Got the Saturday Night Asskickers together for the Anima game.  Players were…

• Monte with Fodor the Taoist
• Sebastian with Janus (I forget his class)
• TomT with Cid the Warrior

I might try to recruit like one more player, but I haven’t decided yet.

Anyway, we kicked off the session with a little fake fight to get everyone accustomed to combat.  They took out the bandits from that fight extremely quickly (I think 2 rounds…).  Afterwards, Monte had to go as he’d had a REALLY bad day.

Anyway, then it was on to the adventure proper.   The Janus and Cid, who had known each other from fighting in a recent battle together, were at the village of Aggrio for the annual Festival of Gabriel.  They tried their hands at some games, with Cid winning the title of Strongarm and Janus unfortunately failing at his game.  Then it was off to the village square for some dancing…

That’s when things got ugly.  An airship arrived, hovering over the village and dropping mercenaries down into the village square.  Two of these mercs rushed our heroes.  This fight was pretty quick, partially because one of the mercs botched his attack so badly that he damn near killed the second merc on the first round (basically he swung at Cid, tripped and stabbed the other merc in the back AND got a critical hit when doing it).  After dispatching these two mercs, a second group of mercs (three this time) rushed the party. This second battle was much more evenly matched, the mercs didn’t end up being extremely clumsy this go-round.  But crits and fumbles still flew on both the PCs’ side and the mercs’ (at one point, Cid had an initiative of -92.  Yes, that’s “negative ninety-two”).

About midway into the battle, the village temple began burning.  Not too long after that, a flying Lunan in black half plate flew from the temple and the mercs followed him back up into the ship.  In fine Final Fantasy tradition, the Lunan antagonist was deadly handsome (he had a 10 on his Appearance and, yes, I rolled that randomly!), rather androgynous and vain as all crap.

Janus wanted to climb up the ropes after the fleeing soldiers, but Cid had a better idea; cut the ropes and capture the soldiers.  Cid cut one with his Big Honkin’ Axe ™ while Janus actually managed to shoot one of the ropes in half with his crossbow.  The mercs, cut off from their ship (which promptly left) surrendered.  Cid and Janus checked to see what the Hell the mercs had been after.

When they talked to the head priest of the temple, they learned that the mercs came for several scrolls, each of which held the location of a religious artifact.  Once all of the artifacts were collected, they could be used to reactivate an ancient tower that allowed whoever activated it to go to the gates of Heaven itself.  But, the mercs didn’t get ALL of the scrolls; the priest managed to hide one, which he gave to Janus and Cid to protect.

Janus and Cid decided to take the scroll to the safest place nearby; the Holy City itself, seat of the Human Empire….and so, off they rode and that’s where we ended…

As far as game play, the system looks damned complex at first, but it’s not.  It plays very simply.  Combat was very frustrating for the PCs at first as the NPCs kept denying them their attacks (if you get successfully hit you lose your active action/attack, even if the attack does no damage..initiative is very important in Anima) until they stumbled upon a very good tactic for a “tank” type character; just Take the Hit and let your armor sort out the damage.  That means they only defend at half their bonus, but they won’t lose their action unless they receive a critical.  Also, a group of evenly-matched opponents (such as the PCs and that second group of mercenaries) can lead a combat into grindspace if all people are doing is just standing there swinging.

Overall, I think they were mostly pleased. 

We had 5 players lined up for the WHFRPG one-off.

1 of them had school stuff to do.

1 of them (who normally never misses a session) had a bad computer virus to take care of.

1 of them wasn’t going to be there until muy late.

2 of them showed up.  One of those two kept having to disappear for work-related stuff.

I was tired from all the OT, so about an hour into it, I said “fuck it.”

The Saturday Night Asskickers gather this evening so we’ll see if that goes any better (one of those peeps was the dude with the virus, so hopefully he’s got that all straightened out).

Beginning to get burned out.  Thinking of taking a couple months’ break from the Friday night game.  Not sure if that means “not gaming at all for a couple of months on Friday nights” or “assembling a brand new team to go out and kick ass on Friday nights for a couple of months.”  I’ll have to make that decision today.

Why, yes, it does suck that I’m repeatedly having to make these “the session didn’t get off the ground this week” posts.

More schedule modifications.

• Friday Night Fighters:  Weekly D&D game (until July anyway) with the exception fo the last Friday each month, which is when we’re doing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
• Wednesday Night Warriors:  On indefinite hold.
• Saturday Night Asskickers:  Anima:  Beyond Fantasy.  First session is this Saturday.

