Month: October 2026

Paranoia readthrough: Orcbusters

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

I would say that this is where it got silly, but it’s Paranoia, so it was already pretty silly. I will say that this one feels a little like someone just threw their hands up and decided to give zero craps, which is maybe not entirely a good thing – yes, a certain meh-just-go-with-it spirit is explicitly part of the game, but maybe giving just one or two craps might help? Anyway, let’s get into it and we’ll see what we can make of it.

So, the backstory for this adventure is that a doohickey called the Transdimensional Collapsatron was discovered as part of a long-dead High Programmer’s possessions and accidentally activated, and it transported three wizards from Dimension X to Alpha Complex. Yes, wizards. You know, guys in robes and pointy hats who can make stuff happen by chanting and waving their hands. They’re part of this sci-fi comedy game now. See what I mean about this being maybe a step too far in the sure-throw-it-in way of thinking?

But okay. Wizard magic (“Shaping the Force,” in their own nomenclature) works on the same rules as mutations, though wizards are actually good at it, and know some entirely new spells/mutations like throwing fireballs, spreading magical darkness, and communicating across language barriers. The GM is cautioned to make it clear to the players that the wizards, while certainly an intimidating outside-context problem, aren’t all-powerful – they act stressed when they have to fast-cast something, their magical force fields shrink a little every time they deflect damage, sometimes their spells just plain go wrong and cause a big mess that they clearly didn’t intend, and so on. Don’t get the players so demoralised that they won’t even have a go at them, basically. You can’t have their efforts go badly and hilariously wrong if they won’t make them in the first place!

Like most adventures so far, this one comes with half a dozen pregen characters, though here they are a bit more flavourful than usual since they are not-too-subtly also meant to fit fantasy stereotypes – we have a grumpy short guy who likes messing around with tech, a gung-ho Femme Fatale member with lots of combat training, a happy-go-lucky runt with sticky fingers and a mutation that makes him super-persuasive, a big dumb meatbag who’s immune to psychic influence… All good stuff, and like I said, a little more interesting than the usual selection of samey, one-dimensional little backstabbing nitwits. Like I keep saying, the game designers chose an incredibly narrow premise, and while that’s great for making the game distinct, it also makes it very challenging to come up with material for it after a certain point. The way these supplements keep dragging in more and more things that don’t strictly belong in a “classic Paranoia adventure” (though keep in mind that things stayed purely “classic” for maybe two or three books before the drift started; by Vapors Don’t Shoot Back, the players were already boarding a pirate ship) is a pretty direct result of that, I’d say.

The adventure starts with the wizards, their moronic lizardman flunky Randy in tow, appearing at a vehicle repair facility (they interrogated some clones demanding to be given “transportation home” and this is the confused directions they got). The players get sent in after them, get saddled with a bunch of shell-shocked civilians who glom onto them and keep getting in the way, and get some sense of what the wizards are capable of. They also follow them into the facility where they have to deal with malfunctioning and psychotic bots. The wizards ultimately teleport away.

The second altercation with the wizards happen at a power station, where the wizards managed to plug in the Transdimensional Collapsatron but couldn’t get it to work properly, resulting in some other fantasy thing being transported in. A few suggestions are given, from a bunch of hungry hobbits to a fire-breathing dragon. The players will have another inclusive altercation with the wizards, though this time they might also be able to communicate a bit with them – the wizards are beginning to despair of getting home under their own power and so are thus more receptive to anyone who might even conceivably be willing and able to help. Either way, they eventually disappear again.

Through it all, the Computer is being unhelpful as usual, but it’s also being rather less… Computer-y. What I mean is, it keeps being sarcastic and abusive in its pronouncements rather than doing its usual dissonant-serenity, “you are mistaken, citizen. No one is screaming. The Computer is your friend” thing. That’s another thing that makes this adventure feel like it was just cobbled together by someone who just didn’t feel inspired at all by the setting as it as.

The third time the wizards show up, it’s at a travel information office (they wanted information on how to travel back home, but… well, that was a bit of a non-starter). There, they’ve managed to capture a powerful psychic mutant who they feel is a little closer to their own kind, so when they flee this time, they’ll leave Randy behind to take her with them instead. Randy can tell the players approximately what is going on, though of course he’ll do it in the slimiest way possible so that they doubt every word. Also, as an additional complication, a bunch of sleeper agents from a rival Alpha Complex also try to capture the wizards and the players end up having to fight them for the privilege of losing them all over again.

