'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 15

Tabletop Tuesday — Supplemental… (Or, “Maybe if we bought a new bookshelf?”)

One of the built-in double-edged sword qualities of the tabletop role-playing game industry gig is how once you’ve released the books you need to play the game, you’ve given your players everything they need to play the game for… well, forever. They don’t have to ever pay you again and they’ve got everything they need to play that system for years and years to come. It’s a fantastic thing.

It’s also not the greatest sales model to, y’know, keep the lights on. One solution? Supplemental material. Sourcebooks. Player’s guides. Adventures. Settings. Spellbooks (or the equivalent in whatever setting, tech and psionics for sci-fi, superpowers for comic-book settings, etc). Those not only keep the lights on, they often breathe some fresh air into your game if you’re starting to stall out a bit, especially as the narrator.

Of course, there’s also the flip-side to that: the glut of… less than great that sometimes happens.

I’m pretty sure my pre-teen self took that original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set (mumble-mumble) years ago and played the game without any other material for at least three or four years. When AD&D 2nd Edition happened, I picked up multiple extra books (I definitely had some real stinkers, like the “Cardmaster” boxed set, which was… not good).

But I’d rather not dwell on awful releases that never should have made it to the shelves—(cough)Spelljammer(cough)—when I can instead talk about two of my favourite supplemental books.

Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide

Okay, I could subtitle this one “I love the Jobber!” and be done with it, but the Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide has way more than said template (though I swear I use all the freaking time in my M&M game). The M&MDGG has a lot of the usual bits you find in a narrator’s book for a tabletop roleplaying game: discussions of setting, breakdown of plots and trouble-shooting, and one of the best villain motivation chapters I’ve read in a TTRPG book. And, most importantly, none of it reads like generica. I mean, yes, you could translate the advice given here to most game settings, but the book itself is grounded in the comic-book game it represents. The settings discussion, for example, is framed around the various ages of comics (Gold, Silver, etc.) and the motivations align with comic book villainy, even when grounded in more-or-less real world psychology. Add to that the chapters on Challenges (everything from fires, avalanches, to that whole villainous death trap thing) and Adventure design (with multiple approaches described, for those of us who aren’t particularly linear, and those who are), and you’ve already got yourself a great sourcebook that’ll keep your Mutants & Masterminds ideas humming along.

But the two things I adore most about this book are the templates and the maps.

I’ve mentioned before about how the Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Hero’s Handbook has what I consider the gold-seal standard of character creation, so I won’t go over it again, and you can absolutely use those charts to create villains à la carte, but Chapter 3 of the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide gives you a series of templates you can personalize with even less work than said character creation tables, and with varying power-levels so you don’t have to do the number-crunching thereafter to up- or down-size said villain. And there are minions! When something takes away my planning time—most often, in my case, a migraine—I know I can flip to Chapter 3 of this book during the game and have something I can play right off the page, and since the templates all have so much personalization to them, each villain feels completely different.

As I mentioned, the Jobber template alone is one I go back to over and over. “Jobbers” are one-note villains of not-quite-up-to-the-hero’s-power, with a single thing they do well—like an energy blaster, or leaper, or that guy who only uses bolas or boomerangs or javelins—and like all the templates in the book, it’s quick and easy to go from “rough idea” to a completed NPC in no time. Each template also comes with discussions of variations on said theme, their oft-used tactics, themes, and a few caper ideas to get the ideas flowing.

And the maps? Presented as Villainous Lairs, they run the gamut from Amusement Park to Skyscraper Penthouse, and I’ve used about half of them on the fly during adventures. Each one also has little ideas tucked into the description for how you might use them in a story, and things to consider about said location, or what might be cool to do there.

You know what? I’m totally going to do a post on how I’ve used the M&MDGG to make an adventure without a tonne of work. But you get the idea. And I should also note the book has two fully ready-to-play adventures in it, too, with great examples of all the various concepts discussed throughout the adventure-making part of the book. One is designed linearly, the other designed more open-world, and both are great.

Star Trek Adventures: Tricorder Collector’s Boxed Set

Okay, this might feel a little like cheating, but bear with me. The Star Trek Adventures game is an absolute favourite, and the Star Trek Adventures: Tricorder Collector’s Boxed Set is the single only other physical book beyond the core rulebook I’ve purchased—everything else I own in pdf, because shipping to Canada is painful—and while technically the Tricorder Boxed Set is a complete version of the game (albeit only including the information, starships, and character options from the TOS-era Star Trek), that’s not why I break this puppy out every single time my Star Trek Adventures gaming group gathers.

I do it because of what came with the book.

First, actual little red-alert tokens to use to track Threat (the game’s currency for me to spend as the narrator in order to make things more challenging for the players) and little United Federation of Planets blue tokens to track Determination (what the characters use to boost their own chances of success). Those are cute.

Second? Actual Star Trek Adventures dice. I didn’t really need the d20s—though it is cute that instead of a 1 there’s a Star Trek delta—and the fact they’re in Kirk’s command-wrap green is sort of amusing. The six-sided dice, on the other hand, I’m really happy to have, because while Star Trek Adventures does work fine with your regular d6, you have to “translate” them to Star Trek Adventures results, as STA d6s have 1, 2, blank, blank, delta, and delta results, and it’s just so much faster to roll dice with that actually printed on the faces, rather than rolling regular d6s and remembering that 1 is 1, 2 is 2, 3 and 4 are zero, and 5 and 6 are 1 but also potentially an effect of some sort.