Yay!  Gaming actually worked yesterday (after I squashed a bug in MapTool b50 that screwed a couple of players over & made it so they couldn’t see the maps).  The characters…

• Sindiin, Human Wizard
• Yuiri, Eladrin Wizard
• Gerran & Greyfang, Dwarven Ranger (beastmaster build)
• Erroll, Human Rogue
• Que’Lara, Eladrin Paladin of the Raven Queen
• Brother Iruel, Tiefling Cleric of Pelor

The party, on a mission to retrieve an artifact in some elven ruins to save the village of Two Rivers, approached the ruins.  Yuiri spotted some faces in the vines around the front of the ruins while Gerran spotted some sort of vine trap on the stairs.  Sindiin started talking about backing up and letting loose with some fire, which apparently the critters in the vines heard and initiative was rolled…two vine horrors and a vine horror spellfiend rose from the vines. 

One of the vine horrors opened up with the creatures’ ability to cause vegetation to spring up and grab people nearby, and caught all of the PCs in the area (though it only managed to affect 4 of ‘em).  The fight took a while, and the PCs learned the hard way that the Spellfiend’s attacks were electrically charged.

I had a clever tactic I was going to use with the spellfiend, but ended up getting stuck with PCs all around me so I couldn’t use ranged attack.  Yuiri freezing-clouded the two vine horrors, which also took out the vine traps on the stairs.

After dispatching the vine horrors, the PCs entered the ruins, the seal on the front doors having been broken a long time ago.  Inside, everything was covered in spiderwebs, and Que’Lara began working on diffusing the seal on the northernmost inner doors.  Meanwhile, the party got swarmed by deathjump spiders from the east and west doors (5 in all); in a very tight area (which I suspect kept Sindiin from using some of his cooler area spells).  Crits were rolled, 1s were rolled and in the end, two of the spiders escaped.

And that was where we called it.  Due to a screw up by me with MapTool and the “blocking line of sight” thing, the PCs have a small idea of what’s coming soon. 

On the Saturday once-a-month-f2f game front, I’ve pretty much given up on that.  Instead, we’re going to have a once-a-month-online-long-session consisting of 4 hours of Warhammer Fantasy RPG and 4 hours of Anima:  Beyond Fantasy.  First session is next Saturday (unless something happens to change it).

…apparently last night was one of those.  My internet connection was crapping out constantly last night so…we ended up not gaming.

(sigh)

Because I plan to be doing things best left undescribed to you tomorrow night for Valentine’s weekend, we had no session this week, so I ran a one-shot Warhammer FRPG game.

The characters were Yin, my 13-year old’s elven outrider and Pieter, Richard’s human charcoal burner.  The setup:  they awakened in a cage in a sewer with no equipment other than clothes and no idea how they got there.  Nearby was a table, chair and a lamp.

Yin noticed the hinges on the cell door were rusted and looked easy to break, so a couple of good shoves and the adventurers got out of the cell.  They saw a door down the hall and, while they were deciding what to do, a giant rat swam up and attacked the unarmed party.  Cue the improvised weapons (the chair for Yin and the lamp for Pieter).

Pieter won the day by accidentally breaking the lamp over the rat’s head, catching it on fire (and burning himself in the process).  The rat decided to jump back in the poo-filled water and escape. 

The door held the PCs equipment and a list of some kind (neither could read), so they carried on for a bit, looking for a way out of the sewers.  They found a ladder and a door and, when they started to climb, someone attacked them from the shadows..

..it was a rat-man (a Skaven?  Nah!  Those don’t exist!!).  This battle went much quicker, armed with weaponry as they were.  At the end of the battle, the Skaven had a mangled left arm, a sliced up right hand and died in a fountain of blood.  The group got out of the sewer to discover they were in Altdorf.  Finding a scholar and paying him to read the list they discovered it was a list of names, including their own.  Obviously, something is afoot!

But, we ran out of time so…maybe someday we’ll follow this line.

This is why I love gaming.  I was ready for a knock-down drag out last night.  But I get ahead of myself.

The characters…(everyone showed, and all but one actually on time!)

• Yuiru (eladrin wizard), played by Halley (my eldest daughter for those of you not keeping track)
• Brother Iruel, tiefling cleric of Pelor
• Que’Lara (showed up late), eladrin paladin/rogue of the Raven Queen
• Akarnon tiefling starlock
• Sindiin, human wizard
• Erroll, human rogue

When last we left our heroes, they had arrived at Two Rivers to retrieve a girl somehow tied to the current goings-on in Estrabaq with the Faceless and their infiltration fo the royal family.  While Sister Hagrid, priestess of Erathis and the lady in charge of the orphanage, when to retrieve the girl (named Genevieve, and she looks rather like the Queen, I might add), something weird happened.  The entire village had a worldfall into the Feywild.