Finally, the players corner the wizards in an R&D facility just as they’ve managed to get the Transdimensional Collapsatron to work, and they all get sent back to Dimension X. It’s your basic fantasy setting, in spite of the pulp-sci-fi name, though befitting Paranoia it’s got a black comedy slant to it, with everything run by comically-sociopathic wizards who treat their human “herds” with the same care and compassion that the Computer treats its cloned citizens. There is also Randy’s species, who are the wizards’ evil soldiers and enforcers.

Once back home, the wizards are once more on certain footing, but they’ve exhausted themselves and aren’t up for dealing with the players right now, so they yell for some lizardmen minions to come help them, and strike a quick retreat into their dark evil dungeon (because of course they have a dark evil dungeon) along with the Transdimensional Collapsatron, leaving the players to deal with the mooks and get their bearings. Once they have figured out where they are (Randy is still with them and can advise), they don’t have much choice but to embark on a dungeon crawl to secure their way back home. Fortunately, a bunch of R&D clones and a bot got accidentally brought along, so there’ll be both someone capable of rigging up the TC and a power source to connect it to… assuming the players can keep them from being killed or destroyed, of course.

So it’s a dungeon crawl, and in most respect a fairly linear and basic one – the players pass through one chamber after another, blunder into traps (theoretically they can avoid them, but that’s unlikely to happen, so the best they can hope for is surviving them), fight monsters, and maybe find some loot along the way. There is magical healing items sprinkled throughout, to make up for the fact that there’s not going to be any instant clone replacements. Some of the more memorable encounters are a gelatin cube (not a gelatinous cube, gelatin. Raspberry-flavoured, in fact), a succubus (lucky that Alpha Complex clones get stuffed full of hormone suppressants that render them immune to such temptations), an over-friendly and near-invincible dog whose drool causes all metal objects to rust into uselessness, and two tribes of talking penguins who try to get the players to side with them. One room has a mixed bag of monsters sitting around waiting for it to be time to walk off on their patrols – they’re the wandering monsters of this dungeon, see? Oh, and at one point, there’s an orc, to justify the title, but he’s actually the dungeon chef and can’t put up any kind of fight.

In the end, the wizards turn out to have vacated the premises when the players got too close to their sanctum, having left the Transdimensional Collapsatron and a note telling the players to just take it and bugger off home. So presumably they do. The epilogue suggests that the Computer then sends them off on new and deadlier adventures in other dimensions, teasing a supplement called Vulture Warriors from Dimension X. I’m pretty sure that’s a joke, but there is in fact a second-edition supplement with that name…

Anyway, this was fun and all, but… yeah. It felt a bit too gimicky, despite my stated position that the best adventures so far have been the one who have been slightly gimicky. I guess the part that’s missing for me is the thin line of logic tying the obvious inspiration to the realities of Alpha Complex? Like, in all the other adventures, when something wildly out of genre turned up, there was always some sort of fig-leaf explanation for why it totally made sense, honest, and that just made it funnier. Here, wizards aren’t, e.g., powerful mutants who just happen to wear robes and carry staffs for spurious reasons. They really are wizards. Nor are they exaggerated, parodied or otherwise ridiculous like the aliens in Clones in Space were. There’s no joke there, is what I guess I’m saying, beyond them simply being in the game in the first place – which is strange and disjointed, but not really funny, per se.

Oh well. Next up is the final book published for the first edition, HIL Sector Blues. We’ll see if that’s a return to form.

World of Warcraft: the RPG: Kaboom, Baby!

Previously in this World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign:

When we last left our heroes, they had fought a bunch of kobolds in a tin mine and witnessed the appearance of what seemed like a ghost. This time, they set about exploring the rest of the mine with admirably methodical zeal. It’s just a shame that the dice were once again not on their side.

