Savage Worlds – War of the Dead Episode 14

Tags

RPG, Savage Worlds

 

 

 

Once again, I am not sure how to describe what happened yesterday.

No, really, this was outside the normal range of oddities.  Eric didn’t show up, and that didn’t seem to help keep things on track.

This is probably going to be a short post.  This is for a few reasons.  First, we didn’t accomplish much yesterday.  Second, I don’t have much to talk about.  Third, I am working on Necromunda minis, and really want to get back and paint them…

So what did we do?  We chatted a lot.  We got Jirimiah and Reese engaged in the banter.  We got Jirimiah to laugh, a lot.  We asked Jirimiah lots of questions about himself.  In effect, we kept Jirimiah entertained for about five hours.  He seemed to need that, a lot.  You see, Jirimiah likes people.  He likes interacting with people.  We give him a specific type of “nothing seems to be off limits” type of people to interact with.  Every time we think that we have hit some unspoken low bar that we should never go below, someone in the group finds a way to set the bar lower.  It is all in good fun.  At least, that is how I rationalize what I do.

I feel that running a game, I need to provide some level of ambiguity, and possibly questionable NPC’s.  The normal “I am a mad serial killer, and I stabby stabby” kind of NPC bad guy isn’t lots of fun to play for long.

My NPC’s tend to be caricatures of real life.  I tend to pull in the worst of people, and give some portion of that worst of all people into one NPC … OK, I tend to lump it all into the NPC.

Why just have the NPC be a mindless killer?  You can have him be a racist bigot who has rationalized in his own mind why he is correct.  I am not a bigot. At least, I don’t think I am.  I have been around them.  I spent 6 years in the Army, and believe me, there were some really fascinating people of every color, race, creed and sexual orientation in the Army.

I remember one guy in Basic Training.  He was a dumbass.  I mean true dumbass.  He was a white guy from Texas named Hoffman.  Now, we ended up finding out that while he associated himself with Texas, he had only lived there for a year before joining the Army.  He was actually from New York.

Now it didn’t help that Hoffman also looked like a half Ork.  I mean, really.  If he had green skin, he would have been a perfect half Ork.  He even had a funny nose that looked like he had been rooting around for truffles.  His nose actually was pushed up kind of flat in front, looking like a pig snout, and he had a round face.  Imagine Porky Pig.  I am not making this shit up.

Needless to say, Hoffman was also white.  He was a white supremacist.  Well, he was a dumbass, a dumbshit and was generally stupid, but he also believed in the concept that white people were superior to all other subhuman races.

Hoffman would walk up to a black soldier and start telling him about how black people were marked with the Mark of Cain.  You know Genesis 4:15…

And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

So according to Hoffman, all black people were descendants of Cain, who bore the mark by God, so that they would be seen from far away. QED, the descendants of Cain were black, so that white people would know that black people were branded by God.

Now this was the least irrational thing that Hoffman would say to a group of black soldiers.  And he would say it with a shit eating grin on his face.  I assume that it was a shit eating grin, it may have been more of a “I am white, and my white buddies are going to back me up if one of you makes a move at me”.

Well, if it was the second, assuming his white buddies would back him up, he was wrong.  Always wrong.  None of the white people ever backed him up as groups of black soldiers pounded him into the ground.  We just looked at the black soldiers and tried to let them know that he wasn’t with us.  The black soldiers would kick the crap out of Rawlins in the squad bay area, and no one lifted a finger to help him.

I remember trying to tell Hoffman that he should just keep his mouth shut.  He didn’t understand.  It was almost as though he was reinforcing his hatred for people with dark skin by being beat up.  It may have been a vicious circle building on itself.  Kind of a negative feedback loop.

I tried one time to explain to Hoffman that people in the middle east were dark skinned with dark hair.  If God wanted to mark Cain and his descendants with a mark that could be seen from far away, he would have made them light skinned with blond hair.  Because, that would not have fit in in the middle east.

Hoffman didn’t like that.  Not at all.  He told me that I was a “nigger lover”  His words.  Whatever love I have for any group of people not withstanding, the black soldiers who were within earshot of my comment decided that I may be pretty all right.

I ran into too many people in the Army who were racist.  It wasn’t limited to white people who hated people of color, or specific religions, or specific sexual orientations, etc.  I found out that every group of people is capable of holding hate for another group of people.

Note that I say “capable”.  There were many fine people in the military.  I chose to interact with them, and be friends with them.  But you didn’t have to look too hard to find some group of people who associated with only “their kind”, be they black, white, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Korean, etc.

Thankfully, the people who lived this “in your face” view of my subgroup is superior to your subgroup was minimal.  But there was always an undercurrent.

Anyhow, I like to flavor my NPC’s with some combination of “need to keep him alive” and “I want to kill him”  It just so happens that I can also do a pretty good bubba southern guy voice, and the lifetime of observing racist assholes allows me lots of source material.  Sometimes, I think I may go too far, but then… maybe not.

So where was I?  What happened yesterday?  Not much.  I tried to get the adventure back on the rails, the other players tried to keep it off the rails.

That pretty much sums up the session. But then, that sums up just about every session I have ever played with this group.  You see, we started out playing games by playing Toon.  If I remember correctly, the first time that Collin, Shari, Mike and I played an RPG together, it was Toon.  We have added Sue, Bill and Eric, but we are still playing an extended game of Toon. It doesn’t matter if we are playing Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, D&D, Pathfinder, etc, we are still playing a game of Toon.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is important to understand.  Maybe it isn’t important to understand, it just is.  One of the things I have learned in my life is that some things just are.  You shouldn’t spend a lot of time lamenting it, or even questioning it.  Just accept it.

So what did the party do you ask…

Well, I tried to help the party learn something important about the town.  They had what should taken five minutes took over two hours.  They followed a group of armed men up the street.  They go into the house, and disappear.

What the party is *supposed* to do is sneak up to the house, and listen to the small windows in the basement, and hear the people talking about how the Mayor is concerned about the Army people finding out about the experiments.  And that is it.  You know, building some tension in the story, setting up the next series of plot lines…

So what does the party want to do?  Burn the house down.

You read that right.  No provocation.

Burn the house down.

With everyone inside.

Murder Hobos.

Yup.  That about sums it up.

After a very long time at the table, I ask the different players to make intelligence rolls.  You know, trying to get the train back on the tracks.  Did it help?  Not much.

Shari didn’t make her intelligence roll.  Going around the table, only Collin rolled high enough to realize that “the panes of glass in the basement are single pane, and he knew from previous experiences that you can hear conversations easily through single pane glass.  So he decides to sneak up and listen at the window.  He rolls terribly, chips it and rolls terribly again, so all he hears is mumbling.

He goes back and reports to the rest of the party, and they decide the most appropriate thing to do is burn the house down with the bad guys inside.

So they have expanded their approach. Going from simple arson to arson with the intent to murder the people inside.

Eventually, the party retreats from their bloodlust and decides that they should at least try to figure out what is going on inside the house.  So they walk up to the door, and knock on it.  One of the locals answers the door, and in a short conversation, the local says they don’t need anything, to which Sue flashes her breasts at the local, and the local decides that they need Sue, but no one else in the party.  Sue realizes that she doesn’t want to be alone with the locals inside the house, and tries to talk the local into letting all of the party in, to which the local says, no. But the woman with the breasts is welcome to come in as long as there is a continuous titty show.  We are in rural North Carolina, after all.

After some time, a North Carolina standoff occurs, and the local shuts the door with the party outside.

Sue decided that she was going to pick the lock.  Now Sue looks at me completely straightfaced and says that she is going to pick the lock.  She rolls the dice.  I ask her if she has lockpicking skills.  No.  Mike asks her if she has lockpicking tools.  No.  But Mike says that she may have a fishbone.  The lock is not picked.

Broquen Glaz decides to carefully knock out the window in the front door, allowing them to gain entry to the locked door.  He tries to break the window quietly, but isn’t successful.  It makes a lot of noise.

The local comes back upstairs, and the party blames some kids that have run away.  The local calls up Lenny.

Now Lenny is a really nice guy.  He is also talkative.  Lenny is supposed to guard the door until the party can come back with some new glass.

Lenny tells them all about what is going on in the basement.  You see, the Doctor is doing experiments on living people, grafting zombie flesh onto the living human’s bodies, trying to make a hybrid that is immune to the zombie plague.  There are multiple tables with people being experimented on, a cage full of zombies, a cage full of bound and gagged people, and jars of experiments filled with liquor that they aren’t allowed to drink.

The party hatches a plan. Burn the house down.

Well, they really didn’t hatch a new plan, they simply reconstituted an old plan.  I mean, why come up with a new plan when the old plan would have worked anyway.

So Lenny talks to the party, and lets Sue know that he really likes croissants with Nutella.  Sue promises that she is going to make Lenny croissants with Nutella.  The party then leaves the priest, Eric with Lenny as they go back into town to get stuff to burn the house down.

Lenny spends a lot of time talking to the Padre, telling him about how he likes Mexicans, since they brought Taco Bell to this country, and their Grilld Stufft burritos are the best, and he also likes Dorito Locos tacos a lot.  Lenny espouses his great love for all things Mexican that are shown through Taco Bell.  The Padre stands in stunned silence.  Actually, Eric wasn’t there, so the Padre just stands there because no one is playing his character sheet.

The party goes to tell the Major about the goings on that Lenny told them about.  They are waylaid by a nice lady with two small children.  She pulls them aside, and convinces them to go to her home.

She spins up a long tale about how her husband was actually the Mayor before the zombie Apocalypse, and the Mayor and Doctor arrived the second day of the outbreak, and took over the town  Many people are scared in town.  Her husband was murdered by the Mayor.  She wants to leave.

As she finishes up her story, there is a knock at the door, and there are eight armed men who escort the party out of the house.  The leader, Jimmy Dean explains to the party that the lady is upset, and probably mentally deranged.  Her husband was the mayor, but was bit by a zombie and had to be put down.  The lady blames the Mayor and the town security because she didn’t want her husband to be killed, but he was infected.

The gunmen lead the party away from the house, then disperse.  The party is then approached by the Sheriff.  The Sheriff confirms the lady’s story, but also states that he can’t take on the Mayor and his gunmen alone.

So the party continues on to the Major.  The Major is not much help.  He cites FEMA regulations and ICS certifications, and how he can’t assume command unless the local officials, as in the Mayor asks him to.  There is still a Constitution in effect, and unless specifically requested by the elected officials, the military is only to assist.

All the party hears is bureaucratic mumbo jumbo.  The Major is simply explaining why he has to stay on the rails that his NPC was written to.

So the party hatches a plan.

Burn the house down.

Yup, an oldie but a goodie.

They go back to the house, and find Lennie discussing the virtues of how Taco Bell is a genius, because they use the cheese as a layer to keep the hot meat from wilting the lettuce and tomatoes.  This isn’t so good on the Grillt Stufft Burrito.  You can take the tacos home, and they will still be kind of fresh, but the Grillt Stuft Burrito must be eaten at the restaurant, otherwise, the lettuce gets wilted.  Lennie knows all about Mexican culture, since he has tried the bean burritos, taco pizzas, cinnamon twists, and all of the different types of hot sauce packets.  He really likes the green sauce packets, but they are not always available.

Lennie likes the Padre.  He doesn’t tell him to shut up like the other people in town do.  Lennie follows the Padre around like a lost puppy.

The party sends the Padre off, so they can enact the plan, burn the house down.

As the Padre and Lenny walk away, the party breaks into the house.  They discover that the entire house is full of frilly foo foo furniture, with lots of roses on the cloth and curtains.  There is a grand piano and every bit of furniture is covered in plastic.  The runner rug in the hall is covered in plastic.  The house is immaculate.  For now.

The party quickly determines that they need to move heavy furniture into the stairs that lead into the basement.  Then fire.

The party discovers 12 and a half gallons of moonshine in the kitchen.  All in used plastic gallon milk jugs.  They add several of these to the mix, and carry several away, it is moonshine, after all.

The fire starts, and grows quickly out of control.

The house is engulfed, the party moves to the army convoy.  They grab Lenny and the padre, the lady and her two kids and the Sheriff and leave with the convoy.

Meanwhile, the house is fully engulfed, and the flames and embers have caught nearby homes on fire.

Yes, this is normal.

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Savage Worlds – War of the Dead Episode 13

Tags

RPG, Savage Worlds

So I have been trying to figure out how to describe what happened at the last Saturday RPG session.  I have been stewing over this for a while.  Things almost got back on track, then it didn’t.

In a nutshell.

• The party drugged the Mayor.
• The party dragged the Mayor.
• The party learned what a real SOB the Mayor was.
• The party found out that some people go missing, usually those who have leadership skills.
• Collin confronted Bubba Skeeter, the head of the town’s guard system
• Collin one-shot punched Bubba Skeeter, and killed him so dead that it was kind of embarasing.
  • And Collin did it with a 2 of clubs, but with exploding damage dice
    • Well, exploding doesn’t even come close to describing what happened with Collin’s dice
• The party went out with an Army Sergeant to find a few missing troopers, or at least figure out what happened to them
• The party found a military convoy, and the major in charge of the convoy wants to take over the town, or at least use it as a base of operations.
• The town is not happy.

Yup, that is about it.  At least the big stuff.

Sue is back.  That didn’t make the group any more mature.

Case in point.

The party drugged the Mayor.

The party went to Elanor’s house and made bran muffins for the Mayor.  Now the Mayor is a health nut, so of course the mayor would like bran muffins.  Elanor informs the party that the Mayor is not a nice man.  He is uncouth, and unholy.  He believes all sorts of things that are not true about large groups of people.

Sue provided the Viagra for the muffins.  I mean, Sue, who had not been playing for the last few weeks magically created Viagra, well, the party did raid the pharmacy, and got a wide variety of medical supplies from behind the counter.

The party crushed up Viagra, to the tune of about 6 pills per muffin, and baked the muffins.  They then went to the Mayor’s office to provide a “peace offering”.

It turns out that the Mayor likes bran muffins, but he really likes them when there is a dollop of jelly or jam inside.  He states that this dollop of jam inside is better than cutting them open and slathering butter and jam on the muffins.

He eats two of the muffins.

Now here is the problem.  You know that thing that they say about “if you have an erection lasting more than 4 hours…”, well, 12 times the dosage for Viagra creates a bit of a problem.

At the same time, the padre starts drinking Patron tequila with the Mayor.  I won’t write all of the horrible things that the Mayor says, but in general, it involved:

• Tequila is the only good thing to come out of Mexico
• He has spent a lot of time in central and south America in the CIA doing counter insurgency runs against the drug cartels and the commies
• The rocker looks like his mother mated with a llama.
• Everyone agreed that the rocker, Broquen Glaz indeed looks like his mother mated with a llama
• The Mayor has the hots for the hippy chick
• The Mayor has the hots for the padre
• The Mayor has the hots for Broquen Glaz, as long as Broquen Glaz shaves his ass first.
• The Mayor is pretty much soused after drinking 14 shots of Patron.
• The padre only drank a half of a shot, and tipped his shots to “keep up with the Mayor” into a potted plant, which is currently a very happy potted plan.

After quite a while, the Mayor is unable to stand up straight.  He has a hard on that makes him bend over at the waist, because his chinos don’t have enough crotch room.

This of course makes the drunken mayor make even more passes at the hippy chick, the padre, Broquen Glaz, and eventually the centurion, whom he has seen completely naked, and evidently likes what he saw.

Now the nurse (aka hippy chick) decides now is the time to hit the poor mayor with some Oxycontin.  She initially thinks that she is going to have to hide it, and crush the pills up and lace it in some shots of tequila.  The Mayor has no problem grabbing pills from her and downing them with the tequila.

It seems that the Mayor may be a bad ass, but he is also a drugged up drunk bad ass with a hard on that won’t quit.

The Party Dragged the Mayor.

Now this is kind of hard to describe.  The players took this, and ran with it.  So please, dear reader, don’t be offended by what I have written, I am simply reporting what the party did to the poor drugged, drunk mayor.

They decided to take the Mayor to Elanor’s house.  It seems that in addition to having the hots for the hippy chick, the padre, Broquen Glaz and the centurion, he also has the hots for Elanor.  He is so drunk that he forgot that he has the hots for Collin also, but then there is Elanor, who is an uptight woman, according to the Mayor, but he has lurid fantasies about what he would like to do with and to her.  Mostly involving a Parchisi board, cheddar cheese and some vanilla yogurt while listening to Karl Marx “Das Kapital” read in German by Liam Neeson.

But then, who wouldn’t get turned on by Liam Neeson reading Das Kapital in German?

Where was I?

Oh yes, they drugged the Mayor, then paraded him over to Elanor’s house.  Well, they tried to parade him to Elanor’s house.  He passed out on the way, falling face first onto the sidewalk.

His junk was so engorged that he was like a teeter totter.

This is where it gets weird.

The party chooses to “help” the mayor get to the doctor’s office by dragging him feet first, face down, allowing the concrete sidewalk to scour his clothes, producing, in the end, a very scratched up Mayor, including losing the tip of his penis, due to the grinding action.

For some reason, Eric thought that this was very appropriate.  He plays the Padre, and the Mayor had differences of opinion with the Padre about just about everything, starting with whether people of that skin color had any value.  We are in rural North Carolina, after all.

I tried to ham up the inbred dumbass bullshit that I heard in the Army, heard from southerners etc over my life.  As horrible as I made the Mayor towards the Padre, Eric kept saying “I have relatives in Kentucky, I have heard all of this before.”  Well, challenge accepted.  I kept getting more and more obscene in describing what the Mayor said, and Eric would say “Meh, heard it before.”  I up it a notch, and Eric just looks at me and says “is that all you got?”  Then Sue and Mike chime in and say “Jesus, Rob, we you aren’t even coming close to what we used to hear in Florida”.  Shari and Collin said at one point “Wow, you haven’t even come close to what we heard in Northern Idaho”.  Bill just sat there and tried to distract himself by looking at his phone.

I could not top these people with my rantings.  Eventually, I just gave up.  I can’t top reality.

I mean, when we have a society where a porn star is paid $130,000 in hush money to not talk about her affair with a married Donald Trump, and that doesn’t make President Trump’s supports say “hmmm”

When there are headlines like this:

and

Now I don’t care if President Trump, Candidate Trump or citizen Trump had affairs.  It is not my business.  What I care about is that he is continuing to make us all look like idiots to the rest of the world.

Every time I feel that the Trump circus can’t go lower, he shows us he can.  This man has talent.

Where was I?

Oh yes, A mayor, with some major rug burn, and then some.  The mayor is going to be hurting when the drugs wear off.

The party learned what a real SOB the Mayor was.

A little too late, the party remembered that the Mayor and the Doctor were brothers.  Oops.  The mayor’s condition didn’t seem to bother the doctor too much.  The doctor filled in the party about the mayor.

You see, the Mayor only showed up a few days after the zombie apocalypse started.  He dropped in out of the blue, and organized the town, making sure that they had adequate walls, training, etc.

The Mayor was a CIA operative in central America.  He was a very bad person down there, keeping the USA safe from democracy.  All of these skills allowed him to come by and take charge.

