Kharmlund #4: Stomping around the dungeon with your big gold giant.

 It's yet another wonderful nightmare in the depths of Kharmlund - an OSE campaign using a homebrewed megadungeon. 

Today, we had two players again, giving us two characters - 

Ildaberd played by anon.

Turk played by anon.

They were joined by allies this time, as the roll on the "pre dungeon events" table happened, and the players were able to get a member of the Solargaurd to come with them. Who are the "Solargaurd" you may ask? Well, they're certainly not me being extremely lazy and using Stormcast Eternals miniatures in my setting because I think they look cool! But yes, that's the reference I gave them, and that's what I will be using if we ever get to mass-battles. Involving that specific type of person, since the Solarguard are weird little guys and one would probably have to join them to get them to fight with him. They were also informed that since they've been having henchmen die, dwarves want shares of the treasure now. So instead they hired worse henchmen, including a lantern boy named Lemmy and a halfling(?) named Nibbles, who was as vague about his reasons for wanting to go into Kharmlund as he was good at picking locks.

This is probably the single largest exploration that the party has ever done, since they found a shitload of rooms, but didn't have much in the way of combat to worry about - the wandering monster checks did spawn a hellish encounter of a single Ratman(and his 19 Giant Rat Pets) which would have been one hell of a nightmare combat but I decided that a seven foot tall, golem looking mother fucker with a hammer the size of a person might do a morale check, and yes, the Ratman did not like that idea and took off at a run. The party returned to the "skull room" at Dracondir's urging (there was gold there) and opened the skull-chest with some of Nibbles's engineering, removing the top half and rendering it safe. This is where the Ratman encounter was rolled, and they were ready to ambush the party, hearing the divvying up of loot and wealth. The players gave all copper and silver coins to Lemmy, buying his undying loyalty. Vandus accepted nothing - he had no interest in the worldly treasures, but did mention he was looking for "solar gold" or "sun gold" and refused to explain its properties or value.

As stated before, the Ratman ordered his rats to attack, got a better look at the Solarguard, Vandus, and promptly noped out of there. The party decided to explore some more around the dungeon floor. Exploration was mostly finding small trinkets here and there, some traps, etc. Then, exploring the north east end of the first floor of Kharmlund, they find a door that had been nailed shut, with more, large spikes driven into the tiled floor to prevent it from opening. They decided to not go this way, despite my cajoling. Vandus was fine with going - he made many references to the land being tainted and liked to purge the land from it. This did not encourage the party to go forward into the Dont Dead Open Inside door, but you can't fault a DM for trying! Otherwise, nothing too impressive, until they found a pair of goblins enjoying a meal of Giant Rat in a small 5x15 hallway. 

The Goblins looked to be Byzan Legionnaires, and they were kind of, well, not supposed to be sitting around eating tasty rat. Nibbles and the goblins chatted in Titchy cant a bit (it's a tiny person thing, you wouldn't get it) and then there was some information gathered. They were relatively low-level greenskins but there was some information that could be gleaned. 

Kharmlund has four "factions" vying for control of the place. Newforge is comprised of the survivors from when the Forges(not literal forges, they're like giant towers and the purpose for them is completely unknown) fell, becoming cursed. The Arin-Vosdht(Orcs, the main movers and shakers of the Byzan Empire) fled here with their slaves, plebes, soldiers and carved out a small niche. There's the "Kurgan", followers of a bandit king who is also behind the resetting of traps and such. The gobbos didn't know a lot about them, but they did know he's an asshole, to the point that there's a kill-on-site order for any "adventurers" working for him. The Ratmen seem impossible to understand, but they are if anything, deeply numerous and whatever is sealed off, the Goblins were not privy to know. 

The party spent a good 40 minutes in game time resting, chillin', (in real life, this was nearly half the in-game session. a lot information isn't really pertinent here, and there was some good roleplaying, but not important for our purposes) then bid them farewell and went north, to find a room that was extremely well furnished, with a fire elemental offering them nice Lay-Z-Boys to sit on and listen to some lore dumps if they wanted. The party declined, mostly because who the fuck trusts sentient fire? Ildaberd wanted to, but the rest went norther and found a room where there's a lot of miniatures in display cases - beautifully hand-carved and incredibly well painted - with a sign telling them and everyone else not to touch the miniatures, especially the gold ones, in the display case - they would regret it. The party was generally quite cautious and left the miniatures alone, finishing up their new room exploration to the north-east a bit. They found the half-eaten dinner and still-warm bed robes of some people, and a beautiful silver hand-mirror face down which they immediately destroyed(lol). 

