A couple of weeks ago, The Dudes traveled to New Orleans to celebrate my 50th birthday in grand fashion. We lodged in a house that was the definition of character (see it here on airbnb) and was within walking distance of the French Quarter, although Uber rides were cheap and convenient. For touristy stuff, we did the airboat ride (Airboat Adventures) and visited the National WWII Museum. Thursday night was our big bar-hopping night, where we started off with a great dinner at Cafe Amelie and then hit 3-4 bars to listen to live music and partake of adult beverages. Best venue of the evening had to be The Maison, where we were treated to a rollicking set by Dysfunktional Bone.
We had a slow start to our Friday, but hey, we were on vacation. We decided to get started on our adventure, which involved us traveling to the Astral Plane to seek out and destroy the Lich Queen of the Githyanki. Real ho-hum stuff, right? OK, so let me back up and do some 'splaining. We rolled these characters up back in 2009. Yep, you read that right, 2009 - this party has been rolling for eight years! Of course, we only play a handful of times each year due to the fact four of us live here in Washington and the other two down the coast in California.
Between levels 1 and 20, we managed to end up quite high on the Red Wizards of Thay shit list. Oh, there were others too, but we had a full-blown Hatfields vs McCoys going on with the Thayans. They would stalk us, ambush and harass us, and we would repay the favor with forays into Thay, raid their caravans, and finally end up part of a massive drow raid that descended upon Thaymount and did major damage to the leadership caste. I think they might be holding a grudge for that escapade.
And then strangely enough, an emissary from the Red Wizards reached out to us because they wanted our help. Wait, what? Faster than you can channel your inner Adm. Ackbar (It's a trap!), we learned that Szass Tam, the Grand High Poobah of the Red Wizards, was scheming with the Lich Queen of the Githyanki to launch some sort of coordinated strike against Faerun. The other zulkirs weren't too keen on this solo endeavour by Tam, so they thought enlisting us (and the Red Sword) would put a stop to the plans without betraying themselves to Tam.
So that's how we ended up on the Astral Plane inside the Lich Queen's palace, fighting powerful Githyanki, gith/dragon hybrids, a legless Githyanki warlock, a two-headed red dragon (!), the Lich Queen herself, and some guy named Szass Tam. I'm pleased to report we were able to vanquish our foes in what was some of our best gaming to date. At least it was great, right up until the point where Szass appeared. We failed to destroy him (and yes, we had his phylactery) and my wizard/archmage Garrity was snuffed out by a Sphere of Annihilation. Luckily, our resourceful son of Moradin was able to do some of that cleric shit and bring me back. So Tam escapes and lives to scheme another day, but we did destroy the Lich Queen (permanently) and thwart Tam's plans of conquest.
What next? Well, for all intents and purposes, our high-level campaign is over. Ned reserves the right to continue this campaign down the road, but for now we are already looking ahead to starting over. I've compiled a small stack of character templates so once we determine our ability scores and hash out who plays what this time around, I'll be good to go. And I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to play this time around - a class I've never played before! Should be fun.
I'm sure Ned could write a dissertation on running high/epic level campaigns, but we would all agree that 20th level encounters take much, much longer. Buffs, immunities, SR, dispells, counterspells, the list goes on and on. I'll write my own thesis on the archmage sometime, but his high arcana abilities were very flexible and a lot of fun to use. Huge thanks to Ned for all the time and sweat he expended on the campaign, and for putting up with all the shit and shenanigans we put him through.
Of course the best part of the campaign is simply spending time with my best friends. We've rolled a lot of bones, drank a lot of beers, gave each other copious amounts of shit, and I love them like brothers. Wouldn't have it any other way.
PS - phylactery is apparently a hard word to pronounce for most of my party. And since they know me all too well, even if they wanted to pronounce it correctly, they butchered it just to stick it to me. Dickheads.
Showing posts with label D&D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label D&D. Show all posts
Friday, January 27, 2017
Friday, September 11, 2015
Chapter 11: Little Metal People
About a week ago, I woke up one morning to find an email alert in my inbox that I had all but forgotten about: Powell's Books had finally received a copy of Fantasy Role Playing Games by J. Eric Holmes, M.D. Yes, the same Holmes of Holmes Basic Set/Holmes Blue Book fame. I cannot recall for the life of me when I signed up for this alert, but I'm pretty sure it's been well over a year. And when I logged in, the book was still available, so I quickly snapped it up. It set me back $10.95 + shipping, which was about 1/10th the price this book usually goes for on eBay or Amazon. Thanks, Powell's! You guys rock.
I am traditionally a read-every-page-in-order kind of guy, but since this tome isn't telling a story I didn't feel any remorse for skipping ahead to Chapter 11: Little Metal People. I tried to read it with a mindset of "pretend it is the early 1980s" and not 2015. It is a good general-purpose miniature primer, discussing how the fantasy market evolved from the wargaming market, who the prominent manufacturers were at the time of writing, and some basic how-to info on prep/priming/painting.
Still, there are enough little nuggets of info that make the chapter a fairly interesting read. Minifigs, at the time one of the bigger companies, apparently did not track sales by number of miniatures shipped, but rather in tons of metal shipped! Heritage was also one of the heavies, and the trio of Ral Partha, DragonTooth, and Archive were singled out as new companies.
