Nuketown

Playtests

First Impressions: Innsmouth Horror Expansion

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 12/30/2009 - 1:54pm

The Innsmouth Horror expansion for Arkham Horror showed up under the Geek Tree this holiday season, and the day after Christmas some friends and I broke it out for a Saturday afternoon horrorfest.

It's an impressive expansion. Unlike our last expansion, The Black Goat of the Woods, this one is a full expansion with its own sideboard for the village of Innsmouth.  Innsmouth adds 12 new locations (along with their own location decks), 16 new characters, 12 new Great Old Ones, story quests for characters (including the base game, and the expansions), and a new Deep Uprising mechanic.

D&D 4th Edition: Quilleron, Oathsworn Avenger

Quilleron is my second-ever character for D&D 4E (Field General Zhoran, a dwarven warlord, was my first) and the first I was able to run as a player. He was designed as a giant-killer for my gaming group's Revenge of the Giants campaign. You can read more about my thoughts on returning to D&D 4E in "D&D 4th Edition: A Player's Persepctive".

The Ruins of New York: Playtest Notes

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 11/08/2009 - 5:01pm

"The Ruins of New York" is a 4-hour one-shot adventure written for Ken Hite's The Day After Ragnarok, a Savage Worlds campaign setting published by Atomic Overmind Press. I'll be running this event at MEPACon Fall 2009, and since it's been a while since I ran Savage Worlds, I decided to do a playtest with my regular gaming group.

What follows is a synopsis of the adventure and my playtest notes from running it. I'll be posting my adventure notes on Friday for those who are interested it running it themselves.

Star Wars Playtest: Starship Battles

They Were Expendable

Never, ever fly a TIE Fighter.

That's the most important thing we learned during our initial playtest of the Star Wars: Saga Edition combat rules as our squadron of three TIE fighters was torn to pieces by an X-Wing and the Old Republic-era S-250 Chela starfighter. It's as it should be -- Imperial propaganda aside, TIE fighters don't last more than a few seconds in most battles in the Star Wars universe -- but our playtest drove home that point in game.

The playtest also revealed other things about this aspect of the game, and in particular the supplemental rules in Starships of the Galaxy.

Importing 4E Skill Challenges into Star Wars: Saga Edition

Skill challenges were one of the best things to come out of our D&D 4th Edition playtest.  Building on earlier versions that appeared in Spycraft and Unearthed Arcana, skill challenges provided an in-game mechanic for resolving non-combat conflicts and complex tasks.

We used it to handle the exploration a lava tube complex leading to a red dragon’s volcano and an escape from an angry horde of goblins on an ice world. In both cases, we found it really enhanced our game, turning what could have another dungeoncrawl or a case of DM fiat into a dramatic, player-driven story.

It’s a good idea, and one we’ve been eager to use in our Star Wars campaign (even our anti-4E contingent  wanted to try it). We did exactly that in our third session (“Chapter 3: The Lingering Twilight”), with equally good results.

Star Wars: Saga Edition - Annotated Playtest #2

Quest Fios faces off against the Scarbrother Gang.Quest Fios faces off against the Scarbrother Gang.

Our Dawn on Zebulon prelude campaign for Star Wars: Saga Edition hit Episode II last night, and I think to say we've hit our stride. Even with two new players joining the session with no Saga experience, our second game went as well as the first.

Unlike our initial game, which focused on three Jedi padawans and their training droid, JPD-14, hunting for the wreck of a starship on the jungle world of Zebulon Prime, this time around our heroes were divided between two padawans and the hired crew of a the star freighter Aeon Harrier.

These new characters – a pilot callsigned Highlife (human noble 1, played by Cory),  his wookie friend Shim'kworr (Wookie scoundrel 1, played by Brendan) and ship mechanic Zulen Tek (Arkanian offshoot scoundrel 1, played by me).

Star Wars: Saga Edition - Annotated Playtest #1

Our Star Wars: Saga Edition campaign kicked off on Friday with our first full-fledged Knights of the Old Republic session. Since my Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Annotated Playtest went over so well  I decided to do the same for this Saga Edition.

This one will work a little differently; instead of annotating a single combat ecounter, I’m going to offer my thoughts on the game session as a whole, discussing both combat and role-playing aspects of the game. If there's enough interest, I'll also do a round-by-round combat playtest for melee and starship combat. 

Dawn on Zebulon

The adventure began on the world of Zebulon Beta, part of the binary planetary system of Zebulon in the Vargis Tau system. We joined our three young padawans in the training yards of the Citadel of Kal-Kor, home to the Unified Force Academy, under the watchful eye of Jedi Knight Lornn Varri.

Nuke(m)Con 2008: The Wild, Weird West

Like a twister carving its way through a Midwestern cornfield, Nuke(m)Con has come and gone. My gaming group held its annual (well, almost annual) home-grown convention over the weekend. In a break from previous years, which typically saw a mix of Dungeons & Dragons and board games, this year's Nuke(m)Con had a western theme.

Asgard Project: High-level D&D 3.5 Playtest #1

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sat, 09/06/2008 - 8:30am

Rather than just complain about how difficult high level combat is in D&D 3.5, my gaming group's decided to do something about it. We've created a playtest group who's willing to put in the extra effort it takes to play a high level game ... and to figure out what, if anything, we can do to make the process work better.

Our first crack at this was the 15th-level one-shot "The Devil-Haunted World".

Observations on High Heroic Tier Game Play in D&D 4E

We ran our last D&D 4E session on Friday, concluding the playtest campaign that ran all summer. Since this was our last hurrah (at least for a while) we decided to level our characters up from 2nd to 9th level to see how they played.

Here are a few random observations that popped up during the game.