The city of Sambral; adventurers on an elevator. Lots of bravos threatening from below.
Author: Bryant
I’m running a small local group through the Embers of Dawn mini-campaign; today we did Building the Pyre. Susan, Peter, Mark, Jon, and Noah played. It’s a remarkably fun group of people – there are a lot of fun possible groups in the Baltimore LFR circle and this is definitely one of them.
I knew it’d be a good time given the players; I was not really anticipating a great module. Building the Pyre doesn’t read as well as the other Embers of Dawn modules. The combats are OK, if a little disjointed, but the skill challenges are fairly blah and over-long. I’m firmly of the opinion that interrogation skill challenges should not be more than 4/3 complexity. 8 successes? That’s a long, painful interrogation.
The first skill challenge, however, was better than I thought it would be. I’m not just saying that because the PCs failed it. So that sort of made up for the other two; and the penultimate fight was awesome good times. Noah crit with his daily and I dragged Mark’s avenger into lava twice. Both times he probably would have died if they hadn’t gotten him out before his turn. That’s what I call entertainment for all.
Also this is the module where the plotline starts to weave back on itself, which IMHO is the real strength of the mini-campaign. So that was awesome too. We’re doing Coaxing the Flame in two weeks and I am tremendously stoked.
This was my second run-through of Arts, both times as a GM. Last time I ran it on high; this time was on low, as expected. I was kind of looking forward to finding out how deadly the final fight was on low, but this wasn’t the right group for that, which is perhaps for the best.
I ran down at the Games and Stuff game day for long complex reasons – can’t make it down there usually, but for special occasions I can. It’s nice to meet new folks. The table was Susan, Tom, Trevor, Nina, Frank, and Zach – two newcomers, four fairly experienced players. I’d only run for Susan and Tom before. We had a nicely balanced group with two leaders, a controller, two strikers, and a defender.
I still like Arts a ton. It caters to my tendency to stretch the roleplay. I think we ran about an hour and a half before the first combat, which given that Games and Stuff has limited time available was a touch long. But man, hamming up Torleaf and the teachers is totally worth it. I played him differently than I did the first time – a bit more fey, a bit more snotty – and it was equally fun.
The transition out of the first skill challenge was, once again, tricky. If I ever run this again I need to make sure I really get why the NPCs are going where they’re going, because it’s really easy for one of the PCs to short-circuit the skill challenge. This is allowed for in the text but I keep tripping over the order of certain events.
I DME’d the first fight down a notch to allow for two completely new players. If I’d had more time I might have stretched it out more but I knew I was short, so easier to avoid bloodying the entire party. I then ran the second skill challenge – which is consistently awesome; the effect on players when they realize what just happened to them is priceless. Skipped the second encounter (really sorry!) and hit the third encounter hard. It turns out a non-optimized group will still beat the low level encounter handily if they win on initiative.
So that was still fun for everyone. Lots of rampaging around the room. I kept dazing Frank (newcomer) which I felt guilty about, but then again it’s not my fault if he misses three saving throws in a row!
Someday I will run Arts for a kitted out group of level 4s and I will rock out the final encounter challenge with all my might. But no matter how I run it, it’s great on so many levels: lots of roleplay, excellent combat.
We started a new year of glorious movie-going with Sherlock Holmes. It was better than I expected, but it did not rise to brilliance.
The raw material is pretty raw. Checking — yeah, fairly inexperienced screenwriters who haven’t written anything great; I don’t imagine the script gave anyone a lot to work with. I give the writers credit for knowing their Alan Moore, though. (Blackwood is Gull. Ritualistic killing of women in order to bring about a future in his own image? Been there, read that.) Despite stealing from the best, though, the story was simple and uninspired.
Guy Ritchie is Guy Ritchie. Things explode. On the whole it was a touch more subtle than anything else he’s ever done, which may or may not have been due to the acting. I found his camera work on the frenetic side, and I’m usually highly tolerant of quick cuts. It wasn’t a work of great craft, really. The epitome of this would be the Holmesian fighting style.
There’s a fun bit in the first five minutes where Holmes pauses for a split second, maps the fight out in his brain based on his observations of the target, and then executes. It occurs to me tangentially that perhaps the writers know their Grant Morrison JLA as well. Shades of Prometheus? I may be overanalyzing. In any case, Ritchie gives us the sequence twice: once as imagined, once as enacted. It ought to be great, but it isn’t, perhaps because there’s never any payoff. It’s just a thing, and it’s only used in the trivial unimportant fights. You’d expect him to use it and fail to demonstrate how scary an opponent is, or at least to use it, but nope. It vanishes a third of the way through the movie, never to be seen again.
