Ticket to Ride

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

Ticket to Ride is an insanely popular board game. It has expansions and different versions but it always impresses me how well the base game plays and how much fun it is. There have been a lot of board games that have come out and a few are more popular than this, but Ticket to Ride is the one game that everyone I’ve played with has enjoyed. My parents, my siblings, my aunts and uncles, and well everybody. More so it is the one game that they ask me to play. Most of the time I’m suggesting games to people but Ticket to Ride is the one they remember and the one they want to play. It is the only game to achieve this level of status with my family.

Ticket to Ride is a game set in the early 20^th century in America. Players collect route cards and then use train cards to claim routes between cities. It is pretty simple though it can be fun to learn which of your family and friends are geographically challenged. Some of my East Coast friends are always trying to figure where Helena is and some of my friends who know where all the American cities are have trouble with the few Canadian cities on the map. To be fair once we switch to the map of Europe, Asia, or Africa I have trouble finding some of the cities on those maps.

I mention a few of the expansions but there is only one I feel is a must have. The regular Ticket to Ride comes with cards but they are small cards. The other full games come with normal sized cards so in the 1910 expansion they have normal sized cards and routes for the regular game. It also comes with additional routes to use with some different options on what routes to use that can bring a little variation to the game.

I have been enjoying the map packs they have put out. These require a base game like America or Europe for the train cards and train pieces, but they do include new maps of different areas with route cards for them and new rules to make the games more complex. I have used many of the new maps without any new rules and I think they work fine like that, especially with players that just do not want a complex game. The Asia map has rules where train pieces get lost in the mountains and are taken out of play. We call this giving a sacrifice to the Yeti. If you see the map you’ll understand that more. The Asia map also has a version for team play that can be fun and brings in a neat dynamic for the game. I have yet to try the team rules with different maps and I am curious as to how well that would work.

Ticket to Ride is my game of choice to play with family and with people that are not hardcore board gamers. There are some of my hardcore board gaming friends that really love the game and many times it is their game of choice when we get together. Even with people who play a bunch of different games and who have played Ticket to Ride countless times it amazes me how enjoyable the game still is for us. There is a closet full of games that we played once or twice or were popular for a bit, but we grew out of. Ticket to Ride so far has stayed a fun and popular game among my family and friends.

Chris Gath. I’ve been gaming since 1980 playing all kinds of games since then. In the past year I’ve run Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classic, Paranoia, and Mini d6. My current campaign is mini d6 and we are using that for a modern supernatural conspiracy investigative game. On some forums I’m known as Crothian and I’ve written a few hundred reviews though I took a sabbatical from reviewing for a few years as it burnt me out. I was also an judge for the Gen Con awards (ENnies) six times. Jeff, the owner of this blog, is one of my players and a good friend.

Review: Bluffside City on the Edge

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

In the days of d20 we had more than a few city supplements published. Freeport is the most famous and the easiest to use with all of its support. It is a gritty pirate city making it easy for players to understand and the original trilogy of adventures written for it as well as other after that served as a great introduction and way to make good use of Freeport. But while Freeport is great, and I did run a very enjoyable campaign there it was not my favorite city published in the days of d20. That honor goes to the city of Bluffside. Bluffside is a city built on the ruins of a lost civilization. It is written with creativity and plenty of mystery that appeals to me. I just hope this time around it gets the support it deserves and that some of the many mysteries the book raises get some kind of answer.

The new version of Bluffisde is written for the Castles and Crusades RPG. It is not a system I like and when it was first announced I was not going to buy it for that reason. However, I found my old copy of the original and was reminded on how much I enjoyed reading the setting. I did eventually buy a copy and I am pleased that I did. I have zero intention of ever using it with Castles and Crusades but luckily there are very few rules that I would need to convert into whatever system I might use when running the setting.

Bluffisde has a rich history and is filled with mystery. A very long time ago there was a civilization that was destroyed in a cataclysm. Bluffside is built over and around the ruins of one of their cities and seemingly the center of the cataclysm. It is named Bluffside because it sits high on a cliff over the ocean. The many districts of the city are in many ways small cities themselves. Each district is separate as the area the city is built on has crevasses that make it impossible to build a single large expansive city. This really makes the different area unique and feel much more like small neighborhoods.