After that, the party simply shrugged and returned back to the surface. Most of their gold/exp was based from the skull room but there were some levelups. The Elf, Ildaberd found some stuff written in Dwarvish code, and got Read Languages as a scroll, so maybe there's something there. No deaths due to the randomly rolled super-golem that joined the party, and Vandus vowed to return to do something about the "taint". He then stepped backwards into a sunbeam and vanished while they were in town. Weird guy.

Overall the party continues to map the floor, and that's good. They're in the opening stages of a Bethesda game - learning how to play, and hopefully soon they will meet the other factions and start making choices. 

Current Player Map of Kharmlund: 

Kharmlund #3: The players find themselves a magic hammer - and Ori the Unwise gets eaten by a treasure chest.

 The sages have sung, the seven weirdstones have been gathered, and the clouds crack apart to reveal...another session report of Kharmlund!

In this session of Kharmlund, we see our first levelup and magical item as the party goes deeper...deeper into the depths of Kharmlund (about a hundred or so feet deeper. The...the point is the map is getting mapped more:

Our players this time around was:

Turk - Level 1 Assassin

Half-Elf - Level 1 Bard (I do not know his name atm)

and two Dwarves - Ori and Nori, because the Dwarves of Lester's Folly weren't a fan of how people might be getting killed for a single GP, so they were concerned about negotiations for "shares".

---

So far, the party hasn't had much, er, direction to what they've been doing, basically just choosing a different direction each and every time, and this was mostly not any different, they decided to go south from the intersection containing the strange altar that shocks people, and found and open room where a pack of Kurgan's bandits were chillin' and talking to one another. I gave them some useful information(through the bandits): Kurgan rewards handsomely for magical items and artefacts brought to him from Kharmlund, and these men were discussing how to get the dagger(assumption was it was magical, otherwise why protect it?) from the altar - the party was offered a large ruby(100gp, 10 coins weight) if they could figure it out.. 

The party thought of taking this on, but instead decided to head south into a large room where they discovered a cabal of the verminous ratmen, who were, funnily enough, also discussing something - how to get water from the wall-face from last session. They wanted the password(they scream at it and it gets angry and unleashes a gelatinous cube on them) and bartered mightily with the party for the password, including the "stick" one of them was carrying (actually a magical wand, but). After getting the "password" the rats scurried off. The "stick" was thrown backwards as a reward and the ratmen ran off to get access to basically just free water, I suppose. 

Ah well. Onto some searching for hidden rooms. There were four in this room, all on the west wall. It's a big-ass room, too. After some kind and clever searching, the PCs were able to find for themselves a couple hidden rooms. One of them was basically just a "how cautious are you" test, with a lever in a hole in the wall - just reach in and pull it! I didn't get this idea from rewatching The Mummy Returns at all. Anyway - they opened it - nothing inside. Just a fun prank, having a laffy laff of a time, friends. The other one was a kind of military Cache - stored away and hidden by Arin-Vosdht(orc) runes. After some guessing, they party arranged it and got their first magic item - Dracondir! It's a hammer for dwarves, with cool runes inscribed on it and the - and I swear I rolled this randomly - an ability to detect gold in a 40 foot radius. With that finished, I promptly pulled out a shredder and fed my maps and notes int- no I'm just kidding, but I have, with this simple item, changed the nature of the campaign hilariously, as players will be able to have far more lucrative delves going forward. On session three. Ha ha. Oh well, this means faster level-ups and likely will take away some focus from the actual Kharmlunding - but that is entirely okay, the campaign only starts at Kharmlund, and won't be ending in it unless that players choose to do so.

