Gary Con XI

Another Gary Con is in the books.  Sticking to tradition, I roomed with the same guys as last year (Judge Jeff of Spellburn and Appendix N, weird illustrator David Hoskins), and this time we were joined by David's friend Harry, who was attending Gary Con for the first time.  This year I decided to run games as well and signed up for three games.  A bit naively I chose to run three different systems, so I lugging way too many books into the Con.

AS&SH: The Anthropophagi of Xambaala

The Anthropophagi of Xambaala is a module for Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea written by Corey R. Walden and kickstarted by North Wind Adventures along with The Beasts of Kraggoth Manor in the aptly named Beasts and Cannibals campaign.  The kickstarter was launched back in March with an estimated delivery date in August.  PDFs were delivered to backers on July 30th and the printed books started shipping over Labor Day weekend.  I've said before that Jeff Talanian runs an extremely professional and punctual operation and he continues to deliver.

I've had time to read through the adventure and my game group has a few weeks of play in it now, so let's see what this Anthropophagi stuff is all about.  Spoiler review after the break.

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.

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.

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.

AS&SH Review

Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea is a game by Jeff Talanian of North Wind Adventures.  "A Role Playing Game of Swords, Sorcery, and Weird Fantasy", AS&SH is a retroclone somewhat resembling 1e but with significant changes, and including the built in setting of Hyperborea, which is heavily influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and many other great authors of weird fiction.  I've been running the game for my group for a handful of sessions now and decided to write up a review with my thoughts so far.  This is fairly long, as necessary for a book this size, looking at the Kickstarter fulfillment and then each section of the book, so if you want the quick version: I love it, 5/5, etc.

AS&SH: The Manse of Korrhil Xai

I'm behind on campaign updates.  We've had three more sessions of AS&SH, playing weekly on Mondays, although I had to cancel one session due to travelling.

AS&SH: New Roll20 Campagin

We're taking a break from MCC and beginning a new campaign with Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea.  I backed the kickstarter for the second edition last year.  At the time, I knew nothing of the game, but I loved the idea of a setting based on the works of HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, and the artwork looked great, so I figured I'd mine it for ideas at the very least.  Last June at NTRPG con, I had the opportunity to play the game in Chainsaw's Lost Treasure of Atlantis dungeon and loved it, so I promptly asked Jeff Talanian to upgrade my pledge from pdf level to the hardback.  The kickstarter delivered the pdfs in September, only a few weeks behind the original projected date, which is a huge win as far as kickstarters go.  Books began delivering in October, and although I haven't received mine yet (Jeff is hand signing each one in backer order, and I'm backer #853 of 897), the pictures folks have been sharing on the G+ community are beautiful and the praise has been pretty universal.