Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

Here are some pics from our games last week.

On Wednesday, we continued our four-part series of Lady Blackbird and Monster of the Week. I can’t comment on how Lady Blackbird went, but it sounded like they were having fun. MotW was terrific. I ran a mystery inspired by the 1985 movie The Stuff. It was awful in all the right ways. I run MotW in a camp horror style, and a mystery about a frozen dessert treat that is actually a Blob-like alien organism was perfect. Our frozen treat, The Dream, even came with a ridiculously sexualized TV commercial (and jingle!) that I’m happy to report had the table howling with laughter. 

On Friday we ended our journey in A Red & Pleasant Land. It was a magnificent, epic ending. The session revolved around the party’s attempt to locate the Red King in his underground maze. The final encounter involved a fight with a red dragon, and I was reminded how superbly DW handles big boss fights. It’s all dangerous, cinematic action, and I love it. Also: whatever your feelings may be about traditional fantasy games, there is really nothing like a dragon fight done well. It was spectacular in that way we have always imagined D&D to be. I felt like a kid again. 

Finally, on Sunday, we did The Quiet Year. This is one we have played a bunch in the Gauntlet, and it delivers every time. I’ll be happy to talk about this on a future episode of the podcast, whenever the fuck that will be (damn you, Tropical Storm Bill!). 

Thanks to everyone who came out and/or ran games: Scott Owen Ferrell Riley Jeff Burke Derek Grimm Russell Benner Marcus Centurian parrish warren Jorge Salazar Daniel Fowler Steve Mains Kyle McCauley and a few new people I can’t tag here. 

Between flooding and Tropical Storm Bill, our gaming/podcasting schedule is really taking a hit 🙁

Oh well . . . I guess that’s just more time to work on the side projects. 

Our last A Red & Pleasant Land Dungeon World session was so freaking fun! Action-packed and totally epic. Loved it!

A quick announcement regarding our plans for running online games:

We will have a separate community, called Gauntlet Hangouts, where we will organize online and PbP games. Before I send out the invites, though, I”d like to get the initial slate of offerings ready to go. 

Here is what I’d like to start with:

-A Saturday morning game run by me. It will be called Saturday Morning Cartoons, and it will be weekly, from 8 am to 11 am, starting July 11th.

-At least one other weekly Hangouts game. If you are interested in running that game, please let me know in the comments. A note for Houston Gauntlet: If you are currently involved in the DW Magic Item Project, or if you regularly attend/GM our FtF games, I will ask you to hold off on volunteering for now. This is in the interest of not spreading ourselves too thin. 

-At least two PbP games. I know very little about running games PbP, so if you have experience with this, or if you’d like to volunteer to run something, please let me know.

I think that will be the extent of it for now, at least until the Community is built-up a bit. 

Skeleton Eggs, the most inside of inside jokes, and the Sword of St. Murienne, a classic magic item in my DW games. 

From the Dirk Detweiler Leichty Patreon, which can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/dirkleichty?ty=c

We played two games for Story Game Sunday this week: Epidiah Ravachol’s Invisible Empire and Grant Howitt’s Kobold Quest.

I quite like Invisible Empire. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before, but it is a hack of Swords Without Master in which you play various members of the court of the Silent Emperor, each doing their best to impress him with their tales of Dread and Awe (and without getting themselves killed). One of the game’s best features is the table of different ways the Silent Emperor might execute you. A favorite from our session:

“Plucked by six necromancers from your future tomb on the first, third and ninth anniversary of your death and dragged into the past to devour yourself.” 

Kobold Quest is a lot like Goblin Quest, but instead of a bunch of goblins going on a really stupid quest, it is about a bunch of kobolds trying to build a really stupid contraption to help them satisfy the demands of their dragon king. It was a ton of fun. One of the cutest things that happened in our game was the procurement of a “dire kitten,” which was just a normal-sized, adult cat. We also had a gang of kobolds who told incredibly filthy, un-funny jokes, a la The Aristocrats, and a particularly disgusting kobold named Lisa, who had a hinged jaw and could swallow (and regurgitate) anything if given enough time. 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Steve Mains Kyle Kowalski Kyle McCauley and Daniel Lewis. 

OMG, Daniel Lewis and I have something so exciting planned for The Gauntlet . . .

Some pics from our Wednesday Meetup. Scott Owen ran a table of John Harper’s Lady Blackbird, and I ran the new edition of Monster of the Week. 

I’ll let Scott chime-in about Lady Blackbird, but MotW was great fun. This new edition is only slightly changed from the first edition, but the changes are pretty good. They mostly make it feel more like Dungeon World, which is not a bad move considering how popular that game is. XP is now awarded on a 6-, which is a good change, as the AW-style highlighted stat method never made any sense in this context. There is also the addition of a DW-style End-of-Session move, as well as some nice tweaks/clarifications to existing moves. 

As far as the story goes, we did a mystery inspired by the movie Phantasm, and by “inspired” I mean “lifted directly from.” It was a blast. I’m hoping to stick with the 1980’s action/horror movie theme for the whole series. This is something of a specialty of mine; my MotW mystery inspired by Big Trouble in Little China is a favorite around these parts. 

Thanks to Scott for running the other table, and to everyone else who came out: Derek Grimm Jorge Salazar Kristen D Ferrell Riley Daniel Lewis Russell Benner Marcus Centurian and parrish warren!

A discussion topic . . . 

The argument has been made to me that complexity equals depth. Specifically, a character creation process that has more options in terms of stats, abilities, skills, background, and so forth, equals a character who is more fully fleshed out and not as “two-dimensional” as those found in DW, AW, Monsterhearts, and the like. 

You can probably guess I disagree with that sentiment, but I’m curious to hear what others think. 

Yesterday, for Story Game Sunday, I ran a one-shot of the classic Dogs in the Vineyard. I was the only person who had played it before, and my hope was to highlight the game’s numerous strengths, including a very fun character creation process; the captivating setting; and the basic tension of the game, which is that your characters have to enforce a moral code that you, as a player, may not agree with. In truth, DitV should be played in multiple sessions, but we had a nice story arc for our one-shot, and I think the players got a good feel for what the game is all about. If nothing else, they got to see me do a boozy, older woman NPC, which is a specialty of mine, haha. 

The game was published in 2004, and is certainly starting to show its age a bit (all those dice!), but for the most part, it holds up really well, mainly on the strength of its setting. Along with The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, this is a game that would benefit greatly from a second edition. I would pay many American dollars for that. 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Kyle McCauley Russell Benner Jeff Burke and Steve Mains.