Or tomorrow for some of us.  

~throwi

benjoshua wrote in North Texas RPG Con 2016: June 2-5th:So, my first game was The Dungeon of Castle Dracula, and we had a great time.  Chainsaw, wjaehnig, and smarmy's son were all playing.  I won't spoil the adventure because there's another game this weekend, but we accomplished all our initial goals and only lost a couple of adventurers.  I must say however, it did not look good at first.  We were rolling terrible and the DM wasn't missing.  The rolls got better as we progressed.  We had a lot of fun, and the DM did a great job. We also completed the adventure about forty-five minutes before we turned into pumkins at midnight.  

Great start to the Con! This is what it's about, right? Playin' fun games with good people. This is going to be a great weekend!  

I had an great time this afternoon playing in Jimm Johnson's OD&D game, Outdoor Survival.  We started in the middle of a dessert and had to make it back to a distant castle before we died of enemies, starvation, thirst or whatever.  We fought quite a few bad guys, a basilisk, and some were boars.  Elric of Melnibone made it most of the way before Stormbringer sucked away all his constitution.  I was Merlin.  We also had St. Patrick, Chebacca, and several other colorful characters from fantasy/sci-fi history.  The best part of playing in his game were the free copies of Planet Eris Booklet 1 and Booklet 2, AKA Rules Additions a Reference Charts for Wilderness Adventures in the Wild Lands of Oros and Rules Additions and Modifications for the Skull Mountain Megadungeon, the Sparn Empire, and the Wild Lands of Oros.  These are both done in the style of the OD&D white box rule books.  I love free stuff!  

outskirtsofinfiniti wrote in North Texas RPG Con 2016: June 2-5th:

benjoshua wrote in North Texas RPG Con 2016: June 2-5th:


I think the DM's plan is for us to die.....  
But I'm going out blazing!!!

Oh, ya'll go out blazing alright.

The funny thing is, benjoshua literally went out blazing! Burned to death by the giant three-headed dog-dragon Cerebus. Only to be brought back to life by a magic leaf!

benjoshua wrote in North Texas RPG Con 2016: June 2-5th:We also completed the adventure about forty-five minutes before we turned into pumkins at midnight.  

When you have groupmates like Jimm's 7 INT barbarian and chainsaw's mark-of-the-beast cleric throwing caution to the wind, you're bound to finish early... one way or the other.

Yesterday morning I had the real treat of playing in Steve Marsh's game, City of the Revenant.  Steve is one of the more creative minds I have ever met as we encountered strange places, weird monsters, and interesting encounters.  Smarmy was in this party and the whole group was intelligent and worked together well.  We accomplished the goal with few distractions and un-necessary side tracks.  Steve's descriptions of everything were well done and thorough.  Steve is also one of the more generous DM's I have ever had as he gave each member a smartly, spiral-bound and numbered copy of his adventure as well as a decorative thumb drive with additional gaming material.  One thing I noticed as I read through the adventure yesterday afternoon is that Steve has excellent command of the English language with no noticeable typos.  Steve is generous not only with gaming goodness but he also provided a free cinnamon rolls and keylime pies party for us afterward, as well as for about twenty other fortunate souls who failed their saving rolls on delicious food smells!  

Friday night I played in Bruce Heard's D&D B/X game, Out of the Dark.  For those of you who don't know (like me until now), Bruce was the translator for French materials at TSR for many years.  Since I speak French, I found this connection especially interesting.  Anyway, our party had to find out what was going on with some strange, disappearing monolith/asteroid in space.  You read that right.  So, we hopped on a spell jammer ship and sailed to the place it was last seen.  We quickly figured out that it was hollow and found a door inside.  We discovered all kinds of classic, yet exceptionally large typical D&D creatures, orcs, trolls, ogres, etc...  We worked great as a team, and finally figured out most of what was going on.  There were several funny moments.  Bruce was an excellent DM, balancing story-telling with mechanics and keeping everything going.  When you have a good DM, a good party, and an interesting adventure, you are bound to have a good time, and we did.  

I'm back home, and need to get a post up about the convention; but at this point, I need to get some sleep more.  For the moment, however, a quick thank you goes to Doug and Mike for running such a fantastic convention.  What a great chance to meet old friends and new, play games and just have a blast.  Awesome job again, guys.  

Saturday morning was the worst game I experienced at NTX, but it held many redeeming moments.  I played in Paul Eckman's high-level adventure, A Hot Day in Hell.  We were charged with finding and rescuing a Dwarven prince in hell.  Fortunately for us, we were teleported near the location where he was imprisoned.  The people in our game could never could establish any rhythm or order until the last forty-five minutes as we realized we had still not found our dwarf.  Players were talking over each other, were easily distracted, made openly negative comments to other players, didn't care what anyone else thought, weren't listening to the DM, etc...  And this game lasted from 9:00 AM until 4:30 PM.  

Our DM was the author of the old, Judges Guild adventure, Inferno.  The game was listed as a 1st Ed AD&D game, but I would not exactly call it that.  My 10th level Paladin had 18 hit points, for example.  Believe it or not, he had a good explanation, and it makes perfect sense once explained.  In fact, he has lots of home-brew mechanics which work very well and make perfect sense once they are explained.  He was also the most prepared DM I have ever met.  He had massive volumes of notes, illustrations, miniatures, etc...  Whenever the party opened a chest, he gave us little slips of taped-up paper.  The outside read what the treasure was (gem, wand, sword, etc...).  If you successfully identified the item, you could undo the tape and read inside what the item did.  Most important, he was patient with all the misbehavior and disrespect.  If you've never played in any of his games, I recommend it if for no other reason than to see some well-thought out, though different, game mechanics.

The funniest moment of the adventure happened when three of our characters jumped through a mirror we all thought was a teleportation mirror into what we hoped was the next room but proved to be a Mirror of Life Trapping.  Once the third character hopped through, a naked man appeared out of the mirror.  Once questioned, he starts blasting us with spells.  I grab him with my strength and throw him back in the mirror.  Out pops a naked gnome lady.  I grab her and toss her back through.  Out pops a party member (yay!), naked, of course.  Someone summons some snakes and we toss one through.  Anyway, we are grabbing naked people, naked snakes, naked monsters, or whatever comes through the mirror, tossing them back into the mirror until we have our party all back with us.  Finally, right near the end of the session, we all come together and assault whatever we thought was our next best lead until we rescued the dwarven prince.  The DM confessed to me afterward that most parties do not find the prince, so I guess all's well that end's well....but not really.  

benjoshua wrote in North Texas RPG Con 2016: June 2-5th:Yesterday morning I had the real treat of playing in Steve Marsh's game, City of the Revenant.  Steve is one of the more creative minds I have ever met as we encountered strange places, weird monsters, and interesting encounters.  Smarmy was in this party and the whole group was intelligent and worked together well.  We accomplished the goal with few distractions and un-necessary side tracks.  Steve's descriptions of everything were well done and thorough.  Steve is also one of the more generous DM's I have ever had as he gave each member a smartly, spiral-bound and numbered copy of his adventure as well as a decorative thumb drive with additional gaming material.  One thing I noticed as I read through the adventure yesterday afternoon is that Steve has excellent command of the English language with no noticeable typos.  Steve is generous not only with gaming goodness but he also provided a free cinnamon rolls and keylime pies party for us afterward, as well as for about twenty other fortunate souls who failed their saving rolls on delicious food smells!  

Thank you.

That made my day.