The books is filled with great places of interest that are ridiculously easy to use. Each one defines a shop or building, lists the regulars so it is easy to know which NPCs one might encounter there, and lists a couple hooks to turns any point of interest into a seed for some type of adventure. Some of the hooks are complex, others are just simple sentences, and all serve to be a good starting point for some type of adventure – big or small.

The book does have a lot of Castles and Crusades information in it. It has 20 pages that are just NPC stats, and many pages of creatures, spells, items, classes, etc. They take up almost half the book coming in at about seventy of the hundred and seventy pages. Because of that, the decent sized book becomes a lot smaller for people like myself that will get little use out of those pages.

Bluffside is a city of mystery. There are plenty of underground caves that can lead to ancient ruins. Even the ancient palace the city is built around has not fully been explored in over a century. There are ancient magics alongside a very modern political set up that create issues for the player characters. There are a few powerful groups each with different agendas and knowledge of the city and its mysteries. The area around the city is also still wild. There are valuable metals to be found in the mountains along with tribes of goblins and other monsters. It is a city ripe with opportunity for adventuring.

It’s a Trap!

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

Grimtooth’s used to invoke fears in players. I don’t know if it does anymore. A copy of Grimtooth’s Traps needed to just be seen in a pile of books the DM might be using or over on a counter with a book mark or sticking out. The very idea the DM might be using the book and the deadly contraptions inside was usually enough to keep players overly cautious and paranoid. Perhaps in the history of gaming only Tomb of Horrors can invoke such a response from the players.

Grimtooth eventually became a series of seven books. Six were generic to fit into any system. The last one they made recycles some of the classics for the d20 system. I only have the first three books and considering how little they ever got used I doubt I would buy the others if given the chance. The books are fun reads to think of the ridiculous deadly nature of the overly complex traps. Most of them though are just there to kill the PCs without giving them a fair chance to do anything about it. I understand their use and the reason they exist. Most traps are pretty lame and barely a challenge. The games made it too easy for them to detect and avoid. Even if one sets them off they rarely do anything more than a few points of damage. But Grimtooth takes it too far. They make it so the traps are near impossible to find and disable and are so complex that it is impossible to predict what setting off the trap will do. Others need to be described in a specific way to confuse the players as if they were described normally it would reveal what the trap is. Going back through the books I am surprised to see how many traps were designed by Michael Stackpole.

The biggest improvement Grimtooth’s and other trap books can use is more pictures and possibly even including some player handouts. Many of the rooms, corridors, and other devices are just described with text and do not always make the most sense. These are complex devices and sometimes having multiple moving parts. A picture really can help one understand how all the pieces fit together and work to make mincemeat of most of the player characters.

Grimtooth’s Traps might be the most famous and most deadly, but it is not the only collection of traps and tricks. Fantasy Flight Games produced Traps and Treachery 1 and 2 in the d20 era. These hardbound books are filled with traps and deadly mechanisms but has the benefit of improved writing and layout. They are much easier books to read and I like how they are organized. There is a wider variety within the books as they have some game mechanics and character options in them. The first book really concentrates on the Rogue and giving them options as well as traps. It has information on thieves’ guilds, though Canting Crew and Den of Thieves are much better books on those guilds. Traps and Treachery also have puzzles in them that are pretty well done. I find I get more use out of the puzzles as they can be more difficult to create on one’s own.

Traps and Treachery suffers from some of the same problems as Grimtooth’s does. It doesn’t have enough pictures, though the descriptions are better. Some of the rules are not well done but at least there is something to use as a baseline. The books are more usable because of their versatility in including other things besides just traps.

The most useful book of this type for me was put out by Wizards of the Coast in 2002. The Book of Challenges is an overlooked book that does not just present traps and puzzles but it combines them into encounters. As a DM this is the great as they are rooms or places easily inserted into a dungeon or building. It has monsters as well as traps and puzzles and many times they are combined to really take advantage of something more complex. There are also almost thirty sidebars of DMing advice that is well thought out and useful. The encounters are organized by encounter level with something for each encounter level one through twenty and with one that is encounter level 22. I’m not sure the higher end ones are really as challenging as they should be but they are still good for mid to higher level groups. Of course if one is using this with Pathfinder or 3e D&D one must take into account that sheer amount of new options that were not available when this was written. The power level of say a fifth level character has risen noticeably within the game in the past ten years.

