Get yerselves to OwlCon XXX!

We’ll be there at Rice University in Houston in person, gaming, talking dungeon-making, and even running a few games this year: High Water Marks andKeepsakes (see below).

We had a great time last year, playing a bunch of 4e DnD, Advanced Civ, Rail Baron, and immersive BattleTech in the pods, and vowed to return.  And so we will.  Look for us at these locations.  We’ll also likely tweet our locations @clawclawbite (also at http://twitter.com/clawclawbite).

Register here and attend as well, and you too will have fun the weekend of Jan 28-30, 2011.

High Water Marks 4 – 6 players
Sun1000 (6) Intermediate
Your 5th-level party starts off in a downtrodden village where it has rained a full fortnight. Among the muck, the fistfights and verbal ill-will broken out between the denizens hints at problems that run deeper than the water. With all the enemies afoot, you will soon learn that a more sinister plot faces the village from higher ground.GM – Stephen Hilderbrand
Keepsakes 4 – 6 players
Sun1500 (5) Intermediate
You and your 5th-level party are traveling on a road along the southern route in a expansive moor, a journey not without considerable challenges. While paying a toll under the shadow of a keep among rocky crags, it is recommended that you seek accommodations within, as a chilly rain has begun to fall, and the eerie glow of the overcast night is about to follow suit.GM – Stephen Hilderbrand

 


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Gamma World

Frank organized a Gamma World adventure this weekend, and we had a blast. We got to choose whether we were city dwellers with greater Alpha Tech hell-bent on ensuring order or whether we’d rely on more mutations as members of an outcast tribe on the edge of the world with the goal of reclaiming our mother elder from a band of kidnappers. We chose the latter, falling back on the classic underdog hero’s role.  This seems fitting for an introduction to a new system…

I ended up a radioactive swarm comprised of rodents that once were lab rats.  The shared sentience assumed the name of “Doctor Radkowski”, one of the doctors killed in the blast from the Great Mistake.  Over the course of the session, they devoiced the “d” in “rad” to a “t”, as only a punning rat swarm could do.  They sang arias, tossed grenades, and swarmed over all the guard bots and mutated plant beasts that they could.  Other characters in the party included a radioactive punk rock timecop, an electrified giant spotter with a dual nature and delusions of grandeur, and a shadowy, largely amorphous being that called itself “The Hamburgler”, named for a term it found on a discarded fast food wrapper.

All signs pointed to the kidnappers hailing from the city, including the paths dragged into the sand.  The trail grew warmer, and we had to find a pass into the city.  We posed as arms dealers and learned of a widow who held a position in town.  Soon we were fighting off robotic sentinels and animated plants.  In all, we had a blast.

The system is interesting in that it is very similar to 4e DnD, only the character skills are limited, and the bonuses stack on a per-level basis, rather than every-other-level.  The generic gamma world is very tongue-in-cheek, necessary for such an otherwise gritty setting.  The system leaves a lot to the storyteller to fill in, which leaves lots of room for role playing.  Don’t let the tongue-in-cheekness fool you; it’s plenty deadly out there with 20-something hit points and 3d6 and 4d6 damage in the air.

The box set comes with a printed battlemap geared toward the near future setting.  Frank used it well, creating some nice verbal terrain out of the cryogenic capsules in the center of the room.

Another thing I liked about the system is that the character sheet isn’t even geared for leveling very far; the post-apocalyptic setting is perfect for one-off and short, multi-session story arcs.  This is about the attention span of most of us these days, especially if a gamer has to miss a session every now and again.

Finally, the randomness of the character generation is something to aspire to as a game designer.  How does it work that not making choices at the beginning is more fun than choosing my own starting gear?  Because it’s challenging.  It’s what makes the post-apocalyptic world pop.

Back to another GM thing that Frank did well — the building of Alpha and Omega Tech decks based on which side we chose to play.  This made this kind of decision important to the story, a welcome element in any role playing game.  Even in a one-off, it’s nice to see the effects of your choices as a player.

In this last image, I was the brown wafer of a disc under the red d6 (I was bloodied at the time).  When you play, here are a few final thoughts: don’t forget to use Second Wind once you’re bloodied, always use your Alpha Tech powers (they go away after encounters — trade or gift them if necessary), and don’t get too stuck to the notion of “classes” (ranger, etc.) or “roles” (striker, etc.); if you play it right, everyone has a chance to defend, strike, control, and lead over the course of a single Gamma World session.

Have fun with Gamma World; I highly recommend it from the bottom of my six-valved, mutant heart.


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MilleniumCon 13 & Pathfinder

We rolled up to Round Rock last weekend to play some D&D, and ended up playing Pathfinder all weekend.

