26/7/2011: Resident Evil

No, not the video game. Completed that years ago when my old friend Matt Marr was good enough to lend me his Playstation while he went on holiday. If you follow this blog with any degree of regularity you'll probably have guessed that this is another game that I play with either cards, dice or boards, and in actual fact it's a card game. Hence the name Resident Evil: The Deck Building Game. I should probably have put that as the title but to be honest I think I might get more views if people come on to this site thinking I'm on about the actual video game. So now that you're here, you may as well read on...

So this is something that Dave put me on to. The mechanics of the game are not dissimilar to Thunderstone: Dragonspire that we played a few weeks ago, but is just different enough to make it feel like a different game. Probably the most significant difference is that there is a genuine risk of death, as I was to discover. For another, the strategy of the game is set in place by the character you play (chosen at random from characters who appeared in the video games, though I don't recognise some of them,) and the cards you buy; there are weapons but it's not like you're building a balanced party or anything like that, it's a case of get tooled up, go into the Mansion and kill things. But it's the same thing that you have to do to win; kill the boss (in this case a plant called Uroboros,) and the person with the most points at the end of the game based on how many monsters you killed wins the game. There are other differences but I won't bore you with the details.

So how did I get on? Well... not all that well actually. The character I drew was Rebecca Chambers, who's special ability allowed her to 'trash' cards (throw them out of the game so there is no chance of drawing them again) and hand cards over to one of the other plays. Playing competitively, this skill is invaluable later on in the game when you've got a lot of cards to draw and several useless ones to get through before you find the card you need. I was prepared to use the skill, but not before I'd made a couple of foolhardy journeys into the mansion early on and nearly killed myself. I did this wondering how bad it could possibly be; in some cases I was still playing Thunderstone but the fact that in Resident Evil you can't actually see what you're attacking until it attacks you compelled me to test the water (or mansion) as it were.

Now at that point Dave and I decided to play the 'realistic' version of the game, where once your character is dead you are out of the game. The other version is basically you miss a turn if you die and come back the turn after with full health. I chose 'realistic' because there's a lot more at stake when you're about to die, and therefore the game is more fun... but it was time to regroup and it was a long time before I headed into the mansion again. I built up an impressive collection of cards to use once I got in there, and decided to risk it. After all, by refusing to take risks, Napoleon cost himself Russia... I actually managed to pick up a herb that healed me a bit, and took down several monsters, maxing out Rebecca's ability (which came in very handy later,) and giving me a nice selection of commendations (points) with which I could comfortably win the game were it to end at that point. Dave was trying to pull it back but the monsters he was fighting were of relatively low power and he wasn't getting all that many rewards for his efforts.

Then, as I prepared myself for another excursion into the mansion, disaster. I came up against Uroboros, and found myself 15 points short of killing it. It, therefore, killed me, and Dave won the game by default.

So what to do next time? Well, I won't be ne-he-hearly so quick to go into the mansion next time, knowing that the weapons you get at the start of the game really aren't up to much without at least some augmentation from some of the other cards. The Uroborus monster takes a whopping 90 points of damage before it will go down so I need to be sure that I'm capable of delivering such a blow before I venture in too many times. What I'd really like to see though, and this is very little to do with the game, is more players. The game carries up to 4 people and right now it's just me and Dave. It's great and we really do have fun playing it, but a 3rd and 4th player will lend a new element of strategy to a game like this that we just don't have at the moment.

Still, not complaining, it's been a great night and I'm really looking forward to the next one! Incidentally, I might be buying Thunderstone before too long. Games like this are really too much fun to let slide.

Off to Plymouth for a week next week, so unless I complete Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance or finish painting some models before I go on Sunday (Not likely, it's taking me ages to do both) that'll be the last you'll hear from me for a bit. See you in a couple of weeks!

Yu Yu Hakusho - Ghost Files, Tournament Tactics

It's been a while since I did a video game blog, but then it's been a while since I've played a game long enough to finish it...

Some of you may remember last March I talked about Yu Yu Hakusho - Spirit Detective, and that I wasn't overly impressed by the game and that I hoped Tournament Tactics would be better. Turns out it was a significant improvement on the last game. When I turned it on and started playing, my thoughts were: 'Hey, this is more like it, the graphics are about as good as the GBA ever got, and the gameplay is far closer to what I've come to expect from most of what Nintendo have released on their handheld consoles for the last decade.' Well, I didn't actually think that word for word, but you know...

