Sertorius

Thursday night I picked up a copy of Sertorius at our FLGS.  Sertorius is an East Asian flavored fantasy RPG that has rather unique interpretations of a number of standard fantasy races. You play powerful spellcasters whose godlike abilities draw followers, introducing (rather quickly I gather) the elements of domain level play. However, magical power can also be corrupting, and you can easily end up as a cursed feature of the landscape called a Grim.

These are very much my first impressions of Sertorius, but I think the result here is something like a cross between Exalted and the Adventurer Conqueror King System. The book is a brick with some 465 pages of content on character generation, spells, monsters, and the world before you get to the character sheets at the back of the book. It is a skills-based fantasy RPG system that uses d10 dice pools against a target number to determine outcomes.

All About the Cannon

Any day I can play Heirs to the Lost World is a great day! Saturday morning at Con of the North was one of those days last weekend! It is a fast-paced, easy-to-learn RPG with the best stunting rules of any RPG I have played.

Heirs to the Lost World is an alternative history RPG set in a 17th Century RPG with Aztecs, Mayans, Europeans, maroons, and pirates!  The game is very immersive; it is both faithful to the peoples it portrays while being as fun as hell to play!

Designer Chad Davidson ran an adventure called Caravan of the High Plateau. The PCs were a mixed caravan of Port Royal pirates and Aztec pochteca. We were charged by Moctezuma with transporting several cannon and barrels of gunpowder overland and into the core of the Aztec Empire. Moctezuma's idea was to begin acquiring the weapons required to even the odds against the Spanish.

My character was one of the pirates who had brought the cannons and powder from Port Royal. I was of African descent and a priest of Ogun: just the person to help transport cannon and gunpowder! As soon as the Spanish first attacked the caravan, I summoned Ogun and had him ride me. This made me much less vulnerable to injury, including from firearms.

A Spaniard on horseback is about to be jumped by an Aztec Jaguar Knight

I had access to "standard" Voudoun spells/rituals which are part of the character build for a priest of Ogun.  But during the game I chose to create spells on the fly using Heirs to the Lost World's wager-based stunting mechanics. Early in the first battle, I "fired" on the enemy by spitting magical shot out of my mouth; the teeth used to create the shot would grow back... in a few days. A bit later, I used a rather ribald ritual to load a cannon with magical shot.

The Spanish of course got wind of the operation (the Aztec's native "allies" from other tribes can be somewhat... unreliable) and so our troubles began. The action ended in the caverns below a defiled temple of Huitzilopochtli fighting a giant Fire Spider that had been summoned by disloyal vassals.

Defeating the creature was a challenge.

We prevailed.

I'd like to be playing (or running) this game a bit more often than once or twice per year!
   

Early Experience With 5E

Cannon on display at Fort Pitt Museum

It has been at least 6 or 7 years since I have played any D&D, although in that time I have purchased a number of old school RPGs. That half-decade hiatus was a very welcome break from modern implementations of D&D. My last experience had been playing in a 3.5 pirates game where it took an entire session to fire a loaded cannon and then reload it to fire again. I left the session after nearly three hours of waiting, when it was clear that second shot was not just going to happen.

But I've been interested to see where 5E would go. Since the summer of 2014, I have purchased the three core books, and the GM screen. About three months ago, a friend proposed an online game through Hangouts, and in the late fall, I created Enkidu, my Half Orc Ranger.

It took a couple of hours to create the character. That's too long in my book, but it was a new PC with a new system. There wasn't as much cruft (such as Feats) to deal with as in 3.5, and the skills list seemed more useful for a roleplaying game than the one in 4E. When my GM reviewed my character he found that I had underselected my proficiencies by one skill. It was only after some rereading and discussions that I also understood how saves and save proficiencies come together.

But we're there now!

Friday night we had our first game session by Hangout. It was an urban/wilderness adventure. Our task was to deliver a shipment to the nearest town. It was winter and the first day after a blizzard, so we made our delivery by sled. Along the way, players made skill checks for various things such as handling the sled and spotting potential hazards. I was surprised that the advantage/disadvantage system didn't get more use, but I think it's likely that players will probably need to be nudged to remind the GM when they are in a situation where advantage might apply to their actions. (And since this is a traditional RPG more or less, GMs will also need to decide about the situations in which disadvantage applies.)

The skills proved very appropriate for the kinds of things we were trying to do.My post-play assessment of the skill list is that it gets things about right. I also thought my character was pretty competent in the skills for which he had proficiency.

There was no combat in the session, so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Our GM is planning to take a more traditional approach to hit points and healing. I have no idea how that will affect the threat posed by monsters, and the efficacy of certain spells; we will just have to see.

So far, so good on the systems front. But boy did that session end with one hell of a PC-induced and completely preventable mess. The party collective decided to leave the sled and shipment of goods in someone else's hands while we went to dinner. I had advised against this course of action, but other voices prevailed. We returned from dinner to find our sled, shipment, and draft horse had been stolen.

This is no one's fault but our own.

It Always Snows In Neverwinter

Fort Amsterdam Post Card

The last time I played D&D with my friend Boris, he was GMing AD&D 2e. A science lab on the Cornell campus was the scene for his medieval Russian campaign. (Back in the '90s, I also gamed quite a bit in classrooms at the University of Rochester. This was before our universities became as secure as prisons.)