For those who don’t know, MilleniumCon is a yearly convention put on by Lone Star Historical Miniatures and is primarily focused on, as their name implies, historical miniature wargames. It’s pretty much the closest convention to us here in Austin, so we usually make it. They generously provide space for the RPGA folks, and this year they also had Pathfinder Organized Play set up in one of the four-table conference rooms.

Originally Dan and I had intended to get in some XP for our 4e RPGA characters. I was looking forward to honing my tactics with my elven barbarian Sithadel, specifically figuring out how to play him without getting him killed. He tends to die once per convention – that’s what I get for making a dex-based barbarian I guess. I like to play unconventional characters.

That all got derailed when I took the Pathfinder core book to work. Dan picked them up when they came out however long ago but I had only read the alpha version they put out online when Pathfinder was first announced. At any rate, I decided to roll up a character just for grins. I came up with Kes, a 1st level wizard specialized in abjuration and prohibited from casting evocation and necromancy. At the end of the process I was really curious to see how this character played, and how Pathfinder played.

So when we got to MilleniumCon we went ahead and jumped in on a Pathfinder game and played. It reminded me a bit of the old RPGA, with the adventure record sheets given out at the end of each session. I liked how some of the organized play elements were structured. For example, at the end of each adventure you get a list of magic items you can buy with the gold you’ve accumulated. By the end of four adventures we had a decently broad list to pick from. Overall it seems nicely structured to keep the characters balanced and play fun.

So, we played two slots of Pathfinder on Friday night, and two more slots on Saturday. At the end of it all I have to say that I enjoyed playing Pathfinder quite a bit. Of course I think the changes to skills in PF are great moves: I’ve hated Hide vs Spot and Move Silently vs Listen since the first time I had to roll them both when 3e first came out. The changes to the classes are great, too. My 1st level wizard was able to contribute to the combat on every round because now 0th level spells aren’t used up when you cast them, so I could throw an acid splash or cast daze every round. The changes to concentration and spell casting times also pleased me – I’ve always thought that spellcasters had it too easy in melee. Now you really have to think twice about where you put your wizard. The changes to how poison work also impressed me.

There were a few downsides, or course. Over and over again I had to hear from the other players how much more they liked Pathfinder then 4th edition D&D. I play 4e, 3.5e, and a little Pathfinder in one game, and I don’t like the “us vs them” these conversations usually take, so I always get turned off when the topic comes up. And of course the Pathfinder fans trotted out the same old saw about how confusing grapple was in 3e. I have always disagreed – 3e grapple wasn’t a blocker for us, and as far as I can tell it’s pretty similar in Pathfinder.

But the real downside for me was all the minmaxing. Just like in the bad old days of ultimate 3.5 cheese some of the players were rolling with some uber powerful summoner class that they couldn’t stop talking about. I was lucky enough to not actually have to play with the roll-players, but it reminded me of how much less 4e games seem to breed uber-powergamers. And I was reminded once again how much I disliked that.

But that was really minor for me and was totally overshadowed by how much fun I had and by how well-organized the mustering and gaming was. Kudos to the Pathfinder Organized Play folks. Next year I’ll definitely be back for more.


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Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Ahoy there!  As ye my know this Sunday be international Talk Like a Pirate Day! 

To celebrate we’re shanghing you to embark on a grand adventure to search for 20 hidden treasure chests, containing all sorts of fantastic and TOTALLLY FREE eBooks!

So get to hunting, ye scurvey dogs!

-C’pn Thompson, ISS Unicorn Rampant


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GenCon 2010

I’m just now getting a chance to write about the great time I had at GenCon this year, but I wanted to make sure y’all saw the pictures I got of all the great games, costumes, and miniatures I got.  So welcome to Unicorn Rampant’s virtual walking tour of GenCon 2010!

Games and Minis

In the “big tables” category, I saw a giant version of Ticket to Ride that looked like a lot of fun.  Also present but not pictured were giant Settlers of Catan and a few other giant versions of some great board games.