This of course does not cover all the books on traps that have been published. Goodman Games has an interesting one called Lethal Legacies: Traps of the World Before. What is great about that book is there is background information that gives reasons for the traps presented in the books and so it also has adventure hooks and mystery. So what are your favorite books on traps and puzzles? Do you find them easy to use or a waste of paper? Does Grimtooth’s Traps still hold its power to scare players?

World’s Largest Dungeon

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

In 2004 AEG came out with the World’s Largest Dungeon. It is an interesting idea and with a $100 price tag really got the attention of gamers as being expensive. But a lot of people were curious about what it was. It is not a book one could just flip through the pages as it came shrink wrapped because it came with free standing maps that needed to be attached to the book somehow.

It was met with a wide range of opinions and eventually a small selection of players started posting they made it through the behemoth dungeon. I was not originally interested in the book until I found it for about $30 at Origins. I read through it and while it had some interesting encounters it was also a huge single level dungeon with not a lot of promise. There is a backstory and different sections of the dungeon can be expanded on to make it a more cohesive story. That’s what I did and I ran it all the way through. It was fun, there was work involved to make it better, and I’m pleased to say I have no need to do that ever again. There will be some spoilers to follow so be aware of that though I don’t see as many people wanting to use this these days.

It was never my intention to run this. It wasn’t the first huge RPG book I bought with no intention of using and it most certainly was not the last. A friend saw it and expressed interest and I came up with some ground rules for running it knowing player and DM burn out for something like this would be high.

The dungeon was originally a prison. Characters that go in will find it very difficult to get out. I wanted my players to know that before we started. Teleportation and other magics do not work there and again I made sure the players knew this so there were no characters that were going to get overly screwed over by the new found rules.

Some players and DMs will not like restrictions and feel it is cheating. In my view the game breaks down so easily with high level magic that restricting them is one of the best ways to keep the game fun and manageable. The dungeon is ridiculously huge and while mapping it out and getting lost is very much part of the experience I eliminated it. I did not want to spend sessions with the PCs lost walking around trying to find something of interest. I gave them the maps. There was no in game explanation for it. I also told them the dungeon is basically sixteen different sections and we will only handle one section at a time. If they left a section that would be the end of that night’s adventure as I wanted to prep each section when they came to it. It allowed me to connect the different sections better than the module does and to include better NPCs and not make everything a combat encounter. The best rule we did though was not start at first level.

Not a lot of the backstory is explained to the PCs so as usual I came up with a way to make them more aware of what was going. As they enter there are hints of guardians and deities, so I expanded on that and made sure the backstory fit in with most of the goings on in the different sections. Section A is mostly empty and has some other beings like kobolds and goblins that have found their way into the Dungeon and cannot get out. They are warring with each other. The most awesome thing about the campaign happened when the players decided to broker a peace between the groups and unite them as allies. All of a sudden this was not just an exploration module, but a rescue mission in which the PCs stuck to and made friends and kept alive as many different people and monsters as they could that were willing to work together. The PCs had created for themselves a basecamp and support team. It allowed me to develop some more NPCs and since they were introduced so early we had NPCs that lasted the entire campaign.

The different sections of the dungeon do have different themes. One goal of the writers was to use each monster in the monster manual that was part of the Open Game License and they succeeded in that. There is one area that is a large garden so many of the plant and fey creatures are found there. One is the headquarters for the celestial guardians that stayed to operate the prison. One that is neat as they used the creatures drawn from Greek Mythology and placed them in a section together. They mostly stayed with good challenge ratings to make sure that different sections had a level recommendation for them. It worked and made the different areas easier for me as DM to polish them up and use their themes to make the adventure shine.

In the end it is a mammoth of a book that took some work and some ground rules for us to enjoy it. I don’t think we would have gotten beyond the first section if we tried to run it as they have it presented. AEG also made a book called the World’s Largest City which I found also deeply discounted and it lies in a box or on a shelf somewhere still in the shrink wrap.

Treasure Hunting at Half Price Books

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

In Columbus Ohio, where I live, we have a few local gaming stores and for various reasons I have given up on all of them. The reasons range from bad service, to disgusting and smelly stores, to false advertising, and fraud. It’s odd but price was never a reason, even though now that I don’t use them I get all my books much cheaper. I use Amazon for some things, but not as much as one might imagine.