It started out okay. I had puzzled over what to have them discover on the kobolds that would keep their GP-to-XP ratio within recommended levels, and I’d decided on a miner’s helmet with a glowing yellow crystal in it that also protected the wearer from fear effects – a sort of exaggeration of the way that Warcraft kobolds feel braver as long as the candles in their helmets are burning. The Tinker put it to good use, being the only one with a kobold-sized head to wear it on. He’s a bit worried that it’s cursed, though, so maybe I should make some ominous references to how it feels like it’s dampening his emotions or something, hee hee hee…

Anyway, after that they ran into a trap baited with some fairly crappy treasure. And to their credit, they actually looked it over carefully and noticed that it was a trap. But then the Tinker tried to dismantle it and rolled another one of those really inconvenient failures, so parts of the ceiling fell on them. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring.

After some inventory management to find room on the steampunk autodrudge for the treasure, they pressed on, only to be ambushed by a grenade-flinging goblin. The Mage’s rat familiar needed urgent healing to avoid expiring again. That’s the third time this campaign. That rat is just plain death-prone. Mind you, the fact that I keep throwing in area-of-effect attacks probably has something to do with it – no one is going to bother to specifically attack a rat, but whenever the Mage is in a blast radius, the rat is in the blast radius with her.

The goblin made a run for it while the Druid was frantically applying some magical CPR (the rat wasn’t the only one who was in bad shape), but her wolf companion chased him down and killed him. He was just a level 1 Rogue, which makes the fact that he almost knocked out the whole party kind of funny – again we see that technology is a great equaliser! Not to mention playing merry havoc with Challenge Ratings.

Somewhat annoyingly, I had to backtrack a little since I realised I’d forgotten that the Mage had Mana Shield up, so she should have gotten the chance to burn spell slots to mitigate the damage. That meant that she was up and awake when the goblin made a dash for it, but she declared that she was just going to let him go rather than get stuck in a fight, so it didn’t change the outcome. There’s a lot of different bits and pieces to keep track of in this system, especially with two casters in the party.

So that was that, mostly. The players poked around a little more and recalled that Njall Bashboulder, the owner of the mine, had mentioned that the only other tin mine in the hills was owned by the Venture Company, so finding a goblin with expensive high-tech weapons sneaking around in there was suspicious. Still, the mystery with the ghost remains unsolved, so the players are going to have to go back in next time, after spending the night resting and refreshing their spell slots.

This of course means that I’m duty-bound to come up with ways that the denizens of the mine are preparing for the players’ return. Only I should probably try to avoid having them lay any more area-of-effect damage traps… I’m starting to feel sorry for that damn rat…

Dragonbane readthrough: The Gates of Power

Previous installments in this readthrough of Drakar & Demoner / Dragonbane:

The campaign Ärans Väg (“The Path of Glory”) that started out in the previous installment here continues with Maktens Portar (“The Gates of Power”). Last time, my complaint was that the open-ended nature of the adventure, while nice in itself, didn’t make it a particularly good fit for the first part in a series. Let’s see how it goes on.

The adventure starts out by giving a bit more backstory for the setting, which states that the elder races – elves, dwarves, halflings and giants – used to rule the land, but fled with the coming of humanity. Some of the dwarves hid their kingdom behind a pair of magical gates, the Gates of Power, which were locked with three keys. Alas, the keys were lost, and the dwarves ultimately felt that they weren’t safe anymore and had to flee towards some unknown fate, leaving behind a great many treasures in their abandoned mountain halls.

Flash forward about 700 years, and there’s a war going on in the lands to the east. The warring parties are the necromancer Dakoth, the noble servants of the god Eledain, and the sinister-but-not-actually-the-problem-this-time minions of the god Sathmog. All three are scrambling for troops and equipment. Mogdath, a “death wight” in the service of Dakoth, discovered the Gates of Power. The treasures inside interested Dakoth, and so did the still-viable mines and foundries of the dwarves, so he sent Mogdath and a bunch of orcs, ogres and skeletons into the dwarven city through a magical portal. The orcs immediately managed to trigger some traps, so large parts of the city collapsed on top of them. Mogdath is now running a mining and weapon-forging operation with what manpower he has left while waiting for reinforcements through the portal.

Meanwhile, the players are assumed to have gotten hold of the keys and used them to open the Gates (it’s suggested that Doriath recruits them for an expedition through the Gates if they haven’t played the previous adventure). Things are about to get frantic.

