+4 Amulet of Mighty Fists

Once upon a time in Elysombra, toward the 2/3rds mark of Jonathan Tweet’s epic 3e campaign, I switched from playing Sigurd, the dwarf fighter who’d taken a level of cleric to better understand Primus’ will, to playing a half-dragon gnome psychic warrior named Dzhay who maintained an illusion of looking like a jailbait Pippi Longstockings until she tore someone’s throat out with her camouflaged silver-dragon teeth.

Dzhay plundered the Psionic Handbook and came out loaded for war. For this, and for abandoning Sigurd, and for somehow talking the notoriously stingy DM into gifting me with a full load of good magic items, I achieved campaign infamy.

Which did not lessen the second time our party got gacked trying to destroy a particular naga-infested Temple of Evil.  We’d been hit by overwhelming barrages of empowered fireballs and lightning bolts, some cast by nagas and some cast by our own frickin’wizard, who’d had  the courtesy to ask whether Dzhay could take a hit from a fireball but did not entirely listen to the answer. The answer had been no, not so much, and especially not with a disintegrate spell on the way from the nagas.

So Dzhay was toasted and Jonathan gleefully turned to determining the fate of the magic items she had been carrying. Old school baby! First I rolled saves for the stuff she used, then I turned to rolling for the items that she kept in her backpack. When I mentioned that it looked my +4 amulet of mighty fists had been destroyed, Mark Jessup, playing the party’s abused but beloved monk, Ta-Wei Shek, nearly spit out his teeth. “You have a +4 amulet of mighty fists? And you keep it in your backpack?”

“Yeah, the enchantment I get from [one-or-the-other-of-the-cheezy-and-near-permanent-psychic-warrior-tricks-I-was-using] is better…Uh-oh.”

“Augh! Augh! +4 amulet of mighty fists! Do you know what Ta-Wei is using? A +2. Augh! Augh!”

Guilty. Guilty and oblivious. And in no position to correct the error.

This, and other slights and fiascoes, eventually led Mark to utter the despondent war cry we forever associate with his flamboyant yet strangely ineffective characters: “I’m 76 hit points you don’t have to lose.”

Although to be fair, in the final act of our heroes’ mortal existence, Ta Wei-Shek climbed the head of the world’s greatest red dragon, Vaerm, and punched her in the brain, no +4 amulet required. 

Doom!

When Lee Moyer and Keith Baker started their Kickstarter for the excellent Doom that Came to Atlantic City boardgame, I felt there was something missing. A few things, actually. Despair. Desperation. The mounting pressure of inevitable torment.

But now that the game is meeting and exceeding its stretch goals one-after-another, now the torment arrives. As I seek to work with Lee on the art for 13^th Age, he is called upon again and again to reach deep within his withered septum to scrape another pewter benefit out onto the Kickstarter ladle. Let it be so.

I love this game. In a previous incarnation I no longer clearly recall, I contributed ideas to the game that its creators deemed worthwhile. Don’t let that put you off. It is more fun than capitalism and less destructive to your friendship circles than the OC (Original Cults). Although it appears to be a luck-based move-around-the-board adventure, there’s quite a bit of skill involved in actually winning, as the wins-to-losses ratio of the verdammt Keith Baker has proven in games I have been privileged to lose. 

At the Sign of the Happy Harpy

We had an amazing family vacation for two weeks just as I was turning over the 2^nd playtest draft of 13^th Age. We spent two weeks in Turkey, starting with four days in the carved rock of Cappadocia, where I typed the new echo spell notes for the wizard listening to the night call of the muezzin bouncing off a fortress rock named the Castle of Uchisar. Then we drove south and west along the coast, hiking in ruins and swimming in the Mediterranean before catching aflight to Istanbul for a final four days of museums and bazaars.

In Kalkan, we stayed in a sweet hotel that we thought was named the Harpy Hotel. But half its logos and signs said the Happy Hotel. Which was it? Well it started as the Harpy Hotel. As witnessed by the Harpy Stele at the nearby ruins of Xanthos, the local harpies were conceived as benevolent spirits, winged women who took the souls of dead children to heaven. Huh. Dead children, well, I guess that’s the human condition. Heaven is good, at least.

But every week a hotel guest mentioned that as far as they knew, harpies were monsters. Eventually the hotel acknowledged its PR error. The owner’s name includes a Turkish word for happy, so the new name is a double-entendre that most guests won’t realize.  

As we were checking out I decided to take one last look at email since it seemed likely we wouldn’t have access that night. I had a surprise present, the first 13^th Age monster tile I’d seen from the Diabolist, sent over by Lee Moyer who’d finished the tile from Aaron McConnell’s rough pencils. And yeah, the moment we were checking out from the Happy/Harpy Hotel, Lee sent over the harpy.

I had my laptop in hand as we checked out and showed the art to the concierge, saying “You know all those people who turned the harpy into a monster and made you change the name of your hotel? I make games. I’m part of your problem.”

For those of you reading this entry for information on 13^th Age instead of keeping up with my synchronicity highway vacations, here’s the scoop on our monster tiles. Preparing the art order, I mulled over the fact that our monster selection for the 13^th Age book deliberately sticks close to d20 norms. Therefore most of our monsters have been extremely well-illustrated multiple times. And recently. What were we going to add? Did our audience really need another monster-format illustration of a gnoll? An otyugh, even? There had to be a more interesting approach. So I turned to the strengths of our setting: what if the monsters could be represented by control glyphs created by the Archmage? That way the monster illustrations would be different and say something useful about the world. Maybe I’d put together a card game using the glyphs. Maybe the game would correspond to a game played by wizards. 