Mostly I use the five Half Price books stores in the area. Half Price Books is a chain of used book stores where most of their items are half price. It is not a place to get the newest hot release in gaming, but a great source for older material, and not all of it is used. Each store has a good sized gaming section and one never knows what they will find there. I have gotten some amazing deals there for which Jeff, the owner of Iron Tavern, constantly gets mad at me for because he never seems to find the same deals I do. Sadly, none of the items I picked up were awesome deals. Each was under $10, but there is still the chance I over paid for them.

The first item I picked up was Role Aids Demons box set by Mayfair Games. It was published in 1992 or 1993 – the box has one copyright on it and the book has another. Either way it puts it in the days of second edition D&D when the names of monsters like Demons and Devils were replaced. It makes me wonder if this was written as a direct response to that.

It has some cool ideas, the best dealing with the classic making deals with the devil kind of things. In here the demons have an agreement with the gods on how they may interact with mortals. The best thing about the book is a 64 page player handout of an ancient book on Demon lore to help the players handle and deal with Demons.

The book has some hit and miss classes, spells, and magic items that seem creative but difficult to tell rules wise how they fair. I would just translate everything from here into a different gaming system. Another cool idea they have is a small table that gives examples of Demonic presence. It has suggestions on how people behave if they have made a deal, how the environment reacts to these other worldly figures, and in general it is a cool starting point to add some awesome flavor into the campaign. If I ever run a fantasy campaign again this is defiantly a resource I would like to make use of.

Another item I bought is the 1981 box set Bushido by Fantasy Games Unlimited. It is the third company to make the game in three years and I have no idea what, if any changes were made. It is credited with being the first RPG to focus on the Orient. It is a complex mess especially by today’s standards. I’m sure I would have loved it if I had the game thirty years ago, but not sure after seeing it now. While there are some really cool details and setting information, it seems like there is not much that can easily be pulled from to use elsewhere. It certainly is not a game I would want to try to learn to play. It will make a nice conversation piece next to Space Opera which is what the game reminded me of most because of the dense text and complex game mechanics. I was able to get the box set cheaper then what the PDF sells for, so there is that.

The last book I purchased is Chill RPG by Mayfair games from 1990. As horror RPGs go it is not too bad. I also don’t think it does a lot to separate itself. Even after reading it I’m not sure what makes a Chill game a Chill game. One thing the book does well is it comes with a small introductory pamphlet. This sums up the game very well and is easy to copy to hand out to players. It has a decent GM section for running horror games and offers some interesting and different takes on monsters and presents some that I have not seen elsewhere. I think it can offer some good inspiration but just does not stand up with other horror games these days.

Even though these are older out of print books that have seen their best days go by it doesn’t mean they are totally worthless. I pick up old books and games for inspiration for my new games. Sometimes it is fun to read them and see how things were done twenty and thirty years ago. I was gaming at the time but for whatever reason these books and box sets where completely unknown to me at the time. That is one of the reasons I like hunting for things at the local used book stores because I never know what I am going to find.

A Halloween Look at Dread

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

[Editor Note: A kind person noted that the PDF of Dread is on sale at DriveThruRPG right now for $3!]

It is the week of Halloween and time to talk about horror gaming. It is hard to scare people in RPGs. I’ve creeped people out and made them squeamish, but the only real scares have been accidental. One time we were playing D&D in my apartment and during a tense scene one of our friends who was late to the game banged on the window suddenly giving us all a fright.

Horror games are popular in RPGs, but so much of it is understood and the rules can be burdensome that it takes away from the horror aspect. One game though has found ways to bring a level of nervousness and uncertainty to the gaming table like many classic horror movies do and that game is Dread.

In 2006 I was an ENnies judge and the Dread RPG was submitted. We nominated it for Best RPG and Mutants and Masterminds 2e won the Gold and Game of Thrones won the Silver. Dread did not stand a chance against those games in popular vote but looking at it and the games it was up against that year only M&M has had a better showing since then. Dread is by far the most innovative RPG I had seen at the time. It uses a Jenga tower as its resolution mechanic. Some people see it as a gimmick and I know more than a few people that refuse to play the game because of that. But it works at creating tension and consequences for actions unlike anything I have seen. If one knocks over the tower your character dies. It is that simple and it makes the game unlike any other. I have seen someone knock the tower over with the very first pull. I have seen people knock over the tower on what is basically a perception check or knowledge check. It really makes one think about his character’s actions knowing that a failed pull can cost that character’s life.

