Thunder Clan Warrior

In the Krullian mountains of the stormy north lives a tribe of people.  The environment is harsh, storms rage through the mountains sending jagged strokes of lightning to blast the rock and scrub during the spring and summers and during the fall and winter blizzards sweep through through the area freezing man and beast alike in minutes if they dare venture forth unprotected.

Guided and shaped by these forces of nature a clan of man grew strong as the weak were weeded from their midsts.  Fierce, protective of what’s theirs and rightfully proud of their ability to survive these people’s bow to now man or god.

Trained to survive their environment where the very forces of nature join with the fierce humanoid tribes and groupings to seek to shatter them, bone, mind and spirit, they emerge the tougher, the more resilient, the more alive in spite of it all. Here then is the weakest of the lot, the teen boys and girls, the Thunder Clan Warriors.

The Thunder Clan Archer, Master of Storms and Eyes to follow…

Thunder Clan Warrior

Thunder Clan Warrior Level 4 Soldier Medium Natural Humanoid XP 175
Initiative +6 Senses Perception +4
HP 55; Bloodied 27
AC 20; Fortitude 17, Reflex 14, Will 17
Speed 6
Warhammer (Standard) ♦ Weapon
+11 vs AC, 1d10+4 damage.
Throwing Hammer (Standard) ♦ Weapon
Ranged 5/10; +11 vs. AC; 1d6+4 damage.
Concussion
On any critical hit the target is dazed (save ends).
Anvil Toss (Immediate Interrupt, when an ally in an adjacent square is targeted by an melee attack)
Slide ally one square.
Alignment Unaligned Languages Common
Skills Endurance +9, Intimidate +7, Streetwise +7
Str 17 (+5) Dex 13 (+3) Wis 15 (+4) Con 14 (+4) Int 10 (+2) Cha 10 (+2)
Equipment chainmail, warhammers, 2 throwing hammers

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Editor Notes:  Accidentally Published a week late.

My time lately has been tied up hard with Fallout 3.  Easily the best RPG I’ve played since Baldurs Gate. I had a random thought today.  Why are the quests in Fallout 3 so much more interesting and immersive than the quests in a MMOG? I mean I give a shit about finding a home for this boy who’s dads family was killed by giant ants, flame effin’ spewing giant ants by the way.  Even though he’s nothing but a quest designer’s idle thoughts and a bunch of pixels and canned dialogue.

Oh and Left 4 Dead demo is coming out Thursday.  Unless you’ve been under a rock or really pay not attention to computer games this may be a big deal to you.

I got a chance to play Touch of Evil over the weekend. Faster paced than I was thinking and with a Villian that’s played by the random placement of the Mystery deck it allows for a player count as low as 1 really although more are very much a good thing.

I bother posting this also idle nonsense simply because there’s very little new under the sun to report otherwise.  The forums are very slow, I’m guessing the initial rush is done, the bloom is off the rose etc. and people have either moved on or are feeling comfortable with the system and not finding any need to post questions or comments or thoughts or whatever or they’re just rehashing the same old things.  “Monsters have too many hit points, fights take too long, players get tired of using the same 2 or 3 attacks over and over, players don’t do enough damage, skill challenges are too easy, too stupid, too hard.”

Been there and done that.

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Apocolypse

This is how I envisioned it after a little thought being disapointed in the ’stands on their own’ feeling each movie had. (and aside from money/time/resources to get the game out for the 2008 holiday season this might be why we’re left to envision, in order to make our own story out of it)…

Prologue - A extremely communicable version of rabies is let loose in the world’s airports, the initial form has a 6-10 day incubation and is airborne.  Thanks to the very small world we have now with international travel this disease spreads across the globe like wildfire.  It mutates as it spreads to become more contagious and with a shorter incubation period.

0.5% of humanity is naturally immune to virus but not the swarms of rampaging raging infected that now infest every city, town and village.

No Mercy - Our four survivors have been trying to ‘wait it out’ in the city but the infected aren’t dying off like they’d hoped from thirst and starvation and now they’re mutating into other [I][B]things[/B][/I].   This is not good.  Not good at all.  The chopper flies past entreating any survivors to head to Mercy hospital.  Our quad fights it way to the hospital and escapes in the chopper.  Unfortunately the pilot has the disease and isn’t immune.  He rapidly worsens but manages to bring the chopper down on a rooftop near the edge of the city.

Dead Air - Our quad kills the pilot and while wondering what the hell is next sees the airplane flying past.  Okay, time to head to the airport on the edge of town!  They make it there, get the plane fueled up and head out.  Unfortunately, yet again, in 10 minutes you can’t completely fuel a plane and all the airports are overrun anyway so the pilot makes an emergency landing on a highway dying in the crash.

Death Toll - Our fearless quad hikes up the highway coming across a small town.  They fight through the town and find a dock where they’re picked up by a boat to chug away down the river.  Gas is a problem and eventually they run out and after drifting for two days end up beached on a sand bar in rural America.  After hearing their stories about how everyone dies around them, the pilot decides he doesn’t want to be their next redshirt and heads off on his own.

Blood Harvest - Our group heads inland in search of supplies and comes across the train tracks and travels along it knowing most of America’s goods are shipped by rail, hoping to come across a boxcar full of Hungry Man meals and Jello Brand Pudding Pops (TM).  They find more infected and a corn field watered in blood.  It’s obviously they’re not going to take up a career as farmers with infected for neighbors but are rescued yet again and drive off in a armored personnel carrier even further into outback where they eventually hole up in a fully stocked ‘oh those crazy survivalist nut’s bought an abandoned missile silo, who’s laughing now’ complex along with other survivors which has become known as Vault 101 in the area.