This game apparently follows the story of Yusuke Urameshi during the 'Dark Tournament' period of the saga, where Yusuke and his friends enter the tournament to destroy Toguro and his team. All the characters from the first game are there, including Kuwubara, Hiei and Kurama, plus a supporting cast of other playable characters. The plot for the game centres around recruiting these other characters in various different locations in the island, and journeying to the Dark Arena to face off against Toguro. Dialogue is basically limited to speech-bubble cut-scenes in between levels, and while Atari's script is certainly not on par with their Square contemporaries, the personalities of the characters are brought out more by their interaction with each other. Kurama, for example, is nice and polite to everybody, while Hiei goes out of his way to annoy Kuwubara, who appears to have a thirst to prove himself. Ironically the least interesting character is Yusuke, who's brattish spite but with his heart in the right place is about all you get from him throughout the entire game. Nonetheless, if only for this reason the game is far superior to it's predecessor.

The actual gameplay won't be a surprise to anybody who's ever played a game with 'tactics' as a suffix. You take a maximum of five characters out in to the game. The action happens on a 'game board' style series of levels, and the characters can move a certain amount of squares that the level is divided into, depending on their move rate. They have a selection of actions, including attacks, which develop as the game progresses, using items and performing actions such as taunting the opponent and recovering your spirit energy (more on this later.) Some of the levels have specific missions, however most of them involve killing demons, which take the shape of humanoid animals and get progressively harder as the game goes on. So far, so Final Fantasy meets Dungeons and Dragons.

A Lion roars at the Masked Fighter, while the team prepare to stike...

Where this game differs slightly from this very popular and some may argue saturated style ('tactics' style games have been around at least since the mid 1990s, in fact I'm pretty sure some of them were derived from Space Hulk, but anyway,) is combining the Spirit Energy system with Initiative. I'll explain how it works, but it will take a minute; skip a few paragraphs if you really don't want to know about it and read on in the knowledge that I haven't come across a system that uses quite this same set of circumstances before or since.

Right. Spirit Energy starts off as what most RPG players would recognise as magic, mana, MP, whatever. You have a certain amount of Spirit Energy you can use in one particular stage, or level, and once it's gone you either have to manage without it or use a special action to recharge it. Where it differs from the usual incarnation of magic is that the greater majority of standard attacks also use Spirit Energy; you can't decide not to use it or you'll never make any attacks. That's certainly the case in the first few levels, anyway.

Initiative is in essence the order of turns; certain actions take more initiative than others. Moving, for example, costs initiative, all attacks do, some more than others, and the special actions certainly use initiative as well. So you might do a fairly low-powered attack which uses 10 initiative and be able to move again almost straight away, or Yusuke's Spirit Mega Gun - the best attack in the game - costs 50 initiative and the other characters might get another two or three turns before he can act again.

Combine these two things and the tactical nature of the game with the implicit strengths and weaknesses of the characters, and you've actually got quite a complex and well-thought-out system which can actually be quite interesting to analyse. Very broadly, most of the characters have most of the following:

• A fairly basic, low powered attack that doesn't use any Spirit Energy and not much initiative,
• A basic attack that is quite powerful and does use Spirit Energy,
• A ranged attack,
• A linear attack, that is to say an attack that hits the 2-4 spaces in front of the character,
• An attack that for lack of a better word I'll call a blast, that affects a number of squares around the character in different shapes depending on the character,
• A reasonably powerful attack that uses no Spirit Energy but uses a lot of initiative.

Learning how to use the different characters effectively is an interesting challenge and in the latter stages of the game becomes crucial. Chu, for example, does not move very quickly, his ranged attack is poor and he doesn't have a linear or blast move, but once he's levelled up and gets in close, he can be extremely powerful. He also doesn't carry a lot of Spirit Energy, which when Chu has all his attacks lends a new level of tactics - if speed is of the essence, it may be better to use his Crusher Kick, which uses a lot of Spirit Energy, than his Headbutt, which is his most powerful attack but uses a lot of initiative. Yusuke and Kuwubara do not have attacks that don't use Spirit Energy, so in the longer battles they will be useless for at least one turn while they recover it. Hiei is awesome - he can't take a lot of damage (relative to some of the tougher characters, anyway,) but can hit the demons very hard and very fast with his dark attacks, and has a reasonable selection of attacks to keep using once his Spirit Energy runs out.

