving several pawns of Vis for experimentation and exclusive use of a Summa on Vim. His boldness may have put him in a bad light with a certain maga, and has resulted in several story elements where he is no longer to be trusted around Vis by himself, and has been told that he needs to make friends with his coven-folk... He is at least trying to be more helpful, although his attempts aren't always met with success.
That about wraps it up for this post, and the first post on this newly resurrected blog. Here's to more to come!