Third—and most beloved—the cards. The Star Trek Adventures Tricorder Collector’s Boxed Set comes with cardboard sheets that denote two starships (the TOS era Enterprise and the USS Lexington, another Constitution-class ship from the same era) and their two crews—the TOS characters you know and love (to varying degrees) from the series, and a from-scratch crew you can use to plug-and-play for the Lexington. This new crew have biographies on the backs of their cards for ease of dropping into a game, but the reverse side of the TOS Enterprise crews has the various options you can take from their positions on the Bridge and… I’m not saying I let out a little squeak of pure gratitude when I realized I’d never have to look through the Core Rulebook to figure out what sort of Task beaming someone up was, but I’m not not saying it, either. There’s one card with combat actions, another with most common Momentum spends, and… look, basically these cards are like game mechanic cheat-sheets and they’re clearly labelled and just trust me, it’s brilliant.

That isn’t to say the book isn’t worth it, either. I love Star Trek Adventures, but to say that the organization of the core rulebook, and the index in the core rulebook is, uh, less than well organized and not very helpful would be… understating. I often can’t find things, the index is of zero help, and I’ve taken to post-its in my core rulebook for everything not on those wonderful cards that came with the boxed set. And like the M&M Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide, there’s also a mini three-adventure campain included, which is always a bonus.

Also? It all packs away into a freaking TOS-era Tricoder box, with a strap and everything!

I feel like I could have gone on even longer about my deck of cards of Cleric spells I use when I play Tane, my Osprem-worshipping sea cleric for my author-group game of Saltmarsh in Dungeons and Dragons 5e, or how happy I am I have all those collectible miniatures—and a battle-map with washable markers—to use when we play Pathfinder 2e, but what about you? What are your go-to purchases beyond the basic rulebooks that you love for your Tabletop RPGs?

Tabletop Tuesday — Pretty (Or, “Sorry, I was looking at the artwork, what was that?”)

The last time my husband and I sat down to play Wingspan—I lost, as usual, and I’m pretty sure I have zero understanding of the real strategy of winning the game, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the round goals or hidden personal goals so much as just plonking down birds worth a lot of end-game points—I did it again.

“Honey?” husband said.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I was just reading about the bird. Is it my turn?”

Wingspan is a neat game, has a built-in time limit of a certain number of actions for each player (which actually speeds up as you lose an action at the end of every division of the four rounds), and there’s a mix of luck (dice-rolling and card-draws) and strategy (there are goals listed and you might want to focus on a particular nest type, or perhaps bird size, or a certain branch of the habitats). Or at least, I assume so. I’ve never actually won a game of Wingspan, and I feel like I make good choices, but when it comes time to tally the points, I’m always way, way behind.

But I keep playing.

It’s. So. Pretty.

Here’s the thing. Wingspan has gorgeous illustrations, and little factoids about the birds, and I live in a country where there’s snow on the ground and very little colour available for the human eye to look at for, like, five or six months of the damn year. These adorable birds with their often heckin’ hilarious names? They make me happy.

So, when we play, I’m just as likely to sit there staring at the cards in my hand admiring them and learning about grossbeaks as I am to actually realize it’s my turn. And while it is a competitive game, there’s very little you can do against another player, so it feels more like you’re just trying to make your own best decisions, which is the kind of game I like if we have to play competitively at all.

I do think I tend to forget it’s competitive when I play bird cards that, say, grant everyone a bonus food item or what-have-you when they activate, but it was a cute birb and how can I not?

Like I said, I always lose.

Expansions!

We’ve also picked up—but have yet to play—all of the expansions. There are expansions that add more birds to the piles, which we’ve done, but there are also expansions that add new food types, replacing the food dice with different dice, and although we’ve cracked that open multiple times, we’ve never got around to actually figuring it out and playing it yet. The base game continues to be enjoyable, and learning new rules or playing the game we already know is one of our Achilles’ heels in this house.

We almost need to plan to sit down and learn the new version long before we intend to play, is what I’m saying, or we’ll never get around to it.

Which is my longwinded way of saying I can’t tell you anything about the Oceania Expansion yet. Maybe next time we play.

The wilderness is pretty, too! As is… uh, 1920s Europa?

I’ve mentioned Parks here a few times as well, and I should point out that’s another beautiful game we play quite often where I get, uh, distracted looking at the cards. And come to think of it, I think that game has an expansion now, too, though I haven’t bought it. Maybe that can go under the Christmas Tree this year, to be opened, oohed at, and then… likely not played until we’ve got a dedicated effort to learn the rules and sit down and…

Yeah, maybe not.

Ditto Scythe. It’s freaking beautiful (if sometimes also a bit dark-ish), but in the case of Scythe… we barely play it. It’s one of those games that says it’s two players, but honestly is a three-player-or-more game if you want it to actually be fun.

What about you? What artwork in games do you love? (And do you remember to play them, or do you just sort of enjoy looking at them?)

Tabletop Tuesday — Paint the Roses (or, “Wait, this is a logic puzzle!”)

A while back, I posted about games I thought were better online (specifically, games we played via BoardGameArena, which is our go-to), and last night, our board-gaming friends met up virtually again and we tried out a new game, Paint the Roses. And let me tell you, even after one game, I know this is an experience I will only enjoy online.

But I really, really enjoyed it online.

Let me explain…

Remember those Logic Puzzles with the Grids?

Thematically, you’ve probably already guessed that Paint the Roses is based on Alice in Wonderland. The players are the luckless gardeners, who are desperately trying to get the gardens ready for the Queen of Hearts before she loses her temper and… well, heads will roll. How this plays out is pretty simple, on the surface. You draw a card (one of the players may choose an “easy” card, the rest all have to choose “medium” or “hard”) and that card has a pattern on it.

The patterns can be one of three combinations: any two colours of roses (red, yellow, purple, or pink), any two shapes based on a deck of cards (hearts, spades, diamonds, or clubs), or a mix of those two, if you’ve chosen the “hard” card (so, red-and-heart, or space-and-yellow, for example). Each hexagon tile, which a player places every turn, has a bush shaped as one of the suits and one of the four colours of roses on it. So, on your turn, if it’s your go at dropping a tile, you pick up a hexagon tile (hexagons are the bestagons), look at the pattern you’re trying to make, and see if there’s a way to drop it onto the board that will give everyone else a hint of what it is you’ve been asked to do by the queen (as represented on that card). So, if I had a card that showed two hearts side-by-side, and there was a way to place a hexagon that put two heart-shaped bushes side-by-side, that might be the best move for me.

