Session 1 of AiME.

  So I spent some time going over the idea of the game with the players, that they would be a decoy party trying to help the real party succeed. I emphasised to them that we would follow the books/movies to some degree, but there would be some variances.  Reminded them that there would be situations that maybe pre-determined to some degree... like they will not be killing Smaug, even if they can. Some events and facts are written in stone.

We started off with where they left the last campaign, completing the task they had been doing for Elrond - gather the Regalia of Cardolan. This campaign had been centred around Bree and those characters had progressed to 11 th level. The restart saw them go back to 10th level and a few characters change to fit the story (extra hobbit for Samwise etc).  They left Rivendell and were returning to Bree, deciding to rest on Weathertop along the way. When they climbed to the top they discovered 13 dead dwarves. One of the dwarves was clutching a scroll of parchment. The scroll turned out to be a fresh copy of a map to Erebor (a copy of the Hobbit map, one of the players was able to determine it was probably a copy due to its newness).

The location grew darker, and an ominous feeling overcame them all, Wis saves all around for fear. A Wraith like form appears and demands the map, more fear rolls. The dwarf survived the fear and strikes out at the wraith, hit it. The wraith dissipates in a cloud of fog. The party realises that a fog has suddenly moved around Weathertop, and the sound of clanking weapons and armour can he heard, getting closer.

A party of orcs and goblins appears out of the fog and attacks. Lead by a Great Orc of Gundabad. The party is quite well stocked with archers, so they quickly shoot out all the goblins before the melee gets started. The party is experienced and quickly overcomes the orcs. A funeral pyre is created for the dead. Remains of the dwarves are collected and returned to the Blue Mountains via indirect means (the players didn't loot it).

The next day they complete their journey to Bree. Here they ask if anyone knows anything about the dwarf party. It is discovered that they came through 2 days ago, but more interesting was that another party of 13 dwarves and a hobbit came through just under 2 weeks back, heading east. The hobbit is identified as a Mr Baggins, one of the hobbit characters vaguely knows him.

They decide to follow up what they have learned and setup a journey back to Rivendell, possibly to ask Glorfindel about the map (two of the players have him as a Patron). The journey to Rivendell results in two encounters. The first is with a party of 4 trolls, they detect three of the trolls in a wood, and realise there is a fourth somewhere. Skilled members of the party go out to find the missing troll while the rest hide. They find him suddenly and a melee begins, the trolls shouts for help. The Bard, back with the rest of the party, rolls a 20 on an attempt to mimic the trolls cry and distract the other 3 trolls, so it works. The single troll is defeated quickly. The bard and the other three trolls stumble around the forrest for 2 turns before he rolls poorly and is trapped. They rest of the players arrive to help, the other group returns, and the Loremaster gets totally lost in the woods, but is found later. The trolls are defeated.

They search and find a trail to a cave, find treasure (a longsword, a shortsword and 20 elf arrows, and a shadow point).

The second encounter was an experiment. I set up a large table area of different terrains, replicating the warg hunt in the movie (but no Radigast). They had to use the terrain to try to avoid the wolves and get to the far side and the safety of Rivendell. In one spot they find a tunnel which allows them to bypass a section of the map area and get behind the wargs, making it to safety... lots of group stealth rolls etc. The party turned out to be pretty stealthy.

They get to Rivendell, to find that the 13 dwarves and the hobbit had been there, but had left 2 days prior. Glorfindel listens to their story and asks them to wait whilst he consults with Elrond. Elrond summons them to a Council. Here he asks them to undertake a dangerous mission, he wants them to act as a decoy group for the main group. Travelling the path they are travelling and attempting to intercept any problems in an attempt to make it easier for them. The mechanic would be that both parties would generate encounters for their journey, but the players would then try to suck up one or two of the other parties encounters. (eg Rivendell to Beorn's House would result in 2 encounters for each party, the player party would try to intercept one of the encounters so the split would be 3 for them and only 1 for the real dwarves). Elrond promises that they will be rewarded with a single share of the quest (a 15th), and other unspecified rewards from powerful people.  They have no choice in the matter of course.

Glorfindel gives them some minor gifts, lembas and herbs and elf cordials, and an impressive elf scarf of incredible beauty. They head out into the High Pass...

Covid delay...not really, cricket!

  We suffered a delay starting the game, but with luck things will begin in 4 days. I hope to do a post after each game session talking about how things went.

I have been reading up on the AiME books to try to absorb background and adapt it to the story we will be building.  For now we are going ahead with the player group (built on the structure of the Fellowship) playing as a decoy team for Bilbo. The first adventure being the destruction of another decoy team by a RingWraith, and the players taking up the mantle at the behest of Elrond and Glorfindel.

Plotting out The Hobbit story line is fairly easy, thanks to a book and three movies. The same applies to The Lord of the Rings. What I have found is that the 70 years between those two stories needs to be filled. I was pleasantly surprised with the way The Mirkwood Campaign book treated this. Single main adventures for each year with events occurring around the adventure. What I really liked from this, as I was trying to absorb all of it, was the inter-connections of all the events, and how they are scattered all around the Mirkwood area. But more especially the npc characters running through-out the story, how some of them can grow, some die, some change etc over the 30 years of this book (it doesn't cover the full 70 years sadly). On top of that are the options for the players to grow as well, including passing their characters on to sons or daughters in the case of humans with shorter life spans (and there is only two of those in the party).

