So here are the significant things that happened to me this
week:
I spent a lot of time on Monday afternoon playing Mordheim:
City of the Damned. You may remember that the last time I talked about this
game, I’d failed the third Human Mercenaries campaign mission, and intended to
return to it once I’d trained up my ogre to be a match for the Daemons I know
are in the library. That was my mission for that session; to train the ogre to
the point where he’d be good enough to take on the mission (roughly 4th
level.)
Slight problem with that: he died.
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| He can dish it out and take a punch... |
After taking him into a few battles and levelling him up
quite a bit, I then found myself against the Undead, who are a very messy
faction to contend with. Most of them are not affected by fear, and they can do
a brutal amount of damage before they fall. The vampires themselves cause
terror, and that severely limits the effectiveness of your warriors against
them. Unfortunately they have a habit of tying up your best warriors in combat
and there’s not a lot you can do about it once you’re there. It was a ferocious
pitched battle against the two factions, which I eventually won but not before
their Crypt Horror tanked most of the health from my Ogre. I managed to drop
the Crypt Horror in the end, but after that it fell to one of the ghouls to
inflict one blow on my Ogre, which was enough to put him out of action and,
when the time came to roll on the injury table, kill him.
I’ve got a new one now – I didn’t have enough money to pay
for a higher-level Ogre, but I don’t mind training one up again. I don’t know whether
I’ll train him enough to have another go at the campaign mission. I’m more
likely to use the regular warriors in the warband for that, because of timing
issues. The campaign missions take ages to get through, and I need to give
myself enough time to do it, so if I get an evening with a couple of hours
spare I’ll do it then – with or without the Ogre. I certainly can’t afford to
take him on the mission at the moment, knowing that he will go down quite
easily.
Then on Sunday I carried on running the Pathfinder game:
Rise of the Runelords that I started two years ago. This is as long and as
high-level as I’ve ever run a game of anything! The line-up of players and
characters have changed over the years but the core of the group remains the
same. We’re at the beginning of Chapter 4 (of 6,) Fortress of the Stone Giants,
and the group enjoyed a battle for to save the town from marauding Giants,
before investigating certain aspects of the town (trying to avoid spoilers
here!)[1]
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| Great adventure path. |
Pathfinder’s an odd game to run; it’s got a huge amount of
depth to the rules but if you don’t know what you’re doing it can also get
quite unwieldy. There’ve been a few times when I’ve been running it and playing
it I’ve found myself thinking, “roll to hit and then do your maths homework.”
Thankfully most of my players are familiar enough with the system to know that
they at least need to be able to tell me what they want to do and how it’s
going to work, otherwise they’ll slow the game down to a crawl.
Where Pathfinder stands out for me, though, is the quality
of the adventures – it’s got the best long-form campaigns I’ve seen in eight
years of roleplaying games, and it’s a pleasure to be able to run them. I’d
even run the same adventure with a different group to see how differently they’d
handle it – if I had time.
I’ve got a new game I’m about to try out, and I’m looking
forward to telling you all about it next week…
[1] By
the way if you’ve gone through Rise of the Runelords and are wondering how we’ve
only managed to get this far after two years, our group meets on a monthly
basis.
