92 Days to GaryCon! Other Stuff

While this series is about me counting down the days until GaryCon, it doesn't mean that everything has to be GaryCon related. At least, not directly that is. I do have a play-by-post game that I have been running for close to eight months now. And I am now playing in another play-by-post game.

The archipelago campaign has started up again with the party being charged to find fresh water on the island after the discovery of orcs being present. The party has managed to get themselves a packbearer in the form of a laborer named Jefel. They also had their first encounter with the human natives of the island, though the unintentionally scared them off. So now they are on their way through a path they have discovered in hopes of finding the native's village and hopefully water and allies as well.

The game is started playing in uses the Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP) system and is set in the "Nightmares of Futures Past" setting from the X-Men comics. My character, Inferno, is a mutant with the ability to control and transform into fire. We only just got started, so nothing has happened yet to really write about. But it will be nice to be a player again since I'm usually on GM duty.

In a way this is related to GaryCon since the entire reason I am going is because I'm a gamer. And since I don't have a group of my own at the moment, it's nice to have something available until March.

The Trials and Tribulations of the Play-by-Post Game.

As of yesterday, my play-by-post game of HackMaster has been going on for five months. Five months is not an inconsiderable amount of time as far as role-playing games are concerned. Typically, a character advances in level once every four to five weeks of real time. By the end of level one, players will have received at least one decent magic item. Then you take into account the the amount of "game time" spent traveling, training and recovering from wounds and you would expect that in the game world the PCs are level six with some really good items and a year has passed since the campaign started.

In reality, exactly one day has passed in game time. The party has fought exactly one battle and haven't found any treasure. I have accomplished in five months what most campaigns get in their first hour. It has been so slow that at times I have had to railroad the party just to keep things going.

Another problem has been player attrition. I have had four players drop out of my game since it started in April. And out of that four, only one had the courtesy to give me a heads up. The rest just disappeared, never to post again. Fortunately I have been able to get the party back up to five players. Unannounced dropouts happen in normal games, particularly ones at game stores. But on a message board where a quick PM to the GM to say, "Sorry, I don't have time to do this anymore," is quite aggravating.

That's not to say it's been all bad. One thing I have enjoyed about the game being play-by-post is the amount of role-playing the players have put in. For example, out of the five PCs only one (a dwarven Cleric of the Guardian) doesn't speak a common language with the rest of the party. While there are two other characters that speak dwarven, one is a soft-spoken dwarf that rarely says more than a few words to anyone, and the other is an absent-minded mage that forgets to translate for the party unless prodded. It has led to some entertaining conversations to say the least.

Also, the pace has allowed me to flesh out some of the backstory for the archipelago. It has also allowed me to make changes to the setting that weren't part of the original concept. It's nice to come up with adventure ideas without feeling rushed.

Ideally, this would be a weekly game played either in-person or through something like Skype or Google+. But since I have to make due with what I have, I might as well make the most of it. I'll try to keep everyone appraised of how things go as the happen, no matter how long it takes.

W is for What Next?

Tomorrow A-Z Blogging ends and things go back to normal somewhat. As I mentioned in by V post, I hope that this will lead to more blogging on my part. I plan on updating everyone on my play-by-post game every Friday, and Hitting the Bottle Week will return later in the month. I do want to at least finish this event on Z, which I wasn't able to do last year.

I am also considering doing more vlogs and maybe a review of one of my favorite series up here. But I haven't decided yet. I'll see how the muse hits me and take it from there.

S is for Setting, or History of the Archipelago

On the 10th day of Famine, 744 YND, a Reanaarian trading vessel was headed en route to Svimozhia along the Reanaarian Run when a storm from the north pushed the off course. After being battered by the wind and rain for two days, they found their vessel off shore of an archipelago southwest of Svimozhia. After spending six days on one of the islands making repairs and doing a small bit of exploration before getting back on their original course to Svimozhia.

Upon returning to Zoa, the captain of the vessel spoke to the elders and got permission to begin an expedition to explore the archipelago fully. No one is sure what the captain said to get the funding needed to begin this expedition. But everyone is sure that something was found on the island besides sand and friendly natives.