A great system, but one that unfortunately only really has the chance to shine in the more difficult levels towards the end of the game. Up until about two thirds of the way in, most of the battles can be won by splattering the nearest demon with your most powerful attack and hoping for the best; some battles are harder than others but you'll rarely get stuck to the point where you need to take the time to think about what you're doing. There are a few levels, though, that are absolute beauties. One specific stage quite late in the game is where the characters have to kill all the demons on the stage plus three floodgates, which spawn out another two demons every so often. The floodgate towards the back of the stage spawns Wolves - by far the hardest of the demons to deal with - and if you try to fight your way through the two gates that spawn Cats and the other demons on the level, you'll find it flooded with Wolves that you haven't got a hope of beating before they beat you. Your best chance is to take that gate out first, and very quickly - but the only character who can take out Floodgates with one attack is Yusuke, and even then, the attack needs to be overdriven (the overdrive system being remarkably similar to Limit Breaks and such.) So Yusuke needs to do enough on his way up there to fill his OD meter, still have enough Spirit Energy left in the tank to perform the attack, and the other characters need to be nearby as well in order for them to support Yusuke so he doesn't get left out on his own. Therefore the other characters need to use their ranged and quick attacks, perhaps not dealing with the demons as systematically as would be usual, but nonetheless necessary.

The sound is as good as it needs to be; the background music is cheesy and not-too-overblown, and all the bells and whistles happen in the right places. Instantly forgettable, but let's be honest, how many games have you bought because someone's said to you, 'Wow, did you hear the BGM from that game?' Not many.

While I'd hardly say this is the best game I've ever played, it's an entertaining enough package to keep you going for a while. Both the storyline and the level-up system is quite linear, so there's almost no replay value (unless you re-he-hearly enjoy setting yourself challenges like, I don't know, max out all the characters, or play through the entire game using Yusuke as little as possible, in which case fine but there are other games out there, you know?) but if you can keep at it, it's fun while it lasts. How it measures up to the anime or the manga I don't know, probably not all that well, because game adaptations of this sort of thing rarely go as well as the publishers would probably like. But if you're not a fan of it, it is if nothing else a solid game that will give you probably about a weekend's worth of entertainment if you really push hard.

So what's next? I'm playing Medal of Honour - Frontline on my Xbox at the moment so maybe...

29/6/2011: The Horus Heresy

Having played Brother against Brother a couple of times now, Dave and I decided to give the Heresy Unheralded mission ago. It's remarkably similar except that you deploy (largley) according to your own devices and use all 5 Traitor Primarchs rather than just 3. There was some confusion about this which I think cost me; because we didn't know that the Primarchs were supposed to be deployed with the entire Traitor force, I allowed Dave to bring them on via drop pod. I doubt it made much difference to the end result, but it's not an experience I'd like to repeat if I'm perfectly honest...

I was playing the Imperial side and set up the board largely how it is in Brother against Brother, to tell you the truth, except that I switched around Sanguinius and Rogal Dorn, and their appropriate Space Marines. Dave deployed a lot of Space Marines with his Primarchs at the expense of anything else apart from the obligatory Chaos Warband. I had a feeling that this would cost him in combat, as many of the card effects are conditional on having the corresponding unit involved with the combat. There's no point using a Daemon effect if you haven't got any Daemons, for example.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object...

Well, Dave won once again by Spaceport victory. Largely due to the appearance of more Primarchs than I was expecting. I think a re-match is on the cards, but I do wonder, as we'll be swapping sides again, what approach to take and where to deploy the Primarchs. Thinking about it, Mortarion's ability is best suited to defence so it might be worth keeping him on the Vengeful Spirit. Fulgrim's effect is nice but as it basically gives you a free corruption draw, it will only really help you against Imperial Army or Tank unit. All well and good but better suited to mopping up the outer areas than attacking the palace itself, where very few such units exists. Magnus the Red may be a bit more powerful because hiseffect gives you a free orbital bombardment so that might soften up the enemy, but it is only really Mortarion that effects the enemy unit in such a way that they will find the battle itself more difficult than they may otherwise find it. Angron's ability is very good but can be countered with the right number of shields and cards, as he discovered when he tried to take on Rogal Dorn. Put simply, wherever Dorn is, write off his and a few surrounding areas.

