Alive and Kicking

I finished my last blogpost by saying "Here's hoping time is on my side over the next few month". Insert maniacal laughter here. Work and staging my house to sell (and then moving across town) are the big blockers for me right now. I haven't been completely dead to the world, however. Here's a few things that've been going on in the "Coming Soon" column of Transylvanian Adventures.

 

NTRPG

• I will be there. Hoping to be there all of Friday and Saturday. I've signed up for a couple of games but was unable to get a slot to run games. I'll be there, though. So if anyone wants to play TA, just grab me. Next year, I'm hoping to have an official spot in which I can demo TA. The NTRPG guys have explained the ins and outs of getting a table there, so I'm fairly sure I can nail that down.

 

The S&S Game

Yup, it happened. Here's some notes.

The Good

• The DCC Wizard hack that makes the Wizard a playable TA class works very well. So, there's a spell-slinging class to use for TA when DAMN #2 comes out.
• The S&S Hack makes for a really weird type of D&D/DCC game. I mean, really weird. I consider that a success.
• With a slight tweak, the "Matters of Scale" rules that have been flying under the radar worked well too. This is one of the trickier points of some upcoming awesomeness in The Hanging Judge's Guide.
• Everyone seemed to enjoy the game well enough. The S&S Hack is a very different beast from vanilla TA, though.

The Bad

• For the most part, I populated Frozen in Time with monsters in the style of TA. It worked fine. But it wasn't polished. So there's a degree of going back to the drawing board that needs to happen with the monsters.

The Ugly

• The S&S Hack doesn't translate as well to the In-Between Adventures tables or even the Investigation tables. I tried that out and, frankly, it just didn't fit the Hammer vibe. There is an implicit degree of melodrama in TA that fits the idea of the monster hunter that  comes home and tries and keep his (or her) life together. This aspect doesn't resonate with the Sword & Sorcery genre. So it's probably best to just roll with a more traditional approach between adventures with the S&S Hack.
• The players in the S&S Hack of TA went balls out with the modifications to the core classes in TA. This was mainly to test the breaking points in the S&S Hack. Good news, nothing broke. Everything held together well. But, as you might've guessed, it gave the party a Monster Mash kind of vibe. No real cross-class combinations seemed to break the game into a thousand little pieces. But the classes were made to be played and, let's face it, the combos implicit in the classes were optimized for a specific type of experience. Too much cross-class craziness dilutes the coolness of the core classes a bit. In retrospect, this probably should've been expected. But it surprised me nonetheless. The more mishmash we went with the classes, the less they felt unique from one another.

 

The Monsters

• I hit a bump with the Monsters. I need to rethink them. This is a good thing. I had to do the same thing with the classes. It will probably wind up as a significant rewrite.