Troll Lord Games

Extreme style
The first hour will be straight RAW C&C until the group finds an strange pylon ... and then it's world of Ioan where the world is dying an skyships ride the currents and the sky is lit by swirling cloud day and night.

It's my own mix of the new Mars pdf, Iron Lords of Jupiter and Bad Axe's Slavelords of Cydonia to make a plupy Planetary Romance setting. We'll include Action and Stunt points along with new, converted races.

Wish me luck. The pedal is to the metal and the railing is coming up fast.
For further information:

pulp: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_hero#Genres)

Planetary Romance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_ ... 22_stories)

Good luck!

Sounds cool. Have fun and you have it whipped.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog

Good luck man. Bring it home!

.............................................Omote

FPQ
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> Omote's Advanced C&C stuff <
Duke Omote Landwehr, Holy Order of the FPQ ~ Prince of the Castles & Crusades Society

Sounds pretty good. May your game be hellawicked

I'd have to say I enjoyed the run of Mars yesterday AF. Couldn't hit the broad side of a floating ship and the inuendos on the naked dwarf were scary but it was fun. Now, to get people out of a 3ed mindset. . .
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Fry: Well, thanks to the internet, I'm now bored with sex.

Battle report to come soon.

I swear the naked dwarf wasn't my fault.

anglefish wrote:
Battle report to come soon.

I swear the naked dwarf wasn't my fault.

Hope it went well. Looking forward to hearing about the game.
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Count Rhuveinus - Lejendary Keeper of Castle Franqueforte

"Enjoy a 'world' where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!" ~ Gary Gygax

"By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes:" - Macbeth

Naked Dwarves... just what kind of C&C game are you running, sir!

.....................................Omote

FPQ
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> Omote's Advanced C&C stuff <
Duke Omote Landwehr, Holy Order of the FPQ ~ Prince of the Castles & Crusades Society

You're screwed!

-Just kidding

anglefish wrote:
Battle report to come soon.

I swear the naked dwarf wasn't my fault.

Waiting for the battle report, (you coulld leave out the naked dwarf TMI )
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Never throw rocks at a man with a Vorpal Sword!

Maliki wrote:
Waiting for the battle report, (you coulld leave out the naked dwarf TMI )

I'm half way through it. Maybe I'll post up a Part I tonight if I can get to the part that explains this whole alleged "Naked Dwarf" Syndrome.

I'm looking forwards to reading about it. How is Iron Lords of Jupiter? I've been meaning to get my hands on a copy of that issue.

First off, my thanks to our host who cooked us some excellent BBQ by the 2 p.m. start time.
Character Creation:

We started around 1 p.m. and got three PCs made, this included two fathers who had to corral three children into playing with each other as well as discussing party back story. Overall the party prep time was good. The potentially slowest part, outfitting was circumvented by me saying, Don't ask for plate mail or anything too obnoxious and you have it.

Some descriptions and pictures of the more exotic pieces of equipment/weapons would have helped. Luckily, the gestalt knowledge of the group got us through that. (We had a small discussion about what a Sleeve Tangler was.) I was getting nervous because our host was asking detailed questions about these weapons and trying to see what their game effects were. In the end he was trying to talk me into a combo Main Gouche and Sleeve Tangler ... Well, you know that really a Main Guache is just a short weapon with an large hand guard, if you put twisty tines on it, you could have ... More on that habit later.
Forgive me that I don't remember the PC names in this one-shot, but we had a Human Rogue (our host), a Half-Elven Ranger (Bulletmeat) and a Dwarven Cleric (a coworker of mine), all at 5th level. We also had our host's g/f watching, she's never heard of role-playing before, all she knew was that we were playing a new game.
Back story:

The Rogue is on penance by escorting the cleric. The Ranger had been a regular acquaintance of the pair when ever the cleric was sent beyond civilization on church missions. The half-ranger was made a believer after the church took him in as an orphan.