Not got a good win/lose record with this yet, looking to improve on it next time...

New Orks and Goblins

Well today I've decided to be lazy and group these two painting blogs together. That should actually work out OK as they compliment each other in that I paint two sets of fundementally similar models very differently...



Bogrut's Blackspiders ready for war



First up we've got these ugly little beasts. They're goblins I've got from the Orc Battallion boxed set, and I named them Bogrut's Blackspiders. There's going to be 30 of them eventually, I think, but this will do for now. Two things I'd like to draw your attention to: First, the skin. How I did it was inspired by an article written by John Blanche in White Dwarf a few years ago, where he was talking about how he was painting some Orks he was working on. The idea is to give the skin a translucent quality to it, to suggest that there's something underneath the paint, and how he does it is that he paints Snakebite Leather (a swarthy sort of brown colour) mixed with a bit of white and a dash of Thraka Green over a white undercoat to begin with, then washes it with Devlan Mud, a wash that was sent by God himself. Then mix a little more white into the Snakebite Leather and paint that over the raised areas of the skin, and wash the whole thing down with Thraka Green. I know it works because I saw the Orks he'd painted in the feature, but I found myself thinking, 'if it works for 40K Orks, why won't it work for Warhammer Orcs and Goblins?' So I gave it a go. There's a few varieties of Orc and Goblin in any different army. The Orcs I'll probably keep as the article has written, but for the Goblins, I felt I had to add a little more white into the second mix of Snakebite Leather to bring out the lightness of the skin. I think it worked really really well.

The second thing is the colour scheme I ran with. This was partly inspired by John Blance, partly by Stevie T from Games Workshop Dudley, and the idea is to limit your colour pallette. For the non-artistically minded among us, that basically means don't use any more than a certain number of colours, in this case 12. That was Steve's contribution to it, as he tells us it's a real skill with painting to pick twelve colours and just use them for the whole model, or set of models. It's a bit of work, and as you'll need to do some mixing in order to get away with it you do need to have an awareness of what works and what doesn't when you're mixing colours, but the results are well worth it as you have a limited selection of colours tying the whole thing together. This is the idea that Blanche tries to get across by only using a very small number of colours, five or six. But if you look at the guy's painting, it tends to have a real gritty, dirty vibe to it; natural earthy tones made up largely of browns mixed in and out. I've used a few more colours than that but I think I've got the sort of muddy, flithy effect I was looking for, and one you'd happily associate with Goblins. The other thing about Blanche's painting is that when he does use colours that are any more vibrant than greens or browns, they tend to be for decorative purposes only. In this case I've only used one colour for this - Red Gore. Most of the eyes are red, and the tassle at the end of Bogrut's sword is red as well; there was one more but I can't remember what it was and I think it's hidden behind the standard bearer.

The whole '12 colour' thing seems to be working well for this. It's not necessarily going to be as easy to do this with every army - I wouldn't like to paint Brettonians in this way, for example, though I'm sure it's possible. But for now, it seems to be working as well as I need it to for the goblins.

So when you compare it to these:

I've spent a while painting these Orks. Basically when I worked for Games Workshop and I could afford to buy paints, I ended up with near enough every colour, and I'm using about half of them for these models. I've talked about these before so I'm not going to go in to too much detail about them, but the inspiration was from a couple of White Dwarf 'Eavy Metal articles, one on painting Ork Skin which I can now paint better than Human Skin funnily enough, and one for painting the Skulltaker. The elements from the latter ended up in the metal elements, and the black leather. You can't see it too well here - my camera was running out of battery when I took these so I couldn't use the flash - but by comparison to my goblins, these have a rather vibrant, 'cartoony' look to them. Steve was kind enough to tell me that my choice of colours worked really well for this; I have to admit it's something of a lucky reflex but it comes down to this: The bright colour of the skin works very well with the yellow clothes. It wouldn't necessarily have worked as well if I'd painted the skin the way I'd painted the goblins, or the clothes. The two styles wouldn't go all that well together. But because I've used all these vibrant, pastelly colours together, it makes the whole scheme work.

