Bral Noir: A Sonata For A Violin And A Murder

I fell of the Blogosphere for some time, but I'm still here! Bloggin' about a game we played a couple of months ago..

Once again, not everyone from the gaming group could make it, so we played a one night story instead.

Inspired by reading a comic book of the early days of The Beatles by Mauri Kunnas, Terry Pratchett's Soul Music, as well as the (then) recent passing of the great artists David Bowie and the Artist formerly known as Prince, this time it was about rock'n roll. With a healthy dose of political intrigue and murder! Set in a world of wizards and warriors in space!

I offered my 5 players a choice of 6 pre-rolled characters. 4 human bards (a music group representing a radical new style, making their breakthrough), a dwarf fighter-thief (the manager), and a human fighter (the roadie).

The story involved the band waking up in an inn on the morning after a gig only to discover one of them (the character nobody picked) murdered and the local police force hot on their trail with unpleasant questions.

Some of them tried to fight the law (the law won). The rest followed the clues on the murder scene, that suggested that their murdered friend had come chanced across some evidence dangerous to the current regime. Eventually, after a rooftop escape, they found sanctuary with the family of the city's former ruler, presumed murdered by the current prince.

It was a fun game! The best part, at least for me, was just sitting back and listening to the players having fun and acting out clichéd rock star mannerisms. They even came up with full lyrics for a song about their predicament!

The full story can be read here. Sadly, it's incomprehensible gibberish to most people. Not only is it in Finnish, but it's in thick and slightly archaic and very anachronistic Helsinki slang.. What can I say? I loved the language of The Catcher in the Rye. Note: The horizontal line on page four marks the transition from intro to actual gameplay.

Anyhow, some paint jobs related. Below are pictured two examples of the guard of the Rock of Bral. Brave men and women who put their lives on the line on a daily basis to keep the citizens safe from pirates, gangsters, adventurers and popular musics.

The minis are from Wargames Foundry. The fancier sergeant is from their Elizabethan Seadogs and Swashbuclers collection, and the constable from their conquistadors collection named El Dorado Adventurers.

And a close-up of the sergeant's shield. Featured are the arms of the Prince's family, the Crown and Crossed Sabers on the right (top) and the ever-vigilant Owl of the Middle City Watch on the left (bottom).

I promise the next post will be sooner in coming than this one!

Bral Noir: The Squid Sematary

Finding a time for a game for several people is tricky. The more people's calendars you try to fit together, the harder it gets, so it's easily a month between games, at least.

And then some gets sick or unexpectedly has to work a night shift. It happens, it's only to be expected.

If you have a character driven story going on, as I try to have, you don't want anyone to miss out. So what do you do, cancel the game and set a new date, so now it's two months between sessions?

What I tried for a solutions, is to prepare a couple of short, parallel stories. The setting is the same, but with different characters. That way, we could play the same game and perhaps I could show the players different sides of the world and the events that characters of the main story wouldn't even be aware of.

The asteroid city of the Rock of Bral would be great for such short stories. The Rock is a veritable crossroads of the spheres, so anything could end up there. With different criminal organizations getting a lot of room in the sourcebook, I felt like going for some pulp detective story -style scenarios. Nothing too serious, of course. This is, after all, wizards and elves in space. On wooden sail ships.

Bral Noir, or Hard Boiled Tales from the Rock's Underworld.

This is also AD&D, so for the first story, which I originally prepared on a short notice, I just generated a small random dungeon using this very handy random dungeon generator. Then I rolled up a couple of characters pretty much randomly, so we wouldn't spend the whole night rolling up stats and choosing skills and spells, and wrote up a short intro as to why some fighters, mages, clerics and thieves would be stuck in an underground complex full of hostile monsters and traps.

The scenario was, that the characters are members of the city watch (plus their street urchin sidekick), investigating the disappearance of a young woman's fiancé. They have found out that a certain illithid is likely to be involved and are lured to investigate the said octopus-headed creature's town house while the thing is out on business.

But their treacherous informant locks them in the basement and as the game begins, they have one hour of in-world time to get out before the illithid returns and is certain to wipe the floor with a group of 1st level characters.

This being a pulp novel, I did a book cover for it to set the mood:

The Squid Sematary (lit. Sleep, Sleep, My Squid)

So basically, it was a classic dungeon with pit traps and (psycho-surgically mind-controlled) random monsters. Half the group got killed by kobolds with paralytic powers and an owl bear before the rest escaped through the sewers, but they managed to save the kidnapped young man.

Read the full story here, if you can (it's in Finnish again). Note: The horizontal line marks the end of the intro and the beginning of game play.