I had them chose between a Medieval start or to begin on the planet. They chose the Middle Ages, which was great. I had an instant hook, Find a way home.
Mission: A church scholar has asked for certain strange documents while out on a historical dig in a remote marsh (Slavelords of Cyndonia, Bad Axe Games).
Report:

Right off the bat, the Cleric and Rogue had great dialogue and if it was a campaign game, they would have been getting bonus XP within 5 minutes of the game staring. It was a great omen.

The group first found the dig site seemingly abandoned. Tools were put up and a fire kept a dinner stew pot warm. A few Siege checks for the Ranger and Rogue provided some clues along with some good old fashioned PC snooping:

A diary shows the ruins under study predate human civilization and have strange characters (the Rogue wanted a few more Siege rolls to see if he could decipher something that's stymied scholars for centuries.)

Some barrels in the camp contain a strange mud that has iridescent purple flakes. Several foot prints lead away from the camp.

The tracks lead to a village where the dig team was celebrating a meal with the locals. The team witnessed this as they sneaked in the bushes. Despite the Ranger's intelligence Siege check offering him the advice that they should enter the village from the front, the Rogue decided to just barge in. The other two followed, pretending to trip and bumble, so as to assuage the natives that they were harmless.

After meeting the group (some great roleplaying of civilized conversation while some party members joined the pagan dances), they were taken to the discovered ruins.

Here, they missed their first chance to discover an important crystal in the first room, no worries. I simply added a secret passage in the next room and put the crystal in there to be found by both the Dwarf, Half Elf and Rogues special abilities. It seems that traps and secret doors located in wilderness ruins provide easy excuses for GM fiat. LOL! The next room did have another clue besides the secret tunnel, huge empty stone chambers that had purple, shiny dust. The tunnel took them to the end chamber, an arch with more strange symbols and an inset that would fit the crystal perfectly.

They put the crystal in, the sigils glowed and then everything went white then black.(We were running late, only two hours to go before we had to stop, so I skipped the planned fight with the [censored] panthers, which could have given big clues to the players, though I did mention to the Ranger, that one of the rare things he was told to defend humanity from was a strange ancient enemy that could turn brother against brother.)

They woke up naked in a cell with a loinclothed tribesman from the village and a strange gray creature with only horizontal slits for a face (a Groll from Iron Lords of Jupiter, Polyhedron #160) chained to the wall. The Dwarf wasn't waking up, so the Ranger, Bulletmeat's PC, kicked him, only to be horrified when the naked dwarf hugged his leg. (I think this is where Bulletmeat started his therapy bill. LOL!)

Comprehend languages helped the cleric understand the words, but not the world they were now in. None of the cities of Greyhawk were known to the creature and he claimed that there were no gods. The cleric (not the player) was entertainingly confused.

I mentioned that Action Points and Stunt Points where now available for those who could creatively describe their use. The Rogue spent his in no time, but took some time getting in the pulp mindset. He eventually used the Action Points to offset any negative he would have gotten for using the body piercing from the tribesman as lock picks to release the Groll. The heavy creature, along with the party, pulled the chains loose from their moorings.

This brought a guard to the cell, but door went transparent when the guard looked in, which spared him from the Rogue's hasty ambush. The cleric kept quizzing the Grol on the door's magic, but the creature said that it was just how the door worked.

The clerics own magic, an Augury, helped locate the team's equipment. The Rogue climbed the outside wall to get the stuff after the Groll used the chains to pull the window bars loose. The officer's room, two floors up had more than PC stuff (which included a St. Cuthbert holy symbol, a mini-cudgel, that now sprouted green twigs when there wasn't a tree in sight of the desert that stretched from horizon to horizon). There were crystal swords and strange crossbows that also had colored crystals (Slavelords has the most variety of weapons compared to the Mars PDF and Iron Lords but the Mars damage stats seemed more in line with what I wanted). Several maps were also snatched up, including one of a land none of them had seen before (the Mars PDF world map,Adamant Entertainment.) Though to be honest these were gotten after the fact. Everyone seemed to forget that I mentioned maps once they started seeing what different effects the crystals had in their weapons. ROTFL!!!!

