Monday 15 August 2016

Retrospective 10 - One Hundred!

A hundred sessions, man! That's a lot.

The game's steady now, and the players are even setting their own goals in the game world.
Things are great!


We have the arrival of Andy, who dies almost immediately after playing a trapped pipe organ. Ooops.
He goes on to create Cranky Jim, a Dwarf who has survived to the present day (Feb 2017). The other reason he's a wonderful addition to the group is that he's got a flat in central London and lets us come over and use it if our usual pub is unavailable!

Also important - Guido, the beloved skeleton-head mascot of the party, finally gets a body!
Sophia animates a hulking humanoid they found in a dungeon, and Guido's head is put on top. He subjugates the body, and voila! Guido the Skeleton is here!
He has to verbally speak his commands to the skeleton to make it do stuff, which is adorable. I truly hope nothing bad ever happens to him.


After escaping one stuck-in-a-dungeon dungeon, the party head straight into another. Slaughtergrid will be their home for real-world months to come, and result in them emerging at much higher levels than they were at previously.
Tom as Eleyn dies over and over as has become one of his trademarks, but Slaughtergrid's chief gimmick - rebirth on death with a mutation - leads to her becoming more and more corrupted and horrific over time.


Ruleswise we have a couple of well-received new subsystems! Religion and Retroactive Backstory.
Termaxianism, the intentionally nutty analog of the real-history Muggletonians, has taken on a life of its own under the aegis of Charles' Cleric. Termaxians are a drugged up rave cult now, which is amusing because I don't think Charles has ever been to a rave.
Retroactive Backstory is just the best thing. Insert own-horn-blowing here.
There's one downside - if you level up your new character via carousing/funeral/etc before they've had a chance to "live", you've got nothing to base their personality on. But then, that's why submitting a character backstory before you've started playing the character has always been a waste of time.




Mini Reviews

The Grinding Gear
It's pretty good, and fun because it's set up as something explicitly made by a guy who hated adventurers in order to kill adventurers. It's a funhouse of dick-move traps but the players knew what they were getting into.
Killed quite a few people, which is good!
They got trapped in the dungeon due to the thing that intentionally traps people in the dungeon, and it got a bit boring down there so I ended up giving them a hint ("there's a strange breeze in this room") so they could find the first secret door and escape.
I did like the unreliable map thing, I'll have to do that more often. Not only did it mean they went through the dungeon like "oh is this the map yet?", it also meant they were thrown when they found the thing the map lined up with but discovered it was inaccurate.

Slaughtergrid
The players were here fucking forever.
But it was quite a fun forever!
I reskinned the monsters to be less standard fantasy profusion-of-species-ish. So instead of orcs and gnolls and goblins and stuff, they're all the bud-children of various Hobgoblins mutated through many deaths in the dungeon.
Other than that, I basically ran it as-is! Having the rebirth-on-death thing meant I could be really unfair with traps and monsters and stuff without feeling bad about it.
The players worked out it was an inverted body fairly early, so it was cool to see them trying to match up the different areas to actual organs.
Recommended!


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