Thursday 14 January 2010

The Stirge - Wait! That's Not Tekumel!

We did some more playtesting of "A Band of Joyous Heroes" last night, sending a party down into some sewers to search for a missing priest. The scenario derived from some D&D terrain tiles Bruce owns, one of which had a body floating in it (the priest - but I didn't tell him that!)

We took our time starting as I had to fill him in on the updates to the rules. The talents and flaws are almost completely done, and he made some suggestions on how to fill in the missing descriptions. I have been playing around with a points system, though I loathe such systems in general. And we discussed the creature creation system from the rules, in particular the Zrne stats, as they seem a bit too deadly.

After that we started the game proper - just something simple to test spell use and new reaction tables.

I introduced the Stirge into My Tekumel, working up some quick stats and throwing what ended up being three swarms at the party. Why bother - you ask? Doesn't Tekumel have enough beasties of its own? Well yes, it does, but I like the D&D Stirge figures quite a bit - with the double set of wings, I think they look the part - and couldn't resist trying them out. Besides it let me try out swarms as well.

Here are the stats I came up with:

Stirge
Dangerous = base 3d6;
Size = technically, each Stirge should count as small, or very small, but as they attack in swarms they get: large +1 or huge +2;
Speed = Fast +1

Total = large swarm: 5d6, huge swarm: 6d6.

One thing we also determined was that the creature's Rep is it's Base Dice, in this case 3.

Vitality = large swarm: 2, huge swarm: 3

Vitality is basically extra hits a creature has. Essentially to kill a Vitality 3 creature, you have to get 3 Obviously Dead (OD) or Out of the Fight (OOF) results.

Bite Impact: 2 - something I'd been forgetting from previous creature stats.

2 comments:

  1. I am looking forward to a completed 1st draft, as well as more of these progress reports. :D

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  2. How can there be too many weird, scary, beasties. The Five Empires are only a small part of Tekumel, and how know what else is hiding in the Underworlds?

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