Savage Legend

I was excited this week to have my application to join the RPG Blog Alliance approved. Yay me!

Yesterday we played our first all Savage World game using the Pinnacle One Sheet Tomb of Terrors using the pregen’d characters (to avoid damaging their own characters and see what skills they might need to have). The characters are all Seasoned, so will be comprable to the level the translated characters will have.

At this point I need to explain a little bit about my gaming group; it consists of my kids (both 9½ at the time of writing – yes, they are twins), by willing but relatively un-rules-savvy wife, a good friend from the village with lots of computer RPG experience but not so much PnP experience, and most recently a friend and colleague from work who GMs his own games but is new to the system (and wasn’t with us yesterday).

I spent about 10 minutes briefly explaining the rules, which are more streamlined but also broader than in Dragon Warriors. That done we launched into the adventure.

The first incident is demolishing the wall to the catacombs, so I made the PCs draw a card – clubs indicating a dropped stone. Merula drew a club and failed an agility role to avoid dropping the stone on her foot. Fail. Pace -1 for the rest of the adventure.

Next comes the chasm which they have to jump across. Gar, having the greatest strength, jumps first and promptly needs his first benny. (There’s a weak point in the adventure description at this point – it describes what happens on a critical fail, but fails to state what happens on a regular fail).

After that it´s the rat swarms, the first of which Merula blasted with her bolt power, the second they stepped out of the way of, waving a torch at them from the corner. Still, the rats were probably the most dangerous encounter in the whole adventure, given that they don’t even need to roll Fighting skill to cause damage.

Next come the 8 zombies. They attacked these with missile weapons to start with to gain the tactical advantage. After Fox broke his bowstring (snake eyes) on the first shot, he rapidly restrung, hit with a raise and immediately caused 6d6 damage to the first zombie (double shot giving 2x 3d6). Half of these promptly exploded, giving him a massive 39 points of damage. I ruled that he not only successfully killed the first zombie but also the one behind with this massive amount of damage.

At this point, Gar decided that he wanted to try out some of the tactical options; multiple attack, frenzy and a couple of others. Soon the zombies were only so many body parts on the floor and it was onward to the final encounter.

Lots of benny using, though I only awarded one, to my daughter for cracking a great joke at the beginning when all the rats were coming down the sewer, making us all laugh. Beyond that I used more than the players did, trying desperately to keep the last battle going, but to no avail. After they took down the bone golem, the necromancer cast armour (bone carapace) on himself with a raise. The next round he soaked some damage, bennied away a shaken and had to re-roll Spellcasting a blast (bone fragments); the re-roll was snake eyes, so I said he took himself out by miscasting the blast inside of the carapace.

I could have taken the previous roll and pushed another round out of it, but with two wounds on the table and an inevitable death just round the corner I thought that it was better to go out with a bang than a whimper and ruled that he’d liquidised himself, much to everybody’s delight.

Feedback:
Everybody enjoyed the short interlude. Positive feedback was given for:

• the simple rules (same ruling for avoiding the falling block as for jumping the chasm as for noticing the rats as for…). Different skills used, but the same game mechanic, speeding things up tremendously.
• Battles were more fun, quicker and allowed much more tactical decision making.
• Magic worked well, be it for healing or ‘bolting’ zombies.

So, all converted to the cause. Just need to put the final touches to the translation of the old characters and we’re away.

Well, not all things – much is as it was, but Savage Worlds Deluxe – SWEX 1.1 as it were, is out. Looks good.

Nothing central has changed, but the additional bits, particularly social conflict resolution and dramatic scenes, look very useful.

Mwuhahaa!

In which the party find their princess and the last hag. Here.

But does it all end happily ever after???

In which the party are sent on a wild goose chase to find the third hag… Isembard’s account continues

Posted “The Taking of Siandabhair – Part I” this morning.

Ok, a clumsy heading – trying to be too clever! We came within an inch of a total party kill last night with the final encounter with the last hag to rescue Siandabhair (Sonjaveer – it’s a Gaelic thing!). In the end a timely joker, a well-thrown water sack and a Dwarven axe saved the day despite the mystic rolling psychic fatigue before everything started by casting Darksight. Darksight for goodness sake, and she didn’t even need it!

For a change I might even have let the TPK happen as this will almost certainly have been our last excursion with the DW rules. I’ll be posting the adventure log in Tales from Karickbridge in the course of the next few days/weeks, then it’ll be a question of waiting for the next constellation of a bad weather day with player availability before we give Tomb of Terrors a visit. I thought that it would be a good idea to try a dry run with the pregen’d characters before we finalise the Skills and Edges that the PCs need.

I had hoped that we would complete the current scenario yesterday, but had to stop short of the very last encounter for time reasons, meaning that there will be at least one last DW session before we switch. We used both the initiative cards and a map on 1″ square flip-chart paper on the table to plan things out. This definitely adds to the tactical part of the game.

At one point we had a situation where the assassin wanted to climb up a cliff to get a vantage point to shoot from. After spending about three minutes trying to find the climbing rules in the DW Rulebook and failing I thought “sod it!”, I know what climbing skill this character is going to have in SW and I know what the difficulty factor for this cliff is in my mind. Roll a d6 for Climbing and a Wild Die; if one of them is 4 or more, your PC has successfully climbed up above the enemy. SW’s unified rules make life for me as a GM so much easier!

The more I read on the PEGINC boards, the more inclined I am to run a pre-gen’d SW fantasy session before we make the swap to help guide my players (and myself) through Skill and Edge choices so that we don’t end up making choices that frustrate us.

Although our setting is fairly low fantasy, I thought it would be fun to run the more classical “Tomb of Terrors” scenario together with the characters supplied. Something for a rainy summer afternoon…