The town doesn’t really like the mayor, but the things that he instituted have kept the town safe for the entirety of the zombie apocalypse.  Now Erick and Mike seem to think that since the mayor arrived 2 days after the zombie hordes came, and that was 14 days ago, the 12 days of the mayor making sure that there was fuel for the generators, and ammunition runs is not very impressive.  Collin calls BS.  Sue is happy that the mayor is drugged and unconscious, and not hitting on her anymore.  Bill is happy that the mayor is no longer looking at him with a predatory leer.  The only one in the group that the mayor didn’t seem to be interested in was the little girl.  Even predatory asshole dickfaces have some things that they won’t do.

It doesn’t matter how many times Eric / padre tries to rudely interrupt the doctor by saying “don’t care”, “don’t want to know”, “shut up” etc.  The doctor is going to tell his story.  Damn it, the NPC has one job, and he is *going* to do it.

The party found out that some people go missing, usually those who have leadership skills.

While the party is at the doctor’s office, they are approached by an Army sergeant who is trying to figure out what happened to his three troops, Privates Aetuna, Caulkins and Klatu Berada Nec-hum-hum-huma. I don’t remember the third private’s name.

It seems that last night, these privates were assigned to go on patrol, and never came back.

In talking with the Doctor, it becomes apparent that the people who do patrols out side the gate tend to go out, and fewer come back in.  Common wisdom is that anyone who has leadership skills that might have a conflict with the Mayor go out with four other members on patrol, and amazingly enough that person is the only one killed by zombies.

Now the Party decides that this must be a big deal.  I try to explain to them that (1) two people missing do not make a statistically significant sample, (2) There appears to be a bias in the information, as it is not confirmed, just rumored (3) the biased information fits the biased perspective of the party, and so on.

That doesn’t matter.

There are ample examples of correlation not equaling causation.  Standard graphs such as:

Clearly show that if we stopped selling organic food, autism would cease to exist.

Similarly, importing Mexican lemons to the US has had a direct result in reduction in US highway fatalities.

and my all time favorite, there is a relationship between the number of pirates in the world and the average global temperature.

Armed with factual statistics like these, the party decided that there must be a plot to kill off the most leadership prone people.

It never crossed their minds that maybe, just maybe the situation was that the person who had the highest leadership potential had no skills at fighting a zombie horde.

But that was Bubba Skeeter’s problem to deal with.

Collin confronted Bubba Skeeter, the head of the town’s guard system

The party decides to seek out the head of the guard.  They want answers, no they demand answers.

They go up to the house with the head of the guard and loudly demand satisfaction.  Now Bubba Skeeter as a big man.  He wore just bib coveralls.  I looked for pictures on the Interwebs that I could use for Bubba Skeeter, and decided that this was the best one that described him.

Bubba speaks with a strong drawl, and the party can understand at best between 2 and 3 words out of every 6 spoken.  Kind of like listening to a cat in bib coveralls.

Bubba Skeeter seems to not want to do what the party wants. The party wants Bubba Skeeter to wake up the people who were on patrol last night, so that the party can interrogate them.  After all, correlation equals causation.  Right?

Bubba Skeeter is having none of this.  His boys came in just an hour ago, and need their sleep.  Otherwise, they won’t be worth a shit tonight.  No candy ass Yankee, or hippy woman, or llama-human hybrid, or weirdo in a centurion outfit or padre is going to change that.

That pisses off Collin.

I am not sure how it happened but Bubba Skeeter and Collin didn’t see eye to eye.  So Collin murdered Bubba Skeeter.  Now I realize in the zombie apocalypse, many of the rules of polite society go out the window.  But to just outright murder poor Bubba Skeeter was a little too much.

That is why I found a picture of a cute cat in coveralls to try to shame that callous Collin into understanding that you don’t just punch a guy to death because he won’t wake up the guards from last night when you demand it be done.

Collin one-shot punched Bubba Skeeter, and killed him so dead that it was kind of embarasing.

Collin and Bubba Skeeter decided that they needed to duke it out.  They go out to the road, and determine that the winner of the fist fight will toss the loser over the fence outside the town.

Bubba Skeeter drew a 6 of diamonds, Collin drew a 2 of clubs.

Bubba missed with his punch.  I didn’t chip it, since I figured that the fight would go a few rounds.

Collin, on his 2 of clubs, rolls stupidly high on his to hit roll, and gets a strength die (d12) plus a raise (d6), well, he would have had a few raises, but only the first one counts.

The on his damage roll, he explodes both the d12 and d6, and then explodes them both again, and then rolls a normal number.  He ended up doing something like 34 damage.  Maybe it was 32 damage after I took of Bubba Skeeter’s toughness.

Now exploding a d12 twice is pretty awesome.  Doing that type of stupid damage is more than awesome.  Bubba Skeeter took a shaken, and then at least 7 wounds.  There was no way I could chip enough damage to keep Bubba Skeeter in the game.

So Bubba Skeeter dropped to the pavement, dead.  Neck broken, back broken, massive hydrostatic damage to his soft organs…  Or maybe since Bubba Skeeter weighed over 450 pounds, the simple act of charging and swinging a meaty fist caused his heart to explode.  I am not sure.

What I am sure of is that the deal was that the winner had to pick up the loser, and drop him on the other side of the fence.

Collin didn’t do this.  He left Bubba Skeeter lying in the road.

So Collin didn’t win.

As the DM, I didn’t say anything, I wanted to see if Collin would finish the task.  He didn’t.  He was too busy thinking about how he should patent the move he just made, and incorporate it into Goomhaven to make Gloomhaven even more awesome that it already is.

So Collin didn’t win.

I am not saying that Bubba Skeeter won, but Collin didn’t win.

The party went out with an Army Sergeant to find a few missing troopers, or at least figure out what happened to them

The sergeant convinces the party to come with him to find Private Caulkins.  The sergeant thinks that Caulkins is going home.

The party wanted a car.  I gave them a lifted Chrysler K car.  I did this before I did some searching on the Internet for pictures of cars.  As I am writing this blog, I found this picture.

This will likely be an upcoming car for the party, since it is so amazingly cool.

The problem is that the six seater K car (four regular people, 6 if you have very small people and a front bench seat… VERY small people).  the sergeant makes 7 people, and presumably, they have to get Caulkins back if they find him.

Eric has the answer.  Rip out the trunk lid, and weld a bench seat onto the back.  I try several times to get Eric to explain how he is going to attach the seat.  I explain that hte generators only create 120 VAC, and arc welders run on 240 VAC or higher.  There just isn’t the load ability to run arc welders.  Eric assumes that I mean that there is no welding equipment there.

Eric then goes on a five minute tirade about how this is not representative of the south that he knows, and has lived in, where every house has at least an arc welder and gas welders, and many houses also have several mig welders also.  His tirade explains that welding equipment is more ubiquitous in the south than moonshine stills.

I tell him again… they have gas welding, but no power for arc welding.  Finally, after he is exhausted from his tirade, he relents and says, fine, gas welding it is.

So I want Eric to explain how he intends to attach the bench seat into the trunk of a unibody car.  I explain that the gas tank is under the trunk, and they will have to remove the gas tank or possibly have a fire.  He is convinced that the Dodge K car has the gas tank in the middle of the car, not under the trunk mat.

Eric knows a lot but I don’t think I would trust him to do a modification of my car.

Eric then says that he will use straps to keep the seat in place.  Once again, I ask how the straps will work on a unibody car.  Finally, everyone decides to just cram into the car and go.

The party found a military convoy, and the major in charge of the convoy wants to take over the town, or at least use it as a base of operations.

The party goes out the gate, and starts down the road Caulkins is likely to have taken.  After a half hour, they see a convoy of military humvees heading towards where they came from.  The sergeant says that they should turn around and go back.  Collin, the driver complies.

The town is not happy.

It seems that the convoy is being commanded by a US Army Major, who wants to take over the town and use it as a base of operations.

The town is not happy.

The mayor is incapacitated.

The head of the guard is still lying face down, dead, in the middle of the street.

No one has cleaned up the dead zombies at the high school football field.

What could possibly go wrong?

Savage Worlds – War of the Dead Episode 12

Tags

RPG, Savage Worlds

So we met yesterday with the intention of playing Savage Worlds, War of the Dead.  You know, continuing on in the campaign.  Well, it kind of worked.

The entire thing started out with Sue almost ready to come back from Inbredlandistan, keeping ‘Merica safe on her secret mission to “watch her daughter’s cats while her daughter was in training”.  Yeah, right.

Well, let’s back up.  The party spent a lot of time not doing the game.  People were late.  I am not naming anyone, but Eric and Rob were on time.  Mike came a few minutes late, and the rest of the group showed up really late.  Not that I am naming names, but the “rest of the group” may be Collin, Shari and Bill.  That is OK.  I am not on a timeline.  But between the late start and the general conversation at the table, we didn’t get started until about an hour and a half after we were supposed to.  Now, most of that time was BS’ing, along with gossip.

So backing up, I had a busy week at work.  I went to Houston Texas, well actually Sugarland Texas for several days.  Now I have a love / hate relationship with Texas.  I dislike the politics they have on display.  I don’t hate their politics, but I disagree with the conservative things that they do.  The people are really nice.  Whenever I interact with the people, it shows me that decent, kind people could have very different politics than I believe in.

The heat and humidity (and cockroaches) are enough to make me want to run away screaming.  I can take dry heat.  I can take cool and humid.  I don’t like hot and humid.  Even air conditioners only do so much, since you still have to walk outside, or get into a hot car. And there are cockroaches.

I don’t understand how people can live there.  I don’t understand why people live there.  It was 80 degrees and pretty darned humid while I was there.

I did do some interesting things while I was there.  I stopped at a game store I randomly found on Google.  It was Golem’s Gate in Stafford, near Sugarland.  The game store was small, but had a good selection of board games, and surprisingly, a really nice selection of RPG’s.  They had hard copies of several Savage Worlds games, along with the usual D&D game books.  It was surprising that Pathfinder was not represented, but World of Darkness was.

I wonder if D&D 5e is undercutting the Pathfinder dominance of the industry.  Paizo had a huge runaway hit with Pathfinder.  It was easy, approachable, and eventually (in my opinion) sagged under its own weight.  I mean, in order to keep the monster fed, they have to come out with new books and modules regularly.  Do we really need 6 official bestiaries?  To be fair, all you need to run a good game is a core book and Bestiary 1. There are two extra books that add new rules for races and classes that are pretty nice.  I have four bestiaries, along with several after market monster manual books.  I haven’t bought bestiary 5 or 6 , since I have so many RPG books, I just haven’t felt the need to get them.  This probably says something about me, since my functional problem with things is that I am a completist.  If I get into a game, I want to get everything for that game.  This is problematic when I have the following current major RPG lines…

• Dungeon Crawl Classics
• Mutant Crawl Classics
• Pathfinder
• D&D 5e
• Rifts
• Harn
• Runequest
• Call of Cthulhu
• Paranoia
• Amazing Adventures
• Starfinder
• GURPS

and so on, and so on.  You see the problem…  It bugs me when I don’t have all of the supplemental product for every game I have.  Now I have large PDF libraries for other games.  For instance, when I see something that is on Drivethru, I will buy it in PDF, and may print it out for easier reference. That is what I did for Star Frontiers.  Now, I had most of the stuff for that game when I was a kid.  When I found it in PDF format, I grabbed it.  I bought the entire V1 set of books and modules for Twilight 2000 a few months ago.  It was about $40, but I played the heck out of that when I was in high school.  I will eventually print it out and bind it to have it available for easier reading, and maybe force it on one of the gaming groups I participate it in.

This week, I grabbed the entire PDF set for Aftermath, a serious Post Apocalyptic game series.  I played this in middle and high school also.  It required a flow chart to play.  It was super detailed.  The game was a little much, but it was a hard science version of post apac that was more serious than Gamma World.  Think more like Traveller in seriousness and science fiction.  I didn’t like the game system for Aftermath.  But I would mod the ideas into Gamma World and Morrow Project.

Yes, that is the flow chart from Aftermath.

The game system was not for the faint of heart.  The ideas were pretty awesome, and could be folded into other games with a limited amount of work.  Kind of like how you can take just about any fantasy RPG module, and with a little amount of work make it work within any fantasy RPG system.

I was the only person in my gaming group in middle and high school that had a paper route, so I had a steady source of income.  Everyone else had to wait for their parents or other relatives to buy them stuff.   They tended to want to play one game, or possibly two games because they didn’t have the income to go and buy new game systems.  The games tended to be D&D (1st Edition) and Star Frontiers.  That is because for a nominal fee, you could buy the core books for those games, and have a lot of fun.  I liked those fine, but I also wanted to play other stuff.

TSR had good ideas, but other gaming companies had good ideas also.  I found that I could weave into the D&D or Star Frontiers horror, wonky post apocalyptic ideas, etc.

Yes, I was usually the DM, since I had the money from the paper route to buy the books.  I also liked the books and modules.  I would read them and imagine what I could do with them in the games we played.

I actually never really played RPG’s much.  I usually ran them.  I like running them, and kind of framing the story that we are all involved in, I do like playing too.  I am having a lot of fun with Pun Pun, the kobold trapmaker in our Thursday game night.

Where was I?  I was prattling on about games…

When I was at Golem’s Gate in Stafford, I found amongst the RPG’s two copies of the original Deadlands DM screen, and one copy of the paper character cutout standees.  They were $15 apiece.  All brand new, never been opened.  I texted Loren to ask if she wanted one.  Then I called Loren…  I am not a stalker, but this was pretty cool.  Loren later told me that she was in Safeway, and her phone doesn’t work inside that store, so she didn’t get back to me.

I bought all three, just on the off chance that Loren wanted the DM screen.  I wanted one of the DM screens and the standees for me.  Later Loren told me that she already owned the DM screen, but we could go in it halves and give it to Daron.  Daron seemed to think it was pretty all right when we gave it to him.

The trip to and from Texas was bleh.  I don’t really like flying.  I am not afraid of it, I just find sitting in a small seat for hours on end truly unfun. I have traveled a lot.  The thrill is gone.  Maybe that is because when I traveled for work, I went to places like Lubbock Texas, St. Louis Missouri, and so forth.  Not that those places are bad but if I were going to the Bahamas, that might be better.

I returned with little fanfare.  The dogs were very happy to have me come home.  The kids and wife were happy also, but they didn’t bark excitedly at me or for me when they saw me, like the dogs did.

Friday was a pretty quiet day.  I spent it in quiet recuperation with the dogs.  Then Saturday came.  As were were getting ready to out the door, we get the following from Sue, who was still on her secret patriotic mission in Inbredinistan

We weren’t sure what that meant, so I chose to send Mike thoughts and prayers.   I created a poll on Facebook Messenger to see if we could come to some sort of understanding of how to be nice to Mike today.

I figure that if that is enough for the Republican Party after a horrific school shooting, that should be more than ample for an RPG session.

We meet at Dice Age Game emporium, and wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Well, it wasn’t really that long, but the Harer family is getting coffee.  Evidently, they had to grow the beans and roast them before the coffee was able to be served.

Meanwhile, we were starting to get bored.  So we did the only thing that people do when they get bored.  They start thinking.  I have a bright idea that we need to tease Collin about Gloomhaven being so AWESOME!

Quickly, in some odd way, a plan is hatched.  Well, we actually took more time trying to find a marker that we could insta-tat on Mike’s arm than we spent thinking about the overall project, but through desperation, inspiration came through.

Mike covers up the fake tat, and waits for the Harer’s.  And waits.  And waits.  Then waits some more.  Evidently, the Harer family is still playing Gloomhaven.

Finally, the Harers show up, all of about 5 minutes late and Mike shows the tat to Collin, who has the following reaction:

I am not sure if this is fear, angst, gas, or what.  He seems to like the tat, and mutters about how he should get it in permanent manner on his back.

Things seemed to go downhill from there.  We really need Sue back to get us back on track.

It didn’t take long and Eric steered us down the old S&M path.  He decided that all of the minis needed to be roped together into some form of ritualistic orgy…

And then Mike started playing with the barf bag I grabbed for him on the plane.

I really can’t explain why I got a barf bag for Mike.  It started several years ago.  I think it was about 12 years ago, when I went on a business trip to California, and Mike asked me off the cuff if I would bring him something cool from Anaheim CA.  In desperation of looking for something cool, while at a conference for traffic engineers, I found nothing.  So I grabbed a flyer from the hotel that was for the Richard Nixon library in Yorba Linda CA and a barf bag from the airplane and gave it to him.  Mike seemed pleased with the gift.  Ever since then, when I can grab a barf bag from the airplane, as in when I remember to grab a barf bag from the airplane, I give it to Mike.  This is a true test of the concept of “it is the thought that counts”.

After I posted a picture of Mike playing with the barf bag puppet, Sue responded on Facebook Messenger with:

Followed by…

Not getting into any specifics of what we did to her husband, Mike seemed to enjoy himself, a lot.

Where was I?  I think I adequately described the pregame show.  Now onto what we actually did.

You see, this was intended to be a session where the party could actually rest and recuperate.  They were provided an idyllic setting where they could rest up, and prepare for the next few chapters.  It provided the opportunity for a base of operations where they could be well taken care of.

Did they take advantage of this?

No.

Not at all.

Rails?  Who needs rails?

The adventure started out just where it left off the previous week.  Bad things happened.  As Collin was driving the van, an Apache helicopter crashes right in front of the van, causing Collin to swerve to try to evade the helicopter.  Well, Collin is kind of a poor driver who has moments of brilliant inspiration.  This was not one of those moments.

Collin is unable to swerve out of the way with his sweet 1973 Chevy Van.  He crashes into the helicopter, and destroys the van.  Everyone in the van is seriously injured due to the crash.  The party looks outside, and sees that the burning helicopter is right in front of them, and sadly, there are a large group of zombies shambling towards the crash scene.  Help is on its way!  Not so much.

Mike’s Luchador bravely hops out of the van, and is quickly surrounded and dies.  Shari runs away.  Just as things are getting bad (as if Mikes character dying in the first encounter of the session), four large 4X4 trucks drive up with two men with rifles in the back and they dispatch the zombies.

Mike pulls out a pregen character, who is a glam rock star, whose weapon is a guitar.  I don’t remember the glam rock star’s name, but it is something like Jem

Or maybe one of these guys.

or one of these guys.

Whatever the story is, I think that Mike’s character should be on a never ending quest for Aqua Net.  I mean, how else can he have hair like this in the zombie apocalypse?

It is about this point in the game where we start getting trolled by an 8 year old girl who is in the store.  She hangs around the periphery of the table, listens to what is going on, and offers her opinion about things.  Mike loses it.  Not in a bad way, but everything this girl says causes Mike to laugh uncontrollably.  The girl has strong opinions, and is perfectly willing to express them.  The girl hangs around for the better part of a half hour and keeps Mike in stitches the entire time.

The people in the truck offer to take the party to their town, so they can recuperate and possibly join them.

Now for some reason, several of the party members seem to think that this may be a trap.  After all, no one helps out in the zombie apocalypse.  Right?  Eric keeps referring to the Governor and the Walking Dead, as though there is some sort of connection.  How could a group of nice people actually exist in this day and time, much less nice people in North Carolina?  We all know that no one in North Carolina is nice.  Just like we know that there are no basements in Florida, and all boats have canopies on them.

The party goes with the people in the trucks, but only after securing all of the medicine that they could from the wrecked van.

The people in the truck are friendly, and they drive for a while and end up coming up on the town of Dalesbury, which is surrounded by a wall made out of junked cars, tractor trailers, farm vehicles and the such.  There is a gate, and people with guns are manning the wall.