I'm very enthusiastic about the whole thing, but I am sure my players will put a stop to that soon enough.  :)

Re-start

 Well it looks like my old blogspace got out of date, or something. On to the new.

No, its working again, so back to the old....

So I was playing an AiME (Adventures in Middle Earth rpg) game over a year ago, and it was very good.  We stopped that because I was waiting for a specific book in the series to come out (Moria) and also I was excited about a new campaign book I had purchased thru a Kickstarter - Odyssey of the DragonLords. This was a classical greek setting, which is a subject area I really like (along with Egyptian). By the end of last year (2020) I was growing tired of that game, so it was great that christmas and new year gave us a break.

During the break I had a great idea. Lets return to AiME and lets run the game as if the players were the Fellowship of the Ring, or at least a parallel copy of them. Then I watched The Hobbit movies and wanted to include that story in the sequence as well. Sadly there is a gap of over 50 years between the two stories, but what's the point of fantasy role playing if you can't shove in a bit of fantasy in there. Besides all the races except humans live quite long lives, and even the humans (dunedain) can live to be quite old. Also, the AiME game system itself is sort of supportive of longer styles of game time passage, suggesting one major adventure per game year.

So I got into it. I have six players, and can play a character of my own, which makes 7, the fellowship was 9. So we demote Merry and Pippin to npcs (non-player characters). That works. And the character I play (as the GM), can be the wizard (Gandalf) equivalent, and can pop in and out, just like Gandalf does.  To that end I came up with:

Gandalf - Loremaster.

Aragorn - Warden/Herald.

Legolas - Wanderer/Hunter of Shadows

Gimli - Slayer/Foe Hammer

Frodo - Burgler

Samwise - Warrior/Knight

Boromir - Warrior/WeaponMaster

To a small degree there is some contriving in these choices. I wanted to use as many of the AiME character classes as possible, and I wanted them to sort of fit the role of the story characters as much as possible. The choice of Knight for Samwise for example fits the devoted follower and friend of Frodo, which a lot of the Knight abilities sync to. It will mean that Sam will end up running around in heavy armour, and that lead to an extra layer.

Instead of the characters being the exact Fellowship, they will mirror them. Not exactly, but the same similar events will occur, plus some extra ones. So if this group of players are not the band of dwarves/fellowship, but they are going to do most everything they did and be in most of the same places... then obviously they are a decoy group!  Which explains why the Fellowship had it so easy (sic), because the decoy group were taking on all the nasty stuff.

Even the parts that a locked into the cannon of the story, that 13 dwarves could defeat Smaug, that's because it was actually 13 dwarves and 7 others.

The opening scene of this new adventure will be the 7 players running into a battle scene where 13 dwarves have been slain (yet another decoy group, but a less successful one). A Nazgul (weak early version) demands they hand over The Map (what map? the one they found on the dead dwarf), the players resist and chase the nazgul off but are then attacked by some orcs... etc.They now have a map, actually a copy, and will need guidance on what has happened, so off the Rivendell they go.

And so it begins, they Journey to Rivendell. Along the way they run into a band of Trolls, a different band, then some wargs and goblins. At Rivendell they are asked to take on the decoy role formally by Elrond, and then head off for Erebor.

The gap between The Hobbit and the LotR can easily be filled with a few other major adventures, like the Green Dragon of Mirkwood, or a journey north into the Grey Mountains etc.

TBC...

New blog

 Started a new blog as I couldnt get this one to update... but now its working... sigh...

https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/5646818835842958523

Staying with the new one.

Time to move!

So G+ is a gonna. Which is a shame, I have become quite comfortable in G+ even with most of its idiosyncrasies.  The worst part now is to work out where to go next.  

Presently that would appear to be MeWe - mewe.com/i/kevin.flynn4

Not sure if that will be the place to go for gaming, but it has a few people moving there already so lets see if we can't generate momentum.

Playing lots of rpg's presently. Two weekly games: D&D5e and a Savage Worlds Weird Wars Rome. And three bi-weekly games: Pathfinder and 2x AME (Middle Earth D&D5e), one where I GM and another where I play.  

I really like the Middle Earth 5e games, the groups are trying to keep within the ME canon to a degree but the occassional DnD event will slip in now and then. Its a comfortable environment to play with and the AME classes are quite well balanced.

I am also very much enjoying the SW WW Rome game (GMing). The characters were transported from a Rippers game at 90 xp, spent 6 months acclimatizing to Rome and have now been sent off to discover what is going it. I have a massive story line planned out and they will need all that xp to survive.  Blending in SW characters with roman history has been a lot of fun.

Haven't done a lot of work with my projects however - Fallen Cities or Sarmarkand. Need to get back to them before I forget where I was up to.

OSR and COWS in roleplaying.