Might.

What do you mean, “might”?

Here’s where the game gets pretty interesting. After the tile is placed, everyone puts little clue cubes down on said tile denoting how many matches that tile creates with the pattern shown on their hidden card. By which I mean, if I dropped a red rose with a heart bush beside a yellow rose with a heart bush in my example above, but it’s also beside a yellow rose with a diamond bush, I’d put down a single cube to denote there’s one combination of adjacent tiles matching what’s on my card—Heart-Heart. But then everyone else places clue cubes as well, and if another player had a card with Red-Yellow, they’d put down two cubes, because that red tile is beside two yellow tiles, and if those were the only tiles in play touching the red heart tile I just placed, we know for sure what their combination is, because only red-and-yellow is set up twice.

Got a headache yet?

The game comes with grids, like those logic-puzzle games where you have to match the dog with their owner and the colour of their collar. So, while in the example above it might have been best for me to play the tile where I did because it provided the clue about my card potentially being heart-heart (but, since I only dropped one cube, it couldn’t be red-yellow, or I’d have placed two), you’re also trying to guess someone’s card every turn, and if you get it wrong, the Queen comes for you just that little bit faster, so sometimes, you’re going to be looking at what you’ve learned about other people’s cards and deciding ruling out or confirming a guess on their pattern makes more sense, and you’ll still coincidentally learn more about everyone else’s cards, thanks to the clue cubes being placed every time a tile is added to the garden.

I’m sure all that is as clear as mud, but the short version is, it’s way more fun than you think, you’re not allowed to talk about your pattern, but it’s co-operative in that you can discuss what you’ve learned about everyone else’s, so each tile that drops we went person by person to figure out what we’d learned via those clue cubes, and then decided which card to guess based on our best shot—and even chatted about what tile might be best to place where to rule out patterns on other peoples cards, and so on. And all while putting little Xs and checkmarks in our grids for each person’s card.

You said this was better online… how can you know that?

One word: cubes. I know, 100%, in my heart-of-hearts, that I would absolutely fuck up placing the clue cubes on the garden while playing, easily miscounting how many matches the tile has to my card. At that point, the game is unplayable. Ditto remembering to pick up all my cubes when my pattern has been guessed (because the cubes stay as reminders of what you learned). On the online version, the computer does that for you. It makes no mistakes. I make mistakes. A lot.

More, the computer also keeps track of the order the tiles were placed for you, numbering them, because that becomes important, too: a tile placed later in the game will be beside a tile placed earlier, and you might need to remember that when the first tile was placed, it wasn’t there, so any clue cubes on that earlier tile won’t take the newer tile into account, whereas the new tile will note all the occurrences of the hidden card patterns.

Are you sure this is fun?

I’m probably not telling it well enough, and this is probably a case where watching it played is better. But I really, really had a good time, and even though we lost (in part because we mis-clicked at the start and there was no undo button), and honestly, I think this one is a “you need to try it” style of game you just can’t really talk someone through. That said, if you’re at all a fan of logic puzzles and enjoy co-operative games? Give Paint the Roses a shot.

One Week until we get Stuck With You!

Time seems to be simultaneously faster than ever and also beyond molasses-in-winter thanks to the ongoing never-ending-pandemic, but somehow, next week is the official release of Stuck With You.

I know. How?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let’s start with the blurb, shall we?

Two frenemies become lovers in this story of Queer joy and playful romance.

Stuck With You is a story of Queer joy and a playful teen romance, following two frenemies as they fall for each other while stuck in adjacent seats on a day-long train trip.

Ben is on a train back to Ottawa after a visit with his dad in Toronto when he runs into the last person he wanted to see: Caleb, the handsome, confident boy who recently and accidentally broke Ben’s phone. Preoccupied by worrying about whether he should take a gap year, Ben has little time for Caleb’s jibes.

But when the two start talking, not only does Ben find himself won over by Caleb’s roguish charm, but he also learns his seatmate is bisexual.

Stuck With You discusses important issues facing teens as they contemplate their futures within the context of a light-hearted romance plot with witty dialogue and charming interplay, almost all taking place within the space of a single long train trip.

Stuck With You, by ‘Nathan Burgoine

I’m really, really chuffed I got to take part in the Lorimer Real Love Series, which is a queer themed hi/lo line. (If you don’t know what hi/lo is, don’t worry, neither did I until I first bumped into one—they’re high-interest and low reading complexity. Meaning, they’re for readers who maybe don’t have a high reading level thanks to having fallen behind, learning English as a second language, reading disabilities, or any other factor, who still deserve stories about people like them with plots that are interesting, but paired with a comprehension level that’s accessible).

At its heart, Stuck With You is an upbeat, fun YA queer rom-com, though it also includes how ridiculous it is to be 17 and expected to know where your life is going, gap years, cute boys, impact-vs-intent, biphobia, apologies, and the horrifying realization you want to kiss the boy you thought was so annoying four hours ago.

Ben gets on the train home to Ottawa hoping to put a horrible March Break with his father behind him, only to find the person who’d made that week all the more horrible—Caleb Khoury—will now be sitting beside him for the next four and a half hours. It’s the worst.

Until it’s not the worst. And then, maybe, it’s not even bad. Wait. Is Ben enjoying Caleb’s company? What is even happening?

Tabletop Tuesday — Legacy (Or, “A permanent sticker? Are you mad?”)

We cracked this open last night!

