Tag: Jason Cordova

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. 

Last night, we had an incredible session of Dungeon World. It will go down as one of my favorites, I think. 

There were a few things that made yesterday sing, but importantly, the party finally started to take control of its own destiny in the red & pleasant land of Voivodja. Before, there was a tentativeness to all their actions, whereas last night there was simply action. 

We had a lot of fun set pieces, including an encounter with the horrifying Pale Bishop; a showdown with a vampire bride that nearly killed several party members; hints of the campaign to come in Carcosa; and a rendezvous with a new favorite NPC, the Tailor!

Now, I normally treat NPCs as fairly disposable, but I really, really like the Tailor, and especially how the players have embraced him (sometimes literally so). As a general rule, I’m not in favor of slotting in a Gandalf-type character to prod and guide the party members along, but in a weird setting like Voivodja, the Tailor was super-helpful because the party needed a little push from a friendly NPC to really get into the meat of things. He was a fun character who gave the group a certain measure of confidence in their choices. It’s going to be sad when he is inevitably killed by some Big Bad. 

Thanks to Ferrell Riley for running the other table. And to everyone else who came out: Daniel Fowler Marcus Centurian Scott Owen Kristen D Russell Benner Kyle Kowalski and Jeff Burke