They did their first ping and located a treasure cache nearby. Eastwards, so naturally off they went. They found a goblin brewery northeast from the big ping - goblins chillin' and offering brews. Nominally, allies or henchmen of Kurgan, but just happy brewmasters looking to get wasted and placated dangers with brews. Otherwise they found, in no good order - a floating glass orb with a giant ruby inside alongside many poisonous spiders. Turk remarked there's no ratmen around when you need them. There was also a reading table, and a book of a man writing a memoir of his regrets (said regrets were mostly just him bragging) with many pages earmarked. They did find the last major get of this floor, the blood-drinking box. Basically it's a treasure chest with fangs, feed them things and then it will open. After some negotiating with the henchmen, Ori took the chance - he died. Nori wasn't too happy with how things went after this but he wasn't going to cry about it - accepting a share instead of a wage for his silence on the cruel throwing away of Ori's life (and the discovery of the lost hammer Dracondir). They got a decent get for it - a gem worth 1500 gp. With that, the party decided that enough was enough, time-wise and left Kharmlund, passing all WM checks with no attacks. Money money! We got some levelups and such, so the party will be better served, but I'm very curious exact how Dracondir will change the campaign going forward.

....I played Torch and Shield.

 Torch and Shield is the kind of game that intrigues me far more than it has a right to do so.While my background is mostly wargaming, I've only really truly enjoyed the excellent Battletech and Blood Bowl as far as gridded games go. While Underworlds was a decent title, I didn't see anything that wouldn't just work better without the hexes - for goodness sake there aren't even facing rules!

Ah, I'm ranting. Torch and Shield. No real major interest in dwarves, sour taste in my mouth because let's be frank, the Hobbit movies burned me, and I didn't really enjoy any of the newer "duardin" GW was putting out. I've since come around on the Fyreslayers (I like the newest Warcry band and nothing else, at all.) but alas, not much else. 

 

But, I do like Landsknects, and when I saw those on their website, I realized I should pay more attention. Let me be clear, I wasn't going to go for anything in the kickstarter but those goofy merc-looking dwarves, but then I watched some videos on the game, and realized that they basically took a lot of Games Workshop design ideas and put it into an honestly brilliant game. 

Combat is quick and easy to resolve, and features "buckets of dice" style resolution - you will be rolling around 3+ dice to make hits, you need successes for hits, those come on a 5-6, so throwing more dice is always important. 

There's no real structure to this post, so I'll just go with some observations:

While it's a "bring what minis you have" rule (which is a pointless descriptor, every minis game is a "bring what you have" game and there's exactly one company with the clout and power to enforce otherwise...) I found that going WYSIWYG was a massive, embarrassing mistake because one side of Vulkyn Flameseekers (mostly painted!!) was able to trounce a dwarf army of Kainan's reapers (not painted! mea culpa!!) very easily in every single game (we played three) except for one where we got some very unlucky pulls from the event decks and I was having to pull from my Warcry teams to be able to have enough. Now I've been assured that the main game will have a load-out system, so I'll mea culpa that for now, because otherwise having a "balanced" team with pure WYSIWYG is not possible.

Positioning is important and there's something of a "death spiral" in the games - your characters have 3 wounds, and it's possible to get one-shotted easy - but even taking a single wound means you become easier to be wounded. That's generally fine, because the resolution is pretty chunky and - roll a direct contest to hit, then to wound for each hit you get, a la' MESBG. There's knockback like in MESBG or Blood Bowl or Underworlds, and like MESBG and Underworlds if you don't have a place to be knocked back to(you choose where to go, unless the enemy is using a hammer. Hammer dwarves get to choose where to push) the enemy rolls an extra die to wound you. Like Blood Bowl, you can then do a "follow up" and come up to them. 

Taking a wound means you're knocked down. It uses a pool system, so if your MS(attack stat) is 4, you roll 4d6 and count the 5/6's for a hit, same with wounds, with armor and resilience reducing the amount of dice the "wounder" would get from its strength score. That resilience goes down by 1 each wound suffered, and all of the demo guys had 2 resilience, so if you took two hits and weren't dead, you were not going to survive another hit.

