MCC: The Arrival

 Goodman Games launched their kickstarter for Mutant Crawl Classics on June 24, 2016.  Fulfillment was originally estimated for fall 2017 but after backer feedback on the pdf drafts, they decided to delay printing to correct some mistakes and their new estimate was May 2017.  They posted a few days ago that shipping had begun, but they made another mistake - not everyone got their backerkit tracking numbers correctly.  So it when my apartment mailroom notified me that I had a delivery waiting, I got a nice surprise.  Photos ahead.

Gary Con X

The Seat of Honor

Day One

I arrived at Gary Con X around 3pm on Wednesday.  This is only my second con to attend after going to NTRPG last June.  It's a significantly larger con but still nowhere near the size of the big cons.  Whereas at NTRPG I carefully booked all my time, I only scheduled a single game each day, hoping that I'd be able to find enough extra stuff to do to fill my time.

On Challenge

There is a shortage of player intended advice in RPG books, but the 1e PHB contains a section on "Successful Adventures" full of good tips for playing the game.  Although it assumes a level of out of game commitment among the players which likely seems absurd to most GMs, it ends with this poignant section on why players should care about playing well:

Jousting for OSR games

I've been wanting to introduce some medieval games into my campaigns.  It's always nice to have opportunities for wealth and fame that don't involve fighting monsters.  Jousting tournaments can provide a whole host of adventuring opportunities as the PCs will rub shoulders and exchange blows with a great many characters of varying social standing, and how they conduct themselves can greatly influence their standing.

Surprisingly, there aren't a lot of jousting rules that I could find.  None of the various rulebooks I own have any, and a cursory internet search only turned up a lot of overly complicated 3x-5e houserules.  Fine if you're into that, but they won't suit my purposes, so I figured I'd take a crack at a simple jousting system that accomplishes a few goals.

AS&SH Roll20 Update and Rats in the Walls Review

My Roll20 campaign has had eleven sessions so far.  I posted recaps of our first session and another update after a few more sessions.  While I haven't felt like writing up session reports lately, I did want to write a review for the first official AS&SH module that I've inserted into our game, Jeff Talanian's Rats in the Walls.

Villain Spotlight: Jenner

In 1979, after his pitches were rejected at Disney where he was working as an animator, Don Bluth and a group of his fellow animators left Disney to form their own studio, Don Bluth Productions.  The studio is known for their unique animated films that often dealt with darker subject matter than Disney films.  An American Tail is a somewhat depressing story of the immigrant experience, beginning with an antisemitic raid by Cossacks on a Jewish Ukrainian village.  Once they flee to America they find their dreams of utopia are somewhat dashed by the terrible poverty the lower class immigrants live in in America and that the same prejudices are there as well.  All Dogs Go to Heaven is a heartwarming story of gambling addiction, smoking drinking, murder, and the soul's ultimate fate for heaven or hell.  It features some of the most disturbing images of demons and hell to be found in a children's movie.

Fear the Walking Dead

In my current AS&SH campaign, my players have encountered zombies twice.  The first was running into four zombies in a corridor.  They threw down oil, lit the hallway on fire, led the burning zombies into some other monsters so they'd fight, and only when there was only two left, badly burnt and wounded, did they engage them in combat.  The second encounter, they opened a door to a room, saw eight zombies, slammed the door shut, spiked it closed, and fled to the opposite side of the dungeon.  For the first time ever, my players are deathly afraid of zombies.