So obviously and in retrospect unsurprisingly, it’s up to Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. to elevate the thing. Which of course they do. Downey’s Holmes hooked me in the sequence where his need to show off undercuts his friendship, because it’s played for laughs — ha ha, look at Holmes get pissed off and incisive — until he’s actually wrong about a key point. Which leads to bitterness. Which transitions directly into a sequence of self-destructive Holmes. Which is perfect.
I loved this vision of the characters. Holmes is a dangerous, angry, haunted man. Watson is compelled by his friend’s brilliance, and is also pretty dangerous. Ex-army, so he should be. Great work from both actors.
The women have much more thankless tasks. Kelly Reilly’s Mary is surprisingly strong, and is one of I think two characters in the film who ever get the best of Holmes. I think this is absolutely necessary in order to maintain the Holmes/Watson/Mary love triangle, but still, it’s a good bit. In fact, I think she has the edge on him twice. Still and all, it’s a very slight role.
Alas, Rachel McAdams is stuck with the “major” female part, in which Irene Adler is relegated to a helpless pawn. For a master criminal, an awful lot of people out-think her, and she needs rather a lot of saving. I was disappointed.
One line review: rompity romp romp romp. I liked it.
My goal is to play in and DM a grand total of 50 LFR games or more during 2010. One a week, no big deal, right? I run a game day every two weeks, which covers half of that; I have a few more Embers of Dawn sessions to go; I go to conventions, which means a lot of games in a short timespan; and I do home games.
The goal behind the goal is to get one of my characters to paragon tier and foster paragon tier play in the Baltimore area. Right now, play at the two major Baltimore locations is 95% 1-4 and 4-7. Pump up the volume!
I’m using this bloglet for tracking. I will try to record each game, with light notes on how the game went, what I thought of the module, and so on. It’s an experiment in short-term focused blogging.
I’m certainly going to want to run it somewhere. I mean, hey, new toy.
They’re talking a lot about the cloud; they’re not talking very much about the implications of what’s essentially a client OS. Will the cloud software be open source? If not, you’re awfully limited: it checks the signature of your OS every time you boot it. Can’t do much hacking that way.
Also, custom firmware. Everyone who’s been bitching about the iPhone as a closed system should be paying close attention to this. In some ways this is tighter than the iPhone; an iPhone doesn’t check the cloud to see if it’s been hacked every time it boots up.
OK, you can download Chrome OS for your machine regardless, but there will also be finetuned Chrome OS devices. I’ll be curious about such details as performance differences.
Probably edits to come after the Q&A. Surely someone will ask about open sourcing the cloud.
I just read the debut novel from Harry Connolly, Child of Fire. It’s urban fantasy/horror with a crime fiction feel: if you’ve ever read a book where a couple of investigators roll into a small town and clean up some corruption for their own reasons, you know the approach. There’s an excerpt available.
I’ll give it a solid B. The plot gets a bit complex in the middle; I think I counted at least four distinct factions in the town, which is sort of a lot. The writing’s good, the protagonists are reasonably interesting, and the world’s good. You can tell it’s designed as a series, with lots of back references to origin stories. There are rules about how magic works.
I like the idea of a secret society — the Twenty Palaces — which ruthlessly eradicates magic. I like the source of magic. Connolly writes good creepy modern monsters. I read someone calling him Lovecraftian, but that’s wrong: he’s mining the same post-modern horror vein as Esoterrorists. The scene where he confronts the source of the town’s problems is pretty darned good.
I wouldn’t need the League Pass if I was still living in Boston. But down here? It’s awesome; worth it for the Celtics games alone but when I can check out other interesting games at moment’s notice… that’s superb.
I wish it was in HD. The lack of high def is mitigated by the presence of home announcers sometimes. Listening to Tommy and Mike makes me feel all at home.
The Celtics bench is better than it was two years ago. Rasheed should practice his inside game for when he needs it, but otherwise I’m totally content. When Davis gets back, that’ll be another improvement.
The Big Three are not as good as they were two years ago. Garnett didn’t miss those alley-oops even last year. Possibly he’ll play back into better shape, but Allen’s still a bit down from his peak. It’s not a huge dropoff, but it’s there. Pierce has stayed pretty even.
The Additional Two are much improved. Perkins is a beast at his new weight. Rondo’s got it. Still no jumper, but he’s smarter when he’s unguarded now.