And here's a picture of the master of the house, whom the PCs fortunately never had to face:

And the title? Taken from the Finnish translation for Stephen King's Pet Sematary: Uinu, uinu lemmikkini (lit. Sleep, Sleep My Pet). Because of that, here's a link to a cover of Pet Sematary by The Ramones, as performed by the finnish band Pojat:

Chorus: "To a bewitched boneyard, I took the best of cats. Tonight he will come back,"

The 7th Sphere: Book One: The Secret Of The Laughing Cobra: Chapter Two: The Baroness

Full Finnish text of this AD&D 2e Spelljammer session here.

After making a deal with an art collecting wizard to procure the portrait of the pirate captain Gabarra, our heroes set out to the painting's new owner's mansion on a tiny asteroid near the asteroid city of the Rock of Bral.

There they found the baroness Marfont-Drabek living in an odd tower on a small rock with an orchard, accompanied by a family of gnomes.

Most of the session was spent by the players coming up with plans to steal, rob or cheat the painting for themselves using forgeries or illusionary buyers until finally deciding on walking in and starting to haggle. The negotiations were rocky until, following Chandler's Law, a band of cutthroats-for-hire, who had been shadowing the heroes earlier, boarded the tower.

The game concluded in a short swordfight, in which the players' ship's mate, a gliding ape or a hadozee, almost singlehandedly annihilated the attackers and caught a glimpse of their mysterious, black clad  leader, as the rest of the brigands made their getaway.

The baroness was still not willing to sell the portrait, but the PC's valiant defense of her tower made her ask for their assistance in researching the portrait's background and any secrets it might hold.

The minis of this post: Baroness Jeannette Marfont-Drabek (from Foundry), holding a magic wand, accompanied by her faithful servant, the gnome fighter Jorziver Nesmor (from Reaper):

The 7th Sphere: Book One: The Secret Of The Laughing Cobra: Chapter One: The Collector

An account of our second Spelljammer session, played quite a while ago, as a pdf here. In Finnish, again, sorry.

After surviving the pirate attack last time, our merry crew arrived back in their home port on the asteroid city of the Rock of Bral. The space town is detailed in the TSR source book by the same name.

In short, it's a busy space port on an asteroid. It used to be a pirate haven, but now the town is a hub of interstellar commerce and diplomacy, ruled by a monarchic prince who maintains a balance of power between nobles, merchant companies, foreign powers and organized crime.

My main inspiration for how the Rock of Bral should feel came from Ankh-Morpork of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. But also Point Central of Mézières' and Christin's Valerian comics and probably dozens of other, subconscious sources.

Now back in the dock, running low on cash, the spacefarers' learn that ship repairs are extremely expensive. They do a bit of information gathering and haggling, find lodgings at the ship's previous owner's, the father of one of the character's, new inn and receive a business proposition. The proposition comes from a mage, a mini-dragon breeder and an art collector fond of titles, who had invested in the character's ship in return for a collection of objets d'art, now sadly lost in the pirate attack. The mage offers to waive their debt and pay for the ship's repairs, in exchange for a portrait of a pirate captain by a famous artist, recently acquired by a competing art collector.

I really hadn't anticipated how much gaming time it would take for these things to happen. The plot hardly moved at all. But I hope that I managed to create a mood that people enjoyed, because RPGs are definitely about the journey, not about getting there.

The mini of the post, the art collector Quinten Galashiel, Magus Magnus Tertius Ex Universitas Selüniensis, a captain of the Fireball Alliance, Grand Master of the Order of the Cup of Bral:

My DM Project: The 7th Sphere: Book One, The Secret Of The Laughing Cobra: The Prologue: The Wasp

In case someone recalls, I once mentioned working on DMing a AD&D 2nd ed. Spelljammer campaign. Well, it took a while, with real life, as usual, interfering with important stuff like pretending to be on a wooden sailship in space.

But now we have been able to play a couple of sessions, and I think it is now safe to post some of the stuff I have done spelljammer-wise, without giving away spoilers to my players.

The first session was going to be plain and simple about the players, sailing their space ship, getting attacked by space pirates and having to fight them off.

What happened is described in detail in this pdf. It's in finnish because it's here first and foremost for the benefit of my players. But go ahead and run it through a translator or embrace this wonderful opportunity to start studying the veritable lingua franca that is the finnish language..

But in short:

We had rolled up the characters earlier, and my players came up with background for their characters on the premise that they would be commanding a small merchant vessel.

The stuff they came up with was pure gold, and with just little bit of elaboration on my part, it was established that one of the characters had inhereted the ship that her grandfather had used for piracy, and then her father had to turned to peaceful commerce when law and order had made piracy a less popular option in their corner of space.