The gate opens and the four trucks pass through, and they drive down the main street of the town.  There is one street, and a dozen or so crossing streets.  The town has a movie theater, a post office, two bars, a grocery store, a hardware store and many houses.

The trucks stop in front of a doctor’s office, and the people are led into the office.  The doctor introduces himself to the party as Doctor Lewis.  Doctor Lewis seems like a pretty OK guy.  He has each of the party members go into a specific exam room in the office.  Each party member is followed by two town members with guns.  The town members explain that they are not trying to be rude, but since the party is new to town, they really don’t trust them, and it is possible that they could be bitten, or want to create problems.  They apologize for the treatment, and ask that the party consider the position from the town’s perspective.  The doctor heals several of the party’s wounds, and asks about the medicine that they brought, is it available for others in the town, or does the party want to keep it for their own.

The response from Eric and Collin is reassuring but noncommittal.  Doc responds that it is OK, but if the party decides to stay with the town, then all resources should be shared.  Once again, no specific response that agrees or disagrees from the party.

The Doctor tells the party that they will be put up in Elanor’s house.  Elanor lost her husband in the beginning of the plague, and she has a large house with lots of rooms.

This is where important plot points could have been included, in the event that (a) corporal Hauser, (b) any one of the three soldiers that accompanied the corporal, (c) the little girl with the flu, and / or (d) the father of the girl with the flu would have allowed for some more information to be described to the party.  But since none of these people were living any more, that doesn’t matter.

As the Doctor finishes up his examination and healing, the party is approached by the Doctor’s brother, who is the mayor of town.  The mayor seems unimpressed by the people that were brought in.  A glam rocker, a person dressed as a Roman centurion, a Hispanic priest, a young girl and a white man.

For some reason, Eric’s character, the Hispanic priest takes umbrage to everything that the mayor says.  It doesn’t seem to matter what is said, the priest takes it as an affront.  It seems that the priest has a chip on his shoulder.   The priest figures that the mayor is a bigot and a horrible person who does not value anyone who is not white.  Well, he may be right.  The priest gets more and more frustrated as the Mayor slights the priest in every way and opportunity possible.  It seems that the Mayor is not happy to have people like the priest here.  Eric is pretty sure that the Mayor is upset about him being Hispanic, but it could be that the priest is not of the correct version of the faith.

As the party is walked to Elanor’s house, they notice that everyone is armed, but no one has tried to take away the guns from the party.  They find out that the town has several generators that they keep running, and they need to find fuel to keep things going.  The town has gardens where food is grown.

Elanor is happy to have the company.  She has a nice and tidy home, where the living room is in various colors of violet, and the sitting room is in various shades of dusty rose.  Elanor makes over her visitors, and tells them that she would like them to rest until lunch, and she will have a very nice beef stew to eat.

The party rests until lunch, and then comes downstairs to a delicious beef stew for everyone.  Elanor is a good host, and has pulled out all of the parsnips, rutabagas and turnips from the stew, leaving a delicious beef stew with carrots, potatoes and celery, allowing the party members to add the other root veggies as they desire.  Elanor knows that not all people like these types of veggies in their food, so she thinks it is better to allow people to add them than try to figure out how to politely not eat them.

Elanor is a beautiful woman in her early 30’s, and talks about how she and her husband wanted to start a family, but he was not able to fertilize her seed.  They were talking about adopting a baby or five before she was left behind and her husband ascended into heaven.  She is sad because she thought that she had lived a righteous life, and would have been called with the other believers in the rapture, but that was not so.  She tries to put on a brave face, but knows that for some reason, she is destined to an eternity in hell, because only the righteous were taken when the seventh seal was torn asunder.  She hopes that if she continues to live a good live, a godly life, that she will be allowed to at least glimpse a view of heaven before she is thrown in to the pit of hell.  Maybe a short glimpse will be enough to keep Satan from entirely owning her soul.

Eric consoles her, telling her that some people were taken in the rapture, but others of true faith were left on this mortal coil to minister to the wicked to hopefully give others the ability to also ascend to heaven.  Maybe Elanor’s faith is what kept her here after the rapture, to help others, and show the truth of faith.

Elanor seems to take solace from what the priest says.  Maybe she will enter the Kingdom of Heaven after all.

The priest asks Elanor about the Mayor.  Elanor tells the priest that the Mayor is not a nice man.  He only wants to be around white people.  Anyone other than a white person is not worthy.  It is unfortunate, but racism lives beyond the Rapture.

The party is told that they will be brought before the town members that evening.  During that time, the party can tell the town members what their skills and abilities are, along with what their story is – how they survived the Apocalypse, and then the town will determine if the party should become members of the town or not.

This should be pretty easy, but the party is not going for it.  For some reason, the party wants to do more.

The centurion and the Mayor get into a conversation about the centurion’s ability to fight, and pretty soon, the centurion has agreed to show his prowess by an Olympic style event.  The mayor and the centurion eventually agree to letting 10 zombies charge the centurion, and the centurion has five discuses (hub caps) and five javelins and his sword.  Evidently, the centurion will fight completely naked also.  The Mayor wants to make sure that this is not embarrassing for the centurion, so he is told he will be chained to a spot, and will not be able to move more than 10 feet from where the chain is locked down at on the ground.

Collin wants to get in on this also.  So does the priest.  They all decide that the first order of business is to allow the centurion to show his battle prowess, then they will reset, and then 10 more zombies will charge at the centurion and Collin’ where Collin can uses 5 bullets in his 50 caliber Barrett rifle, then it is all hand to hand combat.  Meanwhile, the priest can show his power channel through the Lord, and help out the two in the kill pocket.  The Mayor likes the idea of some entertainment for the townspeople since they don’t get to do much otherwise, and the Mayor keeps trying to get more zombies against the party members.  After all, if 10 can be handily dispatched, why not 20?

In the end, the games commence, and the town comes to watch the entertainment.  Mike decides to play power cords on his guitar through the boom box that the town provided.

The centurion takes his place with his five hubcaps and five spears, and his sword.  The zombies are let loose, and amazingly, the centurion kills one zombie with a hubcap.  He kills several with spears, but this is where it gets strange.  Somehow, Eric, the priest all of a sudden figured out that his character had a spell which could be used against the undead, which could turn them, or possibly destroy them.  That would have been nice to use any time in the last, say, 10 sessions.  Eric walks up to the fence, and proceeds to do his magic, and several zombies are stunned, and one drops dead.  The crowd doesn’t seem to notice.  In the end, four zombies get into combat reach of the centurion.

This is where it gets weird.

Now, I have tried to explain the bucolic, calm, nice atmosphere of the town.  This is an oasis in the desert.  Things are nice and quiet here.  If the party plays nicely, then they will have a good base of operations to work out of for a good while.

Does the party agree?  Nope.  They are going to screw things up, because… rails?  who needs rails?

Collin, Shari and Bill all toss the mayor over the fence, into the area where the zombies are.  The mayor is in no danger, but the mayor shoots his 44 at Collin, missing him, but requiring Collin to use a chip.

Collin tells the mayor to call this thing off.  He does this while somehow unlimbering his 50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle and trying to intimidate the mayor.  So the Barrett sniper rifle is not a gun you can Rambo.  It is a big gun.  I mean big.

It weighs 31 pounds unloaded, and is almost 60 inches long.

There is no way that you can Rambo this bad boy.

Now, I carried the M60 when I was in the army.  We all tried to do this…

We couldn’t effectively do it.  The gun is heavy, and more importantly, there is a lot of weight in the front of the gun, making gravity want to pivot it away from you.

It is a game.  So I let Collin intimidate the Mayor with his big gun.

The mayor says “fine” and walks away, not even looking at Collin trying to balance his big gun menacingly.

The zombies continue to attack the centurion.  It takes several rounds of combat, and pretty much everyone giving Bill their chips, but the Centurion ends up killing all of the zombies.

And that is where we ended for the day.

Like I said, it was supposed to be a nice, quiet adventure, where the party would be able to rest, recuperate and get ready to help the town.  We shall see where it will go from here.

Savage Worlds – War of the Dead Episode 11 and some non Pun Pun stuff

Tags

Cosmic Encounter, RPG, Savage Worlds

It was a long week.  I don’t know why it was so long.  I had last Monday off as a holiday, and the Friday before it was a vacation day, so I had a 4 day long weekend, followed by a 4 day work week.  But for some reason, that four day work week was a really long week.

I think it was because I had also scheduled to take this Friday off, so I *was* going to have a 3 day work week, but then I decided to work Friday, you know, lots to do at work.  That may have been a mistake.

We gathered last Thursday for our Thursday night gaming, but Daron was busy.  So we didn’t get to play D&D, so no Pun Pun.  I did bring Cosmic Encounter and we played that without Daron and Summer.

I wasn’t sure how Cosmic Encounter would play with the Thursday night group.  I don’t remember doing anything but playing RPG’s with that group.  Eric loves any type of game, and Eric was full on ready for some backstabbing in Cosmic Encounter.  Loren, Mathew and Jeremy (not Jirimiah) were game, ready to try something new.

I tried to explain the rules, but it is something that you need to play through to get the swing of things.  I was surprised.  Loren, Matthew and Jeremy all seemed to enjoy the backstabby shivving best friend then backstabby shivving thing again.  Loren has told me before that she only really likes RPG’s, and the board games she likes playing are things like Star Fleet Battles and BattleTech.  I have played games like Car Wars with her, and she doesn’t seem to enjoy that as much as an RPG.  I get it, in an RPG, you are not trying to figure out how to get the proper mix of cards, resources, etc to get the most number of victory points.  In an RPG, you can try to build a character to tell a story.  That is more fun to me also, but I do enjoy board games with friends, as the game is a foil to allow people to spend time together.  Other people do it with football, baseball, book clubs etc.

The game went very well.  Everyone seemed to get into the overall wonkiness of the rules.  I had a special card, that if I kept it, I would automatically win if all of the cards of one of the decks was consumed, requiring a reshuffle of that deck.  I sat with zero victory points for most of the game, as I wanted to see if I could win with that card alone.  I did, but then Matthew played a cosmic zap card that took away that card just as I played it, so for an infinitely small amount of time I won, then I didn’t.  I also decided at one point where both Loren and I played a negotiate card that I would play kingmaker, and give Loren the two victory points she needed to win, and I would get my first victory point, that worked well, until Jeremy played a card that undid all negotiations.

In the end, Eric and Matthew won, as they both played a negotiate card, and were able to give each other the number of victory points to simultaneously win.  I pointed out to Matthew that he would not be “THE” winner, but he was perfectly happy being “a” winner.  🙂

The powers in the game were a lot of fun.  Matthew never played his power.  Eric’s power allowed him to add the total number of ships in his own system that were not on the planet being attacked to his attack card value.  This was pretty devastating for everyone attacking him.

Jeremy’s special power was that any attack he was a main player was first determined by a 50/50 random draw.  That meant that if Jeremy wanted to, he could commit 1 resource to an attack, and then let chance, pure chance determine the outcome.  Jeremy seemed to really like this, and did it over and over and over.

For some reason, every time Jeremy and Eric attacked each other, Eric was able to win the chance.  Whenever Jeremy and Loren attacked each other Loren always lost.  Not sure why, but the force was not with Loren last Thursday night.

I am blanking on Loren’s power at this point.  All I know is that whenever she attacked me, it was bad for me.   I think her power was that when she was attacked, or attacked someone else, she could randomly select a card from the other player’s hand.  She did this to me a lot.

My power was that whenever I pulled ships from the void, I got 2 extra ships.  Whenever I pulled cards, I got two extra cards.  This allowed me to have a ginormous stack of cards.  This helped me keep the cards I wanted, as I had a few really good cards, but whenever Loren stole a card from my hand, it was usually, but not always, a crummy card for her.

Fun was had.  Everyone told me that they would play Cosmic Encounter again.  That is good, since I really like that game.

The key to a good Cosmic Encounter game is to have a bunch of people who are willing to be awful to each other.  You have to revel in other people’s pain and suffering, and not get your nose out of joint when you lose terribly.  There is also some level of bluffing and trash talk that is included in the game.  If you play it with a bunch of people who are all nice to each other, then it is not a really good game.

You also have to enjoy a game that strategy does not really work super well in.  There are no dice, so the random element is related to what cards you pull, along with how you can use any given moment to screw another player.

Roy, the owner of Dice Age Game Emporium does not like Cosmic Encounter.  Roy likes games where he can map out a strategy, and work through it while denying other people what they want.  He seems to revel in games where you have 100 possible paths to victory and as you play the game, you pick a path, and as things are denied you by other players, you continually refine that path to victory to figure out how to deal with the current situation.

That works well for lots of strategy games.  It doesn’t work well for games that are based on some level of chaos.  In my opinion, if you are playing Cosmic Encounter “right”, there is lots of opportunity for chaos…

Hopefully, we will all be ready to play more D&D, and Pun Pun will have some more tales to tell.  I was surprised at the response that I got about Pun Pun’s story on the blog.  Everyone thought that it was not a true representation of what happened, since it happened from her perspective.  Really, aren’t all stories told from a perspective?  Do we doubt the news, because it is from a perspective?

Bah, write your own blog if you don’t like Pun Pun’s story from her perspective.

Saturday, we played more Savage Worlds, War of the Dead.

Sue was still not there.  She was probably finishing up her top secret mission to the third world country that she is helping overthrow.  Bill, Mike’s official government minder left to go back to Arizona.  We are not sure if this is because the Trump administration decided that Mike was not a threat, no longer a threat, or if there was no threat in the first place.  Mike is sworn to secrecy.  Bill didn’t tell us.

The other Bill, Bill the huge fan of 1980’s power ballads, was back.  He thought that Air Supply’s show was amazing.  He still had some whip marks on his arms, where he was brutally attacked by old women thrashing around in the mosh pit while “All out of Love” was playing.  We warned him, grannies in a mosh pit is not a good combination.  They whip their walkers around and pinch cheeks in full on orgasmatronic mode.

Bill was also having problems with his computer again.  He “claims” that the hard drive was having problems.  Probably a virus.  You know how they are.  The virus’s that is.  Anyhow, after Bill got the computer working, he was upset because Comcast, or someone was throttling his download speed while he was trying to restore his mega game library from Steam.  I suggested that it would probably work faster if he simultaneously downloaded his games from Steam while also viewing some really nasty stuff from Pornhub.  After all, no one just downloads games from Steam.  Steam knows that it is probably a denial of service attack if you are only downloading games.  You need some raunchy porn to go along with the game download to satisfy the servers.

I also suggested to Bill that he should do a punk rock version of this beauty.

Mike was still lamenting the lack of Sue at home.  We all felt bad for him.  It is hard having a true patriot who is willing to “watch their daughter’s cat” for weeks at a time.  We all know that this is some sort of code.  We are not sure what the code is, but Mike told us that Sue will be flying back after next weeks game.

Shari and Collin were ready to play.  Shari had some sort of secret that she was not able to tell, but I could tell that it was bugging her to no end.  She wanted to tell us, but it was a horrible secret and she was not allowed to tell it.  Collin sat there and couldn’t make it through a sentence without including “And Gloomhaven is so awesome!”

It was kind of odd.  He was saying things like “I had a sandwich for lunch, and Goomhaven is so Awesome!” and “I was driving my car and Gloomhaven is so awesome!”, and “And there I was looking at the bean burrito at Taco Bell and Gloomhaven is so AWESOME!”  I am not sure if this is a new form of Tourette’s, or some other malady, but we need to be wary of.

Eric brought a toilet for Roy.  Most customers pay with money, possibly a bank card or maybe some chickens.  This is the first time I have ever seen a customer pay with a used toilet, and one that didn’t even have a seat.  I guess I have a lot to learn about bartering.

It took 5 people the better part of an hour to install the toilet.  I didn’t realize that so many people needed to sit on a toilet to get the wax ring to seat.  Also, Shari showed her home improvement prowess by showing all of the men who were working on removing the toilet that you didn’t need a ruler to pull out the old wax ring, you just needed to grab it like Trump would and pull it out.

So we started playing some Savage Worlds.  It was a lot of fun, but it would be better if Sue were there, showing me that I was number one.  I get this a lot.  I get it at work, I get it at the game store…  I get it from Mike, when I remind him of his character needs.

I think that Mike is having a good time.  I am not sure.  He may be showing his true nature after being separated from Sue for so long.  We had some conversations via Facebook Messenger, and Sue said at one point that we should mess with Mike, and then also said that we should leave Mike alone….  I am confused.

Where were we.  Oh yeah, Savage Worlds.

Because the party skipped by some of the vignettes last session, they had to deal with guilt, or at least some of them did.  The party members were required to make a Spirit roll, at a -2, and if they didn’t make it, they would feel guild over not doing anything useful to help the people in the three things that happened.  Let’s see, what did they do…?

Oh yeah, they didn’t help the three soldiers that were stuck in the truck, surrounded by zombies.  Well, Bill, the government minder did die trying to help.  Then, they tried to help the nice young lady with her toddler child out of the car, sort of.  Until she was overrun by zombies, and then they shot her dead.  Then they started a fire at the gun mart without helping the guy on the roof.

You see, actions have consequences.  Just look at this dildo, and you know that I am right.

Too many people stayed home on election night, you know who I am talking about, all the illegal aliens who could have voted, all the dead people who could have voted.

Now I am not saying that Killary would have been any better.  I really didn’t like Killary, but I dislike Trump more.

As Commissioner Gordon said in The Dark Knight…

Gordon: He’s the dildo ‘Merica deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll worship him. Because he needs it. Because he’s our dildo. He’s a loud, asinine dipshit. A true disgrace to the Human race.

Well, maybe Commissioner Gordon was talking about someone else, but I think the quote above just about says it all.

For the record, there are Trump Dildos available.  This one is a standard dildo..

This one has an expanded base, to make sure that it doesn’t go too far into the anus.

There are also multicolored Trump Dildos on Etsy…

Now if those pictures above offend you, I don’t care.  Trump is a tool.  He is not even a good tool.  In case you haven’t figured it out yet, my politics are such that I dislike Trump, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, and a bunch of other good for nothings that are in DC.

Now, in all fairness, I don’t think that the other side has much to be proud of either.  I just find that the far right conservative side tends to offend me more at this time than the left does.

But that has nothing to do with Savage Worlds, or the World of the Dead, or Saturday’s game.  For some reason, any simple thing that these dipshits do derails me.  Like the concept of arming teachers to save kids in schools.  What a stupid idea.  Why not adequately fund the teachers so that they don’t have to buy their own supplies for the classroom first?  Maybe, just maybe, stop sucking on the NRA’s tit and realize that there are between 4 and 5 million members of the NRA.  4 million is what the Huffington Post estimated based on their annual budget of $160 million and a $40 membership fee, 5 million is based on NRA’s actual posting of information online.  There are 327 million people in the USA.  A quick math equation of 5 million NRA members out of 327 million people in the US means that approximately 1.53% of the population of the US are NRA members.

How exactly does 1.53% of the population dominate the national dialog?

Let’s do some comparisons.  The National Geographic Society has 6.8 million members.  Sunset Magazine has 1.3 million publication subscriptions.

Why doesn’t the National Geographic Society get the same time in front of congress, making sure that natives don’t wear things covering their breasts, and keeping beautiful butterflies flying?

I see what you did there.  You let me get distracted again.  Damn, you are good.

