How Do You Think It Went Down?

This is the game we played on Gygax's deathday...

Set-Up:

Tower.

Sticking out from the water.

Several stories.

Flooded city. Or what's left of it.

Snake people (librarians) up there at the top, in the middle of raiding it. Food and gold hoarded at the top of the tower.

Near the tower, less well-defended, a shorter tower, rope bridge stretches across to the middle of the big tower.

Hidden in lower echelons of the tower--defenders, allies of these snake men. Including: stinging jellyfishmen, a few well-hidden archers, and someone launching toothed, carnivorous, floating gas-spore-like creatures at the intruders.

At the base of the tower: floating, a bobbing sphere, the size of a house, made of shaped coral with windows of crystal.

Characters:

PCs enter on a ship--Kimberly Kane as Miss Mold Pig the Barbarian, Mandy Morbid as Zsa Zsa the Yuan-Ti Cleric, Cameraman Darren as The Fighty Dwarf, and Bobbi Starr as Lola, likewise a fighty Dwarf.

The dwarves are sailors.

NPCs tied up belowdecks: a pirate named Rakk they found stuck in their rudder (veteran of the struggle the snake men are now mopping up), a cleric named Sister Daxia who was helping the party but who got herself disarmed, hogtied, and gagged on account of her recognizing Rakk after they picked him up since he stole some kind of artifact from the church (ages ago) and so she tried to kill him.

How we left it at the end:

Kimberly and Darren clinging desperately to the head of a jellyfishman in the water while Mandy swims toward them. Everyone being shot at with arrows.

So, readers, how did the session go down?

Painting Is Fun!

Still putting in the hours...

(acrylic on paper, original is like 12" wide I think.)

Oh, and for the I-Can't-Figure-Out-What's-Going-On Contingent, James also commissioned this alternate version...

Shoulder fixed...

Of course I might change it nine more times.

Click to enlarge to the size it will actually be printed.

Click twice to enlarge to like 80% of original size.

My Brand-Spanking New Alignment System Which I Will Never Use...

You could say I believe in a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to alignment. Or you could say I don't give much of fuck about it unless my players do.

Here are the only observed alignment elements I've ever actually seen in a game:

ADD--PC wants to do things. Fast. NOW. Will totally admit to being willing to do the wrong thing as long as it is something.

Sneaky--PC wants to think of clever things to do, then do them. The end is largely irrelevant, the sneaky means is the end.

Greedy--PC wants to get gold, level up, or whatever s/he thinks is worth doing in this game to make him/her more badass.

Bloodthirsty--PC is fighty.

Curious--PC wants to find out what the fuck is going on in this dungeon/world/city/city-state.

Righteous--PC wants to Do The Right Thing. (Does not include helping fellow PCs, this is a bolt-on characteristic that anybody of any alignment might do.)

Fancy--Player wants to role-play in the Theatre Club sense of the word and does all kinds of seemingly game-goal-not-achieving stuff. May even go so far as to want to use an alignment system.

Laid Back--PC will pretty much do whatever his/her friends are doing.

Note:
PCs can also be--re: their fellow PCs--Disruptive, Helpful, or Apathetic, but since everybody is one of these things and it sometimes depends on which fellow PC they're thinking of, it ruins the elegance of the system and I left it out.
________

An alignment is a string of these words in order of their priority to the PC:

Fafhrd is Righteous Greedy Curious
The Mouser is Greedy Sneaky Curious
Elric is Fancy
Pippin (in the movie) is Laid Back ADD
Bilbo is Fancy Curious

Kimberly Kane always plays Bloodthirsty ADD
Mandy plays Curious Fancy
Connie plays Sneaky ADD Greedy
Frankie plays Sneaky Greedy
Satine plays Fancy Greedy Sneaky
Caroline Pierce is Laid Back
Cameraman Darren is Laid Back Sneaky
McCormick is Righteous
I play Sneaky ADD Curious

Wayne Reynolds Has His Moments

I ain't no company man, but...



And yeah yeah yeah, I know how you prefer Frazetta or Erol Otus but my house has many mansions and there's room for post-anime-kubert jr.-esquisms in it. And I guarantee half my players will be like "Oh, I wanna be her", especially Nightcrawler's sister up there.

And before anybody starts moaning about the "unrealistic proportions" Mandy would just like to say:

Did You Playtest Vornheim?

(Totally unrelated picture. I like pictures.)

Getting the final Vornheim manuscript together, doing the credits. I asked all the DMs who playtested it for a list of their players so I could include them in the credits but I don't know if all of them actually did it. If you helped playtest Vornheim and do not see your name here, (or if it's misspelled) lemme know now (zak z smith at hot mayle dawt calm)...

Eric Gall, Patrick Mastrobuono, DJ Papcin, Ian Gardocki, Steve Lightsey, Duke Dukellis, Joe Burns, Tim Jenkins, Lon Varnadore, Sam Deere, James King, Chris Lowrance, Craig Wilson, Ken Fernandez, Michael Marshall, Pablo Clark, Nikolai Fullman, Hakon (a little circle over the "a") Nordheim, Martin Skullerud, Aron Riktor, Sven Roald Undheim, Tavis Allison, Mike Monaco, Tom Monaco, Richard sullivan, John Ughrin, Ara Kooser, Susan Rati-Lane, Terran Lane

City Supplement Wishlist

(<--this picture has nothing to do with this post but I like it. Anyway...) Ok, putting the final touches on Vornheim: The Complete City Kit. James is finalizing the layouts and I'm finishing the pictures and seeing just how much extra space is left over in the layout--because I want to cram every single inch of this little book with stuff you can use during a game.

So, since we're in the middle of that, here's a question for you, gentle readers:

Is there anything you would like to see in a book about running D&D cities?

Speak now or forever hold your piece.

This is Raggi testing layouts: