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.

Villain Spotlight: King Haggard

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle, was published in 1968.  It tells the story of a unicorn who overhears a hunter saying that she is the last of her kind and decides to leave her enchanted forest in search of other unicorns.  She learns of the Red Bull, who drove the unicorns to a far away land, and she meets companions in the magician Schmendrick and Molly Grue, the wife of a bandit leader.  On the journey to the castle of King Haggard they encounter the Red Bull and Schmendrick turns the unicorn into a human to protect her.  They arrive at the castle and seek employment with the king in order to search the castle for signs of the unicorns.  Following clues and braving the lair of the Red Bull, they eventually free the unicorns and destroy the castle.

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.