So because of guilt, something that the NRA and Republican Leadership are immune to, some of the party members start out with fewer poker chip bennies than the others.  Eric and Bill were unaffected by the fact that they didn’t help out people who were in dire straits, so they started out with three bennies.  The rest of the party members had some level of guilt, so they started out with only one bennie, and they will do that for this session and three more sessions.

The party starts out, and shortly finds an HEB.

Now the players keep asking what an HEB is.  I have told them several times that it is a grocery chain in the south.  The players at the table are convinced I am wrong, just like I was wrong when I said that buildings had basements, since obviously no building ever had a basement in Florida, not knowing that they were actually in North Carolina.  The party also included haters who said that there was no way that any boat ever, ever didn’t have a roof on it.

As they approach the HEB, they find that there are three cars and one van in the parking lot.  The cars are a really nice Chrysler K car complete with stick shift, sun roof  and electric door locks.  Shari is in love.  This is the ideal car for her, so she says…  Earth calling Collin, take note here.

The second car is a beat up old VW bug.  Every panel on the car is a different color.  The interior pleather seats are cracked.  Mike asks if the doors are locked.  I respond that the doors are locked, but like all old VW Bugs, the lock doesn’t work, and he can open it right up.  Mike responds, just like my old bug…

The third car is a 1980 Yugo.

The party doesn’t even bother with this car.  I am not sure why.  They are convinced that it will not be worthwhile for anything.  I reasoned that if the 1980 Yugo made it to 2018, someone was putting a lot of TLC into it.  It may be a pretty sweet ride.  But no interest from the party.

The vehicle that the party really focused on was the 1975 Chevy van.

The paint is a pearlescent white at the top of the van, and has a lavender bottom, with the paint colors blended, including a darker purple flop and a classy amount of metal flake added.  The wheels are Cragger mags, and the back wheels are slightly larger than the front ones, giving the van an aggressive stance.

The windows on the back doors are painted over.  There are no windows on the main cab of the van, and the driver and passenger doors are tinted cop killer black.

All of the chrome work on the van is super shiny, where someone has obviously spent a fortune on getting it all nickel plated, then triple chromed.  This was someone’s labor of love.

The inside is truly classy plush shag carpet, with four captains chairs all of which swivel around to a post in the middle where a steel tube can be attached with a small table to play cards and hold your beer cans on.

The party is wary.  Rob never gives out something as nice as this.  There must be a catch.  There must be.

Eric is nervous.  He decides that he is going to carefully open the hood of the van, and pop the battery cable off the post.  This kills whatever power might be on the security system.

Eric opens the door, and finds out this this van is even better than they thought.  It has a full 8-track music system, and even better, it has a case of 8-tracks.

There is vintage gold in the case.  Golden Earring, Blue Oyster Cult, The Rolling Stones, Waylon Jennings, The Carpenters, Fleetwood Mac Rumors, and six Dianna Ross cassettes.  The party is upset, because there are no Beatles cassettes.  Mike sat and sulked because there were no Beatles tapes.  He kept muttering to himself that when he had an 8-track, he had several Beatles cassettes.

The van also has a CB radio.  None of the party clued into that when I was telling them about the van interior.  They were too fixated on the fact that there was an air mattress in the back on the shag carpet, and a large wooden box that included a healthy supply of condoms, lube and the marijuana.  Mike grabbed the pot.  I think he wanted to make sure that it was properly secured.  Shari grabbed all of the lube.  No one bothered with the box or the condoms.

Eric noticed that in the back of the van, there were really odd metal poles that were bolted onto the bottom frame of the van, and created a large frame in the back.  There were ample tie points on the frame also.  It almost looked like this van had the ability to restrain someone… I wonder what that would be useful for?

The only thing the van was missing was some sweet graphics like this…

Mike wants to know where the keys are, after all, it would be a shame to ruin this van by having to hotwire it.  Against all odds, the keys were above the sun visor, and they fell right into Mikes hands when he tilted the visor down.

Bill was concerned.  There must be something wrong with this van.  Rob never gives away anything that is nice or useful.  Never.  Never.

Eric goes and reconnects the battery under the hood.  The entire party is concerned now.  Bill has been going on for so long about how Rob never does anything good, ever, that they are now all worried.

Geez, all I was trying to do was give the party something nice, to see how long they could keep it nice before it gets wrecked.

The prize was in the grocery store though.  The party needed to get the drugs from the store to help the little girl back at the warehouse.

The party wants to know what the inside of the store looks like.  It is dark.  There are so many sale posters up on the windows that no light is getting in the store.

Mike spends about 5 minutes looking at the door, trying to figure out if it is a good idea to open it or not.  The entrance has two doors.  The doors swing on a hinge, and if there were power, when a person stepped on a pressure mat, the door would open.  Shari tells the rest of the players at the table that these pressure mats only worked for people who wore shoes, but if you tried it barefoot, the mats wouldn’t work.  Shari speaks with authority, so we decide to let her have her moment.  No one calls BS on her.  We really don’t know for sure.

The doors are not locked, and are easily pushed in.  The party slowly enters the HEB, wearing shoes, hoping that it isn’t a trap.

Mike goes for the liquor section of the store.  He finds it, and immediately starts breaking the glass out of the security system to get at the liquor.

Everyone still hopes it isn’t a trap.

Well, it is.  The book says six zombies per player.  The players get into the HEB, then all hell breaks loose.  While Eric, Collin and Shari run like the wind outside, Mike and Bill are left, surrounded by zombies.

Mike is able to get away.

Bill is not so lucky.  He is surrounded and bit several times.  He isn’t able to shake all of the wounds.  Bill declares that he is going to immolate himself, pouring flammable liquid onto himself, and then charging the group of zombies closest to the liquor cabinets.

Billimolation runs at the zombies, and starts the store on fire.

Everyone runs to the van, and just as the fast zombies catch up, Mike tosses the keys to Eric, Mike crawls in and shuts the sliding door on the van, Eric starts up the van, and slides over to the passenger seat, and Collin gets in to drive.

The Chev 350 sounds good.  Somoene did some major work on the engine, it rumbles, and sounds pretty nice.  The engine is backed up by some rodded glass packs.  Collin starts driving away, and the zombies follow.

Shari asks if she should help Bill.  Bill says “I am dead”.  I remind Bill that he will not be dead in a short while.  Well, kind of not dead any more.  Shari decides that it is not worth trying to save the corpse that was once bill.  CTWOB, kind of like TAFKAP.  I wonder what symbol CTWOB would use.

The party is distressed because they have no meds.  I don’t think that they are as worried about losing the detective.  Maybe they were.

The zombies pour out of the HEB, and start following the van as it rumbles slowly around the store.  Collin starts having them trail out like a tail, and then gets enough zombies behind them that he can race forward, and let the rest of the party jump out of the van, get on top of it, and get to the ladder to the HEB roof.

The party finds the roof is locked, but Mike is able to use his crowbar, and his benny for a second roll to pry open the access door on the roof.

As soon as the door is open, smoke roils out from the fire inside.  Mike bravely scales the ladder, after describing how he will keep out the smoke by urinating on a rag, and tieing it around his mouth.  This was said in the game store at a higher volume than the rest of the game conversation for some reason.  When Mike declared this, Jirimiah, Lisa and several other people all looked up like “what the hell is going on over there?”

Mike descends and finds that other than the store being on fire, there do not appear to be any zombie threats.  He goes back up, and everyone decides to come down.  Shari takes the crowbar and gently opens the door the the pharmacy, and Eric and Mike start looking for cold medicine.  I explain to them that they are in the pharmacy, and only prescriptions are here, the normal cold and flu stuff is out in the store.

There is a corpse on the floor, with a gun nearby.  It appears that the pharmacist killed himself.

With complication comes inspiration.  Eric starts gathering all of the bags of prepared bags of medicine.  A very large amount of bags are filled with amoxicillin, and speak about treatment for Chlamydia.  There appears to have been an outbreak before the outbreak here in town.

Mike and Eric, both being athletes know what sort of opiate drugs are the best to have, and make sure that they gather all of the opiates, and other similar drugs.

After a short while, the party gathers all of the drugs they can find, put them all into plastic bins and shopping baskets and shuttle them up the ladder onto the roof.

By this time, there are many zombies trying to get into the van that Collin was sitting in.  Collin did the same thing, driving around slowly, creating a tail of zombies following him around.  After a while, enough zombies are following far enough back that the Collin can drive back, the rest of the party (except Bill) come down, get into the van with their huge selection of drugs.

The party moves on, driving around, and they realize that they have no idea how to get back to the warehouse.  As they drive around, Collin notices the road is exploding behind them.  Collin accelerates, then turns left down a side street into a construction zone.  Collin rolls so well on his driving roll that he doesn’t get any dust or dirt on the van from the construction site.

As they continue on, they see the new Bill character.  He is a Roman Leginaire

His name is Biggus Dickus, or maybe it was Vibratta Clitoris, Suppositorious or Overanxious Odus .

Bill is all about removing the huns that have attacked the capital.  He quickly gets into the van, and is ready to work with the group.  He likes the carriage that the Senators are driving him around in.

The van gets driven back to the warehouse eventually.  There are hundreds of zombies on each side of the warehouse.  This is where the conversation gets interesting.  Eric wants to have the vehicle driven up next to a man door, and the party will open up the sliding door on the van, the man door will open up into the warehouse, and the party can enter.  Collin had a long conversation about man doors on buildings.  For some reason, he was concerned about these.

Collin has a problem with man doors.  I am not sure what they ever did to Collin, but Collin is really wigged out about them.

It ends up that the party drives around and gets another tail of zombies following, and empties out one side.  In a complicated throw, Bill’s centurion shows off his throwing skills and throws a tire iron with a rope attached onto the roof.  It is retrieved by the people at the top who take the drugs from the party.

Things are supposed to go smoothly from here.  They don’t.  The zombies overrun the warehouse.  But since the party didn’t go back into the warehouse, they didn’t get into the boss fight, but as they drive away, they see the spurt of blood arcing from the people on the top of the building, as zombies consume the people that just got the medications.

Well, that sucks.

As the party drives away, the sun is setting, it is kind of pretty, and an apache helicopter crashes right in front of them.

More later.

Savage Worlds – War of the Dead Episode 10

Tags

RPG, Savage Worlds

All right, I don’t really know what episode we are on for War of the Dead.  We played this campaign for quite a while last year, then stopped and played a bunch of other games.  I had a hankering for getting back to this campaign.  I also wanted to play some Savage Worlds.  Eric wanted to play some post apocalyptic stuff.  Mike wanted Sue to come back.  His government minder, Bill (cover story Bill is Mike’s brother from Arizona, but we all know the truth).  Sue wanted to come back, but she was hip deep in some deep cover spy action Keeping America Great Again (KAGA!) in the Bible Belt of ‘Merica.

Collin and Shari wanted to play a game, any game.  They are pretty much up for just about anything as long as Collin gets to plot the demise of the rest of the party, or in a boardgame, make sure that he wins by a significant spread of victory points.  Shari is up for just about anything, as long as it allows her to be either the kingmaker or cause chaos.

Bill didn’t show up again.  It was obvious that Bill was following the last gasp tours of the great musicians of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s again.

I went to Seattle for a joint IMSA / ITE conference this week on Monday.  I saw that Air Supply was touring, and was stopping at the Emerald Queen Casino in Tacoma.  I knew what Bill was doing this weekend.  I mean, what else would a self respecting 22 year old man do, rather than come and listen to the hits of a bygone era, from before he was born?

I mean, look at these guys.  Who wouldn’t want to go and listen to their hits?

These guys are on a major world tour, hitting all of the casinos, riverboat gambling halls, and even some major time share resorts.

And the short guy is all butched up with tattoos to look like he is tough.

Nothing lends street cred to your song “All out of love” like some tats on your arms.

When I go to the Air Supply site, and look at their VIP tickets, the following is on the FAQ site for the VIP experience…

So we know that Bill was there in the crowd, belting out the lyrics to all the best Air Supply songs, like:

• Making love out of nothing at all
• Lost in love
• All out of love
• The one that you love
• Young love
• Keeping the love alive
• Power of love

I need to find out from Bill if any of Air Supply’s songs didn’t include the word “Love” in the title.

I also want to know how many of the fans in the audience look like this…

So other than Bill going to the Air Supply final reunion tour, what else happened?

Collin brought me a moving box that had the Cool Mini or Not (CMON) Rising Sun game.  The group Kickstarted this for me last year, in appreciation for me running games most weekend for the group.

So what is Rising Sun?  I have no freaking idea.  The minis are amazing.  Here is a screen capture of some of the monsters from the rule book.  And yes, they really do look that good.

The rulebook also includes the following as the objective of the game.

Rising Sun is a board game for 3 to 5 players set in legendary feudal Japan.  Players compete to lead their Clans to victory by accumulating Victory Points over the course of the Seasons. Players will forge and break alliances, choose political actions, worship the gods, customize their clans, and position their figures around Japan. Victory Points can be gained in several ways, from winning battles, to harvesting the right provinces, to playing to the Virtues accumulated by your Clan. By the time Winter arrives, the player with the most points will rule the Land of the Rising Sun!

There are several clans which the players play.  These include the clans of Bonsai, Koi, Dragonfly, Lotus and Turtle.  That is in the base box.  The Kickstarter included several additional clans, including the Kickstarter Exclusive Fox clan and two other clans which I don’t remember the name of.

The minis are absolutely amazing.  I only hope that I can do them justice.  The Rising Sun Kickstarter included pictures of minis that they painted, and they look amazing.  Here are some of the pics that really grabbed me.

This guy is painted in yellow.  I have a really hard time painting yellow.  Every pot of yellow paint that I own seems to take a lot of layers to get the color depth, and it tends to need to be thick enough that it can dull the details.  Thankfully, these minis are way better than the Zombicide minis, and there is some real depth to the detail.

The minis are really amazing for this game.  I need to restate, that the pictures above are not of my painted minis.  These are painted professionally by CMON people, and they did an amazing job on them.  I will be looking closely at them for inspiration.  I probably won’t copy colors, but looking for how they brought out the detail, and trying to figure out how I can do something that is close to help make the minis as beautiful as I can.

I will tell you, there was a lot of interest in this huge box of minis.  Several of the people who paint minis were really interested in these guys.  The monsters are just as detailed.  There are several Japanese style dragons, which are always cool.  There is also a Godzilla like Kaiju.

There are a lot of minis to paint for this game.  The game play looks pretty good.  Eric said that he watched it being played earlier in the week at a meetup gaming group, and the people seemed to like it.

So I have managed to prattle on for about Bill and Air Supply, and about the amazing game for Rising Sun.  What else has happened?

Last week, the auto repair shop declared that the Dodge Dynasty is dead.  Long live the Dynasty.  It was a good car, for the three weeks we had it before the engine was toasted.  That means that we are looking for another vehicle.  Damn.  I get it, shit happens, but spending about two grand on a vehicle then having it die because the fluids were not checked is maddening.  Life lesson.  Kids are expensive.  I will get over it, but shit.

Like I said, I went to the joint ITE / IMSA meeting in Seattle last Monday.  ITE is the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and IMSA is the International Municipal Signal Association.  I have worked through the chairs of the NW Section of IMSA, and am a past president of that section.  It was a lot of work, and was a good experience, but it taught me that I really want to avoid responsibilities in non profit groups.  There are too many needs, and too few people who are willing to step up and give their time to the needs of the organization.  Both organizations are great.  The people in the organizations are great, but they all have their own lives.  Too many people would like to just be able to come to the conferences and benefit from them, without putting in the effort it takes to volunteer and help run the conferences.  I get it, life is busy.  I gave four years to running the chairs, finding conference spaces, trying to get people involved.  I got burned out, and now I am one of the people who goes to the conferences and runs away when I see someone trying to create a committee.  The conference was pretty good.  I got to talk with a lot of people who were selling stuff, along with other people who do what I do.  I met up with a lot of old friends in the Seattle area, and caught up on things.  The drive wasn’t a lot of fun.  It is a long drive to Seattle from Vancouver.  Thankfully, the traffic wasn’t as bad as I remembered from past trips.

The rest of the week was pretty much normal.  Work was work.  I got a lot done.  I watched a couple of movies at night, and remembered why I don’t care for Tom Cruise.  I tried watching the Mummy, and even though it was free to watch, I didn’t care at all about it.  It wasn’t good.  It wasn’t bad.  I just couldn’t care about the plot.  The special effects were good, but no matter how much fluff you put into the view of the picture, if the plot is not good, the plot is not good.  Having Tom Cruise in the movie didn’t help.  I find Tom to be really boring.  Some actors are good enough that you don’t focus on the actor, instead you see the role.  Tom Cruise has about all of the acting talent that Pauly Shore brings to the camera.  Tom Cruise is also like Pauly Shore, where both actors have had one significantly good movie, and the rest are pretty much bad.

Pauly Shore’s good movie was “In the Army Now”, which actually was a really good movie, and if you were in the army, you could really appreciate it, I mean a lot.

Tom Cruise also has one type of movie that is good, rather than one movie.  This is the type where he dies.  Interview with a Vampire Valyrie, and Edge of Tomorrow are good examples of this type of movie.  I really don’t like Tom Cruise.  I find his “acting” style to be repetitive boring and pretty much meh.  The one role that I did like him in was as the producer in Tropic Thunder.  Now that was acting.  I had heard that the Mummy was panned by the critics.  I can tell you that I tried watching it.  I made it through all but the last 20 minutes, and then I just turned it off.  I didn’t care about how it ended.  That was how meh it was.

I usually don’t do that.  I am a connoisseur of bad movies.  the more schlocky the better.  But the Mummy wasn’t bad, it was just meh, and it wasn’t worth the time to watch the last 20 minutes of it after spending the first hour and a half.  I can think of one other show that I did this in.  The Battlestar Galactica TV show as awesome, until the final season.  I turned off the final episode with 20 minutes to go.  I just didn’t care.  I spent several years watching the show, and then… bleh.  I didn’t care.  The show was pretty awesome for the first several years, then it was like Oprah, “You are a Cylon, and You are a Cylone!  You all are Cylons!”  Who the fuck cares?  But when they got to the end of it all, I just shut it off.  I did the same thing with Sons of Anarchy.  After Jax waffled on killing Clay for the 16th time, then he killed Clay, it was like “who cares?”

Maybe I am alone in this view, but at some point, if your show runs out of ideas, just kill it.  There is something in the entertainment industry that needs to fill movie times in exact intervals of 15 minutes.  The movie must be 90, 105, 120 minutes long, or else.  Preferably 105 minutes, including the intro and exit credits.  That means that you have to write the story to include extra shit, or cut out very important plot points to meet the specific time requirements.

TV is the same way.  The shows must be written to have a story arc that covers 22 weekly episodes, each with exactly 41 minutes of plot to accommodate the intro and exit credits, along with advertisement breaks, and each story line must end with a cliffhanger.  If you only have 14 episodes worth of material, you need to come up with the extra 8 episodes worth of material, even if it sucks.

The brits have the right idea.  Run a show for the required amount of time that it takes to tell the story, and then stop.  Leave the audience wanting more.  The exception to this is Doctor Who.  Some people love Doctor Who.  I used to watch it religiously, but there was a point a few years back where I decided that statues that crept up on you when you weren’t looking was a bit thin related to a plot.  Doctor Who is a religion for some people, like Star Trek or Star Wars and the Marvel movie world.

I did find a movie that I do want to watch… Super

This seems to have the type of irreverent humor that appeals to me.  Plus it has Rainn Wilson, Michel Rooker, and Nathan Fillion.