When we first got Gloomhaven, and there were little boxes to check off as the prosperity of the city of Gloomhaven was increased, I took a deep breath, found a pencil—yes, a pencil, because you can erase pencils!—and coloured in the squares… but it wasn’t legible enough. I got a black ink pen and—deep breath—made tiny little checkmarks that would still leave the boxes visible. Then we had an encounter or two and one of them ended with a symbol I looked up in the instruction book and it meant…

Destroy the card. Even the symbol was a card ripped in half.

Feeling like a complete fool, I instead went into the office, picked up an envelope, wrote “Destroyed cards” on it, and put the card in the envelope and hid it in the bottom of the box. What did I think was going to happen? The game police weren’t going to show up and arrest me for not properly disposing of one of the cards. Still. I couldn’t do it.

Then…

Stickers.

There was no coming back from stickers. It was one thing to put the location stickers on the map of scenarios as they unfolded—that was just making a map more, uh, map-like. But there were stickers that covered other stickers, and then—shaky breath of sheer anxiety—there were stickers that permanently changed how the game played. You adjusted your character, and it wasn’t just your character that changed, it was any future version of that character and who would do this to me?

Welcome to “Legacy” games, ‘Nathan

I have a complicated relationship with Legacy games. Or, well, I would have, if I’d played more than a couple of them. Look, the thing is, when I’ve bought a game and then I play that game and then the game says, “now destroy this card” I freeze. Destroy the card? Like… that’s not a euphemism for discarding or something?

You literally want me to tear up this card?

Is there a camera somewhere recording me right now?

Place a sticker on the board or game piece and change it forever going forward? But… But how do I start over with this game if I do that?

What do you mean I can’t? This is a one-way trip? Look, I don’t think you realize how many times I can binge-watch the same series (or even just one episode) of a show here. This is a fundamental part of my makeup. I make characters I’ll never get to play, for TTRPGs I might never get to have a session in, for fun. What you’re asking me to do, Legacy-game creators, is physically painful.

But I’m learning. Or, I’m trying to. Gloomhaven was my first real exposure to Legacy games, and here’s the thing: we got literal years of enjoyment out of that game on a single play-through. Can it be reset back to its original state? Not really. Or, I suppose it could if you mapped out a “new map” on a piece of paper, same with the campaign stickers, and with careful notes about how the cards should originally appear vs how they’ve been modified since—not to mention emptying that massive, massive envelope full of “destroyed” cards—but the truth is, since then, we’ve played the prequel and the expansion, and as of last night we started Frosthaven, the latest sequel that is its own entirely new game and…

I think I’ve made peace with knowing we’re going to permanently change this game as we play. Even the rulebook has big spots where stickers will eventually go to change how the game plays. It’s inevitable.

(But I totally bought the removable stickers.)

It’s not just Frosthaven, though Should buildings really fall from the sky like that?

Thanks to our best gaming friends—the two others we play Frosthaven with—we’ve inherited their copy of My City, which is another legacy style game that starts out as a pretty basic Tetris-ish game of placing buildings of a city along a river, and then scoring based on how many rocks you covered, how many trees you didn’t cover, and how many empty bits you didn’t leave left over. After every game, you move forward a “chapter” and there are—wait for it—permanent changes you make to your game boards. They passed their game on to us because it can be played with two, three, or four players, and since they were a couple and we’re a couple, it’ll work twice from the starting state, since there are two unmodified boards left over.

And lots of stickers.

We’ve only played two rounds of it, and so far the game itself is trying to balance out my inability to be a math and spatial genius like my husband by adding stickers to my board that offer me more options to gain points and stickers to his board that offer him more options to lose points, but so far that’s really not helping, because did I mention spatial genius?

Like, my husband graduated university with a perfect GPA. Literally perfect.

And you wonder why I like co-operative games.

How is Frosthaven, though?

We’ve only played the Scenario 0 so far, which is a simplified version where your characters don’t even get to bring all their cards, and all you do is fight off some starvation-crazed wild beasts, but… ohmigosh I loved it. There’s just something about the mechanics of the -haven games that really works for us as a player group. My husband gets to do all his permutation/math/spatial stuff, and I get to create backstory that doesn’t matter even a jot, but explains my card choices and my votes on the encounter cards where the group has to react to some narrative change. Our gaming friends also approach it in different ways, with K often looking for really cool one-two combos (which the rest of us have a distressing tendency to accidentally upset with our own choices), and J being more like my husband, who likes to optimize every move with crunchy choices.

I’m playing a Quatryl Blinkblade—he has tech that messes with time to be super fast sometimes, and slow it down other times. It’s kind of a tradition that started accidentally. I played the Quatryl Tinkerer in Gloomhaven as my first character, and the Quatryl Demolitionist in Jaws of the Lion, and I just like the little tinkerer blokes with their technology and never-say-die attitudes. The Blinkblade is complicated, and I’m glad we did the Scenario 0 to give me a few “aha!” moments with how the cards work, but honestly, I’m already having a lot of fun.

Right off the bat, I can say the changes to the way looting works is really, really enjoyable. I ended up with some coins, some hide, and some metal, and I know there’s a crafting mechanic on the way and wow is that truly, truly something I’m going to enjoy. Because I’m a nerd. Also, my adventuring goal card is to collect various types of plants, so I’m basically a time-bending tech-wielding wee bloke assassin-slash-botanist, and how can that not be amazing?

And we’ve already put three stickers on the board.

(I’m so glad I bought the removable stickers.)

Tabletop Tuesday — Preprinted Adventures (or, “Store-bought is fine!”)

Yesterday, I got to play my first ever Pathfinder 2e game. I picked up a Pathfinder bundle aeons ago, but never really looked at it since although we were going to play Pathfinder next (this was after a years-long 3.5 edition campaign wrapped up), about half the gaming group had children and if that, as they say, was that. When I did meet with new in-person players, we’d discovered Gloomhaven, and that sent us on years of weekly or alternate-weekly gaming and we never quite got back around to Pathfinder, and the second edition came out, I bought it, and… it sat in my digital gaming folder file.