Everyone knows Dread as the Jenga game but the most innovative part and the aspect of the game that is easiest to use in other games is character generation. The game is designed for one-shots and character sheets are a list of leading questions. The player answers the questions to define his character. Questions can sometimes be a challenge to come up with so one cool thing about the Dread RPG book is at the bottom of each page are sample questions like “Despite being a pacifist what situation always leads you to violence?” The question defines the character in a specific way but allows for the player to pick a situation their character will probably get into in the session. Most characters are a list of about a dozen questions but I personally prefer closer to eight. It takes less time to do and it is easier to fit that information into the session.

The summer I and the other judges nominated it for an ENnie I was playing a game at Origins where the GM used the question character generation to help enhance the game he was running. He had the dull character sheets with the mechanics and everything on it but allowed for the players to define some of the details of the character. I thought it was a great idea. I don’t use it all the time, but I like to include some questions when it works for the game.

Dread works best for horror and I have played with all kinds of horror scenarios. It seems easy to me to see how any horror movie or book can become a Dread scenario. But for people looking for sample Dread adventures there is Dread Tales of Terror issues one and two. Wastelands, the first one, has two adventures in it as well as some good advice for the game. Each adventure is a simple set up, one being in a post-apocalyptic world and the other one waking up in the local grocery store with only the other players characters around in an otherwise seemingly empty world. Precious Illusions, the second one, seems to push boundaries a little more. The first adventure there called Little White Birds deals with a children’s insane asylum and the second one, Beneath the Service, is a High School reunion with some very messed up classmates.

Dread is one of those games that most gamers should try at least once. It can be challenging to run, as there is an art on when to ask players for a pull (and how many) and when not to require a pull. It is also one of the few games that does not require the book to be run, though the book is helpful to read to aid with some problems that might come up – like what does one do if the tower is knocked over on the very first pull.

Review: Edge of the Empire

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

Edge of the Empire is the newest iteration of a Star Wars RPG. West End Games had the license in the 1990’s with their d6 system. Wizards of the Coast had in in the 2000’s with their d20 Star Wars and then Star Wars Saga versions of the game. I am a sucker for Star Wars. I own the previous games and have a copy of each supplement for those games which is a ridiculous amount of material. I have run and played in many different Star Wars campaigns in those systems and some were very successful and others were less than great. My group is now playing Edge of the Empire so this review is a reflection of reading the book and playing the game.

The big difference people talk about first with Edge of the Empire is the dice. It does not use normal dice so one needs to either buy the overpriced special dice they sell or use normal dice (d6s, d8s, and d12s) and conversation charts. There are seven different types of dice the game uses but right now I’m not going to talk about the force die as that doesn’t interact with the other six. There is the Ability die, Proficiency die, and boost die that are all positive helping the character to succeed, Then there is the Difficulty die, the Challenge die, and the setback die that are negative and hinder the characters. Each die side has one or two pictures on them with some sides blank. Players collect the different pictures they roll to determine success and failure and if they can get an advantage or disadvantage. The dice are measuring two different things so it is possible to not succeed but still create some kind of positive advantage for your team or succeed in the action but create some kind of disadvantage. Other games have done this with less dice and less complexity. Once the symbols are collected the players look up skills or combat tables to see what they can do. In hearing groups play it seems they don’t do this they just play it by ear which would be faster. However, under each skill description in the book there are ways to spend these symbols. The other issue is that for most gamers one cannot just look at the dice about to be rolled and have an idea of their chance to succeed or fail. I’m sure by now someone has sat down and figured out the odds with different dice combinations but most gamers won’t spend the time doing that. Gamers I see just roll and hope for the best not having any idea if they should be succeeding or failing.

Character creation is simple and fast. It is a class system without levels. I would have liked different names for the classes or as they call them Careers. I feel anyone for instance can be a Bounty Hunter and have different skill sets for success. While the game allows for a good amount of customization one still has to have the career of Bounty Hunter to be a Bounty Hunter. Each career has three specializations. Extra specializations can be bought with XP and one can even buy specializations from other careers though they all more expensive. Each specialization gives access to a talent tree. Talent trees are a mix of unique and not unique powers. Too many of them I feel get rid of penalties or add a small bonus. The different talents are not equal and some are much better than others. Like many systems most of the talent trees force a character to buy lesser and in some cases useless talents to get to the better ones.