But that has nothing to do with playing Savage Worlds, now does it?

So we met Saturday and oogled at the minis for Rising Sun.  Then we sat down to play. Savage Worlds, End of the World.  Collin, Shari, Bill, Mike and Eric.

It had been a year since we played this particular game last.  We had to remember the basic mechanics.  Roll to hit against the parry, then roll against toughness to see if you actually did any wounds.  Unless it is ranged attack…

Long story short, we had to spend some time relearning the game mechanics.  We also had to relearn where we were in the book.  I started describing the situation that the party was in, and one of the players would say “We already did that… remember, this is where we murdered the little girl…”  OK, maybe it wasn’t murder, maybe they just let the little girl die.  Eventually, the players and the DM synched up and got the adventure going.

The adventure was supposed to be simple.  But this group never allows it to work that way.  There were three simple vignettes, each was supposed to challenge the party, and give them a moral dilemma to figure out what to do.

The first one involved the party coming across an armored truck with three soldiers in it, surrounded by 24 zombies.  They could hear from inside the truck that the soldiers were in dire straights, and were about to run out of ammunition.  What to do?  What to do?

Well, sneak on by and realize that this was not the party’s problem, right?  Hmmm.  That is what they initially tried, then Mike realized that Diablo Americano had a moral obligation to help out the needy.  You know, that cursed role playing attribute that he took to make the character interesting.  Also, Bill’s old man character had a bloodlust problem with killing off zombies because the zombies killed off his entire family.

So, begrudgingly, the party tries to help the three soldiers in need.  It doesn’t go so well.  The soldiers are surrounded by not only walkers, but also sprinters.  Bill. the Corporal NPC. Collin and Mike are quickly surrounded by sprinters.  Collin and Mike run for it, leaving Bill’s old man with a cane and the corporal fending for their lives.  Things don’t go well for either of them, surrounded by multiple zombies, Bill and the corporal die.  Badly. Bill Senior was able to play Savage Worlds for approximately 30 minutes before he died.  Now Bill did nothing wrong.  He thought that the right thing to do was to help the party, and in turn, he was surrounded by ravenous zombies and died.  Bill Senior learned a valuable lesson.  Never help the party in a Zombie game.  Things don’t work well for that.  Let the other members of the party die, run away, save your self.

Being a true experienced role player, Mike pulled out another sheet for his government minder to play.  This guy is an aging glam rock star who has an electric guitar that he bashes the bad guys with.  He also has a smoking habit and if he can’t keep his smokes around, he will start getting the shakes from lack of nicotine.

Then the second mini scenario involved the party coming across a car with a mother and toddler surrounded by a large group of zombies.  The baby was screaming, the mother was freaked out.  the party stood around and observed, thinking that it would be nice to have a car.  Maybe they can get rid of the zombies, and push the woman and toddler out, and drive away.

In the end, the party begrudgingly decides to help out.  Kind of.  They draw the zombies away, and the woman gets out of the car… too soon… and is mauled by the zombies.  She goes down, the toddler takes some bites, and Eric shoots the toddler to put her out of her misery.

See how thoughtful this group is.  They then run away, trying to get some distance between them and the zombies.

A short while later, they come across a gun store with four vehicles, 48 zombies and a living human on the roof that has a sniper rifle, killing some zombies in the crowd.  How to help?  How to help?  Eric decides to “help” by shooting at the gas tanks of the cars, to get them to drain some of the fuel on the pavement amongst the zombies, and then Collin will throw a lit road flare at the fuel.  Unfortunately, the fuel not only engulfs the zombies and cars, it also engulfs the building, and the man on the top of the building takes offense to his building catching fire, and starts shooting at Collin.  Now this is a high powered rifle, a Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifle.  The man is a good shot, but Collin is living the old football days, dodging around, and only gets four very large bullet holes in his football jersey.  Collin is not happy, but realizes that it is time to get away, so does the rest of the party.

Now, if the party had actually “helped” in any of these vignettes, things would have been good.  If they had saved the man on top of the gun store, they would have each received two firearms, and 10 fully loaded clips for each of those firearms.  But the fact that they didn’t actually help makes things worse.  Collin and Eric have no shame, and are completely unaffected by the fact that they didn’t help, at all, but the other three players all start with two fewer bennies for the next four sessions.  Guilt.  Guilt is a bad thing.

We finished up after this, and played another game called Skull, a bluffing game that Eric brought.  Skull is a fun little game, but completely nonsensical, as I sucked royally at it.  If I can’t even win one hand, let along losing every goddamn hand royally, it is obviously the game sucking, not my ability as a player.

The United States Post Office Is Doomed To Fail.

Tags

Deadlands, RPG, Savage Worlds

 

The USPS is not capable of customer service.  I get it.  But, they are doomed to fail.  Email, DHL, Fed Ex and others are going to get rid of this dinosaur because the other methods of moving media are more efficient.

That being said, the USPS isn’t helping themselves.

Last year, I backed a Kickstarter campaign for the 20th anniversary edition of Deadlands.  I was stoked.  Most of my Deadlands stuff is printed out from PDF’s that I bought.  I printed the books out at Office Despot, and had them put clear plastic sheets on the front and back, and spiral bind the materials.  I have been able to purchase some of the physical books, mostly from used game / used book stores.

But the possibility of getting a printed book in color!  What a great thing!

So I pledged.  After the short Kickstarter campaign was over,  two of my friends who also are huge Deadlands fans found out about it, and were unhappy, since they were not able to get in on the short campaign.  OK, the campaign was plenty long, I assumed that they knew about the campaign, they didn’t.  So it was obviously too short for them, right?  Anyhow, I figured out that I could purchase extra books as part of the backer kit.

Pinnacle Entertainment Group also ran a simultaneous campaign for a fourth book in the Savage Worlds campaign.  Good Intentions.

So I patiently wait.  OK, maybe not patiently.  I am pretty stoked about this.  I wasn’t playing games when Deadlands came out.  I had a 15 year gap or so in when I stopped playing games, then restarted.  I stopped playing games when I graduated from college, because I was an adult, and adults don’t do that type of stuff.  Well, yes they do.  About 10 years ago or so, I started playing games again, and have been playing catch up on all of the great RPG’s that I missed out on.  Some people go out and buy a Porsche as their midlife crisis.  I am a big guy.  I am tall, and not height-weight proportionate.  I don’t fit in a Porsche.  So I guess I went back to what I loved in my childhood, games.

So I was stoked.  A chance to get a limited edition book that includes full color artwork.  I also had two friends who wanted the book.  So they gave me money, and I ordered extra books on the Backerkit for them.

Then, out of the blue, I get an email on May 5, 2017 from Peginc saying that the package is coming!  Woot!  Every day, I click on the tracking number, watching the package on its journey across the nation, coming to my door, or at least I hoped it was coming to my door.

Now, I should say that this is the only package I have had this problem with from the USPS.  In other cases, the USPS has delivered packages to other houses.  In some cases, the USPS signs all of the packages as being delivered the first thing in the morning, followed by the package actually showing up on my doorstep after 6 PM.  This seems to happen more often during Christmastime.  We had one package delivered with a Christmas present for my daughter which the USPS signed as delivered at noon, but they delivered it to a house that was several miles away.  Thankfully for us, the people who got the package were honest, and they brought it to us themselves.

Anyhow, none of this is as bad as what I saw with the delivery of a traffic signal cabinet for work a few years ago from a major trucking service.  The shipper forged my signature as accepting the traffic signal cabinet and pallet of materials to go in the cabinet.  This was about $40,000 worth of equipment.  In the end, we spent four days working with the delivery company, and they found that it was damaged at the dock of their Portland sorting sight, and some people at the company didn’t want to be on the hook for damaging the freight, so they “lost it” behind a dumpster and forged the delivery signature.  The two pallets were very large.  The pallet with the traffic signal cabinet was the full size of a shipping pallet, but the box itself was over 6-ft tall.  The other pallet of all of the ancillary equipment was a full shipping pallet, with equipment boxes that stood about 4-ft high.  This was not something that could be “lost” easily.

Anyhow, it took four days for the shipper to find the package on their own site.  We never heard what happened.  In the end, it all worked out.  The shipper had to send it back to the manufacturer.  The manufacturer had to rebuild the damaged cabinet and resupply the damaged equipment.  I am sure that it all was paid for by the shipper’s insurance company.

Anyhow, back to the saga of the Peginc shipment.

So I wait.

and I wait.

And I wait.

Normally, being a person who has ADHD, having up to the minute data on the shipping isn’t really that good of an idea.  I have some level of OCD.  Hell, everyone has some level of OCD.  But knowing that I can check on the location of the shipment on my phone means that I don’t need a fidget spinner.  I can simply open up my email on my phone, then click on the link to get me to the current shipment info.  I can do this twenty times or more an hour if I need to.  It isn’t exactly instant gratification, but it is close.

So on May 9, 2017, the alerts stopped happening.  The shipment information stopped with the following:

On May 9, I was ecstatic.  The package was coming!  It wasn’t too different than Nathan in the Jerk, when the new phone book arrived and his name was in the book.

So I wait.

and I wait.

and I wait.

Finally, on May 15, I decide to ask the USPS what is going on.  After all, they said that the package left Portland Oregon on May 9, 2017 at 2:30 PM, and was en-route.

I get a cryptic email from the supervisor of customer service that the package actually never left Federal Way, it actually never got to Portland, even though the records on the USPS Internet site said it came in, and was scanned out.

Yes, you read that right.

The email included the name of the customer service supervisor, and the phone number to call if I had any questions.

Mind you, no information about how they were going to try to find the parcel.  Just that it was lost.

So I Called the number to the post office.  The phone rang through to a voicemail / robocall type of situation explaining that this was the number for the customer service and the passport service at the Vancouver Post Office, then it said to leave a message.  Then it rang a few times, and hung up.  No message taken.

I rang again, listened to the overly long information about what the number was for, then the post office phone went to a busy signal.  I tried again, and figured out that if I pressed a “O”, I could bypass the message.  I ended up calling the number about 6 times, and got a variety of ringing with hang ups, and busy signals.  I was never able to get to the point where I could leave a message.

Over the next few days, I called several times.  All with the same experience.  I looked on Google for reviews of the Caples Av post office in Vancouver, and find that other people complain about the same experience with the phone system.

Frustrated, I decided to go directly to the post office and talk with this supervisor of customer service.  So off I go to the Caples Av post office in Vancouver.  I show up, and go to the regular line.  After waiting in the regular line, you know the one where you ship packages from, buy stamps etc, I finally get to the front of the front of the line, and explain to the postal clerk that I am looking for information about a lost package.  She politely informs me that the line I was in was for transactions that included money, I needed to go to the other room, and go to the blue door.  No problem.  So far, everything is acceptable.  This postal clerk is very pleasant, and helpful.

So I go find the blue door.  I end up at the blue door just as another postal clerk is finishing up helping another customer.  I am standing five feet back from the door, with the intention of allowing privacy with whatever transaction needed to take place between the customer in front of me and the postal clerk.

They finish their transaction, and the postal clerk turns around and goes back to his desk, not 10 feet from the blue door.

A little explanation is in order.  The blue door is a door with a bottom half that can be closed, while the top half is open to allow people to talk through the open portion of the door, while keeping the people on either side of the door.  Kind of like the picture below, only it was a blue door, and the person on the other side was a postal employee, not a smiling kid.

The postal clerk (at least I think he was a postal clerk) completely ignored me.  He didn’t make eye contact.  He didn’t greet me.  He didn’t bother saying something like “Someone will be right with you”.  He just turned around and went back to his desk.

So I rang the miniature cowbell at the door.  He ignored me.

Now I assume that this guy was a postal employee.  He didn’t wear any postal employee gear.  He was on the correct side of the door to likely be a postal employee.  He was wearing knee high white sports socks, sandals, black basketball shorts and a Raiders tee shirt.  While I know know that this person was a postal emplolyee, since he didn’t seem to have any clothing on that would indicate such, he was on the correct side of the blue door (the door said employees only beyond this point), and other postal employees (people who were wearing clothing that indicated that they were postal employees) would walk up and interact with Mr. Raider as though they knew him.

None of the other employees acknowledged that there was a customer at the blue door.  I observed a digital clock on the roof beam in the middle of the work bay area, and could watch the minutes tick by.  After about 5 minutes, Mr. Raider finally looked at me and said “someone will be with you in a while”.  Nice.  I was finally acknowledged.

About two minutes later, Mr. Raider was sitting at his desk, dutifully ignoring the people at the blue door.  I say people, since a woman entered the line after I was acknowledged, and rang the bell about two minutes later.

Mr. Raider didn’t see who rang the bell, but he jumped up and said “You need to Stand Down sir.”

Stand Down.

It was said in a military tone, as an order.

I know what Stand Down means.  It is an order given to someone who is out of control and needs to back off.  This is not a friendly way to interact.  This is not a good way for people to get trust, or to show any form of empathy or customer service.

I explained to Mr. Raider that while he was speaking to me, I did not ring the bell.  He said “Well, you need to Stand Down.”

Now Mr. Raider went back to his desk.  After watching a dozen or so other USPS employees dutifully ignore the now growing line at the blue door, finally, the first person I interacted with came over and asked “Has no one come up to help you yet?”  I politely said “no”.  Now, she apologized for the wait, and asked me what I needed.  She ended up finding the person I needed to interact with.

It was a breath of fresh air to get to someone who actually knew how to be good at customer service.  The lady who helped me, and the customer service representative were as helpful as they could be.

The package indeed had been checked into the Federal Way postal facility on May 8, but evidently never left it.  The Internet information that the package had gotten to Portland, and was dispatched is incorrect.  Evidently, the USPS bases some of the information that is on the Internet on the shipping manifest, not the actual scanned package arriving.  The bin that was headed from Federal Way to Portland made it to Portland, and somehow the system automatically registered the package out to delivery even though it never left Federal Way.

At this point, the package is lost.  While it is lost for over a week, there is nothing that the USPS can do about it until it has been lost for over a month.  I need to wait to see if it is delivered in the next few weeks.  If not, then I can start the process of filing a claim to see if the USPS can look harder to find the box, or maybe see if they will replace the lost box.

Needless to say, I have had packages go missing before.  This is particularly frustrating as I have been waiting a long time, and am now waiting even longer, and I accepted money from friends to pay for this.  I am not the only one out money at this point.  Two friends are out also.

The USPS has shown that they are capable of making mistakes.  Everyone is capable of making mistakes.  I am hoping that the USPS finds this package, and it is in good shape when it arrives.

I have sent a complaint to the USPS regarding Mr. Raider and his inaction at the customer service counter.  I truly have never had such poor customer service from any person that I can remember.  I remember being in the reception center of Fort Jackson, getting ready to go into army basic training.  The civilian workers there were handing out underwear.  They asked the inductees in the line if they wanted boxers or briefs.  After the inductee told them they wanted A, the civilian handed them B.  It was like since the Drill Sergeants were playing mind games, the civilian workers wanted in on the games too.  But at least those workers were interacting with the customer.

I did explain to the customer service supervisor the frustration that I had with the phone calls.  He explained that the phone mail system only held 20 messages.  In the event that more than 20 messages were on the system, every additional caller would be dropped.  He told me that they were trying to keep up on the messages, routing them as appropriate, to keep the total number of messages under 20, however the passport calls were all going to the same number.  If someone was on break or lunch, then the messages were not being routed, causing people to be dropped.  I explained that I had called during the day, not lunch, at times like 10 AM and 2 PM.

Long story short, I have no control over this situation.  I feel frustrated because I have spent quite a bit of money on a package that is lost.  I have not only spent my money, but I have spent the money of two good friends.  There seems to be no recourse, other than to wait an hope that things will work out.  The USPS has shown that their own systems appear to not accurately track their shipments.  This leaves me with little faith that it will be resolved.

 

 

Savage Worlds Episode 19 plus some random number

Tags

RPG, Savage Worlds, War of the Dead

Welcome back.  I really don’t know how many Savage Worlds posts there should be at this time.  I just know that I haven’t kept up on every single one.  I am trying to do so, as this is a post from yesterday’s game.

The party met once again to try to have lots of fun, and apparently try to see if they could adequately show the other people in the game store how to have a good time while gaming.

Eric pointed out a CCG play mat and, it almost made me think that I needed to start playing CCG’s.  Almost.  Now, if I only had a reason to have a ginormous mouse pad at work.

I texted a picture of this to my 18 year old son, who does play Magic The Gathering.  I asked him if he needed a cool play mat.  He responded “is it regulation sized?”  Now that is something that never occurred to me.

Something cool that could be used in a game to show your awesome sense of self…  “is it regulation sized?”

And that is where I realized that I don’t need to play any game where the rules of play are more important than the swag you bring to the table.  Gavin and other MTG players have told me stories about how the card sleeves need to be “regulation”.  Bleh.  Give me a game where the primary need is to have fun, not to insure that your cards are properly sleeved.

MTG may be fun.  I have played it a few times, but some of the people I have played with are over the top competitive.  If you come into the game store for a few games on a MTG night, you never know if you are going to find a person who just wants to have fun, or if you have a person across the table who all about winning.

I played Netrunner, Lord of the Rings and Call of Cthulhu LCG for a several years.  I haven’t kept up on these for the last two or three years.  I like the format of a LCG over a CCG.  The main difference is, the CCG’s are all random draw.  You buy a packet of cards and you get 12 or 15 random cards.  Sometimes they are awesome.  Sometimes, they have nothing that you can work with for the deck or decks that you are playing.  Sometimes, you get a card in your random draw which is supposed to be worth big money, but unless you know someone who really wants that card, you either hang on to it, hoping to find the right person, or you trade it at a CCG shop, who gives you something like 15% or 20% of what the Internet says the cash value says (if you are lucky) or you trade it for another card where you trade it in for 20 to 35% of the “cash value”.

Most of the trades that I see in the CCG game stores involve a very excited person coming in saying “I have the ultra rare “Pepe” card!  The Internet says it is worth $200!

To which the person on the other side of the counter responds either with one or more of the following:

• We already have 16 of those in stock, and we will only give you $0.11 for it
• That is cool, but only the foil Pepe is worth $200.  You have the common Pepe, which is actually only worth $0.05
• Those only work in combo with Eternal Witness and Followed Footsteps.  If you had all three of those, we would buy all three from you for $0.35, but what we really need is at least four complete sets of Pepe with Eternal Witness and Followed Footsteps, which would be worth $0.75 in cash, or $0.94 in trade.
  • Check the math, this is actual MTG trade in value math from what I hear at the game stores
• Yeah, those were powerful last quarter, but this coming quarter, WOTC is focusing on the new Pink deck which is a one time breast cancer special deck color.  This new deck color is supposed to smash Pepe into the ground, so it will be useless in 2 weeks.
• Oh, you looked this morning on the Internet, and found that Pepe was worth $200?  Let’s check and see what the current value is…  checking…  “Wow, the Internet says it is only worth $0.99 now, I hope you didn’t invest a lot in that card.”

Or some other such thing.

So I see people buying entire boxes of MTG cards, or Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, or Luchador A Go Go cards hoping that their investment of $300 for the box will yield enough cards to make their deck work better, and then they will be able to sell off the cards they don’t need to make up the balance of the $300 box.

Now, looking at my bookshelf of RPG books, I am in no position to poke at anyone who spends hundreds of dollars on their MTG deck.  After all, we all geek out in our own ways.  What I don’t like about MTG your success is based on two or three factors.