After being approached by some hobgoblins looking for “their tribute,” the party stalled long enough for the Mayor to explain exactly what the Hell was going on.  Seems at the village’s founding, a deal was struck with a fey hobgoblin named Murkeye the Immortal One; an unknown amount of time full of peace and prosperity for the village, but one day it would be called to Murkeye’s side and the price paid; every child in the village.  As luck would have it, today was the day Murkeye opted to call the village.

Now here’s where they surprised me (and this is why I love gaming as well as why I love this group).  They actually found a loophole in the pact; they had the mayor write up a law that every citizen of the village over the age of 2 days was an adult, forged and aged the paper (via prestidigitation) to make it look as though the law had been in effect for years and decided to try to fool Murkeye.

Akarnon was unable to fail the resulting skill challenge.  So they convinced the hobgoblins to take Akarnon directly to Murkeye.  Akarnon bluffed the crap out of the hobgoblin, convinced him that this was all legal and binding.  He also offered to bring back magical treasures for Murkeye from a nearby ruins (that Yuiru knew about; as part of her backstory it fit best that she be a native of the Feywild to tie her in with the group).

Impressed so much with this plan and that they managed to get out of this situation without spilling a single drop of blood I was that I just gave everyone however much XP they needed to get to 5th level.  That also means that next session (in 2 weeks; taking next week off for Valentine’s Day weekend festivities), we get to have a good old fashioned dungeon crawl.

The Wednesday night game is only 2 hours long (and currently only has 2 players) so these reports will be fairly short. What we’re currently doing is continuing the Dark Heresy storyline. Mithras and Jerichus were ordered to continue their investigation to see how deep the xenos invasion was infiltrating the planet…

After a day or so of rest, the investigation continued. After talking to one of the Plumes lieutenants, a man by the name of Marcus, the two adepts discovered that there is an offworld trader named Gorram that seems to have some sort of deal with both sides of the civil war, and is able to not only get around the blockades, but as a result is able to sell his wares and trade goods at standard prices (as opposed to the double everyone is having to charge).

So, it was off to Gorram’s warehouse/store. Just after entering the Wharfs, a crossbow bolt flew at Mithras from an unseen assassin in a nearby abandoned house. Going into “danger mode,” the two acolytes moved toward the house, but unfortunately, the assassin had escaped through the back door of the house and down the twisting alley. Deciding to leave that for now (and finding nothing investigating the house as to the identity of the assassin), the party sallied forth to Gorram’s…

OK, so the Friday Night Fighters wrapped up the Maggots in the Meat adventure from the Dark Heresy GM’s kit.  That DH game will be moving to Wednesday night, and we’re picking up the D&D 4e game again on Friday.

But, I digress.  Last night we finished the Maggots in the Meat adventure, well, after I toned it down a lot.  Y’see, it’s supposed to be a starting level adventure but the main xenos villains, the Slaught, are some mean little muggafuggas.

It didn’t help that when the group were attacked by the first Slaught, they all failed their Fear checks, most of them by a very large number of degrees of failure.  That set the tone for the fight that followed. 

One of the party’s psykers, Dame, kept triggering psychic phenonema, specifically one that gives everyone Corruption Points.  Eventually, she just disappeared into the Warp.  There was at least one weapon malfunction on the PCs’ part (and one on the part of the Slaught, but the Slaught’s melee attack was uglier anyway).  Also, Mithras rolled so poorly on his Fear check that now he’s got 11 Insanity Points and we have to check to see what the effects of THAT are gonna be.

Not only did I have to cut the final encounter down from three Slaughts to just one, bit I ignored the Slaught’s armor and the penetration from his weapon during the combat.  These suckers are tough…lots of wounds, practically immune to crits, regeneration each round, the ability to suck up damage like a vaccuum sucks up..uh..stuff, REALLY hard to affect with psyker powers (+10 to the threshold is nothing to laugh at) in addition to their flat-out immunity to certain other pysker powers.  The fight with the group against just ONE of these suckers took nearly 3 hours.

But, the party succeeded, finally.  Now, the players that can make it to the Weds group have had their characters asked by their Inquisitor to stay behind on Acreage to determine how deep this Slaught invasion is going and how involved the planet is.  Also, provided everyone spends half their XP awards, they all get promoted a rank.

Now that we’ve got the tech issues worked out (hopefully) we’re probably going to switch back to D&D on the Friday Night games after this week (as this week should be the culmination of the Maggots in the Meat adventure for Dark Heresy).

I’m thinking of starting up a monthly Sunday game, and I’ll probably move Dark Heresy there.