Tabletop Fun

[Ceir]

Got to sit down and play a few runs on one of the Final Girl modules I picked up, Haunting of Creech Manor. I definitely see why people have ranked it low on the list of season 1 films - in my post a few up from here, I did say I knew it was pretty RNG swingy, but dang. I like it thematically, and yet - one run I found the Possessed Kid in short order, and two moves away from where I needed to go, boom, done; another, I never found her despite my best efforts, the Poltergeist murdered everyone else and finally splatted me; and in yet another I didn't even get a chance to look for the kid because the Poltergeist went from zero to a hundred in about a turn and a half and just blitzed me. Part of it I can chalk up to learning the map and mechanics, part of it is my luck with dice at any given time, but part of it definitely is the mechanics that are harder to mitigate.

Despite all that, I'm not too disappointed, it's just the less-fun of the season 1 sets I own. And I can definitely think of a couple mix and match combos that would possibly fare better. The "find the kid" gimmick is tied to the Poltergeist killer, not the Manor location; and there are definitely killers I want to try in the Manor map because it's so much denser and interconnected, and locations I want to try the Poltergeist on that would make the whole gimmick a little easier to plan and mitigate.

On a non-FG note, loot get! I was finally able to source a To Boldly Go expansion for Star Trek: Attack Wing, so now I have a pretty good spread of Federation ships for my Alliance: Dominion War solitaire game; something a little heftier than a single Akira and Excelsior from the Part 1 starter. Plus, regardless of inaccuracy, this is the set with the nice silver paintjobs on the models.

...apparently I'm really hitting the solitaire games lately.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Dragonlance--

So this week's session had us having to deal with (sigh) politics. Dwarven politics, no less. I channeled some of my inner Pratchett by remarking about how "you could stick two dwarves in a room and they'd come out with three different opinions," and the collective noun for dwarves was "an argument."

Basically, in order for us to get the dwarves of Thorbardin to accept the 800-some refugees from Pax Tharkis, it required a royal decree, but there hadn't been a King of Thorbardin in like 250 years. Selecting a new king required someone to forge a "kingsword," but you couldn't do that without the Hammer of Honor. The Hammer had been sealed away in the last king's tomb, and the tomb had been magically raised some 7000 feet up an air shaft in the middle of the mountain. Getting into it required we go into the City of the Dead, the necropolis in the deepest parts of the mountain, where the tomb had originally been located. Dwarves were forbidden from going into the City of the Dead outside of funeral processions, but as none of us were dwarves, this law technically didn't apply to us. But we still needed permission to go there, so we had to speak to the Council of Thanes.

This was where the politics applied. We had the Thane of the Hylar on side (we'd brought back word of his son's death, honor dictated he do this for us) and an allied thane alongside. There was the Thane of the Theiwar, who was a traditional rival of the Hylar, who would vote in opposition to the Hylar, and there was another thane who tended to vote in opposition of the majority due to sheer contrariness (later claimed to be "to keep balance" when we talked to him). We mostly had to make sure we could keep the other two thanes on side. One of them, the Thane of the Aghar, wasn't too much of an issue, she was pretty stupid and voted in the same way as whomever voted immediately before her (which would be the Hylar), but it was the Thane of the Klar who we really had to work on. The DM also noted that the Theiwar thane had a whiff of sulfur about him, which we associated with the Draconians (the "black cloaks"), but when we tried to bring this up to Hornfel (Hylar thane), he noted such smells were not unheard of in mining.

The Klar, as a clan, had delved a little deep, and had gotten hooked on a drug they derived from ground-up mushrooms, dubbed "spice." (This was not a Dune reference, but a reference to Critical Role's Campaign 1, where the bard Scanlan got bamboozled into spending a significant amount of money on spice, thinking it was a name for a drug.) The council adjourned so the Klar's rep could "consider his vote" (he was really just jonesing for a fix), and while Justinius and Cogburn (the two smarties) tried to see if they could get the "contrarian" thane on side, this left Runa and Catt to go talk to the Klar, who wouldn't talk to them about voting until he knew he could trust them, i.e., to take a hit of spice. Which, naturally, was snorted up the nose.

Our barbarian, and the kender. Taking fantasy cocaine.

Catt failed the CON save and basically became paralyzed for an hour, while Runa got a one-hour buff to her STR and DEX rolls, but an eight-hour debuff to her INT and WIS rolls. But it worked, and when the council reconvened, the Klar voted to allow our party to go into the City of the Dead.

We had one encounter with a pack of undead dwarves down there, but they turned out to be decent enough, and the spokes-zombie was willing to talk. He'd been cursed for sinning against Reorx the Forge-god and wouldn't get to rest until 77 people had heard his sad tale, and he was at 31. We agreed to listen to his tale, which was long and dull (three hours long), and moved along-- which is when we got jumped by a dozen dwarven assassins. We managed to survive, but found the assassins were wearing Theiwar crests.

Finally we had to solve a puzzle in the tomb of Prince Grallen (the last king's son), noting that his statue depicted him in full armor with a shield and axe, but no helmet, and every armored dwarf we'd met had always worn a helmet. We found a helmet in Grallen's uncle's tomb, put it on his statue-- which became animated and spoke to us. We explained we were trying to retrieve the Hammer of Honor, which was in his father's tomb, which was 7000 feet above our heads. Grallen knew what caused it, but the solution to lower it was inside the king's tomb, so Grallen just opened a portal to the tomb for us.

Next week: the Tomb of King Duncan

Also, gonna be doing my first Tier 3 (levels 11-16) adventure in Adventurers' League this week.