The other characters had either inherited shares from the aforementioned grandfather's crew members or had bought a share after the first characters family had run into financial trouble when the father lost a valuable cargo, his crew and his health to starvation when the ship was trapped in a sargasso, an area of space void of magic, where faster-than-light travel (at the speed of magic, naturally) was impossible.

Now returning from their first mercantile voyage of acquiring goods to sell on, they were returning to their home city on one of the asteroids in the asteroid field trailing the moon of their solar system's main planet. As the game opened, their ship was fired upon by a pirate ship and struck by a D.E.M.* -class magical shot, setting their cargo hold on fire.
*Deus Ex Machina

After an intense dogfight the players drove off the pirates. Being PCs, they used tactics I could never have anticipated. In this case, dropping their burning cargo on the pirates through a dimension door and augmenting the effect with an illusion spell of  even more flames, shattering the spacehighwaymen's morale.

A bit of a cheap shot, destroying their cargo arbitrarily, but it established the set-up I was going for: A group of low-level characters, slightly more likely to barter with people instead of just robbing everyone, in possession of a exceedingly valuable, magical transport but still in urgent need of cash.

But enough about the story and on with the minis, this being primarily a miniature blog. The PCs were going to meet a groundling cog, outfitted for magical space travel and out of the choice of suitably sized ships I had presented, my players had opted for the wasp (which they named Blackie Lawless):

From The Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures In Space Boxed Set, TSR 1989

From The War Captain's Companion, TSR 1992

The Spelljammer boxed set came with cardboard cut-out ships to use for ship-to-ship combat, but I, being me, just had make some minis out of greenstuff, wire and paper.

The colours are blank, still waiting for a design.

A battle among the asteroids (just bits of gravel slightly shaded).

The biggest regular ships in the game have a keel lenght of 300', and the hex map from the boxed set has hexes of 25mm, edge to edge. To fit even the bigger ships on the map, I originally aimed for a scale of 10':1 mm. The wasp has a keel lenght of 80' so it would have been 8 mm long. Needless to say, that is way too tiny for my sculpting skills, and it is now 16 mm long. I reckon my boats aren't going to be to scale. Especially when the smallest ship in the canon, the elven flitter, has a keel length of 20', translating to a 2 mm speck. Here is a comparison shot with a 28 mm scale human:

Bartolomeu had managed to stay sober for two whole days. But when the little ships came, he decided it was time to jump off the wagon again.

It was a fun night of gaming, giving me a feel for the personalities of the PCs and a chance to try out the changes I've made to the ship rules, on which I shall elaborate in future posts.

A Drow

Continuing with our AD&D Forgotten Realms campaign somewhere in frozen wilderness of Vaasa (or is it Vaasa?) I also managed to finish a mini for my goddaughter of her character. Durion, a head-strong, independent drow ranger, whose past and the reasons for her exile from the Underdark are shrouded in mystery, but who has proved herself quite handy at chopping up zombies and goblins.

A Half-elf

We're starting a mini-campaign of 2nd edition AD&D in the Forgotten Realms. Classic!

I rushed to make a mini for my (counts as) half-elf bard (at a more leisurely pace the campaign would be over before I got him done).

After creating the characters he played a quick 15 minute introduction scene, during which I described my character more or less along these lines:

• A young, slender man of medium height with long, braided hair and golden eyes.
• Dressed in fine clothes, but they have a few tears and some dirt on them.
• A dark green cape, a wide brimmed hat with feathers.
• Wearing leather armour, carrying a fine sword with a gilded basket hilt and a musket.

I had this Reaper swordsman lying around I used.

Added some modelling putty for the cloak, the hat and the swords basket to replace the cut off handle. For the braid I simply braided some string and glued it on and the firearm and the hat's feathers came from the Warlord Games box of ECW pike and shot which has proved to be a very useful purchase for spare parts.

Getting the cloak to cure billowing in the wind was a bit of a challenge because without support, the putty bends down and I thought I didn't have anything at hand that I could shape that wouldn't stick to the putty. But then I thought to use a rolled up ball of cling film, which worked a treat.

Hastily painted everything in dark tones:

Then the usual midtone-highlight routine:

To speed thing up, instead of painting the base I just glued some model railroad sand and flock on it for a quick finish.

A must admit, I have close to zero knowledge of the geography, history or politics of the Realms, having mostly played other settings. It seems the adventures will be mostly set in and around Waterdeep which, as I understand, is a major metropolis in a world filled with advanced dungeons and advanced dragons. With this starting point I wrote the first draft of my character's backstory, still subject to the DM's approval, of course.