I must be getting old, or my brain injury is playing up.  I am getting a little tired of the OSR movement (Old School Revival) and of Cows in Runequest, and they are two different issues but with a vague connection (a not-me one).  Which is not to say either of them are wrong, except that I am always right!  Its just that roleplaying is so much more these days and we should embrace all of it.

Why do I have a problem with the OSR. Because they seem to have problems getting out of the past and at least trying something new. Yes dnd has a lot of nostalgic value, and yes I find it strikingly easy to slip back into playing dnd (especially 5th edition I might add, which is probably more old school than you would believe), and yes it is a nice comfort zone game that is easy to teach. I started playing dnd in 75 and I even have an original whitebox set, so I have been through all the incarnations of the game. But for god sake the world has progressed and new games with stunningly brilliant ideas have come out (like RQ), and can we move on a bit, at least acknowledge them and the 21st century.

And Cows (the animals, beef, horns etc), I am so sick of hearing about cow herders and clans and tribes and homesteads in RQ. Who are these people who play at this level? I'm sorry but most of the pre-Rune level stuff in RQ is simply practise for when I turn uber!  I want to go on HeroQuests - which strangely enough is the one thing the game has NEVER clearly defined and developed 'official' mechanics for (apart from the runes themselves to some degree, but that seems to have been solved by the coming latest edition).

I want to be a hero at the side of the dudes who defeat the Evil Empire (yes Lunars have gone to the Darkside), I want to be on the top deck of the Cradle, I want to look Gorn Orta in the eye and haggle!... there is no room for cows in my RQ! And yet whole volumes exists to support this level of play. (Disclaimer: there is nothing wrong with this, its just not me, and it is ALL about me!)

And everyone I played with since 1978-9 has had the same view as me, we all want to be Rune levels and stomp Lunar scum (apart from a few recalcitrants). Did I misread the implications of the original books, where the tribes of Prax not the oppressed ones, were the Orlanthi not oppressed, were Ducks not oppressed!!!  And who oppressed them all!  And who were the Heroes of both history and recent times, I don't recall Lunars being in that group, in fact the opposite.  I suspect there has been some historical re-writing going on, apologists for the Red Moon have infiltrated our libraries.

And Sartar itself? My friends and I seem to have made another mistake there... we NEVER (well hardly ever) played in that area of the world, we played in PRAX! Wasn't that the true homeland of the first two books? Didn't everybody head east to Prax and Pavis? If you were not a beast rider were you not a rebel orlanthi hiding out in Pavis and the Big Rubble. Where did you have to be to play The Cradle, surely one of the greatest adventures ever written.

There are no cows on the Cradle. Pigs, yes, but that pig was BIG, and tough, a Rune level pig!

The world is full of people who are not me.

And NEW games systems that excite me just as much as DND and RQ did when I first encountered them... such as Apocalypse World and its many hacks. 

Thats all, move along, ranting over...

A Little too close for comfort...

Brain Aneurysms.

This is where a blood vessel in your brain develops a leak and blood pours into the brain, which is not good for you. Brains only like blood in a very controlled feed, leaks from broken plumbing are very bad for you.  My father died from an aneurysm, and possibly they are hereditary on the male line of my family.

Mine burst on the 28th Jan. I felt a little funny, like there was a bubble in my head initially, then it started to hurt. My partner is a very sound sleeper and she was on the lounge doing that when my attack started. I managed to get off 3 cries for help, each more desperate  before collapsing, and fortunately she heard the last. She acted perfectly, immediate ambulance call and inspection to make sure I could breath. The ambulance arrived in less than 5 minutes. Time with aneurysms, like with heart attacks, is of the essence.

So I awoke in an ICU bed at the locale hospital with and new collection of staples forming a lovely half circle in my skull, but I was alive, which is a very good result. Better, I was mostly lucid and all my body parts were mostly doing what I asked of them, so apparently I had not suffered any permanent brain damage.  I was amazingly lucky.

To cut a long story short, I was in hospital and then in a Brain Rehabilitation Unit for a total of 7 weeks while they tried to ensure my recovery, and if I had suffered any lingering damage. During that period they were using quite a few strong drugs, one of which, vancomycin, had an unexpected side effect that caused my brain to start overheating, getting over 40.3 degrees at one point. This is not a good thing.

Despite all that I have recovered, and today I was discharged, certified healthy, provisionally. I have a new sensitivity to sound, and I get tired a little quickly, but all in all these things will fade as I get some exercise and time under my belt.  It is not an experience I would recommend, long stays in hospital are extremely boring, and you tend to suffer sleep deprivation in public wards.

I cannot express my appreciation to the staff of the two hospitals who looked after me enough, they were wonderful. The nurses were exceptional. The same goes to my friends who rallied around to support me and my partner during a very trying time, they too were also amazing. And needless to say my love to my partner who saved my life and has been with me all the time.

I am home now. I have been lying in my own bed again, which is glorious. I have had a slice of vegemite toast, which is ridiculously fantastic (its the small things you miss), and I am absurdly happy.

So if some of you have been wondering where I have been for 7 weeks, that's the story.  I am eager to get back into my regular rpg sessions, anything to stimulate my brain. Things are generally pretty good.

Kevin Flynn