Dorn Freeman, as created via HeroForge. Former gladiators don’t tend to end up with a lot of matching armor.

Making a character with my .pdf edition of the Core Rulebook wasn’t particularly smooth—nothing makes you appreciate a well-organized book like being able to flip back and forth in it to look things up—but I ended up crafting a Human Liberator named Dorn (Pathfinder 2e’s version of a Paladin who cares more about freedom than law), and by the time I was done creating my character, my husband took his turn and made an Elf Cleric, and our third player chose to be a Goblin Sorcerer (with a Strength of 3, because he decided to roll his stats and managed the amazing “four rolls of 1” feat). I was destined to be the punching bag, but that’s fine. Dorn had a couple of minor magic tricks and Dorn is good with a rapier.

Because it was our first time with the system as players, and our GM’s first time as the narrator, and we were looking at two hours or so of play-time, she picked up one of Paizo’s Bounties adventures, specifically, Hillcross Roundup, and we started our journey only to be interrupted by a woodpecker—yep, that’s right, a woodpecker—swooping down and using its beak to hammer in a Help-wanted! sign right in front of us. Someone needed help recovering some lost dinosaur babies.

And we were off. About two hours later, we’d succeeded, been rewarded, and had a decent grasp of the basics of Pathfinder combat, had made some rolls during role-play as well, and honestly, it was a blast, and the perfect introduction both in the sense of length and complexity for us to decide if we wanted to keep going with Pathfinder 2e or not alongside Frosthaven, perhaps alternating weeks.

To which the answer was yes. I’ll be picking up a Bounty to run for when it’s my turn to GM—we’ll take turns, which lets everyone have a chance to play as well as narrate—and once I’m feeling comfortable with the system, I can dive deeper.

If you don’t have Homebrew, Store Bought is fine!

In case it wasn’t obvious from when I had my turn at Bag of Giving with Mutants & Masterminds, I freaking love pre-printed adventures. Picking up Crystal Frasier’s The Reign of Cats and Dogs from their awesome Astonishing Adventures line allowed me to focus on making sure I had the crunch down, while also letting me spend more time prepping some of the role-play aspects. The plot, the villains, the challenges, they were all there on the page, and even came with pre-determined DCs. Instead of coming up with something from scratch—and fearing whether or not I could fit it all into our three hour time slot—nabbing an Astonishing Adventure meant I could instead file off the serial numbers and have some fun turning Frasier’s admittedly already awesome superheroic puns into my own Canadian versions of said puns, but all the math, the powers, the challenges, and everything else? It was already there.

Those are the the main advantages of picking up a preprinted adventure: the work is done, and balanced to the levels listed, and even likely fits a particular time allotment that’s written on the package, too.

You get all the joys of being the narrator without all the pains of staring at an empty screen or a blank piece of paper and wondering what the heck you’re going to do with the characters this time. Especially when it’s a new system, my go-to is a preprinted adventure—or, in the best of all worlds—when the core books come with a small adventure of their own to get you going.

Oh, and bonus? You’re supporting the creators. Because one thing about TTRPGs and the RPG gaming industry that can be tough is the core books are technically all anyone needs to play the game. That one-time purchase can set you up for endless gaming, and that’s a fantastic, wonderful thing. But it also means those amazing publishers who put out that product could maybe use a dime or two from other sources (who am I kidding, there’s no maybe about it), so picking up a preprinted adventure isn’t just a time-saver and a convenience, it’s another way for me to support a gaming system I’m enjoying.

Mix and Match is fine, too.

In the many years ago of the before-times, my last two Dungeons and Dragons campaigns were both built on preprinted adventures. I ran a group from 1st to 20th level through the Shackled City Adventure Path (I still miss you, physically printed Dungeon Magazine, and lament your passing), and then we did the Savage Tide Adventure Path after that (again, 1st through 20th level, though I think in that case the characters just barely squeaked their way to 20th level in the final moments). Having the whole thing in one volume made prep-work minimal, obviously, but for me the real freedom of those pre-printed adventures is how I can then adjust the pre-printed adventure to the characters, tie in their pasts and their personalities, and weave in sub-plots that get the characters more engaged throughout. One of the player characters turned out to be a fragment of a dream of the big-bad given humanoid form in the first Adventure Path, and in the second, the players had so many rivals and friends every attack on Farshore had them worried they’d lose someone they cared about.

With Star Trek Adventures, I’m doing a more mix-and-match approach with my two groups—there are quite a few adventures available from Modiphius, as well as Mission Briefs (core outlines for adventures that give you the ideas and some breakdown of major moments, but none of the actual crunch is done for you), and I did pick up the Shackleton Expanse campaign, which I’m using for one of my two groups, but so far, I’m finding it very enjoyable to mostly come up with my own adventures for these groups. But I know if a scheduled game night shows up and I’m running on empty I’ve got multiple options to go-to in my back pocket—er, digital file folder—to have a session ready to go with a minimum of prep-time.

I’ve also talked about how much I love Deck of Worlds and Story Engine, and I’ll often take a pre-printed adventure, find the important or supporting NPCs, and draw a few cards to flesh out their motives or add complexity to how I’ll role-play them in a session.

Sometimes the lack of pressure created by having a preprinted adventure is all I need to conjure up an idea to turn that blank page into a functional homebrew adventure.

And check out this Bundle of Holding!

