Dragonbane

 After the somewhat less than successful end to the previous quest, we restocked on supplies and retraced our steps following Roderick's trail to a mine with three entrances, choosing the largest one in the middle with a set of mine cart tracks that piqued Krisanna's interest. It opened up into a series of large circular caves with a fire burning in a pit in the second one. Krisanna sneaked through the gloom followed by Orla and climbed up a ledge where they had seen some movement. 

They were surprised to see a couple of goblin guards, and Krisanna offered them a biscuit in exchange for any information about the dwarf. In response, one of them attacked and the other sounded an alarm. They dealt with the immediate threat and climbed back down preparing for battle with sounds of oncoming feet. There followed a spectacular and bloody battle with goblins, orcs and they even bought a cave troll! Much slicing and dicing, before the remaining three orcs surrendered and were let go in exchange for telling us that the dwarf we sought was locked up further north.

We found some prisoners locked up in one room, and we freed the humans but left some bolshy dwarfs who took umbrage at us 'borrowing' their sacred axe. No Roderick though, so we followed Krisanna's treasure sense deeper in, finding two chests - one trapped which nearly poisoned Krisanna and the other stuffed with treasure, including gold, silver, a master forged sword and a grimoire with four spells.

The next room had a certain dwarf chained up and after thinking for one horrible moment that the sunstone might be concealed about his person, it turned out that the fire fairies (fuckers!) had stolen the jewel. We locked him up with the other dwarfs who were somewhat miffed with him. We left them food and promised to let them out and (maybe) return the axe when we were done with it. We left the mine on a minecart, much to Krisanna's delight - wheeeee!

Back through the woods, disposing of a bear en route, before arriving at a mirror black lake which Krisanna immediately skimmed a stone across, waking the fire fairies (fuckers!). Fortunately they seemed happy to trade us the sun stone in exchange for Makander retrieving their golden lyre from the bed of the lake. As Krisanna took the stone, a ray of light shot up, briefly bringing back the daylight before fading again.

Back to the Forbidden Lands

Back to the Forbidden Lands after a break and we quickly picked up on the plot threads we had left dangling. We had been given a set of simplified rules for stronghold management, and by complete co-incidence we happened to passing by a tempting looking fortified tower …

Larian was boosted up on to the wall for a look and of course the place happened to under the control of the Rust Brothers - time for a scrap! After an exchange of arrows and crossbow bolts, Ochs managed to bash the gates down and went charging in. Some tough fighting followed, particularly with some very nasty magic users backing up the fighters, but things went our way in the end, even if Ochs’ lack of empathy proved to be a potential Achilles’ heel.

Dragonbane - On the Trail of the Pesky Dwarf

We were waiting for our audience with the Archon when a terrible realisation dawned - there was only bread and water to eat for breakfast. A quick trip into town for something more substantial and then back to find out what had happened. It turned out that there had been a commotion in the tower and the watch maiden had been knocked out. A bit of investigation and a strong smell of dwarf led to the realisation that the culprit must have been Roderick Redbeard himself! Orla had to be held back after the Archon said that we had a reputation of being ‘relatively competent’.

Bastonn tracked the scent to the east where we camped for the night, disturbed only by a pair of fire fairies (fuckers!). The next morning a combination of tracking and Krisanna’s treasure sense directed us back into the woods where we found a large octagonal structure surrounded by giant swords. Clearly dwarvish, we figured out a way in by deciphering some runes that told us it was the tomb of Thraidin Trollbane. 

We descended some stairs and made an equal offering of gold and silver on a small balance scale which opened up the tomb itself. No sign of Roderick, but the sarcophagus had a tempting looking lid which was just asking to be levered off, revealing a tempting looking magical axe inside. At this point, the giant statue at the far side of the room lumbered into life, so we prepared for a fight (not realising that we could have run away at this point).

The battle was going our way and we were feeling confident when Aodhan fumbled his fireball spell and opened a portal, summoning in a nasty looking demon that proceeded to nearly kill Krisanna as well as knocking out two of her teeth, before turning its gaze on the rest of the group. Yikes. Fortunately the initiative fell our way, and the party managed to kill the demon and the statue before they could do any more damage. 

A miserable night’s camping and we woke to find all of our rations had been stolen by the fire fairies (fuckers!), so we cut our losses and crept back into town to try another day.

The Crew 2

The Crew 2 was Ubisoft's answer to Forza Horizons, with hundreds of vehicles, events and challenges spread across a (slightly condensed) map of the whole USA. It's an online, massively multiplayer world with other players showing up for races, but you can effectively play it as a single player game if you want. It follows the classic formula of driving to icons on the map (or fast travelling in the menu) and competing in various sorts of races, time trials and stunt challenges. As well as cars, there are also motorbikes, monster trucks, off roaders, speedboats, hovercraft, and stunt and racing planes. 

I picked this up as part of my PS+ sub, and as well as the base game there are literally hundreds of free DLC events and extra content drops, but in the end I mostly stuck to the story missions which are effectively scavenger hunts where you are given a postcard style clue to a location and tasked with working out where it is and driving there to unlock the next stage. After twelve or so stages, you are rewarded with a shiny new car. These missions give you a good excuse to criss cross the USA and take in all of the iconic locations across the vast map. 

The graphics are pretty good on the whole - perhaps the cities aren't quite as detailed as those in the Watchdogs series, but the wide open landscapes, small towns, mountains and woods can be spectacular as the day/night cycle progresses and the weather changes in real time. The driving/flying model is mostly arcady but feels satisfying enough, especially from the in car cockpit view. 

I think that I'll keep this one installed for a while, just as something to drop into when I fancy a drive.