The card initiative system(each dwarf gets 1 card) was a bit slow going (our first two rounds of six was 50 minutes nearly) but once we had it down pat we were sheathing cards(you get +1 extra card if your leader is alive and can save it for the next turn) and slaughtering each other with ease, with each round lasting about 15 minutes. So for "pro" or "people that know the rules" type players I would say a normal game of T&S would last about 90 minutes. Depending on your life circumstances you could probably get two games in a session. Cards also do stuff like make you lose your light sources fuel or worse like spawning one or three monsters at the nearest entrance to you - meaning you can, at the end of the round, go from chuckling and confident to sweating bullets and having to realign plans. Or you set off a trap and have to resolve a hit against you. Nothing good happens to the player that draws this, and it's the player with priority that gets it. Which is interesting, there's some indication that being the Fated One has positive stuff going for it. As it stands you get to draw from the "fuck you" deck.

Being shrouded is the most "hold your breath" stuff I've seen in a game. Basically you become harder to shoot at but you also lose the protection of the light source, and the light source is a huge part of the game. You will tactically position yourself automatically without even thinking of it, and we started using home-made blood bowl scatter templates to show line of sight. If you're not careful re: light, you're going to have a bad time. Anyone without light becomes shrouded and that means every round you roll 2d6. On a 2, you die, no save (fuck you). You were eaten by a grue. On a 10-12 a monster spawns next to you. Monsters interrupt fights, as dwarves will fight, sure, but they won't stand a monster to live.

You are only guaranteed up to half a game of light. You get d3 rounds of light in the beginning, and after that you roll 1d6 for each light source and it goes out on a 1. Also, you lose 1 fuel if you, the fated one, draw a diamond card. For both teams, draw it again and the lights go out. Then monsters start showing up because you then are rolling for every single god-damned dwarf. Again these are QS rules so I'd recommend you hit up the discord for more questions by it, but this game is very tense and good. It's the diametric opposite of something like Warcry where the point is to just swarm each other like angry ants and beat the fuck out of each other (although there are special skills determined by your card drawn's suit for each guy, similar to Warcry's Yahtzee initiative). You really want to be careful - tactical positioning is extremely important - and objectives are very important. There's still the "cinematic" moments that Warcry offers, but it's more of an "oh shit" as the lights go out and then you suddenly have 12 monsters on around you and it's round two.

 So it's a great game. The Kickstarter is running right now and I recommend you get in on the ground floor because, not only is it good, it has Landsknecht dwarves. 

 

- Klang 

Kharmlund Session 2

In the time between the....oh hell, skip the cliche and let's begin it's time for Kharmlund! An open table OSE game I'm running here bi-weekly. For...ever? I have no idea. It's a sandbox campaign.

For this session, only two players sporting three characters and a pack of four dwarven henchmen went into Kharmlund (it's long weekend time in Canada, it was a fool's gambit to do this). 

That was:

Talsi - Drow illusionist

Ulf - Human Assassin

Grent - Elf

And of course, I will be simply naming any dwarves by the names of Thorin's company aside from other, neater sounding names I find on the spot. So Thorin, Dwalin, Balin and Floki joined the party into the depths of Kharmlund. There was no adventuring in the Dveghom about the underground, they took their eight hour (in-game) time limit and entered into...the long dark of Kharmlund. 

This session had the party dealing with their first combat encounters and uh, boy howdy did they have some combat encounters. First and foremost the party decided to go to the south-west from where they scored an easy win, gaining 400sp, which is like, 40gp in my lazy currency conversion. They scooped it into the pockets of their henchmen without a second thought. Money is kind of a trap unless it's literally gold, especially since I just make "coins" all weigh the same, but the party had four doughty dwarves with them. 

 

                                                                                  The Party's hand-drawn map(it is not correct but close enough)

 

From there, they entered into a few rooms (and made an absolute shitton of listening checks, holy hell, every door, multiple times, at least 60 minutes IGT(in game time) was spent listening at doors. They found the hasty camping site of some bandits belonging to one of the campaign's factions and then found one of the "easy early" treasures I usually put in there. It's a book of smut, with a GP value of 2500 gp. So think "lust argonian maid" and you're golden (also the book is studded with rubies). Sadly, the party was then surrounded, as there's a two-way mirror wall that allowed them to be seen. These bandits, with shoddy equipment and large red K's somewhere on their armor had placed the book there, see. Stolen from Kurgan's treasure, you see. They were just trying to figure out how to get past the wight that "guards" the entrance to the dungeon. One of the bandits also was able to clock a treasure sack full of coins and cut it open, causing silver, sweet silver to spill onto the dungeon floor, everywhere. This caused some distraction, enough for Turk, the assassin to use his ability.

