Monday 13 April 2020

Pretentious trash, but not unplayable.

Does anyone have any online Actual Plays of my stuff?

I'd like to try collecting them in one place I can easily refer to, (like the 'I Reed' and 'I Spek' buttons on the right rail), so the next time someone calls my stuff pretentious unplayable trash online I can just refer them here...

Contact in comments or hit the "where to find me" button on the right for literally all my social media.

06-J.M.Szancer--illus.-for-Za-Krola-Jelonka-by-Jan-Brzechwa-(Poland.-1950)_900


Deep Carbon Observatory


The GG NO RE podcast



Ten Foot Polemic blog


From the LotFP Forums






Veins of the Earth


Pretendo Games blog report


From the LotFP Forums






Silent Titans




Fire on the Velvet Horizon


From the comments..

I've used versions of the Flammeous Lads (from Fire on the Velvet Horizon) and the Nightmare Sea (from the blog) in games, but entangled with other things, rather than as neat units to be pointed out as examples of actual play. I had the Deep Carbon Observatory on the campaign map, but the players never went to the relevant area..


Sky-Stone-River-Place




34 comments:

  1. Love your stuff, but usually chop it into parts and drop into my own campaigns, don’t think I’ve ever run something start to finish.

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  2. I am playing blue medusa and loving it. could have more treasure in the opening rooms, though.

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    1. Not really connected to that project any more but thanks for the comment.

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  3. Not yet, but my (young) players have just waded through parts of Deep Carbon Observatory. They will also soon become acquainted with Veins of the Earth and Fire on the Velvet Horizon. https://chroniclesoftheconsortium.blogspot.com/ although I still need to catch up to that part of their campaign in my reports. And they are eminently playable!

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    1. If they are young be careful!

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    2. I was. I didn't run the starting town because I slotted the Observatory into the campaign in a different way - they were the ones who caused the flooding, albeit as a side effect from using an artefact to transport a city to safety from a war zone. I didn't use the cannibalistic bits or the witch, because they didn't have the advance warning about how not to kill her. I am, though, going to steal her and use her in the campaign later, except they'll have to destroy her in nine different ways themselves. The Crows will be waiting for them in ambush after they emerge from the Observatory at the end. And I have a cunning plan for the giant...

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  4. hi! I don't have a recording but just started running BCO yesterday with a new group using the Knave rules through Roll20.net. Got through the prologue/flooding of Carrowmore sequence in about one hour of real time and everyone had a blast. Will continue the adventure next weekend. Can't wait to get my remastered edition through the Kickstarter!!

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  5. Replies
    1. Not quite what I was looking for but thank you for the pictures nonetheless

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  6. There is this session on youtube of DCO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbPedtTfZtQ

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  7. I've used versions of the Flammeous Lads (from Fire on the Velvet Horizon) and the Nightmare Sea (from the blog) in games, but entangled with other things, rather than as neat units to be pointed out as examples of actual play. I had the Deep Carbon Observatory on the campaign map, but the players never went to the relevant area...

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  8. I've probably bombed you with this, but Vanishing Tower started off a new fantasy campaign with Sky-Stone-River Place. We are 23 sessions in and I have recorded every session. Your module occupies the three first sessions of the game.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFmlC_qhOok&t=8261s

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  9. My players went from Carrowmore up to the dam but then decided to hire some dwarves to fix the dam and flood the lake instead of going into the pit.

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  10. I've only run one campaign before and am presently running silent Titans for three friends who are mostly new to role-playing. Some initial confusions and hilarious mishaps but they named and made friends with the clockwork spider who was a highlight. They forgot the name of the contact they were supposed to give the soap to in the fort and ended up giving it to hugh's number 2, to much general hilarity. One of them gallantly seduced Hugh and he agreed to spare their hands for now. The only real problem I've run into is picturing the incidental villages and stops in the wilderness well enough to make travel engaging but that's probably more to do with my inexperience than the book. Overall very enjoyable times being had.

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  11. I've run DCO! I made the mistake of trying to run it as a two-shot, which was definitely too ambitious.

