Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog

I hate to say it, but the holidays means just one thing to me. Spending time with someone that will invest however long it takes to get your favorite games played again and again. I can’t help it. All of those college breaks that turned into reunions with my best friends from high school just made me that way forever and I will never get over it.

Today we did Space Empires 4X with both the Close Encounters and Replicators expansions. Yeah, it would be nice to have two more players. But this game works well enough with two. There is just enough fog of war to make it worth the effort.

So many things to remark on!

• We both opted to rush each other. I went all in on carriers while my opponent opted for ship size and then (at the start) one level of tactics. He made his way across the board first and made that first nail-biting attack without having any idea what I had.
• The big discrepancy between our empires was that my opponent had no Research Centers. I was doing 40 research points a turn to his 15. When he arrived, I was pumping out three loaded carriers a turn with Attack-1, Defense-1, Tactics-1, and I think Fighter-3. My technology advantage combined with Fighters made mincemeat out of his sneak attack.
• We tried the Resource Cards from Replicators for the first time. These slowed down the game without really adding to it. There is just too many of these cards in play and we are in such a hurry to move through the turns that we just can’t be bothered to keep up with the best moment to play some of these things.
• I did not get to use the ground combat rules which is really my one big gaming dream with this series. Some day!
• The tech discrepancy was decisive. My opponent would not be able to change gears, so while he could maybe build up some point-defense before I could arrive in his sector, he would not be able to ever do anything about the edge I had in quality.
• The experience my ships got from this first round was also a boon. Heck, I could roll right up to that alien world in the neutral zone and just get even more of an edge there.
• The Research Centers are I think a really good addition to the game. They prevent people from going all in on production the moment combat begins which just makes everything in the game matter more and get used more. I’d like to see this cause the additional tech available in Replicators to come into play once we have a game that runs a little longer than this one.
• Ah, I still haven’t leveraged the custom ship design rules to shake up the game at all. I will have to make a plan beforehand for that. There is just no time during a real game to mull that over!

Okay, we should be set now to have a decent game of this coming up for Christmas. No matter what gifts are under the tree, I am just not going to be happy unless I get some first rate gaming in. That’s just how it is!

I was right.

You might have thought I was being overdramatic. But the conversation really has shifted.

No one is talking about the finer points of Braunstein theory. If they are talking about rpgs, they are talking about Zero Prep and 1:1 time– things which the BrOSR introduced months or even years ago. If they are talking about the BrOSR, there is only one thing that they are concerned about: explaining why it is that they cannot or even ought not to ever contribute to the common good.

This is an extraordinary turn. Finally, the real and fundamental difference between the BrOSR and the OSR has been made plain. I mean, sure, it’s one thing to say that the hobby is something other than copying and pasting somebody else’s ideas and then figuring out a way to make tens of dollars a year off of it. From where I sit, people approaching rpgs with this weird and grabbling “how can I make money off of this?” type attitude have not only debased the medium, but its creators and fans as well. Sure, I can almost understand people settling or compromising or even just making a strategic decision. But the thing I can’t understand is the way that people pretend to not be able to understand this. I mean, they act as if it is a landed gentry class that owns sprawling estates which can afford to be genteel and magnanimous and embody a sort of noblesse oblige.

This is a disastrous failure of the imagination. One much more telling than simply being unable to imagine fantasy without the intrusive and overwhelming influence of Tolkien. But we can help you with that. It is in fact our calling to do so. We didn’t just make Brozer free because we wanted to make your game better. We didn’t just make Brozer free because wanted to make it harder for people exploit you.

We made Brozer free because we love you.

Okay, this one… we lost the two girls to scheduling. And the dad was taking care of family stuff. My alpha-gamer buddy managed to scrounge up a couple of millennial guys who I could not quite figure out. They kept talking about going to this guy’s dad’s house for Father’s Day and I was like… “uh, are you… brothers…?” It turned out they were married. Womp womp.

Being of the hotbed of hardcore radtrad Catholicism that is the BrOSR, you would think I would be concerned about these guys fitting into a retrograde campaign with explicit Christian elements but no. After some back and forth about AD&D’s humanocentrism, Fritz Leiber, and a couple of bits from the campaign, the two guys were working up cross dimenasional Ptolomeic elves with some sort of connection to the Olympian pantheon due to their alignments.

We worked up an entirely new party because the other group was in time jail due to training. Nobody complained or even asked about it. It did take forever to roll them up. AD&D takes at least twice as long as B/X as far as this goes. I really need to xerox the relevant charts and tables for people for in the future.

Now, I had worked out with the other players from the online game an attack on the party with the dragon eggs. I thought this would be a big hit and was wildly excited about it. As I broached the subject, I got pushback on this simply having happened as a background event. Not having the same group as last time helped stymie the excitement, too. As we began to go back and forth on it, I finally had to table the discussion because we really needed to get playing for real.