Just time to show you my conversion: when I put together these Orks I wanted to do something a little different to what I usually do, and that is to take some time to think about what I want on the model. Before, when I worked for Workshop, it was all about getting it together as quickly as I could so I left off a lot of accessories. Missed out a bit, though, and so now that I'm doing these Orks I'm putting all the accessories on them now (within reason, obviously,) and worring about how long it's going to take me to paint them later. For the most part, out of 32 models there's no so-called 'kit-bashing' going on in any but 2 of them, this being the second one where I used the power claw from the Ork Nob as a bayonet. Granted, in gaming terms it would be better employed as a power claw, but let me ask you this: Do YOUR Orks have bayonets?

The other conversion, by the way, was one of the Gretchin. I might tell you which one another time!

So, what's next for these armies? Well right now I'm working on an Orc Warboss and Goblin Spider Riders. I was actually painting the Warboss in parallel with the Goblins, but what happened was I stuck a little Snotling on the Warboss's shoulder and forgot to paint him, so I'm doing that with the Spider Riders. It's going to be interesting to see how those spiders turn out, because I've left our what might be considered to be a lot of the necessary detail; I think I'm going to have to get some reference material or at least some help in order to fill that in - and keep it with the colour scheme and the spirit of the army. For the Orks, er, that's going to be put on hold for a while. I meant to get some new ones the other day and I forgot. But the army list needs re-working, 70-something models in 500 points might seem impressive but I can't see it being any good if I'm honest. I might need to re-thing the theme of the army, though they will still all be in yellow.

I've actually got some other projects in the pipeline; I've never painted these models before so I'm quite excited about this! Looking forward to showing y'all.

See you next time!

23/6/2011: Leagues of Adventure: Plateau of the Ape Men

As you've probably gathered from my 'bunched' approach to blog writing, I tend to fall behind quite a lot. I end up writing about things literally weeks after they've happened by which time I've generally forgotten everything that went on. I've got a lot of things to talk about that's happened over the last few weeks and a limited amount of time to write it all in. For this reason, I'm going to leave you in the hands this week of Mike, AKA Gruffalo Crumble, who played the part of Evelyn Cross and did a bit of a write-up of this session that I ran. I'll give you a bit more in-depth information about what went on when I come to write next weeks session up:

"Gliding low over the expansive African savannah, daredevil aviatrix Evelyn Cross pilots her prototype dirigible (on loan from the Aeronautics Society in London) into a rolling cloud bank, which utterly obscures her view of the terrain. Also on board are eccentric German antiquarian Wilhelm von Bremer, gluttonous game hunter Big Allistair and brilliant detective Lewis Granville.

The dirigible is rocked as some unseen assailant shreds one of the airship's wings, severely hindering Evelyn's ability to control the vessel as it careens blindly through the fog. Big Al readies his rifle, as a dark shape circles back around towards the dirigible. A huge, winged monster swoops at the ship, but one deafening blast of the big game hunter's elephant rifle leads the hungry pterosaur to veer off in search of less formidable prey.

However, the damage to the dirigible has already been done, and while Evelyn (narrowly) avoids a catastrophic collision with the side of a mountain, she is unable to prevent the vessel crashing down along a densely forested, tropical plateau. The pilot and passengers all survive the impact, but even the least technically-able can see the dirigible has been damaged beyond hope of repair.

Stranded in the depths of some explored jungle, the heroes forge on through the trees towards a distant cave, leading north along the bottom of a long, narrow trench. It isn't long before the ground begins to tremble underfoot and a thunderous roar heralds a rockfall blocking the group's retreat. The only way is onward!

Emerging from the trench back into the jungle, the heroes are ambushed by a small group of savage Ape Men wielding primitive clubs. Big Al and Detective Granville quickly dispatch the hairy brutes. Searching the bodies, Evelyn finds a locket, inside of which is a photograph of one Cynthia Davenport, a female adventurer and anthropologist of some renown, who disappeared on some mad expedition several weeks previously.

Following the trail, the heroes reach the crumbling ruins of an ancient city, constructed in a style that Professor von Bremer recognises as being vaguely Egyptian. The missing anthropologist is spotted being dragged towards a sacrificial altar by a particularly impressive looking Ape Man adorned with feathers and baubles befitting his station as spiritual leader of the group. The heroes battle their way through a horde of savage tribesmen and confront the shaman, who throws Cynthia to the ground and draws his knife - only to be blown into red mist by the fiery discharge of Big Al's enormous gun the instant he relinquishes his human shield.