Oh, and while I’m here, there’s a Pathfinder 2e Bundle of Holding you should check out. This all-new Rogue Genius Pathfinder Quick Deal presents Pathfinder Second Edition tabletop roleplaying adventure modules from Run Amok Games published by Rogue Genius Games. Send your 1st- to 4th-level Pathfinder heroes into a tiefling’s trap-laden crypt – a troll-infested family cemetery – the caverns of a storm-wracked pirate isle – and a haunted lodge for retired adventurers. And take your characters from 1st to 20th level with a complete adventure path to free the untamed Northfells region from a diabolical demon cult.

More importantly, three quarters of the revenue (after payment gateway fees) from this Pathfinder offer goes to designer Ron Lundeen and Rogue Genius Games publisher Owen K.C. Stephens. In February Owen suffered a pulmonary embolism and a hospital stay that uncovered other serious health issues. Owen has insurance but has taken a hit in income. Ron contributed this offer to help Owen in a tough time. “Owen has been a wonderful friend and mentor. I wouldn’t be where I am today without Owen.”

You’ve still got over a day or so to pick up this bundle. I did, and it’ll likely be my next stop once I’ve gotten comfortable with a few more “Bounty” style adventures and we’re ready for something with a bit more bite or to stretch over multiple sessions.

Tabletop Tuesday — Frosthaven Arrives! (Or, “It all fits back in the box!”)

It’s here!

Okay, so it will be a surprise to absolutely no one that when Frosthaven arrived, I did a squee. I’m fairly certain, in fact, that the squee was so intense it knocked squirrels from the trees and made the dog flee the room. Then I tried to lift the box from my front porch and promptly got over the squee to instead curse because that box is freaking heavy! I have tendons I’ve been rebuilding for the last couple of years, and I’m pretty sure Frosthaven just set me back a week or three.

Probably worth it.

Somewhat embarrassingly, getting it out of the shipping box was also a journey, and one I was glad I didn’t film, because Frosthaven the game was shipped inside a box that could only be called “snug” and I ended up having to claw at it and rip it open from the outside down the seams after fruitlessly trying to lift the game out of the box. (Max the husky, of course, was super-helpful, and enjoyed jumping on the top of the box while I tried to accomplish this.)

Ultimately, however, I got it out of the box, moved it to the shelf behind the table where we game, and then out of an act of sheer love, I didn’t open it because my husband was away on a business trip. When he got home, we cracked that box and pulled the parts out and it covered most of the dining room table, and then I flipped open the book that explained what you had to do to even begin to set up and…

…there was a diagram on how to put everything back in the box.

It Fits!

I don’t think we talk about this enough when it comes to board games and tabletop gaming in general, but can I wax poetic today about the sheer unadulterated joy of seeing instructions on the side of a board game box on how to put everything away in said box in an organized, structured, fashion?

Seriously, the way this one packs away is amazing.

There are some grade-A examples of this sort of thing out there. Parks, for one, has a place for everything and everything goes in those places. Wingspan, too, has an illustration on the side of the box and packages that fit inside other packages and it all stacks together perfectly. Creature Comforts packs away beautifully. Storage trays, clever stacking, modular pieces? I freaking love it when games do this.

And I was 100% not expecting it from Frosthaven.

In hindsight, I might have known. I’m sure one of the bajillion backer updates might have mentioned it, but even if they hadn’t, Jaws of the Lion packs away really nicely back into its box. But when I sat down and saw those instructions and then proceeded to start following the instructions to punch, shuffle and organize everything to get the game in ready-to-play status—which took, for the record, over two hours—I wasn’t sure I believed that it would go as planned.

And I was wrong. When I was done, everything did indeed go right back into that box in the order listed, and I cannot tell you how different an experience that is as compared to Gloomhaven. I still can’t get Gloomhaven back into its box, and we finished it years ago.

I’m sure I’ll be talking about Frosthaven again—I can’t wait to start playing, but my weekly gaming group is going to give Pathfinder 2e a go first for a one-shot, so it’ll be a few weeks before we actually begin with Frosthaven—but in the meanwhile, you can add it to the list of games that pack away beautifully back into the box.

Albeit one heavy ass box.

Got any examples of games that pack away perfectly? Tell me, because I’m not kidding when I say this is one of my favourite things.

Tabletop Tuesday — Bag of Giving presents: Mutants & Masterminds

Hey all! Something really special today for my Tabletop post, and that’s a video live play of Mutants & Masterminds, from Green Ronin Publishing. The session was arranged by Bag of Giving, which is an awesome wee idea put together by Brandon Crilly and Michael R. Underwood that puts together authors and other creative types with tabletop board games for one-shot sessions—and, more importantly, try to raise come cash for some awesome charities (and there are prizes!). I’ve you’ve never played a TTRPG with a group of authors, allow me to tell you, in the shortest possible terms, what to expect: weird, but funny.

Or at least, that’s how it seems to work out for me. Maybe it’s me. Wait. Am I weird but funny? (Cue “Agatha All Along!”)

Our Heroes

For this session, we had four amazing characters:

Ivy Logan—(Played by Pheobe Barton.) Ivy Logan doesn’t have a heroic superheroine name, because she’s a trans woman who can grow to forty feet tall—being forty feet tall rather stands out—a domino mask isn’t going to help much. Also, it allows her to lend her full presence to social causes (and a healthy dose of intimidation, frankly). Phoebe is awesome, and you should check her out online and definitely sign up for her newsletter, which I adore reading as there’s a perfect mix of down-to-earth and don’t-forget-to-breathe alongside the solid advice and updates.

Steel Slash—(Played by Marco Cultrera.) A man out of time, Steel Slash found a magic sword, but when he swung it at something evil, it sent him forward two hundred years in time, and he’s been since mostly flummoxed by stuff like the internet, phones, and all the other accoutrements of technology. His magic sword allows him to teleport whenever he strikes at something, and he’s not sure if he’s just one good deed away from being able to back to his own time, but he hopes so. You can check out one of his stories here!

