Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

To be honest, I was more irked by having completely forgotten the Musical Influence skills at character generation. I have long ago mentally aligned myself to the fact that this characters success is not measured in DPS ;)

I had a belt full of potion grenades that could have been applied to the problem, so I felt reasonably armed (if somewhat inappropriately for wasps) - I'll probably pick up a crossbow and a little training in it, and improve my potion hocking skills one level, but mostly I'm thinking Musical Influence because it's stylish, in theme, and not mana dependent.

My emergency backup character remains a necromancer with a small squad of skeletons. With axes and shields. I may need to buy some barrels to pack them in for storage in town ;)

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Take them as summonable Allies. They're going to arrive faster if you need them in town than they would getting out of the barrels and you don't need tobuy/transport barrels.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

I'm not really sure that zombies and skeletons are appropriate as summonable allies. Ghosts would be fine, but the morality is more dubious. And ghosts aren't as useful for carrying your stuff.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

We're in a game where skeletons randomly appearing out of the ground is a little out of character, and there's no teleporting. So not much in the way of conjuring them whole cloth available.

Plus, if I pack them in barrels, I get to make Diablo jokes.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Create a summoning pentagram on a large circle of burlap or leather, then just throw it down and call them up quick when you need them. :)


Of course I'd do that with Devilkin (DF:9) or Imp (DF:5) allies, and suggest that they look like winged monkeys... ;)

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Alchemy? powdered bone with special herbs. Just add water.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Sessions 17
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_1-17

The delvers had a mostly uneventful night, except that some of Ghazeb's hair fell out and his skin turned pink. The exact cause of this phenomenon is still unknown, though some of the delvers have theories.

The next morning, the delvers walked back to the ruin town, dodged mud zombies, and found a lot of shinies. As a GM, I'm thinking my simple system for allocating treasure in that town (value $100 x MoS on a Search roll, weigh randomly determined between 0.1 lbs and 50 lbs) was perhaps a little generous. On the other hand, a lot of the treasure has been stingy, and delvers have to get rich to continue risking and suffering death. We'll see how overpowered they get after returning to town.

After fleeing from the mud zombies, the delvers started heading home. On the way, they got attacked by 4 Erupting Slimes.

Erupting Slimes are one of the half dozen or so monsters that I didn't get a chance to play in the first iteration of this game. I had placed some in the Tomb of the Bloody Baron, but the delvers never found that particular room. I'm sorry I didn't get to see them in action then because this session's events showed them to be amazing.

4 slimes basically caused most of the delving band to retreat, terrified that the slimes were rust slimes that would destroy all their nifty metal toys. Add to the fact that swords and axes are fairly ineffective against Diffuse opponents anyway, and the delvers were in bad shape. They were fortunate enough to have a lot of alchemical potions which provided for area effect damage. Even so, Thasos took 3 slime hits for a total of 4d damage and Ghazeb took some minor hits.

Next week, the delvers hope to find out what's behind the locked door in the goblin cave. Plenty of surprises, that's for sure.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 18
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_1-18

The delvers go back to the goblin cave in order to open the unpickable door with their shiny new key, only to find out that those pesky goblins didn't abandon their home just because the PCs told them to. A hail of crossbow fire later, and everyone is picking caltrops out of their feet and trying not to be poisoned by monster drool. It may have been surprising, but it wasn't what the PCs were looking for.

I've been looking forward to this encounter for weeks. My original notes for the lair made it a base for 20 goblins, most of whom are out on patrol or hunting at any time. Even if a few of them died, there would be at least some reinforcements. Doing that provided a nice surprise for the PCs and contributed to the feel that the West March is a living, moving space and not just a static dungeon.

The ambush was better prepared, as I had a better idea of what would happen and I remembered the caltrops. The caltrops didn't do more than annoy and harass the PCs, but that's all they're really for. They'd have been much worse if I remembered that caltrops continue to do damage until removed, which is pretty harsh.

Assuming the delvers don't go haring off in some wild direction, I hope that they'll make it back to Polisberg in the next session or two, and then we can go through selling the loot, gathering new rumors, and planning the next expedition. Having said that, they'll probably want to explore their new map instead.