Geek Chic had their beautiful gaming tables in evidence as well.  This year they’ve branched out some and have many styles of hand-made, beautifully finished game tables, end tables, coffee tables, all with lots of neat hidden compartments, removable tops, drink holders, die cubbies, and such.
I love Babba Yaga, and these guys had put together a fun 3′ x 3′ piece of terraced terrain for her hut to live on.
Close up of the chicken-legged hut itself.
Speaking of terrain, if you want to make assloads of walls and caverns for cheap, this is for you.  Molds that you pour your own resin into and then paint the resulting walls yourself.  Available in castle flavor, gothic cathedral flavor…
…and of course Egyptian flavor.
I was really impressed by the level of detail, and the multiple levels of these paper playscapes.  Also, super-affordable compared to any of the resin pieces.
Arr, that be a fine-lookin’ vessel, ripe for the plundering!  And a bargain at twice the price!
In terms of high-quality finished work, these guys always stand out head and shoulders above everyone else.  Of course you get what you pay for in this case.  This Caribbean Spanish settlement actually gave me flashbacks to my trip to San Juan in Puerto Rico.
And of course the miniatures.  First of all, you need a bunch of dragons.
No.  More dragons.
One of Reaper’s display cases.  I love those guy’s work.
Close up of a Remorahaz.
Frost giants!  We got your frost giants!
Scorpion-man-things and dinosaurs.
A good specimen of a Type 6 demon.
Demons, djinn and dastardly dark steps.
And of course a plague rat-a-pult?
I love digging around for old gaming books, particularly anything from the late 70’s and early 80’s when I first started gaming.  I found some real gems, like this.  Who doesn’t love a game of hot man-to-man combat?
My assembled loot from the Exhibitor’s hall; the 1980 D&D red box, just like the one I bought in the toy store at 7 years old, a couple of AD&D adventures from the same era, and a couple of vinyl transfers from Berserk.

Costumes

One of the highlights of GenCon for me is always all the great costumes everyone puts together.  Most are hand-made.
Satyr girls always make me horny (pun intended – sorry).
Not sure if these girls were officially supporting the new DC comics game that just came out, but I really liked the costumes either way.
Steampunk, Victorian styles, corsets and bustiers continued to be popular costume themes this year.  I also saw a lot of savage or primitive costumes this year, a newer trend.
Nice brass jetpack!
A couple of Paizo’s iconic characters made an appearance at their booth.
A picture of me enjoying the costumes.  That’s my renfaire garb, minus the cowl.
Some fun and overtly sexy costumes – I particularly like the caution tape miniskirt.  Caution indeed!  In seriousness, I really like the atmosphere of acceptance at GenCon when folks want to let their freak flag fly.  Last year there were kids going around with “gay gamer” shirts, and this year there was a fair amount of cosplay / anime / genderqueer / raver costuming going on.
This lady put together an excellent Goblin King costume, a’la David Bowie in Labyrinth.  I tried to take several pictures of her costume, but I think she cast blur on my camera.
The blur spell took a while to wear off my camera.
Another savage-looking outfit from this pink-haired elven sorceress or shaman.
The world’s tallest leprechaun.

Games

And of course, I played a lot of games at GenCon this year.  In years past I had made a point of trying to promote Unicorn Rampant, either by meeting people in the industry that we have partnerships with, like Paizo and RPGnow, or by running games.  Of course that meant I was either exhausted or missed out on having fun playing myself.  This year I tried to maximize the fun by playing as much as I wanted to, and giving myself breathers between games if I wanted.  As a result, I had the most fun this year that I’ve had a GenCon.

I played some great RPGA games – the Ravens of Winter’s Mourning game was lots of good investigative fun, and the Curse of the Gray Hag was simply awesome.  Here are a few pics from the Curse of the Gray Hag game.

Here we’re trying to get away from the shambling mounds and into the Hag’s tower, since I had convinced her that we were there to help free her.  I played the eladrin priestess of Loth that is in the rear of the party there.
Some of the unfortunate other players in the Curse game.  Notice the ‘cursed’ status markers on half the party?  That meant they took 20 damage or lost their highest level spell every time they attacked the hag or her defenders.
The actual battle against the Hag, a solo monster, and her flesh golem, an elite monster.  With half the party unable to effectively attack, this ended up being too tough of a fight for us, and some of the players got frustrated and called it quits when we hit the end of the time slot.  Since my character had already accomplished her objective of getting some deadly nightshade from the surrounding fey-swamps, she had no problem bailing on the fight at that point.  In one of my prouder moments, I took no damage at all in the entire adventure, and managed to parley past two of the combat encounters.  Note my strategic position hiding on the stairs.
Then, of course, there was the Tower of Gygax.  This event has become the highlight of the con for me.  I even got a chance to run the Tower for a bit late Saturday night.  Now with a Facebook group, even!  Check it out for even more pics and memories from the Tower: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=145288208818624
I feel like this character sheet I found illustrates the excitement that the tower created.
Here’s Steve, another of Unicorn Rampant’s writers, running a room he contributed to the Tower of Gygax.  We had lots of girls playing in the Tower, which is always nice to see.  In fact, it seemed like more women come to GenCon to play every year.
The chamber that Steve ran: a chasm, rope bridges, sinkholes in the floor, rushing torrents, and an enormous air elemental.
The master of the Tower: Save Versus Death and Kobold Quarterly’s Scott A. Muarry running The Tomb of Horrors for the Tower players Saturday night.  I was thrilled to survive a few rooms delving into the Tomb.
One of the Tower’s deadly rooms: the Arcane Monolith.  I won’t ruin the details, but I’m stealing parts of this for my home game.
Towards the wee hours, Scott decided to throw out the books and wing it off the cuff.  Hilarity and death ensued.
Finally, in the wee hours of the night, I stepped in to run a few rooms in the Tower.  This is me explaining how the chest they just opened is full of poisonous vipers that are now biting them.
Here I am describing how the lever that they just pulled has sent half the party to their deaths at the bottom of a 100 foot pit.
Finally, once they removed the treasure from one of the tests, a fusillade of darts strikes those nearby.  The dwarf grabbing the box survived and got away with a magic ring of protection.  Those who dare win!
Of course, this was just a fraction of the gaming going on, but with 20,000 gamers gathered and playing, there’s no way I could see everything.  It was awesome.
One of the many rooms full of gamers.
Until next year, thanks for reading, and happy gaming!
-Adam A. Thompson
Unicorn Rampant