Assassins in OSE have a neat trick. If they do a sneak attack on an unaware target(and I ruled he was unaware) the target needed to make a save or die roll. He did this to the leader - who did not make the save. The bandits also lost initiative, and most of them lost their morale rolls when their numbers were halved in a single combat round. Sadly, they did manage to kill Floki, so when all was said and done, the dwarves were down a number. Loyalty checks passed easily, but there was some soreness at losing someone so early on.

Onward! 

The party pushed northwards into a small, safe room. There was a pair of living eyes on the wall, and it called out, "Well Met! Have a drink!"  The party greeted them as the wall began vomiting water, cool, clear, water. There was a door to the north, so the party entered and stepped into a teeny tiny shelob's cave. Not willing to mess around with the webbing and the near silent rustle of something on the roof, the party decided to see if they could go around, noting at least two other doors. 

 So they went east. After much more listening at doors, hooray, they entered and moved north, stopping at a small Altar of some kind of wolf god, taking 2 damage from touching it(they were heathen nonbelievers) and debating knocking it over before moving into the "spider" room from a secret door. They were able to try and bushwack the spider and it worked...sort of. The Elf had to dodge what would have easily been a one-shot kill from the thing, but they were able to murder the awful thing. At this point, with the IRL timer running low and them already having a ton of money, they shrugged and decided to turn back.

No major encounters despite 3(!) rolls for them, and the party managed to return back to the land of the living, with a few thousand XP and many large piles of coins, they did good. 

The Dwarves will likely be asking for an up-front fee due to people dying. 1gp ain't worth your life, after all!

Kharmlund: Session 1

 So I've been dipping my toes into running OSR games and I'm beginning to find that these are basically the only kinds of RPGs I could play that aren't just strictly a wargame with RPG things bolted on, like Mechwarrior Destiny. I don't love rpgs, I never enjoyed the culture and I was more interested in the other things people talked about with them - character progression, but socially being more important than anything else and eventually rising up to stuff like being a noble, leading armies into battle.

In short, a really cool wargaming campaign. Most people don't really seem to like that, and I guess that is fine, but I've gotten a few people interested into the setting that they would like to play in it. So I'm calling the campaign after it's OSR-type megadungeon: Kharmlund, which is in-universe for Long Dark.

Before I list our PCs, please understand that Kharmlund is heavily inspired chiefly by the Black Company, The Elder Scrolls a little bit of Warhammer, I have no mouth and I must scream and so on, but the first floor is meant to be more like a "classic DnD". The Dungeon is massive, I'm at something insane like 440+ rooms, and for those of you that feel the need to say it, I am aware that this is overkill. I mostly just want to build two dungeons: Kharmlund for the megadungeon I can always run, and then I also want to do a blank one with a table of shit for populating the doors quickly for portable games. That's...for another time however, and I'd probably build the table out of heroquest pieces, probably use my tiles I printed out forever ago. Something I can fit into something the size of a small toolbox and have it be a portable fantasy RPG. 

Offtopicofftopic. Alright. So the purpose of Kharmlund is that it's effectively a Dwarven hold that on the surface seems like your typical Moria clone, but the deeper you go it's meant to convey that the Dwarves got up to some shit. Like the Dwemer, but several orders of magnitude worse. Anyway, enough lore, let's tell you how our first little session went. Keep in mind I'm somewhat new into this crap so I might not get all of the rules right, I'm more interested in things like Battletech, Blood Bowl, etc. 

Anyway, here's the players I have:

Elf and Human Assassin - A good friend of many campaigns. He'll just play anything. He's shrugged and tried out every RPG, miniatures game, or video game I have ever purchased.

- Husband and Wife wombo combo. The husband likes to keep things silly, and the wife likes to keep things S I L L Y but they're great players. Show up on time, give a shit, offer snacks. Love them. Husband is playing a human thief.

- College Room-mate. He's big into RPGs and such. He's very against letting the party turn into the Glanton gang.

- Wildcard lady. I don't know her well but I know she likes to role play. We'll see.