No Man's Sky - Aquarius

 To take advantage of the dramatic new ocean tech in No Man's Sky, we now have an expedition themed around a new fishing mechanic with some interesting challenges along the way. I particularly liked the new fishing skiff which is a little floating platform with a built in storage area that you can place in the middle of the ocean and cast your line from. This is one of the few expeditions that I have completed on Switch and PS5 versions, simply because it is a relaxing way to spend a bit of time catching weird fish on even weirder alien seas.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer has one of my favourite opening lines of a SF novel. 'The sky was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel' manages to be evocative and futuristic, whilst also showing how technology has changed since the book was written. Instead of a fuzzy grey, a dead channel is now a nice, clear blue, so the line still works both ways. 

The novel is set in a dystopian near future, where nation states have been superseded by warring zaibatsu corporations conducting their business in cyberspace, most people eke out miserable lives in slums and shanty towns whilst the super rich live in orbital enclaves. The protagonist is a burned out hacker called Case, who has had his ability to jack into the matrix removed after a previous bungled assignment. He is hired by a mysterious patron called Armitage, a veteran of an assault on a Russian data centre, and aided by Molly Millions, a street samurai razor girl with permanently implanted mirror shades for eyes, and tasked with bringing down an AI with high grade Chinese virus software.

The opening section, summarised above, hooks you in with things that have now become established cyberpunk tropes - body mods, matrix hacking, cyberdecks - and hits you with new ideas at a dizzying rate. Apparently Gibson had started writing this book and almost gave up after seeing the opening scenes of Blade Runner because he thought that people would assume he was copying its style. Fortunately, he kept going, and this book, along with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash have become the foundational texts of the cyberpunk genre.

There are some bits that read awkwardly now - all of the dialogue for the Rastafarian character Maelcum - pilot of the space tug Garvey - who appears later in the book, is cringeworthy in the extreme. Some of the technical references feel slightly dated - Gibson didn't really know what a modem was, and he thought the 3 Megabytes of hot RAM was a lot. To be fair, the ZX81 computer that was roughly contemporaneous with this book only had 1K of RAM on a good day unless you splashed out for the wobbly 16K RAM pack. It also amused me to read about the implantable slivers of code call Microsofts in the book. Even if I were a cyberpunk, I'd probably think twice about sticking one of those in my cranium

In summary, this is a book that still holds up well, and still has much to say about the way that we relate to technology and AI in particular. It's telling that we've never managed to build a cyberspace that's as beguiling as the one in this book though.

Matrons of Mystery

We were two players down for DCC tonight, so I offered to run Matrons of Mystery using Miro for a murder board. This game is always fun for a bit of cosy crime solving with little old ladies investigating the sudden death of a celebrity gardener at a recording of a popular radio gardening show. Of course, everyone seemed to have a motive for wanting him dead and there was plenty of opportunity from bottle of weed killer, poisonous mushrooms and other clues to put together. What larks!

Furnace XIX

It's a credit to the organisers of this excellent gaming con that they are now in their nineteenth year and still going from strength to strength. This year saw nearly 70 people playing in fifty different games over the weekend, making use of the armoury, the dungeon and the jailhouse of the magnificent Garrison Hotel. It really is one of my favourite locations for playing games, without some of the noise issues of larger cons in big halls. 

After an introduction from organiser Graham, everyone found their assigned tables with minimal fuss. I was down in the armoury running a game of Tales of the Old West from the Quickdraw rules. I'd billed this as a potentially gritty setting, but the players leaned into their characters and had a great time. Using poker chips to track faith points, playing cards for initiative, and a toy gun to demonstrate how the shooting rules worked really added to the atmosphere. They picked up the rules quickly and I was able to improvise a few additional elements on the fly with no problems. The scenario was a tale of revenge for a murdered compadre and built up to an epic showdown with the bad guys, using a lassoed cougar and a fistful of dynamite.  Yee-haw!

Table bling

Your friendly neighbourhood gunslinger

The posse!

After lunch from Morrisons, the afternoon game was the intense and unique Alice is Missing, hosted by Peanut. This scenario involves a missing teen in a Pacific North West town in the middle of winter, and the responses of her five friends as they talk to each via text messages on their phones. After a explanation of how the game was going to run and setting up a WhatsApp group chat, a timer was started on a laptop with music playing. At ten minute intervals, different players would turn over their event card which gave instructions on revealing locations, suspects, clues and secrets to bring into the narrative. As the clock ticked down, the conversations became quite intense as the situation became increasingly desperate and the conclusion left us all emotionally stunned as the in character voice mails that we had sent to Alice were played out. This is something that everyone should try if they get the chance.

How it started ...

How it ended.

Sunday morning was The Temple of Artemis, run by Sue Savage, one of the best horror GMs around. She set the scene of a run down Edwardian country house that had been inherited by one of the characters and the ghastly secrets that were hidden within. The rules were simple using the Cthulhu Dark D6 system, but the atmosphere was like an MR James ghost story as we unravelled the story. Her softly spoken narration made the jump scares all the more effective when she dropped them on us. Sue is working on this one for publication and it's worth looking out for if you want to be spooked on a dark evening.

The final game was a run of one of the dungeons from the Dragonbane starter set, GM'd by Debbie taking great glee in unleashing monsters on our unsuspecting adventuring party. I really do enjoy this system and setting, and the maps and figures included in the box are of excellent quality. The final battle with a giant water serpent was a close run thing with half the characters reduced to zero hit points or being knocked off the raft we were trying to fight on and nearly drowning. An excellent conclusion to the weekend!

All in all, another amazing weekend of gaming, thanks to Graham, Dom and Elaine for organising it all! See you next year!

DCC Temple of the Carnifex

 Back to the temple for another raid, but this time the guards knew we were coming! A tense stand off, boiling oil poured downstairs and a mysterious statue to investigate.