The new map is at http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/..._Linen_Map.gif, in case people want to engage in random speculation.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Marik's low on arrows, Thasos is out of ritual components, and two delvers STARTED the trip with less food than they have now.

We're going. Back. To town.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Not to mention that Beltarne really wants a donkey so he can haul more loots out of dungeons :D

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 19
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_1-19

The delvers unlock the door in the goblin cave, and find an alchemist's lair complete with alchemical flamethrower. Sadly, they do not decide to test out the flamethrower right there and then. There are some abortive attempts to take some of the pricey, delicate glasswear back to Polisberg, but everyone realizes that it weighs a lot and is just asking to get broken.

So instead they just walk home, in a more or less straight line, covering all the distance in a long day's walk. There is some discussion about this, and everyone eventually agrees that trips go faster when everyone stays focused on the destination and doesn't decide to go mountain climbing.

Now everyone is busy updating their character sheets, collecting rumors, performing research, and selling large piles of loot. I have no idea where they'll go next.

One issue I'm struggling with is how to allow the delvers to do research on stuff they've found. They have maps, hints, and clues about all kinds of things that they might want to know about: what made those weird tracks in the forest? What are the Ebon Teeth? The normal 1 roll/week DF rules for Research might be a bit restrictive for this kind of thing.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 20
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-1

I decided to let the delvers make, as a group, 3 research rolls per week for free and buy additional rolls at a rapidly increasing cost. The resulting wall of text can be seen here: http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:WM/Clues. The players still haven't done much with that information, but hey, they have some and they did put some to use.

This session was a bit of a mess. The delvers restocked and recruited, adding Shelley the necromancer^H "necrotechnician" to the group. Then they headed out with her escort of animated skeletons and encountered religious pilgrims and Outrider patrols. This did not go as well as it could.

The entire session was one big travelogue, made somewhat confusing because the GM got east and west confused at a crucial point. On the plus side, I got an excuse to show off a bit of the GM's map of the West March, which is rather pretty if I do say so myself.

The session ended with the delvers entering a ruined and apparently haunted town. Next session, we'll find out if its easier to fight the undead with a necromancer in the party.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

My big plan is still to be aggressively Canadian at folks. Nothing like good manners to confuse and confound people expecting you to eat their eyeballs.

And that licensing paperwork is PRICELESS.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Yeah, I liked the license paperwork bit and the interplay between Shelley and the Outrider Officer:

OO: "Give no orders to those skeletons, necromancer, or my hidden archers will kill you!"
Shelley: "Would it help if I had them sit down with their fingers in the earholes?"
OO: completely boggled "Well, yes, I suppose..."

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

It was the most innoffensive thing I could think of.

I had this mental picture of skeletons getting the finger bones stuck in the ear canal and being unable to get them back out again without help, and from there I figured I should stop brainstorming and say something.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 20
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-2
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-3

The delvers entered a ruined town, got attacked by ghosts, drove them off with True Faith: Turning and Affect Spirit weapons, rested for a while, and went deeper into town. Where they got attacked by ghosts again, to the surprise of no one I think.

I was rather torn on whether to run what essentially the same fight twice, but the idea was that there were lots of ghosts in the town so it made sense. And the differences in the fights made them feel a lot different, at least I hoped. In the first fight, the PCs knew where the monsters were and could approach them on their own time. In the second fight, they were ambushed by the ghosts in an area much more favorable to the ghosts.

The key to the second fight was the despairing ghost's field of despair. Mechanically, it was simple: roll Will every round, apply MoF as a penalty on all DX or IQ rolls or skills and checks related to them. The penalty is reduced by 1 every round, but every round the PC needs to roll again... Ghazeb got fairly hosed by this effect, but was much less important to the ghosts than Beltarne, Marik, and Wolfgang, who could hurt them. The other PCs rolled well on their initial Will checks, and a successful Will check prevented the effect for MoS seconds. It was really meant to hose the low-IQ PCs, and it did okay but not as well as I would have hoped.