The game uses two types of hit points. Health, which is more physical damage, and strain that is more mental and comes back easier. One problem this can cause is tough characters will have a high health but a low strain so it can be much easier to just attack a characters strain. It is really easy to do as most guns have a stun setting and that targets strain. It is also easy to create a character almost impossible to damage. The game of course focuses heavily on combat but even with just the options of the first book optimizing is very easy. The focus on combat does come at a cost as there are no language rules in the game so it is impossible to know who can understand who even though the game makes a clear point that some of the species offered in the book cannot speak basic. There is also no translator in the equipment section which I thought was odd since it is referenced in other areas of the book. The equipment section in general is sparse. There are a lot of weapons and armor but little of anything else.

The Force is treated like a talent tree that any character except droids can buy. To use the force one rolls a force die but with more sides being the dark side it means that characters are likely to be forced to use the dark side if they want to do anything. I can see a force user coming up with a cool idea, rolling a force die, and then say they are doing nothing because they don’t want to lose their character to the dark side.

Okay, that all was a bit negative as the game fails in a lot of small areas. The dice system does allow for a better variety of outcomes instead of the usual hit miss. It can help players be creative with coming up with different ways to use an advantage. It is new so that helps it and it will be interesting to see if people still like it in a couple of years. The options available to characters are pretty open. Aside from the limited number of species in the book most characters from the movies can be created here. It specifically doesn’t allow PCs to be Jedi but the book does have them to fight which was an interesting choice. Droids do seem to be the most powerful species in the game and it is the only option in the book I would have left out.

In the end the book is Star Wars. It wants to do something more akin to the Han Solo and Lando Calrission books. The Bounty Hunter trilogy and collection of short stories is another good source of inspiration from Star Wars novels. Of course since the game does not want to use Jedi and not much of the Empire perhaps Firefly becomes the best material to base a campaign on. The game does give the group some kind of transport as their ship to emphasis the ship crew dynamic. Edge of the Empire when compared to the other Star Wars RPGs does allow for better customization then the d20 based games and does not look like it will break down as fast as the d6 game. It is rather conservative on character power and that might just be the best thing the game has going for it comparatively.

Review: Blackguard’s Revenge & The Iron Crypt of the Heretics

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

The Dungeon Crawl Classic line has of course become its own RPG and a personal favorite of the owner of the Iron Tavern. It started though as modules for d20. While I never got the chance to run or play in most of them they are still very much a go to source for adventures for me. They are usually short and to the point dungeon crawls. They offer a variety of locations, clever encounters, the occasional trap and riddle, and plenty of danger. I made it a point to get a copy of each of them, though not all of the special releases and limited titles.

The Blackguard’s Revenge and its sequel The Iron Crypt of the Heretics are the twelfth adventure in the Dungeon Crawl Classic line. The Iron Crypt of the Heretics is number 12.5 and even though it is by a different author it makes for a good sequel adventure. They are written by F. Wesley Schneider and Harley Stroh. Neither is very large the first being forty pages and the sequel being twenty four. Blackguard’s Revenge is pretty easy to find for under five dollars, but Iron Crypt of the Heretics looks to be harder to find and can go for as much as thirty dollars. Both are out of print but can be purchased as PDFs for around seven dollars.

The Blackguard’s Revenge is a different kind of dungeon crawl. It is a rescue mission to aid a group of Paladins in a cloister that is under attack. There are a few moving parts the GM can have fun with. There are plenty of different creatures to fight and in this kind of module I usually increase the numbers a little and add or enhance the main bad guy some just to make it a bit more challenging on the PCs. I also wanted it to feel like time was of the essence so some of the bad guys would purposely try to slow down the PCs so they would be too late in rescuing the Paladins. This kind of adventure can also raise ethic problems. There is a good amount of treasure here to be found, but most of it belongs to the cloister, so the PCs can look like the bad guys by looting the place. My group didn’t care, they were ready to pry gold symbols off the wall and pack up the Holy paintings. The Paladins when rescued do need the PCs help so there is plenty of reason that the PCs will get rewarded and aided for the next adventure.