I talked the idea over with Lee Moyer. Mr. Value-Added, I call him. Once Lee began experimenting with the glyphs, he suggested that we rank the monsters with icons they might be associated with instead of giving the Archmage all the credit. Of course! Each monster or monster type appears on a form of tile, stone, gem or plaque associated with one of the icons. The Diabolist’s tiles are all shaped like the harpy tile, a shape you'll recognize from the icon's illustration. On the Diabolist’s other tiles, instead of a harpy you’ll get a hezrou or dretch or balor. But the Elf Queen’s tiles look nothing like the Diabolist’s tiles, ditto for the High Druid and each of the other icons associated with a few of the monsters.

Lee nailed this project. We’ll share more monster tiles soon!

Kill Tokens: short play variant for Epic Spell Wars

Epic Spell Wars awards victory to the first player to win two Last Wizard Standing tokens. But playing with four or five players, it can take five to six games for the magic second win, and that’s too long a game for some people.

   If you want to play a set number of games and come away with a definite winner, or you suspect the game may have to end early, try this variant rule.

   Every time you play a spell (or use a treasure, however you do it) and knock a rival wizard out of the game, you win a Kill token. One spell kills three enemy wizards? That’s three Kill tokens. If the game has to end before someone has won two Last Wizard Standing tokens, break the tie between people with one LSW token apiece by counting Kill tokens. If that’s still a tie, heck, I say let them tie. (Haven’t had a tie yet…)

   The play pattern shifts a bit in a good way. Players recognize that getting a kill may end up helping them win, so there is more point to going out in a blaze of glory.

   You don’t score a Kill token for taking yourself out, but if you can take yourself out you prevent a foe from getting the kill. 

Bravo for the Lords of Waterdeep

Lords of Waterdeep deserves the acclaim it’s getting in the boardgame world. For detailed reviews, see Boardgame Geek and elsewhere on the net. Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee created the design in their free time before selling WotC on the idea. The published game lives up to their original vision.

    I had to wait a bit longer than I liked to play my first game. But after my first two-player game, I arranged games four days straight. The last [non-narcissistic!] boardgame I wanted to play so steadily was Dominion. I’m as fond of Lords of Waterdeep.

    If I have a problem with the game it’s that I’m better at it than I am at Dominion. I've won five of six games of LoW, though that might qualify as ludicrous trash talk given some of the two and four point margins of victory I’m crowing about. Even so, that’s a victory record that makes games harder to play in my family. Lisa loves Dominion because she can count on a better than 50% chance to kick my ass.

   I've played LoWwith friends who know little about the Forgotten Realms and in a couple cases nothing about D&D. They talk of the adventurers in the game as ‘orange’ and ‘black,’ the colors of the cubes, instead of calling them fighters and rogues. When I asked my brother if he was going to finish a quest one turn he said, “Well, it looks like I’m going to Discover a Hidden Temple of Laugh-Out-Loud-th.” But even people playing the game as a series of actions designed to acquire cubes of a certain color and cash them in for victory points enjoy the game immensely.

    The more a player knows about D&D the more they catch the flavor. And if you know the Forgotten Realms, you’re thinking “Yeah, hosting a festival of Sune requires two fighters and two wizards who translate into bards singing for the goddess of love and beauty, that’s perfect.”

   I’m looking forward to playing more games soon. And I’m OK with that comment about winning too often coming back to bite me on the VP track. 

Three Evil Overlords

Yesterday morning I decided to take advantage of the buy-15-and-you-finally-get-1-free card I had from Starbucks. I rolled on down the hill to the drive-through, made the order, pulled up to the window and reached for the postcard where I'd thrown it in the passenger seat. "That's odd," I thought. "There's a 13th Age postcard in here. I thought I only had one of those.  Great! It must have fallen out of Jonathan's stuff and Lisa found it when she cleaned the car." The card was something we put together for Jonathan when he was on panels at Norwescon. The wonderful art by Aaron McConnell and Lee Moyer shows two of our evil icons, the Diabolist and the Lich King.
   Beat. Beat. Beat.
   "So where's my Starbucks card?"
   Beat.
   "Oh."
   Yeah, I was a few sips of caffeine shy of firing on all neurons and I'd grabbed the wrong treasured postcard from the special spot behind the Fokker DR-1 triplane model on my desk.
   So as I floundered for my wallet to pay for coffee with a Starbucks Gold card instead of a postcard, I told the barista I'd grabbed the wrong card.
   "Well that looks really cool! What is it?"
   Turned out I could  *almost* have traded the 13th Age postcard for coffee. The barista and a friend working beside him play a lot of tabletop games, mostly Pathfinder and Warhammer. Next time I'll find out which Warhammer armies they favor.

The map is not the territory....

...and in this case it's not even the same freaking planet.

On Sunday, Syrian state run TV news ran a segment explaining how the onfield formation and passing attack of the current world-dominant Barcelona soccer team serve as coded instructions to the rebels who are running weapons into Syria, highlighting smuggling routes and final delivery destinations. You can watch it on youtube here.

The story starts 30+ seconds in, but you need to stay on board until the graphics arrive at the one-minute mark.

You can find a US news site covering the story here.

I'm not sure whether this could be a subject for Robin Laws' occasional  Ripped from the Headlines blogs. Sure, it could be done, if you can stomach using the Syrian bloodbath's whackjob accompaniment as inspiration for gaming.

There are suspicions that the explanation for the story is whacky-ass humor instead of whacky-pack paranoia. I guess that would be 'nice.' I'm hoping that the story should be filed under the Arabic word for 'the Onion.' But Syria seems like the type of place that being forced to explain your joke about national security could have bad consequences, so I'd be content not to know.