There is a delightful photo (all the pics are black & white) on page 167 that shows a swarm of Minifigs pig-faced orcs on the attack. Classic D&D imagery, and it immediately made me think of the orcs in the Monster Manual.
Archive is called out for having "a regrettable tendency to make castings of Japanese or Chinese toys and sell them as new figures (their "land-shark" is an example), but they also produce a number of figures that appear to be genuine originals."
Again, not new information at this point in time, but a very keen observation back then.
Dr. Holmes gives Tom Loback a shout-out: "Dragontooth Miniatures makes a line of utterly delightful fantasy armies." He singles out the Amphibians and Saurians in particular.
He then moves on to discuss female miniatures, and how many early castings were in the nude/nearly nude variety. "It was several years before any of the figure companies realized there was a market for lady adventurers and sorceresses who dressed appropriately to their role and did not look as if they were about to star in the middle of a Las Vegas nightclub chorus line."
Regarding dwarves, specifically female dwarves, Holmes states "There is a sharp controversy within TSR Hobbies over whether a female dwarf wears a beard. Since Gygax insists she would, perhaps there is no hurry to produce a game-playing figure." Nowadays we can find female miniatures dressed (or undressed) for battle thanks to companies such as Reaper, Red Box Games, Hasslefree, and Freebooter.
Another photo that caught my eye was on page 177. It appears that in the dark pre-battlemat days, gamers used what they had to produce a suitable playing/mapping field. It looks like a plain wooden table (which may or may not have been painted/stained) is used as the mat, and chalk (I think) is used to draw corridors and terrain in place of water-soluble markers.
EDIT (11/18/15): If I had actually read the book in order, I would have read the following passage on page 93: "My own gaming table is spray-painted with "chalk board paint" so that the green surface can be marked with chalk and then, when the characters move on, a new set of doors and walls can be drawn around them. In this way, the little figures never move off the table, they only move to new positions as the scenery shifts around them."
For a minis guy like me, Chapter 11 was worth the purchase price alone. I have since started the book from page 1, and as a D&D generalist, it has so far been an entertaining read, again taking everything from an 80s perspective when at all possible. I highly recommend this book, and remember to sign up at powells.com to receive alerts for this and other uncommon titles.
I am traditionally a read-every-page-in-order kind of guy, but since this tome isn't telling a story I didn't feel any remorse for skipping ahead to Chapter 11: Little Metal People. I tried to read it with a mindset of "pretend it is the early 1980s" and not 2015. It is a good general-purpose miniature primer, discussing how the fantasy market evolved from the wargaming market, who the prominent manufacturers were at the time of writing, and some basic how-to info on prep/priming/painting.
Still, there are enough little nuggets of info that make the chapter a fairly interesting read. Minifigs, at the time one of the bigger companies, apparently did not track sales by number of miniatures shipped, but rather in tons of metal shipped! Heritage was also one of the heavies, and the trio of Ral Partha, DragonTooth, and Archive were singled out as new companies.
There is a delightful photo (all the pics are black & white) on page 167 that shows a swarm of Minifigs pig-faced orcs on the attack. Classic D&D imagery, and it immediately made me think of the orcs in the Monster Manual.
Archive is called out for having "a regrettable tendency to make castings of Japanese or Chinese toys and sell them as new figures (their "land-shark" is an example), but they also produce a number of figures that appear to be genuine originals."
Plastic toy (photo: acaeum.com)
Archive sharkadillo (photo: Lost Minis Wiki)
Again, not new information at this point in time, but a very keen observation back then.
Dr. Holmes gives Tom Loback a shout-out: "Dragontooth Miniatures makes a line of utterly delightful fantasy armies." He singles out the Amphibians and Saurians in particular.
He then moves on to discuss female miniatures, and how many early castings were in the nude/nearly nude variety. "It was several years before any of the figure companies realized there was a market for lady adventurers and sorceresses who dressed appropriately to their role and did not look as if they were about to star in the middle of a Las Vegas nightclub chorus line."
Regarding dwarves, specifically female dwarves, Holmes states "There is a sharp controversy within TSR Hobbies over whether a female dwarf wears a beard. Since Gygax insists she would, perhaps there is no hurry to produce a game-playing figure." Nowadays we can find female miniatures dressed (or undressed) for battle thanks to companies such as Reaper, Red Box Games, Hasslefree, and Freebooter.
Another photo that caught my eye was on page 177. It appears that in the dark pre-battlemat days, gamers used what they had to produce a suitable playing/mapping field. It looks like a plain wooden table (which may or may not have been painted/stained) is used as the mat, and chalk (I think) is used to draw corridors and terrain in place of water-soluble markers.
EDIT (11/18/15): If I had actually read the book in order, I would have read the following passage on page 93: "My own gaming table is spray-painted with "chalk board paint" so that the green surface can be marked with chalk and then, when the characters move on, a new set of doors and walls can be drawn around them. In this way, the little figures never move off the table, they only move to new positions as the scenery shifts around them."
For a minis guy like me, Chapter 11 was worth the purchase price alone. I have since started the book from page 1, and as a D&D generalist, it has so far been an entertaining read, again taking everything from an 80s perspective when at all possible. I highly recommend this book, and remember to sign up at powells.com to receive alerts for this and other uncommon titles.
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