• How much money you spend on your deck monthly to keep ahead of all of the new cards?
• Can you balance your deck so that you get your overkill cards out faster than your opponent can get their overkill cards out?
• Are you a complete and utter dick / asshole?
  • Yes, that seems to matter.  There are way too many MTG players who revel in exceptional poor sportsmanship, hooting and hollering when they play their card out and revel in destroying your cards on the field, and then when they win, they go out of their way to show their prowess of the 43 different ways that their deck would have smashed you regardless of how your deck played

Now this is a complete over simplification and exaggeration of how some MTG players are when they play.  But after reading my diatribe above, you really must agree that you have seen people who play this way.

Now getting back to a previous thread.  Luchador A Go Go CCG.  Now that could be fun if it existed.  Mexican wrestler CCG.

Tell me you wouldn’t want to play a playing card game with art like:

and

That would be awesome!

Anyhow, I was rambling on about CCG’s, and how I like LCG’s better.

LCG’s are different than CCG’s in several respects.  First, LCG’s are “living card games”, as opposed to “collectible card games”  The primary difference is that everyone buys the same base box set for the game, then you can keep up and all have the same deck opportunities if you all buy every single expansion for the game.

Sounds good right?  Well, kind of.  I got into FFG’s Call of Cthulhu LCG after it had been out for several years.  The cards were still available at $15 per pack.  Now, FFG did spike the deal by making sure that if you bought one $40 box set, that you would have enough base cards to build about 1/3 of each deck you would need for the base game, but for 7 different factions.  That means that if you really wanted to be competitive for the base game, you need to purchase 3 base games, and then buy one of each and every expansion.  If you didn’t, you would show up to a CoC LCG tournament, and get your head handed to you.

Now, FFG’s Call of Cthulhu is awesome.  The game works such that in order to score victory points, you have to chose whether you want to hurt yourself more than you hurt your opponent, or just hurt yourself more than you hurt your opponent.  Yes, you read that right.

FFG’s Netrunner was pretty cool also.  I played that for about 2 years.  I played with a cool group of people. But the difference between me and the other people playing was I didn’t look on the Interwebs to figure out how to optimize my cards to be the perfect killing machine.  I wanted to experiment on my own.  The other players all went to the Interwebs, found the ultimate way to build their factions, and…. instant death for Rob’s faction.  So after a couple of years of this, I got tired of getting my ass handed to me.  I liked the people, but I sucked at the game.  I liked the game also, I just sucked.

Now, FFG’s Lord of the Rings was another awesome game.  I played that for several years.  It had the advantage that the mechanic could be played as a solo game.  I was working a job where I had every other Friday off, and the kids were in school and Molly was working.  I spent my Fridays’ playing LOTR LCG, and really liked it.  There were two problems with the LOTR LCG.  One was that there was really no rhyme or reason to how to store the cards.  Each monthly pack included a big wad of cards which needed to be worked into the player’s deck for that specific adventure, but they could also be useful for future adventures.  The problem was keeping all of the factions and bad guys cards straight.

The other problem with the LOTR LCG was that it was insanely hard to win.  After losing a bunch of games, I would put it up for a month or so and play other games until LOTR called me back.  There were so many mechanics in the game that would kill you, it was almost not fun.  The artwork, story, and mechanics were awesome, but it kicked my ass so many times, that I haven’t touched it for the last few years.

Now there are other non CCG / LCG games which I also enjoy.  The Pathfinder adventure card game is a lot of fun.  It is a very light RPG type of game with cards and dice.  It has a twitchy mechanic, where you all play against the game.  That is fun enough, but it gets repetitive and old if you play too many games in a row, and don’t mix something else in with it.  The other problem with the Pathfinder ACG series is that the decks are really crappy.  I bought some of the expansions for the first box, and found that some of the cards in the expansions were cut to a different size than the main box.  I understand what happened.  Paizo published the game, and it was a runaway hit.  They had to go to another printer to get more cards out, and the sizes were different.  Slightly so, but slightly is enough to notice.

The other problem with the Paizo cards is that they are incredibly cheap.  If you planned to play the game more than a couple of times, you need to sleeve the cards, all of them.  I found that trying to gently shuffle the cards without sleeving them resulted in most of them starting to show wear.  The edges would chip, and dent.

Now I am pretty anal about my games.  I didn’t keep good care of my games when I was a kid.  I went to my friends houses, and stuffed game boxes and RPG books / modules into my backpack, knocked them around.  I was tough on my games.

I am anal now about keeping my shit in good condition.  I just about leap out of my chair to swat a person who is bending a poker card at a Savage Worlds game.

I am very careful about what I do with my games.  When I carefully shuffle the cards, and the cards are showing wear on the third hand of the first game, there is something really wrong with the production value of the product.  I get it, Paizo has to find the balance between production costs and the ultimate price point on the box.  Figure in the cost of shipping, distribution, and the end retail sales, Paizo probably sells the $60 base box for about $15, and that need to include the printing costs in China and the long boat ride to the US.

For the record, I am OK with paying an extra $10 or $20 for better quality components.  You hear me Paizo?

The games I really like are card drafting games like Dominion, Ascension, Star Realms and the sort.  These games make the player start out with a crummy hand, and then they draft their hand to improve it on the fly against the current resources.  This makes you think on the fly as to how you are going to create a victory condition for you that will work while all your opponents are trying to do the same.

But enough blather about LCG’s, CCG’s and drafting CG’s (DCG?)

We were there to play Savage Worlds, an RPG.  There are cards here, but it is just a poker deck along with the deus ex machina cards for the players.

Now, I know that I have prattled on for a long time here about what different games mean to me, and you, dear reader would like to know just what the hell happened on Saturday, but I have to rant about something.

You see, Shari and Collin brought Oreo Peeps cookies.

There are three things that I despise more than CCG’s.

These include:

• Marshmallow
• Shortening based frosting
• shell pasta

Now, Oreo cookies have shortening based frosting, and these are mocking me with their Peeps based marshmallow insides.

Marshmallow comes from Satan’s anus.  There is no other possible explanation.  IT is vile, and an abomination.

And after some searching on the Internet, I found a kindered spirit, at least when it came to the issue of the filling of an Oreo cookie.  My dislike of shortening based frosting includes the issue of store bought cake, where the frosting leaves a greasy residue in your mouth.  Bleh.

I can’t explain why I dislike shell pasta.  There is no specific thing that I can point to.  It is just disgusting.  The concept of mouth feel is important.  I knew a guy who couldn’t stand bread.  I dislike shell pasta.

Anyhow, Sue was back from her trek to Oklahoma.  Maybe it was Arkansas, maybe it was Missouri.  I don’t know, it was a southern state that was not home.  But Sue came back, and brought a special gift for Shari.

Now, I am not sure where exactly the following happened.  The session on last Saturday was one extended “Sue is back!” celebration.  I am not sure what specifically set it off, but the entire session needed some margaritas, maybe some other type of tropical foo foo drinks with pineapple chunks and umbrellas.

There was no reigning in the players.  At one point, I am trying to keep the adventure going, and Mike and Collin start into a dance routine.  I think this was where Shari decided that her character needed to open up boxes of cereal and dump the contents out so she could turn the bags inside the cereal boxes into jelly fish for a song and dance routine.

Pretty soon, I see Mike and Collin doing a dance routine, snapping their fingers, like they were out of Cats, or a Streetcar Named Desire.   I tried to get some video, but Mike and Collin became shy.

I am not really sure of what happened other than that.  I was caught up in the overall excitement of Sue being back.  We ad all hoped that her presence would help keep the group on track.  Her presence didn’t help.  Not at all.  It was 4 hours of…. something?

Anyhow, in a brief recap of the game, since it is the first nice weekend of the year, and I want to get outside and enjoy the nice weather for a little while before we have Easter dinner.

The party left the church, and the RV was very full of people.  All of the NPC’s from the church who survived came with the party.   The RV included the sick little girl.  Sue decided that she should check out the little girl, to make sure that she was OK.

I took Sue aside, and explained to her that even though she was a nurse, it was important for the story that no one know if she is bitten or just sick.  Sue played well with that.  We decided that the father would keep a close eye on the nurse, and anytime the nurse got too close, the father would freak out.

Eric decided that the best thing to do would be to isolate the girl and her father in the bedroom.

The father comes out from the bedroom, and Eric decides that he is going to take a close look at the girl.  The girl’s father is having none of this.  He hits Eric.  Eric pulls out his Desert Eagle pistol and shoots, and misses.  He shoots a 1 on his hit die, which results in the random shooting of another person.  Eric drops old Joe, the Vietnam Veteran.  The old man man with a cane.  Joe is now  a corpse.

At this point, Collin slams on the brakes of the RV.  After all, shooting off a Desert Eagle handgun in an RV travelling 40 mph is not normal.  Collin fails his drive roll, and the vehicle pitches and all of the cupboards open up, spilling plastic cups, Correlle plates, and cans of food.  All of the players and NPC characters slam into the side, causing the RV to almost turn over.  The RV hits the guardrail and does severe body damage.  Luckily none of the damage will keep the RV from moving.

Joe is still dead.

Brian decides that he is going to drag Joe’s body out, before he can turn to a zombie.  Brian pulls the body through the cans of food, dragging the food with him.  No one else thought that was a good idea.  They needed to get rid of the body, but keep the food.  Shari’s character punches Brian’s character.  Brian responds that he is going to kill her with a gun.  Now, the party thought that this was not a good resultant force for a grown man (named Jesus no less) to shoot an 8 year old girl after the 8 year old girl punches Jesus for trying to pull a body through the cans of food possibly wasting them by having the food drug out of the RV by the legs and body of the corpse.

It takes a while, but Brian finally agreed that shooting an 8 year old girl with a shotgun for punching him was probably not the best solution.

The party continues for a while.  The little girl comes out all sweaty.  Everyone thinks she may be a zombie.  Before she speaks, some of the players make a notice roll, and sees that she is crying.The first two players in order of initiative don’t say anything.  Bill, notices, but initially doesn’t say anything.  After realizing it may be important, he announces to everyone that she is crying, and zombies don’t cry.

Everyone stands down, and the party rearranges everything in the RV as they continue on.

After a while, the party comes to Jacksonville, or at least what was Jacksonville.  They see a tall chain link fence with barbed wire on the top, with a bunch of tents inside.

As they stop the RV, they see a human wave come crushing towards the fence, behind them are soldiers firing guns into the air. Behind them are waves of fast moving zombies. These zombies move faster than anything the party has every seen before.  Before, there was the zombie baby, which was pretty nasty.  These fast zombies are even nastier.

The human wave hits the fence, with the lead people being crushed from behind.  The fence collapses and the human wave crashes forth.

The wave of people and soldiers crush past the RV.  Hands pound on the van.  Bill lets in six soldiers who immediately demand that the party drop their weapons.  They do.

Just as things are getting bad, a military humvee crashes into the RV, flipping the RV on the side.  Everyone takes multiple fatigue points.  They have to run as fast as they can, following the soldiers.

Long story short, the party runs up a hill with the sprinting zombies behind.  They just make it to a grocery distribution center, break in, and discover a fully stocked warehouse.  Inside the warehouse are 40 civilians and 4 soldiers.  Everyone rests, then agrees that they need to find some medicine for the little girl who miraculously was also able to outrun the sprinting zombies even though she had a high fever and was uber sick.

Next week:

We switch to some D&D.

 

Catching up on blogs, after falling behind part 03, Savage Worlds

Tags

RPG, Savage Worlds, War of the Dead

In an ongoing effort to catch up on my blogs, I am filling in some blanks from the last several sessions.  I won’t go over everything, but hit some highlights.

Now, the players are playing an awesome adventure called War of the Dead.

This adventure is very nasty, and a lot of fun.  The only problem is that it is a railroad, and the party needs to work along the story line.  This will work for most groups, but when the party kills a non-player character who is supposed to live, it makes it kind of hard to get back onto the rails.  This party makes DM’ing fun.  They take the game off the rails, so I have to work fast to figure out how to make the adventure work.

Over the last few game sessions, the party continued on from where they left off, running from the marina.  Now they killed, or allowed to be killed two NPC’s who were supposed to remain alive until the story said they were supposed to be killed later in the story.

Also, Brian ended up causing the bikers to shoot up the 2006 Itasca motorhome.  This was supposed to be the way that they were going to continue the adventure.

That is OK.  I stitched some stuff together, and the party was captured by the biker gang.  Hell Fuery, the gang leader, introduced Spiderbait, his girlfriend, to the  party.  Now, Hell is a piece of work.  Spiderbait is even more nasty.  She likes to use her knife to cut skin off her prey.  She has some quality time with the party.

The party finds out that they are going to be used by the biker gang to clear out the town of Fairport.  Fairport is full of zombies and the party was stripped of all weapons, food, and anything useful, and once the zombies follow the party, the biker gang will pillage anything in Fairport that is left.

Now the way that the adventure is *suppposed* to go is that the party goes into the town, and has several adventures.  The bikers were to leave Spiderbait and three bikers back with all of the motorcycles.  The rest of the bikers would follow and loot when the party started drawing the zombies towards them.  Then the party was supposed to be influenced by the still living Henry to go back and take several bikes, damage the rest, ride back to Henry’s house and rescue the still living Elanor while leaving in the still working Itasca motor home.

In the process, the party was supposed to kill Spiderbait, which was going to lead Hell Fuery into a killing rampage.

Well, when the party ends up allowing the early killing off Henry, Elanor, then their actions shoot up and destroy the Itasca motorhome…. and then they don’t bother going back to kill Spider bait (because Henry isn’t alive and can’t tell them to double back and get some motorcycles…) the adventure is officially off the rails.

The party goes into town, and starts adventuring.  This particular adventure allows the DM to draw some playing cards, and depending on what card is pulled, the party gets to have some specific fun, or another specific fun.

Now, *fun* may be a relative term.

So the party sees some interesting things in the town.

At one point, the party starts looking for a car that works.  The first car that they find is unlocked and has the keys in it.  Good thing.  Collin jumps in, and tries to start it.  The key won’t turn over the engine.  The battery is dead.  Bummer.  Evidently, the car has been sitting long enough that the dome light and maybe the radio wore down the charge on the battery.

They continue to look for another vehicle.  They find one that has a corpse seatbelted into the passenger seat.  Collin jumps in and realizes that the corpse is a zombie.  He brains it with a tire iron that he picked up.  There is zombie goo everywhere in the car.  Now no one has any skill at driving.  To make things interesting, the party had little or no control over the vehicle as the careened from one side of the road to the other of the road popping tires, so the car was running on rims.

The group was rolling along and heard a girl scream.  She was eaten alive by zombies, and the party just went “meh”.  Now, if the party had helped the girl, she would have brought them back to her house, where her gun nut father (now dead) had a gun case full of full auto awesomeness, along with enough bullets to clear the town several times over.  But did the party help?  No.  They were having too much fun driving the rimmobile around.

Towards the end of the session, the party is rolling along, and sees something, and decides to stop the car.  They are quickly surrounded by dozens of zombies.  As they are trying to get the car going, they hear a loud roar from the sky, and see an Apache gunship fly over, shooting its minigun at the crowd.  The pilot doesn’t’ discriminate between living and undead.  He just shoots the shit out of the area, killing too many zombies, and seriously critically damaging Shari.

Now, Shari took four wounds from the minigun.  she then failed her health check, so she was “dead”.  I threw the party a bone, and put a hypodermic needle with adrenaline in it, hoping for something like the following:

The party chose to go another way.  Collin and Eric shoved her out the window and drove off.  Eric and Collin found the hypodermic later.  I figured that a compassionate group would say “We gotta save her!”, then start looking around the car for something useful.  Did Collin and Eric do this?  No.  They didn’t.  They threw her bloody corpse out the window like yesterdays’ trash.

I wasn’t feeling particularly well, so I ended the session shortly after that.

The next session, we had several new characters.  Shari brought in an 8 year old girl who was very possessive about her stuff.  She brought Bill, who is playing a hardboiled private eye detective.

Now this one seemed to go better than the last session.  First of all, I felt pretty good.  Second, I had some time to figure out how to stitch the adventure back together.

Shari’s new character knew where the party could get to her father’s fully stockes 2006 Itasca motorhome.  The father and mother became zombie food.  Bill’s character was new, and we were trying to figure out what the connection was.

At one point, Mike and Collin come back, and the party keeps hearing an odd thumping coming from the trunk of the car.  Now I would think that in the zombie apocalypse, that if strange noises were coming from the trunk of the car, and you didn’t need ANYTHING from the trunk, that you would walk away.  This group?  No.  A zombie was in the trunk.  It didn’t do anything other than create a nasty mess in the middle of the large group of zombies at the motorhome.  Beyond the zombies are two patches of horror, where mom and dad are now spots of goo, blood and bones left in the road.  There are 20 zombies.  The party goes forth and kills off the zombies.  Bill lights a Molotov cocktail and torches most of the zombies.  The party drives away as fast as possible.

But, in the aftermath, Collin and Mike lose the rest of the party, and spend a lot of time searching around the area looking for the motorhome.  I am still not sure why Collin and Mike drove the rimmobile off, but the did, and didn’t leave a trail of breadcrumbs to get home.  Eventually, the rimmobile and the motorhome come together again, and everyone gets into the motorhome.

The party leaves town, not doubling back to steal bikes, not doubling back to kill Spiderbait.  I need to find a motivation for Hell Fuery to come after the party with a vengance.  After all, he is a pivotal character to the ongoing plot.  Maybe he is just a control freak who has found that the party’s lack of sticking to his well designed plan has driven him over the edge, and now he must get his vengeance?

After all, the cinematic end of this adventure was supposed to go like:

The Living Dead had found food! Nearly a dozen of them ripped muscle, intestines, kidneys, and other succulent morsels from the still-warm bodies. Blood covered their hands and mouths, but they didn’t care. Only one thing drove them: a hunger for flesh! 

A single gunshot ripped through the nearest ghoul, exploding its head in a spray of thick, blackish goop. The others moaned. Almost as though of a single mind, they turned to confront whatever it was that had interrupted them.

Hell unleashed his fury, the M-16 vibrating his arms as it sent a hailstorm of death into the creatures. Skulls shattered and limbs tore away from bodies as the other men followed his lead. Hell’s eyes were wide with rage and spittle flecked the
corners of his mouth.

When the last of the beasts had fallen, Hell walked cautiously over to the bodies. He kicked a few with his boot to make sure they were dead— yet again. Satisfied, he stepped over them in his search for something of particular importance.

He found it upon the ground on the far side of his motorcycle, and his heart pounded against his sternum as his eyes settled upon it. Her chest and throat had been torn open, the blood already thickened. He stared, jaw clenched, as he raised the automatic rifle and pointed it—waiting. Moments later, the eyes opened. They were glazed and distant. Her lips parted, but the damage to her throat prevented a moan from escaping. He exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger. A single shot entered her forehead. The body stopped moving.

Hell bent down and retrieved a ring from the ground near her head. It was the ring that had once pierced her navel.

“I want those bastards found,” he said quietly, clenching the ring in his left hand and keeping his back toward the men. “I want ‘em found, and I want ‘em alive.”

“How do you know they did this?” One of the bikers asked.

A terrible anger flared within him as he placed the ring within his hip pocket. Then, without a word, he spun and fired several shots into the biker’s chest.