Before the players get any further, though, a major NPC pops out of the bushes. His name is Tefalas and he’s a monk in the service of Eledain who’s been sent to killinate Mogdath. He’s been given a magic dagger who’ll suck Mogdath’s spirit into itself if he’s stabbed with it (which will be relatively easy with prudent use, since it’s got a single-shot spell on it that gives a +50% modifier and +10 damage to the first blow you strike with it, and he only has to take 1 hit point of damage to get dagger-sucked). Since he’s kind of crap with daggers, he’s happy to lend the thing to any player character who feels called upon, though.

After that, the major enemy NPCs get introduced. Mogdath is, again, a “death wight,” which is an evil ghost that’s so powerful that taken physical form. This is actually a hindrance in some ways, because it means it’s vulnerable to regular damage, but it does mean you can lift and carry things, which Mogdath makes use of by having magical weapons and armour. Mogdath also has two “dark wights” with him, who are a sort of in-between points between barrow wights and death wights – they are semi-solid, so they can kind of pick things up but it’s difficult, and they’re immune to any damage but fire and magic. They’re called “Daz” and “Gozer,” because this game doesn’t take itself terribly seriously. Anyway, his last lieutenant is a grouchy “night worg” named Sharch who’s an evil soul bound into the reanimated body of a two-headed wolf whose howling paralyses people.

There isn’t really a plot here; rather, the entire adventure is a big dungeon. We get told where all the NPCs are at the start, and also that Mogdath will get informed almost immediately after the Gates are opened. The GM is instructed to decide how he reacts to that news, with a few suggestions – he might investigate on his own, send Daz or Gozer to spy on the players, gather his troops to hunt them down, or just wait and see if they will oblige him by stepping on a trap. It’s noted that he will try to protect the orcs and ogres, since they double as his work crew – again, he’s less interested in the remaining treasure than he is in using the city as a mine and forge.

Some treasure is certainly to be had, though it’s inconvenient to get to – half of it is in the throne room where Mogdath is sitting, and half is still trapped and under guard to keep the orcs from trying to grab it and bringing down even more of the ceiling. Still, if the players can get to some of it, the sort of items they can wield are game-changers – there is an amulet that heals 3d6 hit points, without the need for a roll or the expenditure of Power Points, for instance, and that right there will turn the game a whole lot less gritty in a hurry. Of course, it’s noted that if Doriath is along, she’ll totally call dibs on everything magical.

The idea is for the players to fumble their way through the mountain, constantly attacked out of the darkness by terrifying creatures, and hopefully at some point be able to dagger-suck Mogdath. Though the GM is also mischievously informed that Tefalas doesn’t know what Mogdath actually looks like beyond “a wight,” so the players might end up catching Daz or Gozer instead, and after that the dagger is useless. Oh dear.

They are then supposed to get to the eastern land. They can technically do that by trapping a wight in the dagger and then tapping on the magic portal with it, which will cause Dakoth to think that a wight wants to get through and activate the portal… but not only do they have no real way of knowing that, but it’ll put them smack into Dakoth’s stronghold, so it’s probably not a great idea. What they are meant to do is break open the floor under the lavatories and follow the underground river beneath it out. I… am honestly unsure how they are even going to know that they need to do that, instead of just retreating out through the Gates like sensible people, much less how you can expect them to think of that particular, highly specific solution. Yes, Tefalas might tell them that the dagger needs to get to the east quite quickly so that it can be ritually destroyed, but come on, surely he had some plans for doing that himself that didn’t include underground rivers?

So the same problem that applies to the last adventure applies even harder to this one. But, other than that, it’s actually not bad, and the darkness and terror makes a nice contrast to the pastoral whimsy in the last one. Having actually run it, I can also vouch for it going pretty well, though I admit that I can’t actually remember how the players found their way out. Probably I railroaded them shamelessly. Oh well.

The trilogy will be concluded in The Heart of Darkness! Before then, though, we’re going to get our first look at the game’s main setting Ereb Altor in Kandra.