    My players loved the imagery: they met the witch, the crows, went through the dam, and met the cave giant. I didn't really know how to run OSR crawls properly, though, so I think they felt a bit bewildered by the number of rooms in the right stalactite (I forget the name).

    I'm not brave enough to run a VeinsCrawl. One day.

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  12. I played in that Black Hack game of Deep Carbon Obsevatory on Gauntlet Hangouts that you linked. It was amazing - and also my first ever experience of anything OSR related! I've been low-key obsessed w/ DCO ever since.

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  13. I ran DCO the original, years ago!

    My players believed it was railroady because first the barrage of things during the flood happens and they didn't really know all the things they missed so to speak; it's absolutely a good system and not railroady but they got the impression that things just _happened_ as much as I tried to convey the choices they had.

    Then the part immediately following that is a wilderness trek… along a river. So linear followed linear, in their minds. The dam map I couldn't really understand. I didn't really get that room 1 [#24] (and, sort of, 7 [#23]) are visible from the outside. I'm not the sharpest tool in the proverbial…

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    1. Hmm, maybe it is too linear. Did you talk to them after the adventure and show them the flowchart and see what they thought?

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    2. Yeah, I did; or rather, I had moved it over to cards that on the front had the flowchart stuff and on the back had the details about the encounter—this was before the new layout made this much quicker and easier to run. I was afraid that the layout (in the old version) was going to make it hard to find. So I had cards that looked like this

      https://idiomdrottning.org/carrowmore_first-card.pdf

      That's just the first card (I can't upload the rest obv since it used your copyrighted text but I had made 19 cards for my own use).
      That card leads in to either card 4 or 5 which in turn leads to either card 7 or 8 (if 4. If 5 then 7, 8 or 9.) and so on. (Obv with the new layouts, cards like these aren't needed because the spreads are easy to use.)

      As DM, I know that there's this huge tree of options to navigate but from the players POV, they don't really see that. They tend to hyperfocus on the one choice they made out of their two (sometimes three) options and it felt to them like there was only one sequence of events.

      I showed them all this after but they didn't know about this system during.

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  14. Also we've done some stuff from FotVH. Maybe four or five of the entries. There are more placed in our campaign sandbox but the players haven't found yet. And the veins are there but the players haven't gone down there yet.

    Overall they liked DCO and want to do a do-over of it sometime.

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    1. Someone actually used FotVH! Amazing, and pleasing.

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  15. Wrapping up DCO this week. Been running it on and off since January. Players are planning a heist of the Crime God's hoard to break into "Time Town." Not sure how I'll handle that but I'll at least be using Veins' to get them there. Excited for another adventure in the same vein as DCO, definitely got a lot out of it (and the players probably did irreparable damage to my campaign world by letting the Crows escape with the book).

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    1. Sorry I missed this and would like to know how it turned out

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  16. One of my commenters has in fact run a game of DCO using a risque The Fantasy Trip conversion (email me if you want his adress and bank information). I own a hardcopy of Veins but I'm still too skeptical on the Veinscrawling campaign rules to deep-dive in, and I'm an all or nothing guy.

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    1. Hang around and wait for the new version of Veins in two years or so.

      'The Fantasy Trip' god damn. I guess those are the circles though. I once played Gav Thorpes 'Inquisitor' with a guy who turned up in a canal boat and was frustrated that the rocking of the boat meant you couldn't use a 3d printer on it. That's just life I guess.

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  17. I don't think this counts, but I ran it at a con recently: https://tabletop.events/conventions/carnage-25/schedule/203 I crammed it into 12 hours, start to finish using Five Torches Deep, 3rd level characters. I think 2nd level, progressing to 3rd before they went in would have been the better way to go. I played it pretty straight but the one thing that I tweaked was the adamantine snake at the end. They didn't have any followers to feed to it and so I let them get creative with finding a way to entice it away and ultimately they sprung a trap door over the gravity knife to kill it. I was probably too generous but the sorcerer did get squeezed to death by the giant before the end. And then of course they all died of radiation sickness, due to their looting of metals that were not meant for them. Also, the (remaining) Crows got the book (I telegraphed this to them a bunch) and well, as Porky Pig says, "That's all folks."

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    1. Thanks! And sorry for missing this comment earlier.

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