A Grab Bag

This posting will be a mix of what's going on and such with the various games I'm involved with or planning.

I have managed to gain access to two ultra-rare books that translate Traveller material into the Hero System, which will keep me from having to stat out, say, two books worth of material on my own.  I and a friend are working on getting them into PDF format for easier access, but that should be done in the next week or two.  This secures the Hero System (5th Revised Edition) as the rules I will be using.  Right now I'm looking through the sector creation rules for Traveller (Mongoose edition) and Stars Without Number to see which I'm going to use to create the local star sectors.  I'll post more on this once I've tried the two systems out.

For my Southern Reaches campaign, I've settled on the 1E AD&D construction rules for use in the campaign as I find them easy to understand and generally straight-forward.  Plus, the construction times work better for me.  2E assumed that all castle construction happened in a year, which is patently wrong.  The 1E system assigns time and manpower for each component and then adds it all up for a total construction time.  That time can be lessened by adding more workers, but it requires long times of construction for large structures, which is what I expect and history bears out.  The players have constructed a lyre of construction, which will speed things up, but it will do so in a way that is easy to integrate into the regular work.

As a note, 3E, and by extension Pathfinder, does not have construction rules in the main book.  We were working on a compromise using the crafting rules, but I was unsatisfied by what seemed to be an abnormally quick construction time for buildings.  I still need to crank some numbers in a spreadsheet to see how they compare to the 1E rules, but I suspect the 3E craft rules are geared towards things that would go in a castle and not things like castles.

Tangentially, at the end of the last Southern Reaches session (last Friday), the players were left with a choice of opponents to tackle: an banshee or an adult red dragon.  Which is more dangerous?  Tough call.  The banshee has a sonic death attack and massive negative energy drain touch attacks.  The adult red dragon is, well, an adult red dragon with multiple attacks, a breath weapon, and spells.  Either way, this will be a significant milestone for the adventurers and will do much to boost their fame and reputations.  Plus, they will be able to make a claim on a copper mine out of the deal.  Look forward to the adventure log explaining all this on Thursday.

Finally, my weekday game has finished exploration of Dyson's Delve, or at least the first seven levels, which is all the DM is using.  From this point on, we are going into newbie DM territory, using material our DM has created as his first campaign.  It will be interesting to see how things go - whether it will be a sandbox, where we get to explore and find things, or a more traditional plot driven campaign.  I'm enjoying the game so far and the climatic battle against Tim Questgiver was tense and rewarding.  I'm looking forward to what new stuff we run into.

That's it for now.  Thursday's post should appear at 7:00 AM Central (a.k.a. "the regular time").

Later!