Now the PCs are trying to take their incomplete and often wrong information and integrate it with what they're learning on the scene. Should be interesting to see what they do next.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

For the record, Marik's not really 'low-IQ'; with a 12 IQ/Will (and a 16 Per), he's easily as much of an intellectual as he is a warrior. Last night was also the only time I was seriously worried that my nonfocus on combat traits would get me killed; I need to learn to stay the heck out of melee.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 23
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-4

The delvers pester the ghost for a while and then decide to go find the pixie village they hope is nearby. With a little luck, they manage to do so! Then they hang out with the pixies for a while and pump them for information.

The pixies played a few practical jokes, but nothing too awful, and even told them where another delve site might be: on the south shore on Obsidian Lake, 10 miles away across open water. I'm not sure how the delvers are going to get there.


This was an entirely non-combat session, and everyone was pretty quiet. There were hardly any rules calls, so there wasn't much to worry about. I did nicely establish the pixies as incessant pranksters, including a lovely opening sequence that seemed to put all the players on the edge of the seats, which will possibly be important for narrative related reasons later.

Now I need to go finish populating the random monster encounters for the southern forest areas.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

These logs are great!

I'm not clear on exactly how the logs are ordered. What is the very first one? Is there a list of the logs in order somewhere?

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Thanks, I have a great bunch of players.

The logs are ordered sequentially, first by trek/expedition, second by session within that expedition. They are collected on the Treks page:

http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks

Hope that helps!

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 23
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-5

The delvers, for no particular reason that I can fathom, decide to provoke a fight with nearly a dozen shock lizards. At first, the fight goes the delvers' way, as their shields absorb the long range fire from the lizards and their attacks whittle down the lizards' numbers. Then the lizards get in a couple of lucky hits, and the delvers discover that shock lizards are much more dangerous en masse as 4d+4 lightning bolts nearly put Wolfgang into the ground and explode two of Shelley's skeletons. The lizards had taken bad enough losses at that point, and decide to flee. Only a few get away.

A heck of a lot of healing magic later, the delvers continue their trek. Their plan to is to walk around the very large lake, hoping to find the ghost somewhere on the southern shore. I suspect they haven't thought this through all the way, but hey: Marik probably won't starve in the forests.

The rest of the session was spent wandering the woods and finding the tracks of the weird inhabitants thereof. Nothing horrible yet, but plenty of weird and foreboding.

One weird question got posed: can a necromancer^H necrotechnician create undead^H flesh/bone golems from ambulatory plants like Crushrooms? A quick search of Magic and DF2 implied it was possible, but nothing definitive either way.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Nothing in the zombie spell forbids it, though, personally, I'm not sure I would allow it. I would only allow Zombie on animals, personally, if nothing else because I don't like the idea of zombie plants or zombie insects (Yeah, I know, zombie scarabs are traditional, but who cares).

Do zombie crushrooms fit in your world? If so, then allow it, if not, then forbid it. Personally, the main rule about if something can be animated by necromancy depends on if the creature has bones, because I prefer clean skeletons to dripping zombies.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Insects are animals, though. I'd certainly let Shelley animate one of the Giant Wasp corpses they've found, though I doubt I'd let it continue producing venom. Still, flying zombie with a powerful stinger: not bad. Maybe.

I'm inclined to allow plant zombies, because the West March is all about crazy kitchen sink wackiness.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Its your call, but does the idea of ravenous hordes of zombified crushrooms crying "stamen, staaaamen!" strike your sense of horror or of humor?

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Crushrooms don't cry anything, any more than wasps do - talking animals is already firmly in the humor area, you don't need to make them zombies to add to that.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Conflating magically animated undead with Romero's Living Dead is also in humor territory.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

True, true. Either way, I cry dirty pool - Count Chocula doesn't prove that vampires are an inherently silly idea.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

...but the sparkly vampires from Twilight do. ;)

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 24
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-6

A lot of people had other obligations last week, so we had to cancel. And James - the fellow irregularly playing Ghazeb - had to drop, so now we have an opening.