The Reanarrese aren't the only ones making plans for the archipelago. The Svimozhians quickly learned about it from a few rum-soaked crewman aboard the trading vessel, and they consider the archipelago to be part of Svimozhia. The Kalamaran Empire also has expressed interest in the archipelago. Both nations have begun to send their own expeditions.

The archipelago consists of eight islands, one central surrounded by the other seven. All attempts to find a safe place to disembark on the other islands has proven difficult. The seas around the island, particularly the central one, are filled with shallow reefs and a variety of intelligent and monstrous sea creatures. The sailors call these waters "The Devil's Moat".

Q is for Questions

With the start of my play-by-post campaign coming on Saturday, I have had a few questions come up that need to be addressed sooner or later. I figured I would answer a few of them now.

How will the PCs train?
We'll be playing by the new Player's Handbook rules which states that characters don't need to formally train until they hit level six. Since the first island is designed to take a party of six PCs to level four, that shouldn't be an issue. By that time, the company in charge of the expedition should have made a few arrangements for formal training. In the case of some classes there may be other opportunities right away, if they know where to look.

O is for Objectives

The archipelago campaign is the closest I've come to running a sandbox-style game. As soon as the party lands on the island they have one main task ahead of them, explore the entire archipelago. How they choose to go about this is their prerogative. But there is more to the island than just making a map of hills and trees. Depending on how the party chooses to fan out and search, they may miss a few adventure hooks I have laid out for them.

Part of the problem is the way overland maps are drawn in role-playing games. Unlike most maps that show landmarks and exact positions of things, more RPG maps are little more than hexagonal graph paper with markers in each hex to indicate terrain. A single hex can be anywhere from 100 feet to 10 miles wide. I'm using 1 mile hexes, but that still leaves a lot of room for a party to walk past a hook or macguffin. Since experience in this game will be awarded more on exploration and discovery than combat, the party will have to be thorough to avoid missing anything.

This works both for and against me. If the party just walks by the hook it gives me time to flesh things out while I throw random encounters at them, but it slows advancement down considerably and may get boring after a while. On the other hand if they choose to be through in searching every square mile of the island they should find everything, but again it will likely slow down while they explore every nook and cranny, and most of the time without finding anything.

My only solution will be to establish a short-term goal up front that will lead to clues about the island's origins and secrets. Hopefully it will allow the party to meet all their goals without railroading them.

M is for Maps

On of the goals I have set for the players in my archipelago campaign is to map all of the islands. Mapping is one of those aspects of fantasy role-playing games I love. Armed with only the gamemaster's words, a pencil and some graph/hex paper, a player attempts to craft a workable map for the entire party to find their way through the dungeons and wildernesses of the campaign world. It's a fun way to interact with the players and keep them on their toes. A few sloping passages, teleportation traps or just a simple misunderstanding of what the GM said and the players may make a wrong turn down a path they thought they went down before.

My archipelago campaign is going to have an additional wrench in the works, it's a play-by-post game. So there is the additional factor of not being able to see what the players are drawing as it happens. HackMaster also has a Cartography skill, which is necessary for players to create maps. So now I have to adjudicate a player's map-making ability on a document I can't readily see. And I am pretty sure one of the characters that spent points on the skill does not have a scanner or a good graphics program readily available. It will be interesting to see how we manage to get things worked out.

L is for Looking for Players

I'm hoping to get my play-by-post game started by the end of the month. I've already got my brother and another friend in on the game and have made an announcement on the Kenzer & Company boards, but I thought I would extend an invitation to my readership. If anyone is interested in getting into HackMaster and is up for a play-by-post game, let me know. Don't worry of you've never played the game before. I'm willing to help out in that regard.

E is for Encounters

This was originally going to be about gamer etiquette until I realized two things.

1. There's a blog post about gamer etiquette from some gamer's blog at least once a month and my post won't add anything new to the discussion.
2. All "gamer etiquette" issues are less about gaming and more about an individual's overall personality and can basically be summed up with "quit acting like an ass."

