The Band of Joyous Heroes:
Been working on this pretty steady but more working things out than typing things in. I had hoped to have a 60% draft ready on the weekend but that didn't happen. Instead I tried my hand with a bit of mapmaking. BoJH will need a map or two. I will probably end up with four one-page (8.5" x 11") maps, each showing a quarter of Tsolyanu plus a little bit of border. The rules format probably won't allow for anything bigger. I want the maps to be more tolkien-style, if you follow me, with the hills and mountains drawn in; that sort of thing. I'm using photoshop and it's working out not too badly, so far. I picked up some tips from the Cartographer's Guild and am hoping to try them out.
Got a bit of a playtest in last week. Tried out an idea I have for tracking encounters. Hmmm...think it worked Okkkkay - I'll put it in the next draft I send out and people will hopefully let me know how it works. (or doesn't work, as the case may be.) The main fight was more satisfying than previous encounters. I've tweaked the combat a bit so beating the opponent by 1 is OOF, by two is OD - both of these with saves for armour; a result of 3+ is OD with NO save, however.
Once again the Shen character was slain almost immediately due to him rolling extraordinarily badly.
The scenario was a Ksarul priest and escort looking for a lost temple in the Kurt Hills. They ended up being ambushed by some Goddess of the Pale Bone cultists. Most of the acolytes and servants ran away but the priest's escort (an ex-gladiator, two ex-soldiers in heavy armour, and the Shen) put up a stiff fight. The whole party suffered from bad rolling, however, with the priest being knocked OOF without getting a single spell off, and one after the other the rest falling killed or wounded. The ex-gladiator was the Rep 5 Star and every time she used her Star Power her player declared she was performing her "dance of dismemberment". ;-)
To no avail. Eventually she rolled so badly that she ran out of star power. The session ended with the surviving (but OOF) party members being trussed up and hauled off by the cultists.
The next scenario will continue from there, with their escape from the Goddess of the Pale Bone!
Or so they hope.
I also have to figure out how to post pictures. I don't think it should be too hard. Hmmmm....
Note: for those of you not familiar with the Two Hour Wargames rulesets, OOF means "Out of the Fight", while OD = "Obviously Dead".
The session started around 8:00 - well between 7:30 and 8:00, but we had to decide on the characters first. We only roughed them in and then started with only a bare-bones idea for a scenario. We finished about 10:00 after a biggish fight between the party and about 10 or so cultists.
Been working on this pretty steady but more working things out than typing things in. I had hoped to have a 60% draft ready on the weekend but that didn't happen. Instead I tried my hand with a bit of mapmaking. BoJH will need a map or two. I will probably end up with four one-page (8.5" x 11") maps, each showing a quarter of Tsolyanu plus a little bit of border. The rules format probably won't allow for anything bigger. I want the maps to be more tolkien-style, if you follow me, with the hills and mountains drawn in; that sort of thing. I'm using photoshop and it's working out not too badly, so far. I picked up some tips from the Cartographer's Guild and am hoping to try them out.
Got a bit of a playtest in last week. Tried out an idea I have for tracking encounters. Hmmm...think it worked Okkkkay - I'll put it in the next draft I send out and people will hopefully let me know how it works. (or doesn't work, as the case may be.) The main fight was more satisfying than previous encounters. I've tweaked the combat a bit so beating the opponent by 1 is OOF, by two is OD - both of these with saves for armour; a result of 3+ is OD with NO save, however.
Once again the Shen character was slain almost immediately due to him rolling extraordinarily badly.
The scenario was a Ksarul priest and escort looking for a lost temple in the Kurt Hills. They ended up being ambushed by some Goddess of the Pale Bone cultists. Most of the acolytes and servants ran away but the priest's escort (an ex-gladiator, two ex-soldiers in heavy armour, and the Shen) put up a stiff fight. The whole party suffered from bad rolling, however, with the priest being knocked OOF without getting a single spell off, and one after the other the rest falling killed or wounded. The ex-gladiator was the Rep 5 Star and every time she used her Star Power her player declared she was performing her "dance of dismemberment". ;-)
To no avail. Eventually she rolled so badly that she ran out of star power. The session ended with the surviving (but OOF) party members being trussed up and hauled off by the cultists.
The next scenario will continue from there, with their escape from the Goddess of the Pale Bone!
Or so they hope.
I also have to figure out how to post pictures. I don't think it should be too hard. Hmmmm....
Note: for those of you not familiar with the Two Hour Wargames rulesets, OOF means "Out of the Fight", while OD = "Obviously Dead".
The session started around 8:00 - well between 7:30 and 8:00, but we had to decide on the characters first. We only roughed them in and then started with only a bare-bones idea for a scenario. We finished about 10:00 after a biggish fight between the party and about 10 or so cultists.
Nice account, and good to read of playtesting progress.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to next iteration.
Best,