Our protagonist's father was lord Gwinau, a minor noble of an old family ruling an out of the way piece of land where his subjects mostly made their living from raising sheep, logging and some dealing in mined ores and metals. 

As a young man, the future lord Gwinau was a keen hunter and on one of his hunting trips deep in the woods he came across a spirit of the forests, a female creature of unearthly beauty. Obsessed, the man searched the woods for weeks, occasionally glimpsing the object of his desire, finally getting close enough to address her. 

With time the meetings under the trees turned in to a romance and finally the fairy asked young Gwinau to join her in the forest's court. His family duties and the fear of the unknown made the human hesitant to accept, which angered the capricious spirit, for it was no small offer for a mere mortal.

After this, young Gwinau could not find his love no matter how hard he tried, until one last time, one year later, just before daybreak, the forest spirit appeared at the family castle, leaving an infant boy in a basket she named Cumagor and a warning that the family Gwinau were no longer welcome on the lands.

From there on, leaf blight and foot and mouth disease ran rampant and wild beasts preyed upon the ore merchants passing through, packs of wolfs attacking the beasts of burden and troupes of rust monsters devouring their loads. Finally the Gwinau family were forced to pack up and leave their ancestral lands.

All this was too much for Cumagor's grandfather's health and it was Cumagor's father, now lord Gwinau, who settled the family and their retinue in the city of Waterdeep. His father soon married and other children followed, but Cumagor was raised as the lord's son learning court manners as well as horsemanship and swordplay.

Without much political influence, the family eventually made a good living through trade, having connections with previous immigrants from their homeland, now mostly working on the docks and in the warehouses. The Gwinau traded spices, furs and clothes, weapons, books and works of art, some of which were even genuine.

As Cumagor grew, he showed a gift for many talents, singing, feats of dexterity and charming people came to him as easily as breathing. Even as a young child Cumagor proved useful for the family business where much was achieved by keeping up appearances and entertaining other nobles and merchants. 

The family priest  adept at transcription and illustration of tomes had followed the Gwinaus and he also taught Cumagor. These skills were often in demand whenever the necessary documents and permits were delayed, inconveniently mislaid or otherwise unavailable just at the moment. There is a certain high ranking official who earned his spurs as a privateer, whose letter of marque was penned and signed by Cumagor at the age of twelve instead of the scribes and Lords of Waterdeep.

Cumagor's slightly inhuman features always led to odd glances and at times comments about his heritage and even a few fisticuffs. But that would change at least when Cumagor would be lord Gwinau. 

Then one day, not long ago, lord Gwinau took his son aside made absolutely certain that which Cumagor had deep down feared, the title and command of the family fortunes would not go to the first-born, but to his half-brother, the lord's first legitimate and fully human son.

Soon after, the said brother made a joke about Cumagor, which earlier would have had them both laughing now resulted in Cumagor punching his brother, grabbing a considerable sum of money and some choice items and disappearing to the streets of Waterdeep.

Being used to a high standard of living, Cumagor had soon spent the riches on food, wine, fine clothes and gambling. He doesn't know how his father would receive him, should he return home. But as of yet Cumagor's pride will not allow that. To make ends meet Cumagor has been involved in all sorts of semi-legal business and  has now joined a group of other misfits in the city, a band of demi-humans running errands for a mysterious patron.

A Blast From The Past

After years and years, I finally got around to visiting some old gamer friends. The experience was weird in a good way, not unlike coming home.

I also got to play a great game of mythical Japan, Legend Of The Five Rings, ran by my friend who is one of the developers of Audatia, a historically accurate card game of sword fighting with historical people, playing which helps you learn the techniques and terminology of 15th century Italian sword fighting. How cool is that? Dear reader, I trust you know as well as I do, that there are no words for how cool that is.

I was also made aware, that this other fellow I also haven't seen in years has his own miniature blog featuring, among other things, pirates and zombies. Convergent evolution?

(Pic from Wikipedia)

Maybe it's just that great minds think alike. Anyhow, dawnofthelead.com is definitely worth checking out, if just for the mind blowing pirate ship he is building.

But best part was that my wonderful goddaughter, whom I've seen shamefully little, was there with her friend, taking part in the aforementioned Lot5R game. It was their first ever tabletop RPG, and they took to the concept like ducks to water and great, cinematic fun was had by all.

But, anyhow this is my miniature blog, so my conscience demands I include a mini pic also. Being a bit short of anything recently painted, I'll leave you with this picture of some Rogue Trader squats I painted ca. 1996. Looking at the colour scheme now, I can only say: What the van Helsing was I thinking with that colour combination?