Whisper—(Played by Kate Heartfield.) A sleek, chic psychic with abilities that just spontaneously arrived as a wild talent, Whisper has telekinetic abilities as well as a psionic ability to make other people completely unaware she’s right there in front of them. She also seems to warp luck a bit to her own favour, and has a captivating effect on people attracted to women. If you don’t already know Kate, you can fix that here, where you’ve got so much amazing reading ahead of you, you lucky jerk.

The Jurassic Punk—(Played by Erin Rockfort.) An actual lizard who through some totemic shenanigans is now human-sized humanoid, only with the whole tail, spitting-paralytic toxin, climb-on-the-walls thing. The leather jacket completes the look. You can find Erin at ErinRockford.com (you were right, Erin!), and you should definitely try all the social medias searching for “PineappleFury” because not only is Erin smart, that’s just fun to say. Pineapple fury. Pineapple fury.

I want to quickly note that I mentioned a few weeks ago how easy it was to make characters with this gaming system, and that post is here, but we got together for a quick Zoom session prior to gaming and everyone used that system to make their characters (with a few tweaks thereafter) and once again, I have to say how wonderful those quick-create tables are. Whisper used the Psychic table, The Jurassic Punk used the Totem table, Steel Slash used the Weapon Master table, and Ivy Logan used the Shapeshifter table. Everyone did it à la carte rather than rolling dice, and had a character ready to go in no time.

Quick Screencap of the game underway!

We were live last night, but through the magic of the interwebs, and if you’d like to watch it, you can see the whole session here, on ArvanEleron’s Twitch, (he is great, by the way, and is kind enough to host us ancient un-hip types who don’t have our own Twitch streams and also use terms like “hip.”)

I mention it in the video, but I also want to shout-out to Crystal Frasier, who wrote the original version of “The Reign of Cats and Dogs” (you can pick it up here, from Green Ronin) before I hit it with the Canadian equivalent of the platypizer gun, and adjusted the already a-plus puns into eh-plus puns. (Sorry. Not sorry.)

Birthday Presence 48!

It’s that day of the year again: I made it all the way around the sun! I had a donut, I’ve got tea, and later on I’m playing Star Trek Adventures with some buds, so really, I can’t complain about how forty-eight is rolling out. Also? Once you’re my age, one don’t really need any more things. So, I started a tradition years ago where instead of presents, I asked people to tell me about a book they loved instead.

When I became an author, I started asking people if they’d maybe take a moment to write a review about a book they loved somewhere. Just one book, and just one review, and only if they were up for it. (And, no, it doesn’t have to be mine. I’m not using my birthday to guilt reviews of my own books.) Making noise about a book you loved gives the book presence—get it, birthday presence? Sorry, I’ll see myself out—and word-of-mouth is pretty much the best thing ever.

Now, I’m not talking about writing an essay here. Truly. Back when I worked at the bookstore, we had these little “Staff Picks” cards that slid into acrylics, and they were pretty small, so by virtue of their size there was only so much room to write a review. It may surprise you to learn a lot of staff struggled to write reviews. They could hand-sell out loud in conversation like gangbusters, but writing down a review stopped them cold. So I came up with a quick and easy three-sentence review process, and it worked fine.

The Three Sentence Review

The cue-card review went thusly:

A sentence letting a reader know what to expect from the book (without spoilers). In romance, this is often where I likely mention the main trope of the book, drop a word about the characters, and give a general idea of the tone: Something like “ Bet Against Me is Fiona Riley’s excellent—and steamy—enemies-to-lovers pitting two high-powered real estate brokers in a contest to outsell the other.”A sentence talking about what was unique/awesome/moving/exciting about the book (again, without spoilers). Something you think really stood out about the book and speaks to why you loved it. Staying with Bet Against Me, I’d probably say, “Fiona Riley builds queer friend groups into her writing in a way I really love, and also explores family dynamics I rarely see in queer romance, but really appreciate.”A sentence that uses either a well-known author or some facet or genre as an example of the type of reader you think would enjoy this particular book. So, “Any reader of enemies-to-lovers will likely love this, and it launches a new series I think fans of Melissa Brayden’s Soho Loft series will really enjoy.”

So! It’s my birthday, and if you’re up for it, drop a line telling me about a book you loved. Or just link to a review you agree with. Or, heck, just drop a note saying “I LOVED THIS” with a link. All of these things are also super-valid and wonderful ways to do that whole word-of-mouth thing. Clicking a “like” or an “agree” on someone else’s review somewhere also helps. I don’t want this to be a guilt-thing, or an imposition. If you’re not up for it—it’s three damn years into a pandemic, who’s up for anything right now?—that’s cool. No harm done, truly.

Ditto if you’ve already got your own method of writing reviews or gushing about books. That little blue cue-card up there is meant to be a helpful guide for people who want to write a review and feel stuck, not a form to fill in if you’ve already got your own, authentic style. (I feel like I keep saying “you don’t have to do this” over and over, but to be super, 100% clear: you don’t have to do this.)

Tabletop Tuesday — Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion and Forgotten Circles

I’ve already sung the praises of Gloomhaven, but I thought today I’d take the opportunity to discuss the two current expansions—the third expansion, Frosthaven, arrived yesterday!—because our gaming group’s experience with them was quite varied, and we just finished up our journey through Jaws of the Lion.

Wrong Order, Dude

First, I should point out that we did things in the wrong order. It’s not the order they were released, but the sensical order is Jaws of the Lion first, as it’s an introduction version of Gloomhaven, designed to teach you how to play, and then Gloomhaven, and then Forgotten Circles. Instead, we did Gloomhaven, then Forgotten Circles, then Jaws of the Lion. It doesn’t really matter, in the long run, but if you were coming into Gloomhaven from the point of never having played it before, I’d suggest starting with Jaws of the Lion.

