Saturday DCC: The Rise of Fandar

It's rare that I get out during daylight hours to play an RPG, but Saturday, I made the effort and arranged for a sitter, so I could play some Dungeon Crawl Classics. 

I haven't been a player since DragonCon, so I jumped at the chance when I saw the announcement in my Meetup.com feed. 

My character, Fandar the Blood Crazed Barbarian, is a level 1 warrior randomly generated via the Purple Sorcerer utilities. The returning players had played 0-levels last session and all had at least one character survive to level 1. The new folks, which turned out to be me, would jump in at level 1.

Which I feel oddly about. I mean, to me, that's the most fun amazing game idea ever. So, it was strange playing DCC and not having a horde of rabble to run, and more hit points than 4 level 0s combined.

So, in honor of my first DCC game with a leveled character, I painted up a mini:

Fandar is a Reaper Bones mini. He took about 3 hours, start to finish (all on Friday night).
This is before his shower of gloss varnish. I'll use dulcoate eventually on him, for now, he appears to have been slimed.

Here he is on the table at Gigabites:

I tried a Mighty Deed just about every attack - and succeeded once. I'm playing him as a Conan / Thongor type of pulp barbarian, so it's go big or go home, even if I just have leather armor and 12 HP.

We survived the adventure although we didn't succeed in our quest. We voted as a group to not return to town, but maybe drift away someplace where people won't know us. 

Also, as a side bonus, one of the other players is into historical gaming, and we talked about Saga a bit. I did some digging around, and before you knew it, I had ordered a box of Gripping Beast plastics to form my 4 point viking army.

DragonCon 2013: Gaming Pics!

While going through my phone the other day, I realized I hadn't posted the pictures I took as mementos of each game I played at DragonCon. 

So here they are without pomp or fanfare.

The all-important badge

Old School D&D:

My character sheet w/lifelike illustration

Taking "safety in numbers" a bit too far.

Notice that my character is right next to the dragon. I was blinded earlier and proceeded to use the 10' pole to guide me around. Eventually poking a sleeping white dragon.

Malifaux:

My crew of goblins

Things were going better than they looked.

Killing the golem was a bit of an error. It explodes on death, doing some serious damage.

Fate:

Gormon the Goblin Pirate and Failed Mutineer.

A photo-realistic portrait of Gormon.

Dungeon Crawl Classics:

This photo does not do justice to the awesomeness that this session was.

Wherein I Ramble About Recharging

Pumpkin being Pumpkin.

In between bouts of work (2 jobs) and child care, I've been trying to recharge my creative battery.

I recently read a zine called "How to Be Creative More Often: even if you have a job, responsibilities, & need more than three hours of sleep each night." (Kind of  wordy, but you can't deny that it is descriptive). One suggestion the writer gives is to have "feeding periods" where you try to fill yourself up with inspiration: movies, art, books, etc. I'm not sure what, or if any, scientific data backs up this suggestion, but it sounded right to me.

So that's what I've mostly been doing. 

I recently finished reading The Castle of Iron by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt and loved it. One book is not enough to judge either author, but I enjoyed it far more than Jack Vance's The Gray Prince, which I had read prior.  Magic and science co-exist in parallel universes, logic and literary verses are the keys, and oh yeah, they have somatic components to the spells.

Currently reading The Eternal Savage by Edgar Rice Burroughs (originally titled "The Eternal Lover"). I should have gathered from the original title more of the plot of this book than I got from the newer title. 

Burroughs is my guilty pleasure. I don't think he's the greatest writer, but for whatever reason I enjoy reading his books. The premise of this one seems exceptionally dubious the more the plot unfolds. Still, I'll keep reading it as I'm curious as to how he'll attempt to explain it all.

I've been re-watching Ken Burns's WWII documentary, The War, on my Kindle - it's free to Amazon Prime subscribers - during my workouts and here and there. I've seen it in its entirety once prior, when it aired originally and find it riveting, tragic and inspiring.

For my much ballyhooed feudal Japan social campaign, i added a tons of free movies  to my queue, including When the Last Sword is Drawn,which was fantastic. The campaign is likely to have a high level of fantasy, but the drama here was so gripping - a samurai caught between clan, family and duty. What more could you want?

Demons and magic, of course.

I imagine the game will probably be more like Moyeo Ken (anime). Watched one episode so far and thought it was pretty terrible, but I admit there were some cool ideas. 

Some plastic did make it to the table the other day for a DHC7B game - my umpteenth play through of the first scenario in the Nuts!2.0 rulebook. The dice were hot and it played fast, with mt US half squad taking out the Germans rather handily.

Finally, this battery charging thing has paid off in that ive got an idea for a 9Qs adventure for The Ever Expanding Dungeon, as well as some  ideas that will end up here or in the next issue of 6 Iron Spikes & a Small Hammer.

And looking ahead, at the end of the month, it's Dragon*Con. It's no GenCon but it wil have to do. I'm signed up to play OD&D and DCC and  I'm pretty excited about it.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: My First Impression

I had a chance to play Dungeon Crawl Classics two Sundays ago with a local gaming group I found while online. This was the second time I've done this and like the first (although a different system), it was an absolute blast.

Although the DCC rules are modern compared to what I'm used to, they didn't play modern. Instead, it was like slipping on an old, comfortable sneaker.

We started out with 0 level characters, which is way more fun than you'd imagine. With 4 or less hit points (if a character had 4 hitpoints we labeled them "tanks") being creative about combat is key. And we were. 

Although I think we had an unnatural obsession with lighting things on fire.

My game record keeping is mostly bad sketching (as I am not an artist) but I have discovered that looking back at the sketches helps me remember a lot more than my chicken-scratch scribbles do. I've shared two below that I think capture some events from the game well enough to jog my memory sharply:

Ragar, my Dwarf mushroom-farmer (or does he farm dwarf mushrooms?) died in a well - note the tattered end of the cut rope on the lower left. He was the second of my characters to die and it was my idea to go down the well, so it served me right. The other characters, my own included, were right to take him out:

In the survival of the fittest, those who purposely court danger are bound to die

Here's a scene from further along in the adventure:

I started drawing before the GM finished his description and then I realized we had no sail. Hence the  crossed-out mast.

My wizard's apprentice (a chaotic and cunning character I named "Alister C.") made it as far as the big battle scene, and was the last character of our party to die. Not a bad showing for three hit points. Of course, it didn't hurt that he had looted some of his dead comrades along the way for better weapons.

Speaking of the dead, of the 12 characters who went in, 1 survived and could go on to become a 1st level something or other. Now that is awesome!

Even with the player character carnage, it was a great deal of fun for all involved - new and old schooler alike.

So, would I buy DCC? 

I don't know. I love the black with gold foil 70s metal skull edition but I doubt I'd have any luck getting to play this regularly - I don't sense that many people have the rule book, let alone the desire to play.

I spoke with the GM quite a bit afterwards and he seems of a similar bent as me when it comes to gaming but he has other commitments that prevent him from running any kind of campaign. 

This has me thinking about running a Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess game at some point in the future: first as one shots ,and then if enough interest, as a campaign, since both rule sets are freely available for download.