The next adventure being the Iron Crypt of the Heretics. The adventures are written to link together but they do not have to. They can easily be run separate or with other activities in between. What I like about the Iron Crypt is it is a change of pace. Where Blackguard’s Revenge is mostly combat and heroics of rescuing Paladins the Iron Crypt takes a slower approach and has a lot more traps, riddles, and puzzles for the PCs to deal with. It is a challenging module but not so much so that the players get frustrated. Basically the place has been raided and it let out an army of undead that attacked the Paladins in the first module. Now the PCs need to break in and reseal the place. The two modules make for a good back to back series of adventures offering a good variety of encounters and problems.

Blackguard’s Revenge and Iron Crypt are two good modules early in the very successful line of modules. They are easy to convert to other games and Blackguard’s Revenge even has a 1e version of it that Goodman Games published.

Review: Bookhounds of London

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

In early September on Facebook Ken Hite, author of this book, posted a comment that one of his newer books had already received as many reviews as this book, which about three years old. I went to make sure I had it and more importantly could find it before posting that I’d help by reviewing it. I don’t normally do it but Bookhounds of London is an amazing book. At Gen Con that year I had more people that I trust tell me to get this book. They were not wrong. The only reason I have never used it is because it is a very specific book dealing with the Cthulhu Mythos books in London in the 1930’s. If that doesn’t sound awesome to you, then sadly this book might not be for you.

Bookhounds of London is a source book for the game Trails of Cthulhu. Trail of Cthulhu is an RPG that deals with the Cthulhu Mythos and focuses more on the mystery, though insanity and death are still a good part of it. Bookhounds of London takes the normal type of Cthulhu campaign and changes it. Instead of being investigators, the characters are Bookhounds. They operate a bookstore in London, deal with private collectors and auctions, and deal with books that contain information man was not meant to know. It is an interesting twist on what could be called the normal type of Cthulhu adventure. The book can easily be used with any system. The brilliance in this book is the writing and research that went into it.

The book starts with how to create characters. Bookhounds differ in small ways from other investigators. It starts with the new occupations that show the focus of this type of campaign. One might be a Book Scout, Bookseller, Catalog Agent, Forger, or Occultist. The book also has new abilities, like Auction and Textual analysis. Lastly, and most importantly. are the rules for the Bookshop the players characters own or work for. It serves as a place of business, a place to do research, a good way to get contacts, and a base of operations. The book then goes into the book trade. This is one of the foundations of any Bookhound campaign. It talks about auctions, hunting for books, libraries, and of course the books themselves.

The best part of the book though is the setting. It gives a great deal of information on London in the 1930’s. It even has almost thirty pages of colored maps of the city and many of the buildings of the era. It is very impressive. The setting is done in such a way to make it useful for anyone wanting to use 1930’s London, and not just in a Mythos game. I could easily see Pulp games or war games set in the setting and will find the information in here very useful.

Last is the adventure Whitechapel Black-Letter. It is a simple adventure that can be done in as few as three scenes. But the adventure has enough setting seeds and mysteries that it can easily be expanded and much of the work is done for the GM to something much more. It gives hints to Jack the Ripper as one should guess from the title. It is a great starting adventure for the Bookhounds type or to be used as a different kind of adventure in another Cthulhu campaign.

Bookhounds of London is an amazing book. It and Shadows over Filmland, which I also love, really show the writing prowess Ken Hite and the quality of product Pelgrane Press creates.

My Worst Convention Game

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Iron Tavern Guest Blogger

The Gaming Convention season is almost over. There are going to be some smaller and regional conventions that happen throughout the year but the big season is the summer with Origins and Gen Con. I wanted to talk about the best convention games, but there have been so many great ones that it is hard to think of the best. But when it comes to the worst gaming experience at a convention for me it is not even close. At Origins a few years ago I played in a game of Colonial Gothic that failed in so many ways, all because of the GM.

Colonial Gothic was entered in the ENnies and I was a judge that year. I had played it with some local friends and it did not go well. The rules as we understood them made success very difficult even if we min-maxed a character. The concept of the game is supernatural elements in the time of the American Revolution and that was awesome sounding. I really wanted to like the game but it was not working for us. When I signed up for Origins I saw there was an official game being run Wednesday, the first game of the convention, in the late afternoon. I signed up and had my copy of the book, dice, and was ready to play. Unfortunately the GM was not.