This session was mostly combat against a bunch of mutant plant lions in densely packed, overgrown woods. The terrain made things difficult for the PCs, but the big problem was the lions attacked from ambush and managed to knock down Beltarne and Ghazeb on the first strike. Smacking fairly potent enemies while your allies are in close combat proved to be difficult.

This was a very straightforward session, with no real rules challenges. One house rule came up, though. A bit of history about that:

When I first started running the game, the party included Lenia the IQ16 wizard and Thog the IQ8 Scout. Lenia didn't regularly fail monster identification rolls, but she did sometimes and memorably provided bad information in a fight against a Peshkali. On the other had, Thog had no monster identification skills, so he never rolled, so he never critically failed and never provided bad information. It had the weird effect of making the smart person seem stupider than the very dumb person.

I instituted a house rule that EVERYONE had to make Carousing, Current Affairs, and monster identification checks. Stupid/unskilled characters were much more likely to fail, so the low IQ characters who constantly spew bad information now seem less bright than the high IQ characters who aren't crit-failing on a 12+.

Some of the players complained this is a bit much, and I'm inclined to agree with them. So I'm probably going to reduce the chance of critically failing those rules to no more than a 14+, no matter how bad the target number. This still leaves the medium to high IQ people better off, since they only critfail on a 17+, but makes the IQ9 and IQ10 people less likely to critfail.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

New Campaign Session 25, 26
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-7
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/WM/Treks/Log_2-8


The first half of session 25 was a long travelogue as the delvers crossed the wilderness. I'm not sure how much the players are enjoying that, which is a problem because exploring the wilderness is a large part of the campaign.

The rest of the session and all of session 26 was a sprawling battle between the PCs, some thorn lions, and a bunch of savage vinemen with axes. That was very, very messy. The lions grappled the PCs, forcing their allies to attack into close combat, which was dangerous. The vinemen spewed pollen and allergens when hit badly enough, and though none of the PCs were affected by the stuff, it sure worried the PCs.

I don't think there were many rules disputes, though there was some confusion about how various rules worked out: can you Interdict a foe moving to your flank if you made a Move and Attack, and what happens if you declare a lot of Deceptive Attack but forget that you're also under Shock penalties? Is it better to shoot an armored, homogeneous target with a bodkin arrow or a normal arrow? Stuff like that.

There was some funny commentary about pollens and Bruno's persistent allergies on the side comment channel that I need to collect and post.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Notably, my skeletons were actually good for something this time! Alas, they also got the marrow kicked out of them, so I made Mark come up with some clarified rules for skeletal reconstruction and Shelley is eyeing the plant monsters for necromantic golem status.

Yes, you do :D

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

What happened here was a bit of confustion on my part plus me not wanting to bog things down with my slow typing. I put a -4 in my attack and declared in the next line that it was a -4/-2 Deceptive Attack. But I forgot about not having HPT (every fighter type I have ever played before has HPT). Then I saw Mark reminding me about the -4 shock penalty, so I was all like, "Oh nevermind the DA then..." But the timing of my postings and everyone else's made it look like I was trying to get a DA after attacking and seeing my roll.

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Additional necromancy rules, including frankensteining your damaged servants:
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/...cy_House_Rules

Bruno threatens to kill the GM
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/...tes#Session_27

Re: Review of Play: The Saga of the Westmarch DF Game
 

Is it better to shoot an armored, homogeneous target with a bodkin arrow or a normal arrow? Stuff like that.

It wasn't really a question of 'which was better'; I was just confused because the first arrow (7 imp vs. DR 3) caused a 1-point shock penalty (my assumption having been that I dealt 1 damage after DR), but the second arrow (9 pi(2) vs. DR 8) caused no shock penalty at all.

It got clarified when Emily mentioned the rule that I'd (forgotten/never known) about shock penalties being tied to HP - if the big guy had 20+ HP, then the first shot (dealing 2 injury) would have caused -1 shock but the second shot (1 injury) wouldn't have.

That said, with DR 8 the bodkin really is the better choice - it'll deal 1 injury on anything but a minimum-damage roll, whereas a standard arrow needs to roll max damage to penetrate DR in the first place.