2007 Review

Well, this year has been a good year for gaming. Neill ran a game for the first time. I eventually managed to settle on a game that I am going to run. Nige, Willie, and John have all continued with their campaigns.

Neill ran Delta Green - the modern supplement for Call of Cthulhu. We all really enjoyed that game although I still to this day do not know exactly what we were facing. There were a lot of dead bodies though.

Willie continued running his DnD game which borrows heavily from the world of Kelewan for the setting. Metal is scarce, weapons and armour are made of a very hard and resiliant wood. Magic Users are all tightly controlled and members of a guild. I didn't know what I was going to play in this game. I usually play a thief/rogue type character. This time I decided to try something new and I tried a barabarian. I din't know how I was going to play the character but it sort of decided itself during the first couple of sessions. He quickly evolved into a 'Thrudd' type character who hacks first and asks questions later. The major driving forces in his life are fighting, beer, more fighting, more beer, and women in that order. He has a greatsword and he charges blingly into every combat hacking away making the best use of his rageing and cleaving abilities. At the moment his mimimum damage from his greatsword is somewhere in the region of 30 points per hit for the first strike and he then has another two with progressively lower mimimums per hit each turn.

Nige continued his Rolemaster campaign in which I am Nightblade. For anyone unfamiliar with Rolemaster this is a magically enhanced assassin. Unfortunately due to our parties composition he has ended up being the tank in the group which is not what he wants to be. The most memorable moment in the game this year is when we where guarding 3 artifacts on a cart in a procession through the city. We where attacked by magically aided thieves and the artifacts were taken. We chased them but couldn't find the artifacts when we caught them. It eventually turned out that the attack was to destract us while the driver ofthe cart and some of his other cooconspirators hid the artifacts inside the cabbages that were also on the cart - it was a harvest festival type procession with the cart full of produce with the artifacts in the center of the cart.

In Johns game we managed to defeat an evil villains plans and make our escape to South America. On the way we opened the book that we had taken and we now all change into big fluffy cats! This is important to the plot of the next aadventure that we are just starting, honest. The most important thing to happen though was that my Priest has had a crisis of faith and realsied that all he believes in is false - how can there be a god after all he has seen? He went on a bender of wine and women for about a week and he has now pulled himself back together. He has lost his faith, but he isn't telling mother church that as she has a lot of resources to call upon should we need them.

I never ran anything this year, but I have decided to run WFRP 2nd Edition in the new year. Let the battle against Chaos commence!

Browser-based MMORPGs

Last week a friend of mine gave me the latest copy of PC Gamer to read. I came across an article on Omerta, a browser-based gangster MMORPG set in the 1930s. I gave it a go and it was quite fun. Bit of a bad move on my part though!

After voting for the game I found masses of these things. I started playing Bulfleet - a space empire game that is reminiscent of the classic 'Supremacy' game that those of you who had a Commodore 64 or Amiga might fondly remember. Boy, the amount of hours I wasted on that game, and I never did manage to win the 32 planet game. Oh well.

I didn't stop there. I am now also playing Imperia Online, which is similar in scope to Bulfleet, but is set in Medieval times. I like the resource gathering and empire building techniques in both of these games.

The latest one that I am completely hooked on is Gladiatus. This one is different from the rest in that it is more like an RPG in which you play a Gladiator and you train, fight, and adventure. Its not a resource/builder game.

If you want something to waste a few enjoyable days on then I would take a look at one of these. The best thing is that they are free.

Back to Rolemaster

Well, we have been playing Rolemaster for at least 6 weeks now. Boy have we been having fun. At the start of this session, Johns character got a magical bow that was reminiscent of the one that you saw the Ranger with in the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. That was a bit of a mistake on Nige's part. It totally unbalanced the game and we just walked through the following adventure. The next week it was nerfed!

The first mission that we undertook was to investigate what looked to be an abandoned keep in the desert. It wasn't quite abandoned. It was fully of undead. That caused lots of fun for us. It was during this adventure that my Nightblade decided that he was good at detecting traps, and that if he couldn't detect one, instead of telling his fellow party members that he coudln't find one, he categorically stated that there wasn't one there. This went fine for the first few times, and then bam! We set off a trap. Oops.

One of the most memorable encounters in the keep was when we opened a door and there was a room full of weapons in racks - obviously an armoury. Willies character detected a blanket magic field over the room. We threw an object in the room and one of the weapons animated and flew towards the door through which we had threw the object. It was easily dodged. Willie then crouched down and waved a staff or similar object into the room above his head. Another weapon flew through the open doorway aiming for the point where the tip of the staff entered the room. This task was repeated numerous times until the entire armoury was emptied. Nige's masterpiece encounter was ruined - absolutely no challenge to us whatsoever. Well, let me just say that this triumph on our part was to cost us dearly in later weeks when Nige wreaked his vengeance on our characters. Oh well, that will teach us to be smart!

In a later mission, we were travelling through a forest and my Nightblade was scouting ahead. I came across some fire elementals setting fire to the trees. It was at this point that my Pyromania kicked in and I just stood there watching these absolutely enchanting creatures torch everything in site. The rest of the party caught up and defeated the creatures and then put the fires out, to Corvuses disgust and sadness.