Zoey

We played through Versus mode on Left 4 Dead last night and it was a LOT more fun than I was thinking it was going to be.  The biggest issue is that if the teams aren’t even in terms of humans then it’s very hard to win for the side with the smaller team unless there is a huge skill discrepancy.  Also a single game with a full set of survivors getting to the end pretty much guarantees you’re going to win.  It’s very hard to come back from being down.

In case you didn’t know in Versus mode you go through modified versions of the regular maps, they’ve been fixed so that all the normally ‘missing’ bits are put in because the infected end up in areas the survivors never see.  So in order to make the games run as fast as possible each map is optimized by removing surfaces that in Survivor mode that they can’t possibly see.

Dropping down as a big boomer on top of close packed group of survivors and having one of them shoot you instead of ‘bat’ you away so you soak them all in zombie bile is fun.  Grabbing the last person as a Smoker (50′ long tongue) and yanking him (or her) up to dangle choking?  Also fun.  Pouncing on someone who’s strayed away from the herd as a hunter and slashing them?  Fun too.  Of course some of the really fun moments are standing as a boomer (very wide model) in front of the witch knowing the survivors bullets cut through you like butter so that they hit the witch which is usually guarenteed death for at least one survivor.  Yep, also fun.

Anyway if you enjoy First Person Shooters in the slightest, Left 4 Dead is definitely a game you might want to take a look at.  And I hear it’s on sale at Circuit City this week for $39.99.  That’s 20% off retail pricing.

None of this!

Found an interesting and personally intriguing charcter creation concept that at first and even second glance I’m liking a lot.   The base idea behind is the author’s world is humans against the monsters so the players’ race is all human.  But to give them uniqueness each one can choose a ‘racial’ type and this gives them powers much like the races in the PHB.

Frankly I like the concept enough I plan on using it the next time we roll characters up.  I’ll probably tweak it to some extent but I’m liking what I see here.

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Alas poor Yorick

Played a 5 players co-op game of Touch of Evil over the weekend.  It’s a fun game, pretty easy to pick up after a couple of rounds assuming a literate semi-intelligent ape reading the rules.

We ended up fighting the Were-wolf and it literally came down to the last roll.  Being the wise but utterly suckstastic Playwright I didn’t contribute much in this fight, my high non-combat skills didn’t come into play at all.

But eventually we forced a showdown with the wolf although not until after he managed to kill two of the city elders and we had two rounds.  He dropped us one by one but we were chewing through the 30 health he had by the time we managed to track him down and on the last roll he dropped the fighter played by temple who had four attack rolls and needed to get a 5+ on three of them in order to take out the were wolf’s last three health and I’ll be a son of a bitch if he didn’t do it.  So the last member of our party dropped and the wolf collapsed on top of him.

The remaining town elders, there were only two left by then, rescued us from death and gave us a party and we were heroes.

Random Character

You can find a unofficial preview video of the character builder (beta) that’s going to be up on the on Wizards of the Coast’s web site.  I’m not sure but I think this might end up being the ‘free’ portion of it and if you want the ability to build 3D character pictures that’s going to cost the subscription fee?  I could easily be wrong on that.

While I don’t particularily like the official character sheet, too much thin white text buried in blocks of black which prints out hard to read, I think this is pretty damn cool the way you can shift things around and essentially build your own characters sheet using their sections.

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Siege

I’m sure you’re already familiar with Asmor but in case you’re not he (or she) has a new tool up for planning random encounters.  Might be useful to you, I know I a lot of times will use randomness for inspiration rolling several times on charts or whatever until something strikes a spark with me and I can then take that and extend it.

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Charcoal Warriors

There’s a trip to the Twin Valley’s over on the EN world forums and just for the heck of it I’ll link directly to the module here.  Its a free module for 4th edition and it’s a big one, 50 megs zipped although that doesn’t mean much with PDF’s

It includes battle maps of all the important things to scale so that’s always a plus IMO. As usual though with first level adventures you’re going to be fighting goblins or their alternate kobolds although in this case it’s goblins.  The settings while not necessarily unique to me personally is fairly different in that it’s set in a charcoal valley where they make charcoal which if you didn’t know isn’t just dug up from the ground and put into Kingsford bags.

The author is from Sweden so english is not his primary language and this does show in some places but does not detract from the module itself.

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Have at thee!

Sorry, if you’re here for 4E news, the forums are pretty lackluster now, of course it might have something to do with an inability to log in “Service Unavailable” error from the web service to actually you know post something.  Apparently people who still have cached can though.

I could do a rehash, the Rules you didn’t realize is still going strong with almost 400 posts, an EXCELLENT place for DM and Player alike to make a pit stop in on their way to gaming nirvana.  Or at least official correctness.

YYYASCS (Yet yet yet another skill challenge sysetm) is up for grabs, this one with lots of examples which is always good. It looks workable at first read through.

Personally I just think the skill system as the base idea is broken and attempts to fix it are bandaids at best.  The idea that everyone gets equally better at every single skill as they level is just a non-workable solution but obviously we have to have something and this is semi-equitable although the discrepencies is fairly big and is better than nothing. At least the official system has the advantage of simplicity really.

A new take on an old spell.  For some people the Magic Missile’s ability to hit multiple targets and do it automatically is always going to be a thorn in their side.

On this post there’s some talk of a replacement and here are a couple of the ‘winning entries’.  YMMV of course and I’d seriously recommend testing things.

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