After another of those three minute Trollopulous overviews, the players opted for the local dungeon. (They were not going to to anything about the hill giants that dropped by Urgrecht demanding protection money.) I had to restock the dungeon on the fly and got “gnolls” and “a sulphurous oder”. The players rolled into the dungeon entrance and asked if they heard anything, so I described this sound of something struggling to breath. The mom IMMEDIATELY declared it must be a pug, which amazed me. I showed everyone a illustration from the booklet for a pug-man and everyone had a laugh. Someone, maybe a ranger, rolled up on it and took it out quickly. The party continued on, passing over the sulpherous smell and the passage marked with a skull on a spear. They came up on the rest of the pugs and had a nasty fight. The four henchman lost a figure and then failed a saving throw. After some back and forth, the pugs failed a saving throw as well and two ran out of the dungeon.

At this point the players decided to go for a proper burial for the fallen henchman that needed a week to recover. I think they gave him additional hazard pay due to his taking a solid hit. The players decided that this dungeon must be too hard– though in this case it was a fluke that a second level monster had ended up on the first level. (See the obscure DMG stocking rules.) The 15-year-old boy really wanted to gamble so I ran the Zowie game for him a few times. The guy wanted to really play cards and didn’t like it, but then one of the ptolomeic elfs agreed to gamble with him playing blackjack. We chitchat for a while and the two new dudes left for a father’s day meetup.

At this point the players decided to go to the tutorial dungeon. There was no way I was going to stock this before the session, I was shocked when they went there. There were no wilderness encounters on the way there (unfortunately) so my hope for more freeform gaming in the overworld fizzled away. (Making Steadington too hard to bottle the players up was now working against me.) There was another group of hill giants hitting Lothrivengrove up for protection fees and again the players ignored the obviously too-hard hook.

Going into the dungeon, I had hobgoblins near the entrance. I decided he would taunt them and then run away, and the extremely aggressive party ended up trailing up to his lair. This resulted in a rather tedious fight in which the group’s wardogs did most of the work. The players found a chest and had the elf PC that was serving as a henchman here check it for traps and open it. The inevitable poison needle hit him and he made his 7+ roll to avoid getting killed. A false bottom in the chest revealed an illusionist scroll.

At this point the players hear footsteps coming down the hall and they rush out. I described them as short creatures with long, darkened faces and long pointy ears and horrible sneering faces. They decided they were goblins and attacked. This was a REALLY tedious fight and though the “goblins” were losing, they made their morale roll when the odds were wildly against them and continued to fight. Then when they later failed their morale roll and ran away, I found out that there movement rate was so slow they were just not going to be able to get away at all!

At this point I didn’t want the game to be too boring. The treasure amounts were just too small. I declared this group had a piece of jewelry when this was a wandering monster that shouldn’t have had any at all. This was a bad call and I feel bad about it in retrospect.

The players continued their delve, however, in spite of their having lost some war dogs. They turned into a room with a giant, leering face on the wall. The mom carefully drew out my description of the fangs, horns, and tongue. Beside the face was a box with three buttons on it. And I think there was a smell of sulpher coming from its nostrils. This was obviouslly a silly and dangerous puzzle which the players opted to leave alone.

Moving on, there was a room to the right which had a disgusting, godawful smell emanating from it. The players decided it is the monster bathroom and move on.

Rounding the corner is another large room. The light from the bullseye lantern sweeps right and left and across the cieling before settling on a horrific nine foot tall humanoid gnawing on a broken femur.

The thing charges and I think instantly cuts a hired footman to pieces. Between rounds I check for morale and I think the failure was so bad, I declared that the men were frozen with fear a la that chick from the alien movie. Everybody else runs and we find out the 15-year-old that wanted to be an evil Jedi was the only person in the group with a move of 6″. I think I calculated that if the players had a two round head start they could escape the dungeon without getting caught. The jedi kid elected to throw himself into the poo room and then later snuck out of the dungeon when everything calmed down.

The players noted that the “tutoral dungeon” evidently had encounters in it that were definitely not “tutorial” grade. I thought a very large area of level one monsters with level one treasures would be very boring. Also I had alluded to the troll being there back at Madicon.

I think the thing to do is to leave the Troll in as a wandering monster with maybe a hidden lair loaded with extra good loot. Also… those poor “goblins” need something. Maybe a mine or a forge. Who were they delivering that necklace to? [

The players were offered 2000 for the necklace in Lothrivengrove. They looked for a buyer in Urgrecht and got 3000. I thought it was too much. It got split 3.5 different ways.

I think the news item was that a diplomatic mission from the dwarf king to Kickatrix to help with the impending war effort. Wanted posters with the PC’s description will be circulating.