“We’re missing friggin’ bikes, and the corpses sure didn’t ride ‘em outta here! Now, anyone else wanna ask me a stupid question?” His eyes blazed as though the fires of his namesake burned within them.  No one said a word. Everyone was too scared to
even move. “I want ‘em found! I don’t care what it takes, how long it takes, or where you have to go. I don’t care if you have to go into a city full of corpses. Find ‘em, and bring ‘em to me.”

“We’ll find them,” another biker said finally, struggling to keep his voice strong. “Don’t you doubt it, man.”

Hell ignored him and kneeled down next to Spiderbait. He stared at her for several heartbeats, then leaned forward and gently kissed her dead lips before closing her eyes with his left hand. He remained there beside her, chin against his chest,
and fought back the tears. He would find those responsible, and they would pay a terrible price. If it took him to the ends of the Earth, he would see to it that they paid.

After a few more moments, he rose from her side, slung the M-16 over his shoulder, and mounted his bike.

“Let’s roll,” he said as he started the engine and revved it several times.

As one, the Ghost Riders rode away from Fairport.

You see what that cinematic end does?  It places a nice bookend on this part of the adventure, and sets the stage for the next part.  Since the party decided to go it alone, they didn’t get to hear the wonderful prose above.  Instead, they bypass it all, and don’t know why Hell Fuery hates them.

Now, that being said, there is no reason why the players would have heard Hell’s monologue if they had followed the rules, but we aren’t talking about that.

So the party moves on down the road.  They find that the 2006 Itasca motorhome is fully stocked for food, bandages, guns, ammo and fuel.  They drive down the highway, and after a while, they come across several trees blocking the road.  After some careful investigation, they figure out that there is a WARN winch on the front of the motorhome, and on top of that, the person who apparently felled the trees was eaten alive by some zombies after making noise with the chainsaw.

The motorhome moved on.  Collin was doing a good job of driving it on the road.

Then they had a flat tire.  The party was able to replace the tire before another horde of zombies attacked.

Then they saw a man and a woman running towards the motorhome, yelling for help, waving desperately.  What to do?  What to do?  Well, they decided to stop and let these people on the motorhome.  Now, Skeeter Leroy and Patty Mae were hungry.  They hadn’t eaten for a while.  Without asking, they got into a can of Dinty Moore stew – without asking mind you.

Now Dinty Moore Stew was a favorite of Shari’s.  Her dad went to a lot of trouble to get it from the ruins of the HEB after the world went to shit.  Shari had a problem with this.  After all, they weren’t helping themselves to a can of baked beans.  They got into the Dinty Moore stew.

So Bill put his cigarette out on the back of Skeeter Leroy’s hand.  Then things went bad.  I may not have everything in the proper order, but at least the following occured.

Skeeter Leroy and Patty Mae pulled out pistols and started shooting.  Skeeter Leroy shot wild and almost hit Collin, while Collin was faced the other way, driving the motorhome at 40 mph on the road.  The bullet didn’t hit Collin, but it grazed the epaulette of his real leather Member’s Only jacket.

That was a damn nice jacket.  It fit really well, and the cotton ribbing on the sleeves and waist were still in good shape.  The shoulder looked like crap now.  Collin was pissed.  He started yelling to stop this shit now.

Gunshots went off.  Eric pulled out a random weapon from his (bag? holster? we don’t know), but he had both a M1911 45 caliber pistol and a flare gun.  He randomly pulled out a weapon, and it was the flare gun.  He shot Skeeter Leroy in the chest, but it didn’t penetrate.  The flare hit with a loud thunk, then fell to the ground burning the floor of the RV while a group of people have a running gunfight at 40 mph.  Mike leaps at Skeeter Leroy, doing his signature inverted chimichanga split flip, but critically fails.  He lands on the burning flare.  I give Mike a choice, roll the d6, 1, 2 it burns your crotch, 3, 4, your chest, 5, 6 your face.  He rolls a 6.  Go big or go home.  So the flare starts melting the lycra luchador mask that he is wearing to his face.  Shari sends her dog in to pee on Mike’s face to put out the fire.  That is successful.

Brian comes out of the RV’s bathroom, with his shotgun, and blasts Patty Mae into the next century.  She crumples onto the floor like a used dishtowel.  Skeeter Leroy loses it, and starts shooting at everyone, but everyone (except Collin who is still driving at 40 mph on the road, dodging zombies) shoots back at Skeeter Leroy.  He goes down.

The party then does their best murder-hobo routine, strips the two bodies of anything useful and jettisons the bodies from the vehicle at highway speed.

After a while, the RV stops moving.  It appears that the running gunfight caused problems, the type of problems where a gas line was cut by a bullet or shotgun pellet.

They roll to a stop at the bottom of a hill and look at each other.  What to do?  What to do.  Collin goes up onto the roof of the RV with his Barrett 50 cal sniper rifle.  Now, Collin may look as cool as the guy in the picture below, but he evidently never had any lessons in firing the 50 cal, as we shall see later in this blog.  (That is called foreshadowing)

Now, you will notice, Loren, that to this point, no party member has been immolated by an invisible flying character.  Surely, they did throw a dead member out of a moving car, but she was already dead.

So anyhow, as the party is trying to figure out what to do, they are surrounded by many zombies. and they hear the pealing of a bell from a church.  Maybe they heard the bell first, and then were surrounded by zombies, it doesn’t matter.

From the woods nearby, three men appear.  Two are dressed in camouflage, and the other has a priests vestments.  The two guys in camo fire their guns several times into the air, and start moving off, firing their guns to draw the zombies away.  The father approaches the RV and offers safe haven in his church.  Father Raymond explains that the two people in camo are Zachary and Michael, who do this a lot, and the party shouldn’t worry about their safety.  They will draw the zombies quite a ways away, then double back, leaving the zombies in another location.

After Father Raymond explains this, there was a tepid response from the party members like “Oh yeah, maybe we should be worried about Zachary and Micheal, but we didn’t think about that.”

Collin elects to stay on the top of the RV with his big gun, to keep the equipment safe inside.

The rest of the party goes to the church with Father Raymond.  There are several groups of people within the church.  These include a friend of Henry’s and Elanor’s, the people in the house near the marina.  Even though the old guy talks about his lifetime friendship with Henry, no one tells the old guy that Henry and Elanor are dead.  This is another problem with the plot, as the old guy is supposed to have a reason to hate … who?  you guessed it, the biker gang, for killing his old buddy who served together in the Vietnam War.  Lots of hints were given to the party, but they decided to play Henry’s demise close to the vest.

A couple had a nine year old girl who was very sick.  The mother was exceptionally pregnant, ready to pop anytime.  Now the child is important.  The child was dressed all up in swaddling cloth because she had a major fever, and the parents were trying to do the best they could for her.  Shari decides to go over and check the girl for zombie bites.  This is where the nature of the beast of this party shows itself.  Everyone who has an illness that involves a sniffle, a fever, a hangnail or possibly is a libertarian is suspect of being a zombie.  Shari decides put a pretty yellow ribbon around the girls throat.  She ties it a little too tightly, and misses her notice roll…  And mamma bear comes back with a vengance, and bitch slaps Shari across the church.

It isn’t pretty.  The daughter is precious to mamma bear.

Shari then goes out to the RV to get some stuff.  She is able to go into the RV, and come back without Collin, the lookout even realizing that anything happened.  Evidently, there were some starling sized mosquitoes buzzing around Collin, distracting him from being able to see or hear anything.

Time goes on, and the mother goes into labor.  Cut forward.  The mother dies on the table, giving birth to not just a zombie baby, but a supersized zombie baby due to Brian playing one of his cards…  The baby moves fast for a newborn.

Long story short, once the zombie baby is born, Eric sticks his bowie knife into the eye socket of the mother, who dies a gruesome death.  The baby skitters away really fast, and makes life uncomfortable for everyone else.  Then the bikers roll into town.

Now Collin has a Barrett 50, along with a night vision scope.  He shoots four shots, and epic-ally misses on each shot. Now he isn’t going to tell the party this.  OF course those four bullets were put to good use.  Collin runs from the RV to the church, and gets in just before the bikers get to the church door.  Now here is the thing.  The bikers may have been happy to pillage the dead RV, but instead Collin led them through the woods to the building’s front door.

Brian decides he needs to find a way out of there.  He goes up to the bell tower, and starts cutting through the chicken wire that keeps the pigeons out of the bell tower.  Meanwhile, the bikers are riding in circles around the church, shooting, and hollering for everyone to come out.

Now I was hoping for something like this, where the party and the NPC’s in the church would have an epic battle with the zombie baby inside.  It wasn’t quite there, but it was close.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the epic battle.

Things got bad pretty quick.  Shari went out side and decided to kick Hell Fuery in the nuts.  She missed, he slapped her hard enough to do three damage to her.  She chipped it, and came back and shot his ass, to which he ran away.

Then three bikers came into the church on their bikes and started shooting.  Father Raymond came into the room as a zombie, and started attacking Eric.  The zombie baby came in and attacked Collin.  Things got real bad.

Long story short.  This is getting to be a very long post, and I still need to write up my Call of Cthulhu post from last Thursday…

The bikers died.  The church caught fire.  The zombie baby died.  Everyone ran away.  Brian fired at some of the bikers, who returned fire in spades, which made Brian rethink the big damn hero thing.

Everyone got away, the bikers took off, and next Saturday, we will continue.

 

Catching up on blogs, after falling behind part 1 – Gamestorm

Tags

Gamestorm, RPG, Savage Worlds, Steve Jackson Games, Zombicide

OK, I have been falling behind.  There are too many RPG books to read, too many novels to read, too many minis to paint… all of that, and I also want to play board games.  Besides all of that, there is the constant perusal of Kickstarter for a product which looks awesome.  Also, the constant hope that the Kickstarter will top out to include as many expansions as possible.  I am talking to you, DCC Lankmahr Kickstarter…

We adopted a third dog this week.  She was named Kaspi by the Southwest Region Humane Society.  That wasn’t going to work, so we decided that she should be named Frida.

Not that there is any similarity between Frida from Abba and Frida, the new dog.  The name seems to fit.

I am a sucker for shelter animals.  Every dog and cat that we have gotten has come from a shelter or a rescue, or in the case of Tora, our current cat, just walked into our lives.  There are many good animals out there who need a good home, and I would hope that you would all think of adoption as you think of getting a pet.

https://southwesthumane.org/adopt/dogs/

So last weekend was Gamestorm.  This is a massive nerdfest in the Portland Oregon area.  Lots going on for gaming.  There is ample possibilities for board gaming, RPG’s, LARPing, and every other type of analog gaming possible.

I had a great time.  I ran about 12 hours of Call of Cthulhu games for Chaosium, along with another 6 hours of Zombicide.  We had a massive game with way too many people.  The players used something new, at least for Eric and Mike.  It was something called “strategy”.  The problem here was that there were new players who actually wanted to play and win, as opposed to just killing lots of zombies by guns, knives, clubs and cars.

I also played a game of the Morrow Project – kind of.  I played that way back when in the 1980’s.  As swag for running lots of games, I got a copy of the 3rd edition Morrow Project book.  I also got a copy of the older RPG “Cyberpunk”, which is pretty much full of awesomeness.

Now, I love the concept of the Morrow Project.  Unfortunately, the dude running the game rubs me the wrong way.  I walked to the table to play, and saw a guy that I played in a D&D 1.0 game at Gamestorm about 3 years ago.  I immediately thought “Fuck” and “Jesus, I hope this guy is just sitting here”.  But no.  You know, when there are 3,000 plus people at a con, and you remember a specific person as being someone who you really did not like from several years ago, that is not good.

There is nothing wrong with this guy.  I deal with all sorts of people and for the most part, I can deal with anyone who comes by.  But this guy…  Well, he was an expert on everything.  An expert is just a former drip under pressure… get it ex-spurt…  I sat there during the game and dealt with this dude.  Then he decided to start telling everyone at the table about how NBC (Nuclear Biological Chemical warfare) worked.  Now, I was a school trained NBC NCO in the Army.  I went to the 6 month school and went through live agent chamber.  I spent 6 years as an NBC NCO.  I have forgotten a lot of the stuff that I learned 30 plus years ago, but it was my damn job.  He started going on about organophosphates and how they worked in the human body, and I twitched.  After listening to this blowhard for almost three hours, I called bullshit.  I corrected him.  He was not happy.  He told me that I was wrong.

Now I learned a long time ago not to argue with idiots.  They are too stupid to know that they are wrong, and enjoy displaying their stupidity.  I let him display his lack of actual knowledge, and then told him that what he said was very different than what I learned in the six month Army NBC school.  He continued with his line of bullshit, and I decided I needed to leave before he could get me to twitch again and make comments that were unpleasant.

All that being said, I love the concept of the Morrow Project RPG game.  But there are people who you need to stay clear of if you don’t like them.  It is a good post apocalypse militaryesque game.  The basic premise is that people were placed in cryotubes with all of the equipment they will need to bring order to North America 5 years after the big one (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) catastrophe, only they warm up 150 years after the big one, not five years after the big one.  Something went horribly wrong, and all of the things that they trained for may no longer apply.  It isn’t gonzo, over the top post apocalypse like Mutant Epoch or Mutant Year Zero (which are also awesome games).  It is a very straight forward post bad things happen RPG, similar in the overall tone and seriousness of Traveler or Twilight 2000.

I played several games of Savage Worlds (the best was based in the Reign of Fire world)   You know…

Now say what you will, Reign of Fire is a guilty pleasure movie for me.  This movie is so bad, it is awesome.  Matthew McConaughey provides some of the best over the top action in any recent fantasy movie.  I mean, how can you top lunging from a castle wall with a war ax at a dragon in flight?

I don’t know if there is anything to it, but a study showed a link between love of trash movies and high intelligence.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/enjoyment-of-trash-films-linked-to-high-intelligence-study-finds-a7171436.html

After all, we should all believe studies that are on the Internet, one study from Finland shows why Trump won the election.

https://heatst.com/politics/study-donald-trump-won-because-hes-just-so-damned-handsome/

After all, who can argue with this?

Lonnqvist, though, a professor of psychology and not necessarily political science, extrapolates his findings to conclude that Trump won because “less sophisticated” conservative voters were drawn to the former real estate investors dashing good looks and raw animal magnatism (SIC).

Now, I am a heterosexual male, and am not in a really proper state of mind to determine if Trump has “dashing good looks and raw animal magnatism”  Maybe that is what happens when you have magnatism as opposed to magnetism?  I am hoping that some of my female friends can explain why Trump has this fleeting magnatism.

Maybe someone can tell me if this man has “dashing good looks and raw animal magnatism”

Now in this picture, he is apparently magnetically attracted to the American flag…

Does that count?

Anyhow, I also played some GURPS with Eric, Mike and Brian.  We kind of took over the GM’s table.  There was only one GURPS game going on at the entire con.  This was disturbing to say the least.  GURPS is an awesome game.  Too few people play GURPS.  When Obama was the President, he started a crowdsource page on the White House website, where citizens could ask for things to be done by the government.  If one person asked, and enough people actually agreed with it, then the Office of the President would consider following up on this as an action item.

I asked that GURPS be made the national RPG, similar to how the bald eagle is the national bird.  The request had to have something like 100,000 likes to have the item considered.  I got 32 votes.

Now, people use the same website to ask for things like having President Trump release his tax returns.  The last I looked, over 1,000,000 people agreed with that one.  I figure that this has just as much chance of passing as my request for GURPS to be the national RPG.

Anyhow, the GURPS game was interesting, since it was run by a guy who was a Baptist Deacon and a NRA member.  It didn’t take long for him to put his NRA card on the table.  I thought that Mike and (especially) Eric would pop a gasket.  Eric is pretty much a polar opposite to this.  Things were awesome.  This shows me that the joke is true about “what happens if a conservative and a liberal meet for a beer?  Nothing because both of them are cool, and you can enjoy each other’s company even if you don’t agree with their politics.”

The GURPS game also determine player initiative Savage Worlds style.  The GM played out the cards from a Looney Tunes deck, which worked for the game.  Incidentally, I have been thinking of running initiative for D&D and Call of Cthulhu the same way.  After playing GURPS with this type of initiative, I decided that it works for just about every game.  I ran a Cthulhu Dark Ages game using Savage Worlds initiative last Thursday, and it worked really well.

I was disappointed with the dealer room.  There were some nice tables, but most of the tables didn’t hold my interest.  That is ok.  They had several tables which had custom made (very nicely made) stuff for steam punk wear, tables with some indie game companies, hand made weapons and some indie publishers.  Overall, I found that the Chaosium booth had most of my attention.  There was also a booth that was from Crafty Games, and I got a screaming deal on several GURPS 3rd Edition books from that.  Two game stores had booths.  Guardian Games had a large table.  I have bought a lot of stuff from Guardian in the past, especially at cons that they support.  In this case, I only bought a Chessex pound of D6 dice.  Gavin, my son was playing a series of Shadowrun 5th Edition.  He came with a bunch of polyhedral dice, but not a bunch of D6’s.  I got a text while I was running a Call of Cthulhu game that he wanted to know if I had any D6’s he could use.  On a break, I went to the Guardian table, to look for any packs of D6’s that they had.  They only had a Chessex random pound bag of D6’s.  So I bought it, and showed up at his table, and dropped it with a loud thunk on the table.  “Get your kids involved in gaming, and they won’t have money to buy drugs”

The other game store booth was a regular at Gamestorm.  I don’t recall where it is from, but it is not a local.  They had some neat stuff. One box was a sealed Star Fleet Battles box, for only $100.  They also had a Thieves World box for the same cost.  They had a bunch of Microgames for between $60 and $100 apiece. Bleh.  I played a bunch of these games, and liked them in the 1980’s.  I don’t need to relive my childhood that badly.  Besides, games have become more complex over the lat 30 or so years.  I think that after the nostalgia wore off, I would quickly realize that the games were not as good as what I remember them being.

Car Wars and Ogre are good examples of this.  I loved both of those games way back when.  I played the heck out of them.  I have the Kickstarter big box of Ogre, along with a bunch of the extra sheets, and I have Ogre 6th Edition, along with two copies of the classic reprint in a bag.  I also have the reprint of classic Car Wars, and several expansions along with a reprint of a couple of the larger books like Uncle Alberts.

I have played all of these with friends and Gavin.  They are fun.  Ogre is really a fiddly bits game with a lot left to random chance.  It isn’t a really heavy game, but I still love it because it was so much fun when I was in middle school and high school.  Car Wars is the same.  As a modern game, it is seriously lacking.  Build a car, drive it around like a maniac, push your luck ,hope for the best die rolls possible.  It is full of schadenfreude.  I love the game, because of the nostalgia.  But, as a game, it is… pretty OK.  There are many more engaging and interesting games available.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I will play a game of Ogre, Car Wars, Titan (A Monster Slugathon), Illuminati, D&D 1st Edition etc with friends in a heartbeat.  The game is a good reason for a bunch of friends to get together and enjoy each other’s company.  But as much as it pains me to say it, there are far better games available now than these “classics”.