The table had six players and two of us had books. I did not know anyone at the table, but while we waiting for the GM we chatted and it seemed like a good table. No one else knew the game; I was the only person who had played before. I did not mention I had before with the game. Our GM showed up. She fell into the chair exhausted and looked and smelled as if she had just run a marathon. She is a large lady and obviously had health issues. Since then I’ve seen that she now goes around conventions on a scooter. She tossed character sheets at us, told us to make characters, and then she left to get food. We were stunned. Usually GMs provide characters and if we are to make characters they have some condensed rules for us to use and stay there to help the players. With the few copies of the book we had I helped guide the other players to create characters. She came back 15 minutes later with her food. She helped out some and answered questions.

I had signed up for the game to see how the rules work, and to see if when I had ran it earlier that year we had been doing something wrong. The GM told us as we were finishing up characters that even though this was an official event by the publishing company she didn’t know the rules and was not going to be using them as written. Right from the gate the primary reason for my signing up for the game was negated.

The set up for the scenario was that our group has been tasked by colonists in Atlanta, Georgia to find a messenger boy who had gone missing. We created backgrounds for our character so we all knew each other and two of the players created links between their characters and the missing boy to create a better link for why we were going on the adventure. It was a good group of players who worked together and understood what was needed to help a GM along to make the scenario better.

The adventure was supposed to last four hours and it painfully did. We found some clues in Atlanta and made our way on the trail. On the road we ran into a fellow group of travelers. Each of them had a different accent the GM made sure to use and they were not well done. She wanted us to talk to each of the five or six NPCs even though they had no information on the boy or anything useful. The players kept trying to move on but she would bring up another NPC. So we talked to that one hoping someone had useful information but none did.

We found a small town and stayed at an Inn there. Again, there were more NPCs that knew nothing of what we were investigating. By this point the players were getting frustrated. We were not sure what to do so we just wanted to move on to something in the adventure. The characters spent the night in the town and the next morning found an NPC who said he had seen the boy and he went north. That is all we got, but we felt invigorated as we had a clue and a direction!

The group traveled north into some dark woods. There was the sound of a wolf howling. And then we reached the climax of the adventure where we shot a wolf. That was the end of the adventure. A Wolf howled, came out of the woods on the trail, and one of the PCs said I aim my musket at it and shoot. He rolled some dice and the GM said the wolf was dead and that was the adventure. No hint on what happened to the boy. There were no supernatural elements like the game described and it just failed on many levels. It was a bad game, a boring game, but what really made it the worst game ever for me was the GM and her habits.

As I said earlier the game was on the first day of the convention. One cliché about gamers at conventions is the smelly gamer. There are gamers that don’t make any attempt to stay clean and fresh at conventions. But it is a rare person that shows up to the convention smelling horrible. Her eating habits were disgusting. As she ate she made a mess on the table we were gaming at. Crumbs were everywhere. She then licked her hand, placed it on the table to gather up the crumbs, and then ate the crumbs. I had never seen anything like it. I have no idea why I did not just get up and abandoned the game. I saw some of the players at Gen Con a couple of months later and we talked about this. They said the same thing; they did not know why they did not leave. I have never left a con game early so I might just be too polite.

I e-mailed the company and told them they do not want this woman representing them or their games. I politely listed many ways she failed to showcase their game. I got an answer from them but don’t know if they did anything or allowed her to continue to run games for them. I did the following year play in another one of her games. I was signing up for a Dresden Files game and did not know she was running it. I was playing it with a friend so once again I stayed for the whole event. That game was better. It was light on action and plot but at least the GM didn’t eat in front of us. I also did not sit anywhere near her so I don’t know if her stench was active then.

I play a lot of convention games and it is odd how the bad ones stand out in my mind. I’ve had so few bad experiences. The other bad one involved Rotted Capes, but I can save that story for another day. As for the good ones I could talk about many awesome Dread games, Fiasco, Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, Nights Black Agents, Serenity, Spycraft, Mutants and Masterminds, Paranoia, Dresden Files, Dungeons and Dragons, etc. I know that the list is incomplete and I am leaving out many other awesome games I’ve played at conventions.

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