- OTHER husband and wife combo. Husband is playing a Half Elf. I don't know what the wife plays like just yet but I'm very excited to see. The husband will cheerfully turn the party into the Glanton gang (he's very nice irl) 

- British guy. He's British, and I don't know how much he'll be playing but we'll see.

- Sweetheart. Nice lady from my college days. Kind-hearted but you know the nerdy kind girl is also the one most likely to be part of a death cult, so we will see, my friends.

-Girlfriend's Dark Elf Illusionist - she usually plays the 5e stuff and is wholly un-used to murder stuff.

Begin....

The party began their journey on a cart to Kharmlund. The party consisted of the Human Thief, the Dark Elf Illusionist, the Half Elf Bard and the Assassin. They'd hired three dwarves as hirelings and after poking around in the city above Kharmlund, called Dveghom, they entered proper, and came face to face with a wight.

Obviously throwing a powerful undead at them in such short order is such a rude thing to do, the party was (pleasantly? I hope :D) surprised to find out it wanted to trade, offering them five pieces of mellinated(mummified in magical honey) person. The confections basically count the same as WFRP fate points: 500 a pop, they're hard to make and such but they allow a free pass on a save or die roll, even after failure. He offered them freely to anyone from a magical race (nonhuman exception is orc) with the promise that upon their death, they would place two coins on the eyes of their dead comrade so he could be used for the mellifcation process. 

Then the party set to adventuring, but in three hours they managed to get a whole...four rooms explored! I was really impressed at how slow they were going, to be honest with you. Lots of careful behavior here, nailing spikes in to the ground to keep doors from swinging shut. The main highlights of the session were, upon hearing a large party of...something was approaching them, they ducked quickly into a room where eight ratmen were fighting over treasure. The ratmen were neutral since, while jealous of their treasure, wanted to also live. Kharmlund's denizens understand a "shh". There's far nastier things than just other humanoids. After whatever passed them by, the party backed carefully out of the room, unwilling to fight 7v1 in a tight space with no room to maneuver. They were forgotten by the ratmen, who basically function the same as the Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy - all of them are seething, arrogant, hateful assholes, to outsiders only slightly more than each other. Every one of these not-skaven considers every other living being to be some kind of tool, object for their own advancement.

They found a room with a massive skull that opens for coins and slams shut when given them. Since nobody was dumb enough to try and steal from the large coin stash there, they simply threw a couple coins from their starting gold in and then left. 

Final major encounter was a massive contraption the next room over. Smashed ratmen bodies, a pair of statues, both beautiful statues of Vress, the dark goddess of poisoners, witches and any dishonorable killing. There's a huge chest in the room. What to do? After poking around, listening at doors and looking around but not up, they decide to test the room carefully - but seeing if the ratmen can be meme'd into coming in and opening the chest. The half-elf went alone, and took two dwarves with him (they were his hirelings) and returning the ratman room, they find a single survivor - bleeding and gashed, but smug and victorious. After some easy flattery the ratman decides to follow them - after all, he is smarter and better than them, he just killed seven of his fellows - and it's here the bard uses his mesmerizing (its an OSE bard thing) abilities (he played him a song about how much of a badass he was) to transfix and then charm the ratman into looking up to him. Then the ratman was told to go open the chest.

Ssssplat. The top of the room came down like a hydralic press and "mooshed" him, as I described it. The scroll and coins survived, although battered and warped some. Knowing how the chest is trapped, during the reset (the chest began to close again) the party propped it up with a ten foot pole, while caused the trap to half-reset. Then, the thief and illusionist held the chest propped while the Half-elf looted aggressively. All of this, start to finish took 50 minutes in-dungeon time. With 400 gp jangling in the Assassin's backpack, the party took their rest in the Skull Room and after a monster-free Wandering monster check, they left the depths of Kharmlund and headed back.

In town one of them bought a townhouse for 75 gp, not a great price, but it's not that good of a house. The mapper sold the map after doing a memorization challenge. The drow was given two minutes of looking at the Mapper's map and to draw as much as possible - they managed a sloppy but close enough recreation that I allowed the mapper to keep his map. The map was only for like, 4 rooms but the payout was a thousand GP for the map - 250 each. When the wannabe adventurers return to their base of operations and find out it's a shite map, well, they might have an issue. But you know, caveat emptor. 

 With that resolved, it was session wrap-up. There was much shopping done, and the party did well.