But last night, Boris began a new 5e campaign for a mostly new group of players. One of the other guys had been in his medieval Russia campaign back in the day. Fun reuniting with a couple of folks for gaming some 20 years on!

The action started in the city of Neverwinter during winter. In fact, the action started with a snowstorm. When you read Neverwinter, think "New Amsterdam"; the place names in this campaign are going to have a very loose relationship to the geography of the Forgotten Realms.

The setting is similar to 17th C. North America. The racialization is humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings are immigrants and colonists. There was a bloody war with indigenous peoples, mainly orcs and goblins, though there are other races such as gnolls (in the nearby town of Claymore, there is a gnoll street sweeper with a reverse coat color pattern: black fur, yellow spots; he's a quite abject fellow). My character, the Half-Orc Enkidu, is the only character with indigenous heritage.

Of course, this kind of set-up already gets us into very dangerous territory with respect to race in gaming and D&D specifically; there's no doubt about that. But read on.

The fur trade is everything here. There is a trading Company that controls the fur trade, which of course relies on the indigenous people to do the trapping. I read William Cronin's Changes in the Land a number of years ago, and more recently read Mary Lethert Wingerd's North Country: The Making of Minnesota so I know this conceptual territory very well.

I grew up in Western New York, which was central to the early fur trade, and now live in what was originally the Fort Snelling Military Reserve in the Minnesota Territory: a frontier fort and surrounding land reserve set up to regulate the fur trade, and deter rapid immigration into the territory.

Think about how lucrative that trade must have been that the U.S. government set up a fort to slow down the theft of land from Indians.

It should be interesting to see where this goes.

Licking the Wheelchair's Wheels

When my Mom first developed Alzheimer's, I wasn't very kind to her. I was angry, irritated, and embarrassed by her repetitive questions. It was hard even to look her in the face. I wasn't my best self at that time. Now of course, I'd give anything to be able to have a two-way conversation with my Mom.

Repetitive questions welcome.

Some of the anger in the early days came from the fact that I was brought up to value intelligence above all else. How do you feel about it when the person who taught you that value doesn't seem to embody it any more? Of course, nowadays I realize that there is a big difference between memory and intelligence, and that people living with Alzheimer's have to use every last neuron of their intelligence (processing power) to compensate for the deficits in their memory. Today, I feel fortunate that I haven't (yet) had to demonstrate the kind of bravery and focus that people in the early stages of Alzheimer's have to bring to every minute of their lives.

It was really hard for me to deal with my Mom changing. It was hard to accept her as she was becoming. Fortunately, her dog has never had that problem.

I realized that today when I saw the dog licking the wheel of my mom's wheelchair during Christmas Day dinner. Imagine that wheelchair's wheels. They have rolled all over the floor of the place where Mom lives. Those wheels have ground their way though countless crumbs, dropped cookies, and chunks of muffins. They have been well-lubricated with spilled juices and energy drinks.

Those wheels are a buffet.

So of course the dog was demonstrating her Buddha nature. She was living in the moment, tasting every morsel and dribble that ever left a trace on those wheels.

That's how we have to live for our loved ones with Alzheimer's. Try to deal with every moment as it emerges, and take what joy we can in each moment. Lick the Great Wheel. Give it a lick.

Holiday Reflections

If I'm being honest, I'd say I don't enjoy holidays very much. When I was a kid, they were usually times when my parents were fighting. As an only child, I didn't have siblings to hide or run away with at those moments. Even worse, one parent consistently pulled me into the fights on their side. Often the best part of the holidays was when we set out for my aunt's house. The fighting stopped, and usually didn't resume once we went home.

More than anything in this holiday season, which can be stressful even in healthy homes and relationships, I'd encourage people to avoid weaponizing their children. If you have a disagreement with your significant other, take a break - don't break things. Go for a walk and cool down. Or agree to discuss the issue latter, when the kids aren't around to hear your mutual grievances. Even better, talk about them after the holidays are over.

Go ahead and make memories. Just make sure you are making ones you want to last.

Grit Digger

Today at The Everwayan, we have another member of Everway's original and ancient Odd Families: Clay Digger, a miner in the galleries below the city. The Digger family has maintained its longstanding monopoly on mining activities. But the City has expanded so much that mining for coal and precious metals now happens only at the edges of the realm of Roundwander, and in the spheres beyond the gates.

But the Digger family also maintains its premier role in the moneylending arena. And like all of the Odd Families, the Digger family is matriarchal and matrilineal. The Diggers' wealth is controlled by a handful of elder-sisters at the top of the clan hierarchy. Their message for everyone else in the family is: "Wait your turn."

Of course, not everyone in the family is willing to do that. The young and ambitious will always seek ways to get ahead. One of the ways is to find the Forgotten Vaults: one of the many hidden and often forgotten places where the Digger wealth of earlier eras was stored.

Grit Digger is young and unafraid. She delves deep, hoping to find some of her family's ancient buried treasure. Mums the word to her clan mothers, who have begun asking pointed questions about where she goes when she disappears for a day or two at time.

Grit Digger

• STR 13
• DEX 13
• WIL 10
• HP 3

Starting Package:

• Pistol (D6)
• Smoke-bomb
• Mutt
• Shovel