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We continue the tales of the Evils of Illmire. And what I’ve learned while running it. The party start in the sunken Bastion, keeping a Black Skeleton Turned at bay while they rob his throne room. They then have a short rest, and explore the room unlocked by the key on the Skeleton’s belt. Some normal skeletons provide no trouble, but the Wraith they unleash from the cell is much more of a problem, especially when it starts raising the freshly interred skeletons as Spectres. This was a long hard fight, and very nearly ended badly. ...

Jim Parkin likes making and playing very streamlined games. Really, very very streamlined games. He’s into the idea of free kriegsspiel (FK) feeding back into RPGs (the FK revolution, FKR) and summarises it well. This goes past OSR’s “rulings not rules”, and could be encapsulated as “why have the rules? Just talk through the action and agree what should happen”. This requires trust at the gaming table (no /r/rpghorrorstories), and (I personally think) a bit of confidence for the Referee. I barely have confidence that I’m applying rules that are written down correctly, so this terrifies me. Here’s Jim’s words: ...

So, last time, in the Evils of Illmire… well, it went a bit to shit. See for yourself. Rancidius, priest of the Cult of the Illuminal Star, and the bandits defer to him. He knocks Vert, the paladin, to the ground, and then pulls a mindphage from his ear. Useless thing, so much for control. You were supposed to have betrayed the party much earlier! Not that I suppose you needed to, you’ve been much less competent than I expected! The monologing continued in this vein for some time. Once “Father Rand” got this out of his system, he dispatched the group to the cult HQ for sacrifice to the Fearmother. However, en route, the cult see mantismen causing problems ahead, and resolve to tip the party into the Gecko Pit and call it quits. But they’re keeping the loot, of course. ...

In the last writeup, the party was surprised by an owlbear… But before that, I got the party sketched! This was done by HodagRPG, see their zines on itch. The party of three half-elves and a dwarf Clockwise from the top right, we have: Leithedir - elf/human ranger Vert - dwarven paladin Yentor - elf/dragonborn sorceror Corkas - elf/human cleric I really like the sketches, so do my players. It was about the cost of a round of beer, and in Feb 2021, that is an option I do not have. 🍻 ...

To celebrate playing another game of Spire with Alone in the Labyrinth, I got my character sketched! A very nice person drew him for me, find Kiril here or on insta. My character’s a middle-aged carrion-priest, who cares for the downtrodden drow in the city of Spire from his small temple. The hyenas consume the dead and ensure the souls pass up to god. That’s not even my character, that’s just a stock class in Spire. My actual character is that Father Friendly, who helps the needy by summoning magical offal (stock spell!) is also a ruthless hunter of those that have wronged him or fellow drow. He has a brutal prey-hook, can summon a murder of crows, and his hyena is pretty handy in a fight too. Father Tireless ...

Christmas 2019, I decided to give playing by post (PbP) a try. What I mean here by PbP is the concept of playing an RPG, by writing alternate sentences or paragraphs of text, with other people (typically not in real-time). This seemed like a great way of balancing the goal of playing with new people without having to learn how to play games over the Internet, which at that point, didn’t sound fun1. I was surprised how immersive it was, and tried starting a game as GM myself, and then in my RPG boom around March, joined a bunch of online communities and played a few more games. AFter briefly being in too many games, I had a second resurgence towards the end of the year. Overall, I’ve been in at least eight. And I must be honest, I struggle to recommend the format. Let me explain. ...

I have a spare laptop. I’m not going to spend ages cutting it up to make an actual photo-frame, and neither will I build one from scratch with a Raspberry Pi Zero. I’m just going to put it by the TV and see whether my wife and I look at it. Requirements: Show pictures after power on Get pictures from the NAS Auto-update them ...

How many pictures? I like taking pictures. How many pictures? Well, you know, some. $ find ~/pix/cam -type f | wc -l 10167 $ du -sh ~/pix/cam 47G ~/pix/cam That does not include pictures taken on my various mobile phones. And how many have I printed? Well, I think I have less than twenty framed. And I made two photobooks, and I’m not sure when I looked in them last. 😬 I try to finesse them down, weed out the crap (there’s a lot of bad pictures), crop, enhance, etc. And that’s hard and is a never-ending job and I’m just looking at them on my computer then, and my wife doesn’t see them at all. So, let’s show ’em off. This is a solved problem right? Right? ...

Continuing from part one, this post summarises the next two sessions. The party decide they want to investigate the bandit camp (shown by the tower in the map below). Things close to Illmire This of course is Just Great as I’d prepped the temple because they were very keen to go back last session. I had the map in FVTT though with some walls on it, so it was more-or-less ready to go. I just didn’t have NPCs, encounters etc ready. ...

Apologies for the delay on this writeup, it’s back from October. The Barrowmaze campaign continued on a little longer, but then fizzled out to be replaced by the Evils of Illmire one in December. I realised I had too many small RPG groups. I know why this is, I like small groups of people in person - I’d much rather go out with three people than eight. The problem though is with a party of eight, it matters a lot less if someone can’t make it. ...