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Red Nails – a Classic Tale of Conan

Among fantasy gamers of my generation, Conan the Barbarian stands as one of the best fantasy movies ever produced, along with Dragonslayer, Legend, Fritz Lang’s Sigfried, and a few others.  But even John Milius and Dino DeLurentis’s masterful screen adaptation of Robert Howard’s tales of Conan pales in comparison to the original stories.

red nails conan and the dragon

Now, Project Gutenburg has made available to the public one of the most gripping adventures Conan faced, Red Nails.  Originally published in 1936’s Wierd Tales magazine.

Enjoy this thrilling tale of adventure here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/32759


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New blog site!

Hey, everyone!

We’ve been busy setting up some new infrastructure and typesetting material for release on rpgnow.com.

As today is Memorial Day in the U.S., we’d like to further celebrate by laying to rest our old site. Be advised that the URL you should be using to access this blog is clawclawbite.com.

We’ve moved to our own self-hosted WordPress installation, leaving the Google-hosted Blogger home we’ve been using for the last 4 years. This will give us more flexibility and control over our IP as we move forward as a collaboration between Unicorn Rampant Publishing and Inverspace Press.

Thanks, Blogger, for helping to get us off the ground. And thanks, dear readers, for your support these past four years.

Onward and upward!


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Tailslap issue #1 Released!

Tailslap is a new 4th edition magazine of articles detailing new characters, creatures, magic items, encounters, spells, powers, rituals, plot hooks, adventure seeds, playable classes, races, campaign settings and area descriptions for use in your games. We also like to mix in cool little details and intriguing features that will enrich your game world.

These features are intended to be ready for you, be you player or gamemaster, to drop into your games as you see fit. In addition, many of these articles will combine to form complete adventures and campaigns that you can play.  We work hard to make this material as easy to use as it is fantastic, and we hope that you enjoy using it in your games.  To this end Tailslap is formatted in landscape for easy online reading.

The inaugural issue of Tailslap contains the following articles:

  • Vault of the Clay Medusa – a trap-filled encounter by Save Versus Death’s Scott A Murray
  • Player’s Corner – new feats and races for players
  • Wizard Paths and Powers – two new paragon paths for arcane casters
  • The Lair of Jurgen the Learned – an encounter where solving puzzles leads to a sage
  • The Lands of Soralia – geography and history of a region for use in your campaigns
  • People of Soralia – NPCs with stats, backgrounds and suggestions for use in your games
  • Leviathans & Other Aquatic Terrors – new aquatic monsters for players to conquer
  • All That Glitters – powerful magical treasure for your hordes
  • Mundane Equipment – new equipment for your players to wield against their foes

So don’t delay: get your copy of Tailslap now!


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Return from hiatus with claws and bite

Thanks everyone who sent in an entry to our April contest. We’ll post the results, including the top 3 entries soon. And, send in an entry for May’s contest, eh?

Thanks also for bearing with us as we finalize plans to migrate our site to a WordPress installation on our own servers. There’s something downright satisfying about that.

We are also about to embark on an 8-post journey of virtuous items for any adventuring avatar. They should be fun additions to your role playing games, and bring back shades of your gaming past.

Stay tuned.


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New blog site about to go live

In case you’ve wondered what we’ve been up to these past few weeks, well…

After almost 4 years working with Blogger, we’ve decided to move on to WordPress, and will be hosting the site off our own shiny server. We expect to make this move in another few days, once the blog software is completely installed, configured, and the data migrated over. We’ll keep you posted as to when the move will be made.

Those of you using the clawclawbite.blogspot.com address, please migrate over to clawclawbite.com, which will stay with us wherever we move in the future. Consider that link the permanent home of the magazine.

Thanks again for your support…


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