GM THOUGHTS: I really like this game. I have also realized that with the party moving at a pace of 1 room per hour that I massively overdid this dungeon - Kharmlund has 444 rooms. Oh well. We'll see what happens in two weeks.

 

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay session #5: Those are NOT ents!

 

I really do like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

There's not a lot to say, I just love the game and I love playing it with this particular group. We're five sessions deep (started in January, we're doing pretty well as busy-ass adults) and I just ran a fun little session last night.

It was a pretty fun adventure, guy needs wood, has access to a secret grove of trees and it turns out there's a guardian. Some beastmen where cruelly affixing warpstone to its body for the joy of causing chaos, and this guardian(a treeman, NOT an ent) took off running. The beastmen gave chase but lost the trail, returning to the grove just in time to come into contact with the PCs and get brutally murdered by them. A special shoutout to the halfling who critted with her sling and got a 99/100 and exploded the jaw of the spellcaster. There was bumps and some sluggishness as the group tried to remember how the combat worked - our last game was on the seventh of May, and with one of them being a mom and the other two being highly busy people it's fair to assume that there's just not a lot of brainpower being saved and stored to remember how to roll the math cubes and calculate the invisible health points.

The players found the guardian, dying from its infusion of warpstone and said some prayers to it and took a bunch of its seeds, There was some actual character growth with the dwarf trying to understand why people would ever like him as a person, due to his slayer status.

Honestly it was good shit and it's great seeing my players commit so hard.

Anyway, actual update coming soon. 

Battletech Campaign Rules I like to use.

 Hello,

This system is heavily based on the map campaign of the Battle Companies for the MESBG.

There are three phases in a campaign turn:

Expansion Phase: Players may move 4-12 hexes. There's no need to "turn" like in Classic Battletech. Moving 8 phases means that you cannot take Battlefield support into battle. Moving 12 means you give a free battlefield support card chosen at random to your player.

Battle Phase: Players take their forces, roll on scenario and location tables and battle!

Consolidation Phase: Players do the "math" for their guys and set up for the next campaign turn.

Depending on number of players, there's only so many turns in a year. Campaigns will last a year. For two players, campaign years last 6 turns. 

ATTACKING FORTS: Player with the fort may deploy after where they like.

CONSOLIDATION PHASE: 

FORTS: COST 100 WARCHEST POINTS, BUT GRANT 1D3 BDP ON ITS OWN HEX AND EVERY HEX AROUND IT.

CITIES: GENERATE 200 WCP A TURN

INDUSTRIAL: GENERATE 500 WCP A TURN, BSP COSTS -10%

BATTLEFIELD SUPPORT: 1 BSP/CARD. 1 BSP IS A RANDOM DRAW FROM A DECK OF BSP CARDS FOR ALPHA STRIKE. MAXIMUM OF 10 CARDS.

COSTS FOR REPAIRS, HIRING NEW PEOPLE ETC

 

 

******EXPERIENCE FOR MECHWARRIORS******
XP TABLE
Survive a mission: 1XP
All Objectives Complete: 3XP for each survivor
'Mech Kill: 4XP

 

******MECHWARRIOR ADVANCEMENT******
XP COSTS TABLE:
Improve Skill: 5XP + 1 additional XP per improvement.
BUY NEW PSA: 5XP + 1 additional XP per PSA.

ALL NEW MECHWARRIORS START AT SKILL 4(3 FOR CLAN)

******SALVAGING MECHS******
Roll 1d6 for each mech,
1 - Mech was ruined beyond recognition
2 - Salvage: 125 Warchest Points
3 - Salvage: 150 Warchest Points
4 - Salvage: 175 Warchest Points
5 - One piece of equipment undamaged (Five free bubbles of repair to any 'Mech)
6 - Mech chassis is yours, damage and all! 

******BATTLEFIELD SUPPORT******

1 BSP CARD: 1000 WARCHEST(PERMANENT, REFRESHES EVERY BATTLE, 10/CAMPAIGN)

 

 

******TURRETS******
Light Turret: 10/5 Pilot skill 3
Medium Turret: 25/5 Pilot skill 3
Heavy Turret: 50/5 Pilot Skill 3
Pillbox: 100/5, Infantry scale weapons only