After shoving two guards (Marikons from ILJ) out of a broken window, the Rogue pulled up the other two party members and all three of them snuck down to release the Groll.

At a look at the maps, provided an immediate escape to the roof and the eventual location of another arch. One the roof, there was a teathered airship ready for take off, when three red, bury fellows came around with their own crystal powered guns that added fire electric damage. (more Marikons). Everyone's swords added fire.

(Here is where our session broke down a little, the Rogue player kept trying to push what he could do with a Seige roll:

Can I roll to make a move-by attack on the guy in Hold Person and do a Coupe Degrace

Can I roll to make my attack, and leap on to the ship?

I'm prone, I'm going to roll over and take a swing at his legs.

While the genre supports this wild action, it was getting a little old that the player kept pushing me with a new question every round. (see back to the Sleeve Tangler thing.) In an campaign game, the best way to counter this would be to have enemies that were just as acrobatic doing their own move-bys.)
Combat Actions:

* The Marikons kept firing their guns until the PC closed into melee

*The Groll was a damage sponge as it ran up to wrestle a Marikon guard.

* The Cleric ran until he could cast Hold Person, then closed in for melee, did some healing and took damage for it.

* The Rogue tried all the stuff mentioned above and succeeded at most of it.

* Bulletmeat's Ranger had no luck with his bow until the end, getting one fellow in the eye, and then started running as the ship started to take off. He then cut the anchoring tether and held onto the rope as they lifted off into the sky.
Out of the range of crossbow fire, the PC realized none of them knew how to pilot the craft. It was then that the clouds parted to reveal a colossal manta ray creature moving above them --- and then it dove at ramming speed right at the ship .... .

What can I say, you've got to end your Planetary Romance on a cliffhanger! LOL!

Originally, I planned to use The Golden Familiar from the CnC screen and Atlas Game's excellent Lean and Hungry modules as two portal locations. They could chose from either one that was heavily guarded (Golden Familiar) or one where no one ever returned (Lean and Hungry), but we never got that far. Heck if all CnC gaming session went like this, I could get a year's worth of entertainment mapped out in an afternoon. LOL!
Post Game Conclusions:
CnC Pros:

I still haven't checked to see if the movement/attack rule is right, but CnC showed that if it's a house rule, no one can tell the difference. Same goes for action points. Yep, house rule away.

The Siege engine is right up my alley and reflects generally how I run a game. (Or as how some of my fellow gamers call it. You like people to roll dice and say 'That's good' and keep playing. )
Cons:

Some wanted the initiative to change every round, especially if they had no way to affect the roll. I personally like to give speedy characters an edge. With the small attribute mods in CnC, I would be comfortable in a Dex mod to the roll.

While the lack of feats and other minutia keeps the game from dragging on, smart min/maxers are going to latch on to the Siege rolls, switching their tactics from rules lawering to logic/historical lawering. While this may not help some GMs, a simple That's not the way I see it, may be enough.

Dwarves, Rogues and Rangers, there's a lot of crossover in the traps department with these guys.
In the end, the g/f thought it was cool thing that took a lot of imagination. "I could see everyone trying to pull on the chains," she said. Right now, though, she thinks this is a "boy's thing" and isn't interested in playing.

I found that most of the questions the rogue had about moving and higher ground were pg.115- 118.

Now, if I can only remember to add in my combat marauder ability next time for damage. I gotta get outa that 'fighter' mind set.

Now, to just drill out the 'hairy flop' image from my brain.
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Fry: Well, thanks to the internet, I'm now bored with sex.

Forgive me, I had to share.

This was part of an email that came from one of the guys that had to bow out at the last minute

Quote:
Although I missed the game I read the in depth report Chris submitted. It read like a pretty good pulp novel ;p Brought back flashes of the old days --- Lawman

Either I write a decent battle report or everyone else was having as much fun as I was

I love it! I wish I could play in that game; it sounds like loads of fun. I like you use actions points if they are described creatively.

Will there be more? What's that manta ray thing going to do! GASP!

I must admit that your game sounds very interesting but then again as I am a huge john carter of mars fan maybe not so surprising after all.