WoW-Inspired WebComic

So I was inspired to make a short graphic novel/web comic based on my recent adventures with World of Warcraft. I've never been a real serious gamer for this - my highest level charcater is still only 73. She's never reached a current level cap. BUT I did just get the achievement for being Exalted rep with Sporegaar! Yep - the mushroom people!

Then I started farming Cenarian Expedition rep in the Steamvault. The hubby helped out; hilarity ensued. I don't anticipate it being very long, but long enough to set the scene and get out some of the very very funny moments.

I was thinking of taking a bunch of screenshots & tracing over them as my drawing style. Beyond that, I'm little better than the xkcd guys. Because it's short & because it takes place in the Steamvault dungeon, I'm calling it The Steamvault.

It'll really only be funny to other WoW players, but it doesn't diminsh my excitement.

Pearl City 2

So I did something stupid. I started running a second Pearl City game. Keep in mind, one of the reasons why Pearl City is once a month is because I don't have the TIME to prepare for a weekly game. Thank goodness scheduling & now a summer session at Rutgers for one of the players is giving me a break.

The premise: So while my Adventuring Party A is off frolicking in the Glass Sea, amidst the Broken Isles and exploring the sunken city of Shyama, what's going on back at Pearl City? Turns out bad stuff. So Adventuring Party B gets to explore that, and probably change the city (for the better, I'm hoping). I've also started setting up a second Pearl City website - but work on that is slow going. Leep in mind I had several months to prepare for the first before I ran. This kinda fell in my lap. So when APA returns back to Pearl City, PRESTO! They see the new website!

Wish me luck. :) I'll post the second website once I get a few podcasts up there.

PrinceCon D&D Rules in a Campaign Format

My husband, my father & I have have tried out the PrinceCon rules in another setting: a campaign. My friend Mr. West runs a game on Princeton's campus every Saturday (give or take a holiday or two) and while every Saturday is not something I can currently commit to, the hubby has gone back once and plans to again in the future when he's free. We like the system so much, that when my husband starts his campaign this month, we will be using PrinceCon rules.

How does PrinceCon's game differ from normal D&D? For starters, there are only 4 classes: Hero (fighter), Cleric (cleric), Mage (wizard/sorcerer - all spontaneous spell casting), and Guardian (part hero, part spell caster). Cleric spell lists are dependent on the deity you worship. The big four are Aru (healing spells - suped up healers but useless otherwise), Daglir (metals, earth manipulation, rocks), Gaia (animal and plant spells, polymorph - think Druid) and Mavor (detect lies and alignment, oaths and oathbreakers).

Combat does not happen by initiative. Everyone acts at the same time, but in different phases depending on what action you wish to take. Below is the phase order:

1. Declaration phase - mages declare what spells they are doing
2. Powers phase - if you or an item you have has a 'Power' it goes off here
3. Melee phase - first projectile/ranged, then hand-to-hand, then grapple
4. Clerical phase - Clerics do not have to declare their spells, and these spells occur in this phase
5. Spell Phase - Mage spells go off unless interupted
6. Item phase - Items may be used here for example tying someone up, activating a ring, locking a door
7. Movement phase - All moving takes place here. moving counts as an action, and you may not move if you acted in one of the above phases (except for certain Hero feats I think)

My husband is modifying these PrinceCon rules for his campaign - these were streamlined to make a 46 hour con work. For campaign use, some updates need to be made. I think he's also making the classes better to address problems he sees in power levels.

I will probably document some of these changes/additions here.

This past weekend was a small gaming convention in Delaware known as Relaxicon. Different events run all weekend long, many of them opposite each other. For example, LARPs, table top games, board games, and card games.

I ran Maddie Hatter's Tea Party MiniLARP - a 2 hour piece of fluff with the opportunity to get all decked out in fun costumes and sit around drinking tea. We had a fun time, and I'll be continuing the LARP's plot through next year's, where instead of a Tea Party it will be a march to the Red Queen's castle. Below is a brief description of the main characters I had in this year's game, and pictures of the lovely people who played them.

Maddie Hatter: An idealist inventor of high-tech millinery, she announced that she was going to peacefully run as a political opponent of the Red Queen. At the first sign of trouble, though, she ran.

The White Rabbit: Although the White Rabbit was killed years and years ago, he still lives. The Red Queen had found him and saved his life by replacing his internal organs with clockwork parts. Now he's loyal to the Red Queen although being best friends with Maddie Hatter.

Robin Hood: A local insurgent against the violent Red Queen, he used to play pirates with peter Pan, and he's still stealing and causing mayhem (for the resistance, of course). And he might just have to take the resistance into his own hands.