D&D has consistently gotten better with each edition (except for 4th edition), so has Call of Cthulhu, World of Darkness, GURPS, TORG-Deadlands-Savage Worlds and Traveler have improved with new revisions (Except for the horrible D&D 4th Edition, and maybe D20 Call of Cthulhu, and maybe some of the D20 RPG’s.. and maybe several other games).  Harn is one that I would love to run.  However, with the gaming group that I currently play in, Harn would probably be painful.  Harn is really a serious RPG game for serious gamers.  I am playing with people on Thursday who want to become the best of the best of the best

OK, not like Men in Black, but the most important thing for many of the players is to find a way that they can increase the fighter’s AC to above 28, or to have the ranger be able to shoot 5 arrows each round.  That is OK in Pathfinder or D&D.  Unfortunately this isn’t really about role play, which I like.  I am currently running some Cthulhu Dark Ages for the Thursday group, while Daron is taking a break from running Pathfinder.

The Saturday game is seriously fun.  I have no problems with the gaming group on Saturday.  They are all friends, and usually we need to play the Benny Hill / Yakety Sax theme several times to punctuate the action on the table.  This is awesome fun.  I love it.  I really do.

I also love the deep RPG possibilities of games like Harn, Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperboria, Traveler, Coriolis and Runequest.  I am not complaining.  The games I am playing in are awesome.  The groups I play in are awesome.  I can use parts of my favorite deeper RPG’s in the games that I am running.

So I have rambled on about all sorts of things, that have little to do with Gamestorm, and have blathered on about what I am currently thinking about.

In general, Gamestorm was awesome.  I bought next year’s tickets on Sunday.  That is pretty nice, as I can get next year’s tickets for half price.  Gavin  and I can go for the price of a full admission.

Savage Worlds Episode 18 A, B and C

Tags

RPG, Savage Worlds, War of the Dead

OK, I have been remiss.  I haven’t kept up on the last three weeks of Savage Worlds posts.  This is because I have been working on a Judge Dredd campaign for GURPS.  Well, I have been reading lots of Dredd stuff, reading GURPS rules, and working on compiling a player’s guide for Megacity 1 for the players.

I haven’t run a GURPS game since way back in the 1980’s, with 1st edition GURPS.  I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to remember details from game systems I haven’t played in 30 plus years.  So I am skipping by the older 1st edition GURPS that I don’t remember well, if at all.  I am reading the 4th Edition books.  I have been working through NPC character generation, all that good stuff.  I have played 4th Edition GURPS, but never run it.  How hard can it be?  Pretty darned hard.

GURPS is kind of like Rifts in complexity.  Rifts is amazingly awesome, but is broken as a game, since you can OP it as a player so many ways.  But Rifts and GURPS are both full of amazing ideas with large numbers of books.  I played Palladium games way back in the 1980’s and liked playing it because I could be anything in any world.  The rules allow for anything as long as you buy enough of the books to support what you want to do.  GURPS is like that, but for the most part is designed better so you can’t OP the system as a player as easily.  You can still OP the system in GURPS, but there is more balance.

The other main difference is that Palladium / Rifts still has most of their books in print, where Steve Jackson Games has only a few GURPS books in print, with many more available as PDF files.  Lately, Steve Jackson Games is putting some of their out of print books on a print on demand via Amazon.com and Create Space.

Anyhow, I am spending my spare time working on a players guide for the Dredd campaign.   I think I am the only truly hardcore Dredd fan in the group.  Other people have heard of Dredd, or realize that Sylvester Stalone starred in one Judge Dredd movie about 20 years ago, and that there was a Carl Urban Dredd movie a few years ago.  Maybe they have seen the movies.  I may be the only one who was reading Dredd comics back in the 1970’s and 1980’s.  I am probably the only one in the group who can spew out details about why the Futsies are not executed by the Judges for murder, where other residents of MegaCity 1 would be executed.  OK, I am a fanboy of Dredd.  Major fanboy of Dredd.

The campaign will allow the players to be some form of non-judge in the Dredd world.  I have played a Dredd game where everyone was a judge in the game (Savage Worlds system), it was OK, but being a judge and saying “STOP, Prepare to be judged”, then shooting the lawgiver at them after selecting the one of five types of bullets got old after the fifth or sixth time.  This group of players will much more appreciate the goblinesque approach of mayhem, and trying to stay ahead of the law.

• Eric likes Post Apocalyptic game and enjoyed the GURPS games that Loren ran – Check
• Mike likes the Dredd movies, and GURPS – check
• Collin likes GURPS, rolls low regularly, and wild goblinish role play games – check
• Sue likes RPG’s that have no rails – check
• Shari likes playing RPG’s where she can role play a unique character – check
• Brian likes engineering characters and role playing them in any system – GURPS has a ridiculous amount of customization – check

Sounds like this could be a good thing.  I just need to not give Dolnitzer dynamite.

So after all that blather, what did we do over the last three weeks?

Well…

I am going to make this simple, short and sweet, because I want to get back to the player’s guide for Dredd.

Long story short (too late), The party, Kirkman, the Colonel and the two remaining troops went back to the theater, and Ms. Harten was stirring up the other survivors in a Revelations based fury.  The other survivors threw Forthington out to the cannibals as a sacrifice to God.  The other survivors attacked the party, several other survivors were shot, and just as things got bad, a whole bunch of the sick died and rose as zombies.  The party was overcome by the mass of other survivors, and clubbed into unconsciousness.

Later, the Colonel managed to cut his bonds with a knife he had hidden in his boot, and let his two troops and Kirkman free.  He woke up Sue, and promised her a long lifetime at his home in northern Idaho, where he lives off the grid. They could grow potatoes together and live a simple life where the government only knew where to send his retirement check to a post office box.

Sue decided that as enticing as that may be, she wanted to get the rest of the party out.  They cut the bonds of the rest of the party and snuck out of the theater while Ms. Harten was busy whipping the other survivors into a tent revival frenzy.

As the party left the theater, they saw the eviscerated remains of Forthington.  It was grisly.  I won’t post any pictures of this, as it was just too nasty.

So the party goes to the destroyed bridge.  The colonel is still in charge, and he then informs the rest of the party that it was nice having them around, but his mission is over, and other than Sue, no one else is coming with them.

Collin sees of the port bow that a large well lit white ship with orange stripes on it (coast guard) is coming right for the ship.  The party is saved.  The colonel wants to boogie out of there before the authorities arrive.  He has been paid for a job, and he is going to finish it.  He intends to take Sue to his fast getaway boat which is just off the ship, and abandon the rest of the party.

Collin notices that the Coast Guard ship isn’t slowing down.  Then the Coast Guard ship rams the Pinnacle full speed, with dozens of cannibal coasties falling from the front of the Coast Guard ship onto the Pinnacle, simultaneously, the explosives that the paramilitary team explodes, rocking the Pinnacle.

Private Snuffy, one of the surviving paramilitary guys has his finger on the trigger, and (following the rails of the adventure) shoots Kirkman, the Colonel, the other paramilitary guy and himself, killing all the bad guys.

In a miracle of bad editing, the authors of the railroad adventure didn’t explain where Private Snuffy or the other military guys got their MP5 submachine guns, several grenades after being subdued, knocked unconscious, tied up, stripped of the weapons, let alone how Snuffy shot himself.  But that doesn’t matter.  Really, it doesn’t.  Deas Ex Machina happens all the time.

The colonel is sad that he is dying before he has the opportunity to consummate his love with Sue’s character.  He regrets that he won’t be with her to manage the  system of solar charged 12 volt car batteries he has rigged up to provide for the power in his single wide of love.

Sue is appreciative of the Colonel’s getaway boat, but that is just about all.  As the Colonel dies, he tells Sue to get to the back of the boat to get out  There are ropes tied off, and they can rappell down from the Pinnacle down to the escape boat.  Private Shifty is manning the escape boat. he is a good man.

So the party strips the deas ex machina weapons off of the dead men and run like hell for the rear of the boat.  When they arrive, the escape boat is there, backed up against the ship, and the ropes are in place.

Everyone successfully rapells (as opposed to repel) down to the fast boat.  Things are quiet.  There is no private Shifty.

Things go from bad to worse.  No one knows how to drive a fast boat.  No one has boating skill at all.  And it has been too long since anyone has watched Miami Vice to remember how Sonny and Crocket did it on TV.  The cannibals reach the deck of the ship right above them and start pouring off the ship, onto the area around the fast boat.  Now the adventure said that the party was supposed to get X new cannibals on the ship each turn until they could get away.  Meh, I decided that I would drop 8 tokens per round onto the mat that represented the boat.  I dropped them from about a foot above the escape boat, and if they landed on the boat, then they were an adversary, otherwise they bounced into the water.  In come cases, the tokens knocked other zombies into the water also.

Also, Private Shifty showed himself, he was down in the hold of the fast boat with four other friends, all hungry for human flesh.  Eric tried epic things.  Mike tried epic things.  Shari tried to survive.  Collin tried to help.  Sue eventually saved the day by figuring out how to pilot the boat away from the Pinnacle and then they fought off the other bad guys.

Eric prayed and sprayed the zombies in the hold.  It didn’t work so well.  He shot a bunch of bullet sized holes into the hull of the ship.  Mike then killed a zombie with so many extra damage, I figured that the splatter from the zombie head exploding then filled each of the bullet holes that Eric caused.

Things went well for a while, the party argued about what would be on a boat, and what wasn’t.  Eric was convinced that every boat in the world had a canopy over the pilot area.

He is of course, correct, There are no boats in the world which have no canopy over the pilot area.  These images are alternate facts from the Internet, which we all know is flawed and full of lies.  FAKE NEWS!

As you can see, the DM was incorrect in this, and all of the zombies should have ricochet off the canopy that must exist on all boats in the world rather than falling into the open crew area of the boat.

But that is why it is a fantasy role playing game, not a reality based role playing game.

So the party decided that the boat had to have a compass, since every boat in the world has a compass. and they would take off in the direction of land.  Now, how a compass points you to land without the party looking for charts, or some way to georeference themselves against something else, I don’t know.  If you just “head north”, you will go north.  If there is no land north, or the nearest land is Iceland.

As it turned out, it didn’t really matter.  The gunfire from someone, could have been Private Shifty firing on the first ghouls that converted him to the church of the temporary mortal condition, or someone in the party, damaged the fuel lines and the fuel tank.  After about 4 hours of motoring, the engines stopped, and the party was adrift.  The boat was then caught in a hurricane, which blew them way the hell out of the way.

The boat eventually magically arrives at a marina.  The marina only has a couple of sailboats.  The “fast” boat docks itself and the party goes off to see what is in the marina.  The parking lot is empty.  There is a marina office nearby.  The office looks like it has a store, the store door is open and it is dark inside.

One of the party members (I won’t say who, but the name rhymes with “Derek”, or more correctly “Deric” with a silent D wants to know if any of the sailboats have motors.  I tell that (to be unnamed party member) that none of the boats have engines. That player informs me that all sailboats have motors.

I explain to him that when I was in high school, the priest of the church that we attended had a sailboat, and we went out several times on the water.  His sailboat had no motor.  I was informed that this was not correct.

So, “Deric”, I will turn to the lies of the Interwebs to demonstrate that not all sailboats have motors, engines etc.  They may have an outboard motor, but if any of the sailboats had outboard motors, they have been stripped.  Here are a couple of sailboats that have no motors, and surprisingly enough do not have a canopy over the tiller area…

Now, we all know that the scientific method never “proves” anything, so the examples that I found on the Interweb may actually not support my contention that not all sailboats have motors, or that some boats don’t have canopies over the pilot area, but it seems that maybe somewhere out there, some people are bucking the trend.

So the party moves across the parking lot and into the marina office.  The store is ransacked.  There isn’t even a bottle of water left.  They hear sounds coming from downstairs.  They find a door that appears to go downstairs.

Now this is where Sue decided she had enough of these shenanigans.  She tells me that no one ever has a basement in the Florida or the Caribbean.  She is adamant that this never happens, never, with a double finger wag.

I try to explain that this building has a basement, and she silences me with a stern look and a quick wag of the finger.  I tell her that the railroad of the adventure says the building  has a basement, and she tells me I am wrong.  You see, she is from Florida, and she knows that basements are crazy talk, and nobody would have a basement there, ever.  EVER.

Now, I have been to Florida.  I haven’t lived there, but I have been there.  And when I go to Realtor.com, you can search for homes in Florida with basements.  And results come up.

This may all be the cray-cray reality of the Internet.  You know, the same Internet that regularly makes Donald Trump look like a fool.  We all know that we can’t ever trust what the Internet says, after all, the people listing houses on Realtor.com may actually just think that the crawl space under the floor is a “basement”, to and follow their realtor’s advice to include a basement in their house listing to fool people who come from Ohio.

But the real point here is that nobody asked where they were.  They assumed that the hurricane just blew them into Florida.  Nobody asked what the fauna looked like.  Were the trees in the woods pine trees, oak trees or palm trees?

Once Sue figured out that they were not in Florida, and they were actually in North Carolina, she acquiesced and said that it was possible that some people in North Carolina might have basements, maybe.

The next session (yesterday) was equally productive.

The session started out with the party hearing gunshots from the woods (you know, the pine woods).  The party investigates and finds that there is a person inside a nearby house that is shooting at a bunch of cannibals who are approaching the house.  The shooter is a crack shot, and kills all of the cannibals, one shot per kill.

The party approaches, and they are warned off by the man in the house.  Shortly afterwards, a woman comes out and invites them in for some food and company.  Not sure whether to trust this NPC or not, the party comes in.  She offers to cook up some Dinty Moore stew for everyone.

For some reason, Shari isn’t so sure about this, and she wants to watch the lady open up the cans, to make sure that there isn’t some special ingredient to the dinner.

Long story short, the old man warms up to the party.  They eat delicious stew.  The old man fires up his generator and shows a couple of VCR tapes of what the official government tools said on the news.  It doesn’t look good.  Nobody knows nuthin.  Things gone to shit.  We are all on our own.  The president is clueless.  General Emerick tried to tell everyone to go to specific centers to keep the healthy alive, and things got bad.

The old man also give the party some of his moonshine.  It is like unrefined turpentine, but when mixed with blueberry Schnapps, it isn’t too bad.

Everyone beds down, and about 2 AM, they hear a bunch of motorcycles rumble into the marina.  The old man gets everyone up and they go check out what is going on.  There is a motorcycle gang, with 24 motorcycles, and 36 people hooting and hollering in the marina.  The gang has set fire to the three boats in the marina, and are trashing the place.  They kill the zombies that were in the faux basement, then they hear the leader say “I wanna check out the house we passed on the way into here.  Mount Up!”

Henry, the old man is worried, he knows that they won’t get back to the house before the gang.  He hightails it back to his wife.

Things got bad.  Mike and Shari are caught by the bikers, and thrown into the basement after they are stripped of all of their belongings.  The rest of the party sneaks in, following Henry into the basement through a narrow window.  Now Sue wasn’t there to argue about whether or not a house would ever have a basement anywhere.  No one else wanted to take up the flag and complain about the house having a basement.

Once in the basement, everyone tries to figure out what to do.  There were 36 bikers roaming around, trashing the house.  At some point, one of the bikers decides he is going down into the basement.  He opens the door, and Henry shots him in the shin, shattering his shin bone, and the biker collapses into the basement.  Then another runs down the stairs, and Henry shoots him, killing him too.

Then things get bad.  The bikers shoot down the steps and some of the players are wounded.  Chipping the wounds, they miraculously recover, except Henry who is incapacitated.

The bikers demand that everyone come out.  Collin takes a grenade, and pulls the pin, drops the pin on the floor, and walks up the stairs calmly holding the spoon in place.  He gets to the top of the stairs, and announces what he has done.  The bikers shoot at him.  He drops the grenade and runs back down the stairs.

This is where we got into some house rules.  I dealt one card to Collin, and one to myself.  If Collin has the better card, the grenade goes off before the bikers can react.  If the bikers have a better card, they react first.  Guess what, the bikers had a better chard.

Then, I say to Collin, OK, not everyone may know what is going on.  How about if we even / odd.  I will roll three d6’s, one for each biker.  On an even they stay, on an odd, they run away.  He agrees.  I roll three odds.  They all run away.  Then I say, how about structural damage.  If I roll a 1d6, on a 1, the area where the grenade went off is structurally damaged, and anyone walking on that square may collapse the floor. He agrees.  I tell Collin to roll that one.  He rolls a six.

It was a big damn hero moment, but not big enough.  The dice gods did not agree.

So the bikers above started shooting through the floor randomly.  With 17 bikers in the floor above, I figured that each player had a one in six chance of possibly being hit.  Only the old lady got hit.

Eric found  the window and snuck out of the basement  He rolled a huge roll, the best roll, on multiple d4’s, and got something like a 23 on an unskilled sneak roll, by critting a d4 a gazillion times in a row. He found three bikers with M-16’s standing outside the house within 15 feet of his window.

Shari was shaken from the shooting, and was trying to roll to lose the shaken, it took like four rounds to do this.  She was jealously guarding her sole, lonely poker chip.

Sue was nowhere to be found.  This is likely because the action was taking place in a basement, and since nobody has basements, there was no way that this could be happening at all.

Mike was playing big damn hero in the stairwell, waiting for a biker to come down so he could mucha lucha his ass.

Brian was looking for a way to get out other than the window that Eric went out.

Collin decided that a prepper in North Carolina, who was so edgy that he had a basement in his house would have kerosene drums for whatever a prepper does with kerosene.  He found six five gallon plastic containers full of some liquid, but in the dark, he couldn’t tell if it was fuel or Kikkoman soy sauce.

Just to keep any arguments from happening, yes, you can purchase 5-gallon buckets of soy sauce.  It costs just under $30 online.

The package says “over 300 years of excellence”.  I think that 5-gallon bucket would take 300 years to consume in this house.

Anyhow, Collin grabbed one of the six 5-gallon buckets, assuming that it was kerosene or some other flammable liquid.  I had Collin roll a d6.  on a 6, it would be soy sauce, or maybe the chemical used in chemical toilets.  He rolled a 1, which is pretty much par for the course for Collin.  He will do great at GURPS.

Then Collin pours the flammable liquid all along one outer wall of the basement.  I was not sure of what the heck he was doing.

Mike rips off his mucha lucha mask, and yells to the bikers to “stop this madness”  He is able to make about a half dozen bikers stop.  One doesn’t listen.  The party hears a person running on the floor above, and Mike, midway up the stairs, sees a biker throw a Molotov cocktail down into the basement.  Mike tries to catch it, and misses, tipping it and it crashes, spreading fire all around the basement, and catching the kerosene that Collin poured on the floor.

Things got bad at that point.  Collin and Shari followed Eric out the window.  They were surrounded by bikers and beaten into submission.  A wave of zombies slowly moved in on them, very slowly.  Painfully slowly… You see what happens, “Deric”  or should  I say “dEric” when you argue with the GM?  Mike goes into the kitchen and tries to shoot bikers, who in turn shoot him to the point where he takes a permanent wound.

Brian snuck off to the RV, and found a double barrel shotgun with 20 shells on a harness. When he broke into the RV, the dome light turned on, and it took an eternity for the damn dome light to turn off, after he closed the door. The bikers knew that he was there.  Brian hid, and prepared to shoot anyone coming into the RV.  He got one shot off, and shot so well that he was able to see that the biker had fish sticks for lunch.  There is now a greasy smear of guts all over the inside of the RV.

The bad guys responded by opening up on the RV, shooting out the tires, engine, glass, and everything else.  The RV isn’t going far now.

Everyone except Brian was captured.  The old man and woman were killed.  This is a problem since “everyone” was supposed to be captured, and the old man and woman were supposed to live.

I need to figure out how to get this train back on the tracks.