So I decided to get back on the archipelago campaign idea with trying to figure out what encounters the party will be able to run into on the first island (which I have given the placeholder name "Malakoah".) While I have a few locations for set encounters/"dungeons", I am also going to need a few "random" encounters for those moments where the party is moving from point A to point B, or camping for the night. This is not going to be something at the expense of the exploration aspect of the campaign. On the contrary, it's something that should go hand-in-hand with delving deep within the darkest reaches of the island. Since this first island will be for low-level characters, there are a few guidelines I'll need to use to set the theme of the campaign.

You are not alone.
The island may be newly discovered, but that doesn't mean it is uninhabited. There will be different tribes of indigenous people on Malakoah, and they may not all get along. Mistaking one tribes customs for another could be a major faux pas for the party. How this plays out could mean the difference between having allies and having enemies.

In addition, there will be a total of three expedition parties on the island, of which the PCs will be a member of one. The other two will be competition for who can discover the island's secrets first. It's another situation where combat may not be the best option. It's one thing to trip up the competition and send them down the wrong path, it's another to outright murder them.

Keep it mundane, but exotic.
Animals are to be the most likely "monster" encounter on the island, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the key elements of the campaign should be that the party is out of their element. They may be familiar with some of the fauna back in their homeland, but on a remote island, there could be a number of variant species of bird, insect, reptile and arachnid just waiting to come down on them. Nature can be just as dangerous as the supernatural, maybe even more so. Players are used to the hordes of humanoids and demons GMs throw at them, so they may likely underestimate the danger of a common, yet poisonous snake. Besides, if you keep the majority of the threats normal, the supernatural ones become all the more special.

Throw a little evil at them.
While racing against other expeditions and fighting off giant spiders will be part of the normal game, one cannot understate the importance of a good villain. This is a fantasy based campaign after all. Who knows what darkness lies within the mountain peaks and jungle depths. And if you don't throw a few of the classic and not so classic bad guys at the players every once in a while, they might get bored and lose interest. Plus, the presence of such creatures could lead to questions about the rest of the archipelago. Questions that the party won't hesitate to find answers to.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Let me know what you think.

A is for Archipelago

I'm working on a HackMaster campaign, and I have decided that it should take place on an archipelago. For those of you not familiar with the term, an archipelago is a chain of islands. The idea is for the players to explore each island one by one until finally reaching the endgame at the final, hard-to-reach island. Ideally, a player character can go from level one to level twenty over the course of the campaign. I could probably do this with any location, but an archipelago gives me some unique advantages and story-telling ideas. Here are a few of them.

Not tied to a given campaign setting
HackMaster is based in the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting. Now I do own the setting book as well as the atlas. But I must admit that I am not as familiar as I would like. Therefore, a "deserted" island with the occasional incursions from the various nations of Tellene provides me with a location of my own design, while allowing me to slowly incorporate the rest of the campaign world into it.

Exploration over Combat
Early D&D was as much about exploring new locations as it was about killing monsters and taking all their stuff. In some cases, even more so. By dropping the PCs into a wild, untamed wilderness, I can point the game back in that direction. One of the main goals of the campaign will be to map the archipelago in its entirety. When I played Isle of Dread last year, I was more than happy to explore the island and get all the hexes in our map filled in. It was the feeling of discovery that drove me in that session. I want that to also drive my campaign.

Controlling the Supply Chain
In most settings when the party needs to resupply they go back into town. The players then crack open the player's handbook and buy whatever equipment they can afford. In reality, supplies at even the most well-stocked store are limited. When you are on a mission of exploration, supplies can become very scarce as the boats that bring them are subject to weather and pirate attack. How will the players deal with these delays? That remains to be seen.

Man versus Nature
Without the benefit of a friendly inn to eat at and a warm bed to sleep in, it will be the players against whatever the weather throws at them. Tropical islands are often the target of tropical storms. Dehydration becomes a threat when the sun beats down on you while the only water around you is the ocean. Poisonous insects and reptiles crawl over every rock and tree. It will be a challenge to find shelter, food, drinkable water and warmth every day of game time.

So far I have a basic map of the first island worked out. I'm now in the process of getting the first few encounters and the adventure hook set. This will likely be an online game, probably play-by-post, so the pace will be different than other games I have ran. But it looks like it should be a lot of fun.