As the shaman dies, he implores his pagan god to punish the heroes for their trespasses - and the volcano towering above the ruins rumbles into life! As molten lava rushes through the streets of the forgotten city, the party race for Cynthia's hot air balloon - and their only means of escaping the plateau alive! Evelyn makes it first, with Big Al, Professor von Bremer and Cynthia all diving into the basket as it lifts off into the air. Nobody had noticed how Detective Granville had fallen behind, and they look away as the unfortunate man is overtaken by the river of liquid fire."
I think that more or less covers it. Cheers Mike!

16/6/2011: Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv

You have no idea how many times I've started this one and got nowhere, and it comes to something, I reckon, when you end up writing about things like this literally weeks after they've happened... This will be the last one on Smuggler's Shiv, as the adventure ended here and as Viggy, the Games Master, is committed to games for the rest of the year, it is unlikely we'll hear from Raziel and his friends before then, if at all.

So, we ended the last week having killed all the cannibals and learned that the Serpentine Demon we were supposed to be hunting had headed to the Red Mountain on the South East side of the island. We went there to discover a cleft in the rock that forms a way down through a succession of ladders to the ocean below. After not-so-easily dispatching a winged assailant (like a dimorphodon but a little bit bigger,) we examined and used the clearly magical collection of rocks (thanks to Gorman for verifying that for us.) This managed to drain the ocean to the point where it showed a couple of closed doors...

There was also a ship on there where we found a mad fungus-based critter who believed himself to be the captain of said ship. Through his incoherent mutterings we discovered that our quarry had indeed gone in through the doors, and we followed... we eventually ended up in a large room with a walkway running across it at an angle, on which were three skeletons firing arrows on to us. I had the idea of using my rope to climb the walkway and take the skeletons out from there. Bronn the Dwarf had the far better idea of using the grappling hook to pull the skeletons down to us; it worked almost every time and the skeletons took damage each time. We won the fight with out too much difficulty, and moved on...

Walking through a veritable maze of tunnels we ended up in a room which featured four pillars and a pool of blood, with a door at the other end. Before we had time to figure out what to do, the door slammed and a pendulum swung down, hitting Gorman and only just missing killing him. Raziel used his knowlege of dungeons to guess that the answer lies in the button on the four pillars; we each pressed one and stopped the swing of the pendulum. Gorman had time to heal himself...

We ended up in a cathederal where our serpentine quarry was there, inspecting the room. She was surrounded by three skeletons, and on seeing us told us she had found something beyond our imagination and attacked. She put up an impressive fight, but with Traugan turning one of her own skeletons on her and the rest of us beating the living daylights out of her, she never stood a chance. It transpired that she thinks she's found instructions on how to get to a lost city, an empire that's been missing for generations. Our party was well aware that the Pathfinder's society would pay large amounts of money for this information...

After this, there wasn't much to tell. We repaired the lighthouse, rounded up our survivors and finished up on the place we were bound for in the first place (Raziel neither knows nor cares what this place is; his only ambition through all of this was of getting out of the Shackles...)

So, how about that for my first adventure? Quite entertaining actually, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a bit of a shame that the format of the adventure doesn't necessarily sit well with a 'club' environment; the idea of a sandbox adventure is for the characters to explore, examine what they find, make use of it, scurry about the place and maybe come across some red herrings that are nonetheless fun to explore. Viggy tried to do it like this for the first couple of sessions, but after a while it became apparent that there wasn't going to be time, and he had to bend it slightly so that we got the main points of the adventure done by the time the 8-week rotation finished. That being said, it was a great adventure to be part of, and it got the best ending I could have foreseen...

What of my character? I evisioned Raziel as somebody who is handy in a fight but prefers not to; a con man with a conscience of robbing the rich and giving to the poor. His only motivation, really, was to avoid trouble, and yes, getting off that Hell-hole of an island was a good step in to doing that, but had the rest of the characters not volunteered to take out the Demon, he may not necessarily have gone all the way to do that. He would have done as much as was necessary to rebuild the lighthouse and escape Smuggler's Shiv, but he wouldn't necessarily have gone hunting for Demons. If they think there's something to be gained from this island let them get on with it! However, now that he has information that the Pathfinder's Society might be interested in, he may or may not choose to exploit it. For now, he's glad to be safely away.

There's a continuation in this. Whether or not Raziel will play a part in it I don't know, owing to the fact that there's a very real possibility that I'll be moving away from the area in the not-too-distant future, and if that proves to be the case then I won't be involved with the Role Play society anymore, which will be a shame. However, if I am...