Characters
Paul - Luther Cheung – Cleric/Monk
Dan - Cedric– Divine Sorcerer
Jon – Cash – Holy Paladin
Dave – Silent Rekh – Fighter Champion
Wade – Lilith – Rogue with arcane trickster
Brian – Jerimiah – Paladin with Druidy subclass
Me – Theren – Wizard conjurer
Game 1 11/22/19
We all tied into Paul’s father’s monastery in some way and find ourselves in the modest coastal town of Jailynn. The sheriff recently left town suddenly and left the job to a young Halfling girl. She approached the group and asked if we’d be interested in looking into a matter for her. She offered to pay our room and board for a week plus 100 gp for our troubles. Since 100 didn’t go into 7 evenly, the Wizard, using his advanced math skills, negotiated her up to 140. It seems there has been an increase of petty thefts in the town. Nothing big, just small coins and such.
There has also been an increase in the rat population and reports of very large, dog-sized rats making off with household pets. And there’s a circus in town that was slated to leave in the next day or two. The increase in crime occurred prior to their arrival so that may just be a coincidence. We agreed to look into it. She wanted to meet in her office the next morning but the players were eager to get started. We split up to do some looking into things. Some went to the bar, some went back to her office, and some went to the wizard school to ply their various skills. Some additional clues were found.
She had hired some purported rat-catchers who took her half upfront money and then were never seen again. Skipped town, in on it or dead? The rats are in the poorer south side of town and have been seen coming out of the sewers. Evidently for such a small town, it has quite the sewer system under it. The sheriff is trying to keep this all quiet, so not to panic people. She also probably trying to keep her job. The wizard recalled reading about were-rats that supposedly have the ability to control rats. He thought that magic or silvered weapons would be needed.
We got a bunch of names of townspeople but I can’t recall any of them. But it all boiled down to rats in the sewers on the south side. We fanned out and walked through the streets of the south side. BTO’s Rogue wanted to be in the back and then Lillith wanted to be behind him so we were pretty spread out. Several spotted several swarms of rats. Their swarm nature gave them resistance to normal weapons but their AC was low and their hit points modest. One complication was that they could occupy the same square as their victim but Andy still allowed it to be attacked without harming the friendly unless you were using an AOE.
The Monk got swarmed but with his Shield of Faith going, he had the highest AC and wasn’t hit. The Fighter did get hit a couple of times. But the fight only lasted a couple of rounds. It was noted that the rats had some weird green slime on them that the arcane knowers thought was unnatural and perhaps the key to controlling them. After a bit of discussion, an entrance into the sewers that we could fit down was sought. The Paladin thought we should look into getting silvered weapons before going down but that opinion didn’t get much traction. So he ran off to pursue it alone.
So the Paladin went back to the sheriff who didn’t have such weapons. She thought the local merchant might have the heavy silver candlesticks he asked about as a backup but he was shut down for the night. He’d have to wait until morning. Rather than rejoining, he went back to the tavern. Some of the players wanted to get more flasks of oil after seeing how effective Brian’s Rogue was with his. Several characters went back to the sheriff to see if the town had some supplies that they used to light the street lamps. The lamplighter was found and provided a keg of oil. That was combined with empty bottles from the tavern and we had as much oil as anyone could carry. Not all did. Meanwhile Lillith and Silent Rekh worked on the sewer grate we found.
After a couple tries, the half-orc muscled it open. Lillith went down to look around but then waited for the rest to show up. The fighter did a short rest to heal up a bit while they waited. Into the sewers. The water was slimy and disgusting. There were walkways besides the streams but walking them required rolls to jump from one to another. We made a lot of athletics and acrobatics rolls with the skilled helping the unskilled. No one fell in but it took a lot of time and certainly wasn’t quiet. We saw a lot of nothing. Andy said that we happened to use one of the least interesting entrances. We did get to what we figure was the basement of the tavern or mercantile but no rats or other bad guys. Just lots of water moving downhill and lots of skill rolls. Eventually we started to get into an area that was going to be more interesting but since it was late we stopped there rather than start a fight.
So RPGs have been a hobby for me for years. A cousin introduced me to the Palladium Fantasy RPG and the Palladium world in its various incarnations has been my favorite ever since. Today Palladium has an entire Megaverse of content but that old Fantasy RPG has its place in my heart. However, I moved and it's been hard to get a Rifts game going either as a player or a GM since then. Setting up a webcam and Skyping just didn't work. Years passed again. For a while I played various incarnations of D&D with my local friends in my new home. Every other week I'd troupe over to a friend's and we'd sit down at the table and roll some dice. But time passed, we got old, had kids, moved out of state and had various mid-life crises. We tried long-distance playing again. Again the webcam came out and failed. After some fumbling around we started to use an online gaming platform called Fantasy Grounds combined with Skype. It started out a bit clunky but after a few years the D&D ruleset and more specifically the 5e ruleset because very polished. It's endorsed by Wizards of the Coast, which seems very wise considering I have pretty much bought all the content at least twice so I could have the hard copy AND play online with the reference material.
And yet... and yet... what about the game system I actually gave a darn about? Well, Palladium is still coming out with content but without people to play with, I really haven't kept up. Every few years I would sit down with a serious face at my computer and Google up a storm trying to find some way to play Rifts online. Roll 20 had some online games but I had invested too much energy in Fantasy Grounds to redo it all in Roll 20. SO fast forward a few weeks ago. I sit down, do another search and I get a reference pop up. Someone named "Damned" had made a very flexible ruleset for Fantasy Grounds. It's not perfect but with a little bit of spit and polish, it may just work. I dug into the tutorials for extensions, stumbled around a bit in the xml and lua files and came up with a slight modification that I think will work with Fantasy Grounds and Damned's MoreCore ruleset. Fortunately, Damned is very responsive to questions. I feel a bit guilty for wasting his time but with his help, I have something I put together with an online tutorial on YouTube. I still don't actually have a campaign to play but it was fun to put together. If this interests you check out my Youtube tutorial!
I was late. I completely missed my December publish date. I almost missed my revised date of late January but I barely made that one. All of these dates are self-inflicted so I suppose there is no harm. Moving into the new house has been a roller coaster. It required a huge change to my lifestyle, which I won't get into, but has generally been positive. Except on my writing schedule. It has definitely hit that harder than I thought. Back in June, I was writing very quickly. In fact, I had started two other projects (a children's book and a litRPG story)and had been making great progress on everything. My latest schedule hit was due to both my girls being sick and having a water leak (which turned out to be in the yard). The girls are actually easier to take care of when they are coughing and listless, except for keeping mommy and me up all night. The flipside is that since they are coughing on us I expect we'll be sick in about a week.
I haven't touched my website in several months, so I was worried that I would completely forget how to use it. Having worked with it for a few days I can thankfully say that it mostly came back. I even found that Goodreads has new widgets that allow your book reviews in Goodreads to be viewed on your website. That is more than Amazon allows. See my blog for a slightly more in-depth description of my tears of bitterness.
On the downside, I realized you can't blog directly in the Joomla editor because if you take too long you get logged out and you lose your blog/comments. Yes, this is my second attempt. If you are reading this and you want to leave a comment...remember to write in WordPad or something and THEN copy the test into the comment field. Just saying.
Of course since the last time I used Joomla it has started saying that PHP 5.6 is outdated and to switch to PHP7.2. I installed this and have been trying various tricks to get Joomla to use it. Unsuccessfully. Running a server on a Synology box has been fun and educational but it has moments of frustration.