Red Hunter: Red is the Daughter of the Queen's Huntsman, and after Hansel & Gretel's father, the Woodsman, killed her lover (a werewolf) she swore her allegiance to the Red Queen. She's determined to win the feud against the Woods family, even though she's got the hots for Hansel.

Hansel Woods: Hansel is the son of the Woodsman, and was recently poisoned by Grandmother Hunter (mother of the Huntsman) after doing her a good deed. He's trying to keep his sister, Gretel, and Red Hunter, from escalating the family feud.

Gretel Woods: Gretel is the daughter of the Woodsman and was recently poisoned by Grandmother Hunter (mother of the Huntsman) after doing her a good deed. She pledged to help the Red Queen if the Queen would help her crush the Hunter clan. The most important thing in the world is family.

Peter Pan: Peter was captured as a child and sold into slavery in the south before escaping and running away to a southern nation known as Neverland. There he accidentally discovered the Fountain of Youth and ran a rag-tag gang of jungle boys until he met Tinker Bella, a pretty weapons inventor, and decided to leave.

Tinker Bella: A product of a siren and a dying sailor, Tinker Bella is an inventor of magical weaponry. Her masterpiece is a freeze ray which uses the water from the Fountain of Youth, and she is in town to find a buyer. That could be anyone from the resistance, the Red Queen, or just someone with a grudge.

Lamm's PSA

Attention all citizens of coastal villages!

Hehheh. Here is a fun PSA that also functions as a summary of the run that Bob West did with us on Saturday. Its about 4 minutes, and features the song "Such Great Heights."

I had to create a new site in order to upload the mp3 file. LAME. I already use Yola for my Pearl City campaign, though, so I know it's pretty simple to organize and use.

The Defeat of Muirhead!!

The third run we went on during PrinceCon was with Alex. Instead of the standard recap, here is a visual depiction of how Muirhead went down. A few comments are added for clarity. (FYI Blog formatting turns these into squares. Click on them to see the full image.)

1. Sitting in hireling hall, our party (two catfolk, one eponi, a fae, and a hobbit) was approached by some chick named Asha having just escaped from being kidnapped and who needed our help.



2. We visit Zerlana who is using her ability to create interdimentional portals at will to train new students.



3. Turns out our Asha really was Muirhead's daughter in disguise! Good thing Zerlana noticed! Yay anti-magic field. Fake-Asha thinks her daddy-o is being controlled by EVIL CRYSTAL SHARDS and she needs our help!



4. We formulate a plan to keep Muirhead busy while Zerlana portals all the gas inside his Zepplin away so the protection spells his tattoo-mages are casting on him are disrupted so we can take him down!



5. Success! Even if we had to pretend to play along with the crazy guy being controlled by EVIL SHARDS, it worked! Zepplin crashed, and we got Muirhead.



6. EVIL SHARDS. Booyah.

Relaxicon, Pearl City

So PrinceCon is not the only gaming event this time of year. In a week and a half I'm running a game at Relaxicon, an awesome Delaware gaming con with all sorts of games, including my favorite, LARPs. It's a bunch of mini games, most between 2 and 4 hours long. There's a blend of card game, board game, pen & paper RPGs, and more LARP-type. Plus there's a talent show called The Styx.

I will be running a little one-shot 2 hour social interaciton game, which will be a Tea Party thrown by Maddie Hatter to sponsor their upcoming run for political office in Sherwood Forest. I need to finish up my characters & get them out to my players. I still have tons of spots to fill, sadly. Once the game is over I'll post the characters on here.

I am also running a once-a-month Pathfinder game called Pearl City. The website for that can be found HERE. I wish I hadn't lost my map of the city before I was able to scan it in. Our scanner just broke, so I'm kinda sad.

Notes

I had a small selection of notecards with me at the beginning of PrinceCon, which were eventually all used by Saturday morning. So I had the ingenious idea to start writing directly into my ConBook. That way I'd never lose my notes. Here is the draft I made for the write-up for Bob's run we did Saturday morning. I intend to work on a picture version tomorrow.

My notes eventually progressed into random scribbles, diagrams, and sometimes incomplete phrases that now make little to no sense. And sometimes it just felt useless to even bother.

The Bad Horse campaign, and one very funny conversation

The below culminates in a brief exchange that occurred during Sunday's final run at PrinceCon. I was running on 4 hours of sleep since 5:20 am Friday morning, and I may have been acting a little punchy. The set up is long, and details roughly the plot of the campaign.