October plans

October is upon us, and it’s becoming all the more important to escape the cold winds of seasonal depression by warming ourselves by the wholesome fires of Roleplaying! September turned out to be a rough month for me, professionally and privately, but my blogging actually went really well. I got everything done that I meant to get done, and I actually got a ton more reactions and contact with fellow 90s RPG enthusiasts than I’ve ever had before. I guess maybe I’ve finally managed to find some other old fogeys who are nostalgic for the stupid awesomeness and awesome stupidity of our formative years. Either way, it gives me a much-needed warm feeling inside. Muah! Muah! Love you, folks!

So what will October bring? Well, my five readthroughs will continue:

  • In the Dragonbane readthrough, we continue with the second part of the Path of Glory campaign as we pass through The Gates of Power into a dwarven kingdom that is not as abandoned as it first appeared. Black magic, hideous monsters, and even more flavours of wight are ahead!
  • We’re actually going to dungeon crawling in the Paranoia readthrough as well, because now it’s time for Orcbusters, the one where the creators decided to see how they might do stereotypical fantasy in their setting and system. Not sure that was the best idea, but we’ll give it a fair shake.
  • In the Torg readthrough, we have reached the end of the Relics of Power campaign, and the players will be exploring The Forever City. The Cyberpope makes his best showing yet, while Thratchen and Doctor Mobius both seem to be having an off day. In the end, very little will be explained, because this is 90s metaplot and every mystery must be followed by an even greater one!
  • In the Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough… would you believe, another dungeon crawl brought on by another apparent compulsion to see how a non-D&D game would handle a D&D-ish situation? This month is starting to feel like it’s got a theme… Anyway, in Awakening: Diablerie Mexico we’ll get to see what a Gothic-Punk dungeon looks like (… yes, your mind immediately went there, didn’t it? Shame on you!) and how the writers might over-legalise the concept of diablerie.
  • The Deadlands readthrough, finally, is also rather Gothic, though of course in a maximally unsexy way. The time has come to explore the Harrowed in Book o’ the Dead. They are tragic undead antiheroes with creepy-cool powers and an evil side that will all but inevitably consume them. Yeah, it really does feel like Deadlands is doing Vampire while Vampire is doing D&D, doesn’t it?

There will also be a bonus post – I sat down and read the first edition core of Dragonbane‘s sci-fi equivalent, Mutant, last week. I’m not starting a full readthrough of it, but my thoughts on that one will be appearing this month.

I am still not going to be posting any installments of my ill-advised Daggerheart readthrough, because I hate Daggerheart and Daggerheart hates me, but to postpone it for another month I am going to post my impressions of another actually good roleplaying game, Shadowdark. After this, I will get back to the candy-coloured piece of crap. Honest. Another post of it is already written and scheduled, though I’ve realised that I’m going to need to go over it and reduce the amount of psychotic ranting a little – Daggerheart brings out the worst in me…

The work on the Monstrous Mishaps Quickstart Story will continue. I actually managed to catch up last month, so this month I’m hoping to stay the course and write up two more scenes. Let’s see if I can think of some suitably silly encounters on the plastic-duck-filled river.

The World of Warcraft: the RPG campaign I’m running seems to have hit stride nicely, and I hope to keep writing up the sessions as we play them. As for the Shadowdark play-by-post I’m planning… well, I got a little done on it last month, but it sort of ended up at the bottom of my priority list. I’ll see if I can’t get another dungeon together for it, though.

Finally, I’m going to try to read and write up posts for City o’ Gloom for Deadlands, Adventure Pack One: Black Duel & Beauty and the Beast for Dragonbane, Silver Angel for Shadowrun, The GodNet for Torg, Clanbook Gangrel and Storyteller’s Handbook for Vampire, and The Book of the Wyrm for Werewolf. And (sigh) 20 pages more for Daggerheart, because I do need to make some headway there. It’s a lot, but I somehow managed to pull it off last month. As usual, note that these aren’t posts that will go live this month; I like to have a buffer, so they’ll be scheduled for last December and early January.

I’m still not 100% sure that this is a pace I can keep up indefinitely, but we’ll see how it goes. Right now, I am covered until mid-December, and this month I should also catch up on my World of Darkness reading, so that I have a post written up for every one of the books I’ve read in order. I figured out rather too late that I needed to write up a book immediately after finishing it, see, because otherwise I forgot what was in it and had to read it all over again, so for a while now I’ve read two new WoD books and one old one per month. But that, at least, won’t be an issue anymore.