I’d also suggest making sure you have the second printing of Forgotten Circles once you’re done with Gloomhaven thereafter, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Jaws of the Lion

Jaws of the Lion comes with four characters, and like Gloomhaven it’s set up for two to four players, and each adventure is set up to scale itself depending on how many players you have. The four characters are unique and interesting: the Voidwarden, a human who balances dark and light energies to effects of good or ill (or sometimes both); the Demolitionist, a cute little Quatryl critter in steampunk Iron Man armor, basically; the Hatchet, an Inox who really, really likes to throw axes (and even has a favourite); and the Red Guard, a Valrath with a shady past and abilities over sand and fire and two very long chains he likes to whip about. The characters had so much flavour. They’re really fun.

Where Jaws of the Lion really excels is in the introductory scenarios. The four characters come with “A” cards, “B” cards, and then regular Gloomhaven cards like the characters in the regular game itself. You use the “A” cards in the first scenario, which are much simplified and teach you the basics of attacking and moving, and also have fully written out descriptions alongside the usual symbols and numbers. Then, in the next scenario, you replace some of the cards with their “B” versions, making them more complex. The scenario also includes some new mechanics for the players. By the time you’re using the normal decks, and you’ve completed the first few scenarios, you’re more-or-less playing the full version of the game, and the story continues, with a few paths to choose from, and a few side-scenarios you’ll uncover if you’re lucky enough to draw them out of an event deck in between scenarios.

The upside to Jaws of the Lion is in the progression and the simplification. The scenarios all take place in booklets, rather than putting together multiples tiles and tokens, which makes set-up so very much faster. The equipment isn’t as powerful, but that’s balanced with the adventures throughout, so it doesn’t feel like a problem, though if you play the Demolitionist like I did, you’ll be scooping up healing equipment because the little Quatryl has zero cards with healing abilities.

The downside to Jaws of the Lion is how short it is. That’s not to say it’s not worth the money—it truly is!—but if you manage to unlock all the side-adventures and play each of the scenarios in order from beginning to end (some get locked depending on which choices you take, so you don’t get to play every adventure in the book, for the record), if you only fail once or twice, like my group did, then you won’t actually make it to your highest, level nine cards. I managed to hit level eight with my Demolitionist, but only for the last scenario. And unlike Gloomhaven proper, there’s no “random dungeon” to play, and unless you fail a scenario, it specifically doesn’t allow replaying a scenario (something you can do in Gloomhaven, and we would do to “learn” our characters or to pick up extra gold we needed).

If you want to play these characters to level nine? There’s a good chance you’ll need to take them into the main game to see them fully explore their abilities. On the plus side, you get access to regular Gloomhaven equipment once you do, which is honestly a freaking joy.

And then there’s the other one…

Forgotten Circles is the first Gloomhaven Expansion, and… oof. To say it was nowhere near as fun as Gloomhaven would be understating. I think where Forgotten Circles went wrong was three-fold.

First, it decided to up the complexity of the scenarios, including using a scenario guide that had lots and lots of “now turn to page X” instructions, so the map wasn’t all visible like in Gloomhaven, but also relied on this for multiple puzzle-like scenarios, where the players had to keep flipping back and forth in the book to see if the choices they made were the right one, which often meant the game ground to a halt while more of the map was put together, or—even worse, and quite often—we had to stop and translate runes to figure out what to do. Every time we saw runes to translate, we had to choose between grinding to a halt or just looking it up online to find spoilers already translated so we could keep playing.

Second, the narrative of Forgotten Circles focuses around the Diviner, an Aesthir character who is central to the scenarios and can open rifts, and create portals, and even teleport. She’s required for every scenario, so someone has to play her—in our gaming group, that was me—and she only retires when the whole plotline is done. It’s also an extra requirement in all the scenarios that if the Diviner exhausts (runs out of hit points or cards), the scenario is automatically lost. She also starts with only nine cards, the least any of the characters can start with, and many of the scenarios involve having to teleport past barriers to get to things—and teleportation is a power only the Diviner has—so for a lot of the adventures, my entire gaming experience was “Okay, I’ll teleport to do thing number one, then next turn I’ll teleport to do thing number two…” and so on, and I had to buy equipment specifically just to regain cards so I could teleport often enough to do so, or last enough rounds and.. it was tedious, not fun. I often felt like I had zero actual choices to make on any given turn, because I couldn’t waste any turns at all or we’d lose the scenario, and it was going to take all my effort to check off the list of things that only my character could do, and they didn’t feel as viscerally interesting as, say, punching a monster.

Third, the Diviner character herself did have some interesting cards, but her initiative was terrible, and the cards just felt so much weaker than all the other characters. This third point, however, does have a patch job and it’s clear the developer realized it. The second printing—and I have to admit, I take umbrage with calling it that, rather than a second edition, which I think would be fairer—changes nearly all the Diviner’s cards, boosting almost every single card in some way. Knowing that had happened soured me to my experience all the more, really, so if you’ve got any intention of playing this expansion, pay close, close attention to which printing it is, and make sure you’ve got the second one.

The positives include new enemies, whose AI cards also include some optional actions whether the monsters are elite or not, expanded equipment, “rift” encounters alongside the usual city and wilderness decks, and a new status: regeneration, which is the opposite of wound (you heal one hit point every round). The other players did have fun with the scenarios much more often than I did, too, though multiple times my husband just said, “No,” when we were playing “puzzle” scenarios and we were flipping back and forth and back and forth through the book to find the right option and instead of failing a scenario, would just locate the answer and put us back on track, because none of us had the patience to drop everything and try to crack a code.

Up next!

I mentioned the arrival of Frosthaven, and I can’t wait to dive into the (truly massive) box. I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m writing about it. I’m really, really hoping it has learned from the Forgotten Circles and isn’t full of code-breaking or puzzle scenarios with lots of flipping through books, but from what I’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Either way, I’ll let you know.