Andy (Purraku) & I (Lamm) were on the final run of a GM's campaign, and we had also been on its first run Friday night. The first time around we had stopped and investigated every small, racist northern coastal town we came across trying to solve the mystery of the vague turmoil we heard rumors about. Lamm would tromp on ahead and win over the small-minded townsfolk with her perky honesty and obvious naiveté. They would see we had a Catfolk (or two) with us, and we'd try to figure out as much as possible before we wore out our welcome. By the end, we had an idea of where the bad guy, "Bad Horse," was located, and a vague idea of what he was doing (kidnapping humans and turning them into Eponi - the half human/half-horse people).

The last run was vastly different. The previous group had found and defeated Bad Horse and removed the hammer that had been causing the race changes, and now we had to respond to disturbance in Falconberg. Our poor GM Chris probably had to finish as much of his plot as he could, because we walked into a 5-front war. I guess we made the 6th group of combatants. Turns out that not only had there been a hammer that turned humans into Eponi, there was also a blow-gun that turned people (well, at the very least dwarves) into Perrin, the otter-people, and a set of claws that turned others into Catfolk. The people (or animals) wielding these items desired the other items, and any other item containing evil magical shards of crystal. Various other races were there, too.

We had seen the wielder of the claws, a huge cat the size of an elephant, creating Catfolk from little alley cats. The last group to arrive was a rag-tag bunch of humans literally dressed in rags carrying improvised weapons. Instead of assuming that they were zombies (which only now did I think of), we assumed they were the people who had been Eponi who had turned back once the hammer was destroyed.

Now, there are only 3 of these half-animal, half-human races; the Perrin, the Eponi, and the Catfolk. They were created by an evil mage/cleric some 70 or 80 years prior. Andy was playing a Catfolk, and upon seeing this new group of enemies and hearing my own hasty assumption that they were former Eponi, he jumped to his own conclusion. Here is the rough transcript of what followed.

Lamm: So all we have to do is destroy the claws and all of these fighting Catfolk will turn back into alley cats!

Purraku: Oh no! I wonder what I am going to do when I turn into a cat.

Lamm: A what? a cat?

Purraku: It'll be great! I'll be adopted by someone and sleep for 14 hours a day and have all the fish and milk I want!

Lamm: Wait you need to be adopted by someone when you're a small, *real* cat?

Purraku: Maybe you could-

Lamm: I'll adopt you! When you're a cat I'll adopt you and you can be my pet and we can be friends forever and we can talk about all the battles we fought in - well I can talk about them and you can listen - and we'll be friends forever, because you'll be my pet! *bounce bounce hug*

As you might have guessed, destruction of the item did not cause original - or even the recently created - Catfolk to turn back into alley cats, nor did Purraku change either.

PrinceCon 36 Photos

While I was thinking of it, I snapped a few photographs of Hireling Hall and some of my early adventures. By the end I was tired, groggy, and lucky to remember where my car was parked.

The Saturation Point

PrinceCon 36 and the tale of Riza Lamm

Riza Lamm was a hobbit who ended up on the streets of Delft far too early in life. Things were often hard as a child alone, and there were times when Lamm wondered if life was even worthing living anymore. When she was still young, a cleric of Aru, God of healing and life, noticed her on the street. Within days she had been moved into the local Aru-sponsored orphanage, and a whole new world opened up to her.

People were nice. They were helpful. And above all, they valued and treasured the life of Aru had given all people. Including her. Lamm's disbelief grew to wonder at the optimism and purity of those devoted to Aru, and she strove to distance herself from her past through Aru's teachings. She took up not only the calling as a cleric, but also Aru's Oath not to harm people, even if they attacked her. An oath she would be sorely tested on once she joined the adventurers from Hireling Hall.

Lamm was determined to help others see and benefit from Aru's love and kindness as she had, and made a conscious decision to view the world with an open mind and an open heart. After all, if she had been forgiven for her past, then there was hope for anyone.

***

This past weekend was PrinceCon 36, a yearly 46-hour D&D convention that ROCKS! Players meet up in Hireling Hall and form parties, snag a GM, and go on "4-6" hour runs (see 7-9 hours) using their own house blend rules that were surprisingly easy to learn. This was my first convention, and I was not brave enough to run the entire 46 hours straight through. I arrived Friday at 6 after work, and over the weekend I was in 5 runs, leaving the building for a span of only 5 hours Friday night where I snagged 4 hours of sleep in my own bed, and some food & caffeine at the local grocery.

Upon my return, it has come to my attention that there are those out there (okay, just Tali) who would be interested in a humorous retelling of some of the adventures of this weekend - and possibly future gaming exploits as well. I hope to post some of my scanned notes on the games (not that I expect anyone to be able to read them), character "logs" and adventure summaries. Besides, it will give me an excuse to relive some of the AMAZING puns that flew around this weekend.