To Every Season

Yesterday was my dad's birthday.  He would have been 76. He passed away late August. My trip in early September was for his funeral service and to spend some time with my mom, sister, and niece (they live in the same neighborhood).

This post isn't really about my dad though other than that it in part explains why my posting has diminished a bit and will continue to do so. I had already been doing that intentionally per my New Year's plans but his passing was cause for much reflection (I drove 14 hours each way so that gave me plenty of time to contemplate!) which hasn't really stopped.

There is much to do and that I want to do beyond gaming and so I need to make some changes. I'm not going anywhere mind - twice a month posting will be more likely however, if that.

My hope is to make better use of my hobby time. In addition to playing games I most enjoy - focusing primarily on WWI and Fantasy (be it on Venus, the Great Game Gone Hot, or some imaginary place) because I realized I play WWII not out of deep fascination but by default - is to contribute to the hobby enjoyment of others.

That means more comments on others' posts to encourage them to continue posting, participating in forums, sharing useful sources of information, rules/procedures that might be useful, encouraging people to submit posts to the Lone Warrior blog (as the website manager, I handle editing blog post submissions) and running more games (RPG mostly) for family and friends.

As proof that work continues apace on my hobby related interests,  I am making "terrain", so to speak, for game 2 of the 1917 Stafexpedtion mini-campaign.

Here, too, is the current state of my painting table (aka the kitchen table):

Figures from Armies in Plastic, HaT, ICM, and CP Models. The house is from Target a year or two ago finally getting a simple paint job.

1917 Fictional Strafexpedition

Spring, 1917, Austria-Hungary makes a little-known (read: fictional) second attempt at a strafexpedition...

Following an artillery barrage, elements of the Austro-Hungarian "Sacher" Regiment, 1832nd Schutzen Brigade, attacked the Italian hill-top trench position north of Fromagio. 

Aggressive action by 3rd company of the 501st sturmbattalion and the regiment's 7th company, 2nd battalion, led to the defeat of the defenders (12th company, 3rd battalion, 212th Regiment, "Fagioli" Brigade), including the capture of the battalion's 2nd-in-Command, Major Romeo Lizzio. 

An Italian relief force, composed of 11th company of the 212th regiment, and a heavy machine gun platoon, came under heavy fire. They retreated seeing the trench in enemy hands.

The Austro-Hungarian 8th company, also assigned to the attack, did not see any combat and were delegated to man the trench, while 7th company attended to their wounded. The sturmtruppen were sent rearwards for rest, having accomplished their mission pressed ahead to the next objective. Major Neurath, who never was within rifleshot of an Italian, sent word of his success in capturing the position to his commander. 

The remainder of the battalion proceeded south towards Fromagio.

*******

The scenario was from One Hour Wargames. The others will be as well. I intend to play a 5-game campaign as Neil Thomas suggests in OHW. The rules however are G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. + Contemptible Little Armies. Units are 6-figure companies with a 7th leader figure. Machine gun bases are platoons.

In addition I have created personalities for the leaders of each company, battalion, regiment, and division involved, using a system by Paul Le Long from the pages of an old print edition of Lone Warrior. The system uses percentage values assigned to five stats. Of particular note for this write-up, the personality system has a health stat. So, I decided that if a leader fails his G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. save, after the battle I would roll against their health stat to see if they survive or not.

Major Lizzio failed his save in hand-to-hand, so after the battle I checked vs his health stat (72). He saved, and I thus ruled he was captured.

Hauptman  Philipp Waltz of 7th company failed his save in hand-to-hand and then failed his roll vs his health stat (a lowly 15, apparently he had suffered from longstanding injuries sufferd on the Russian front) and was thus a casualty. 

High health is not a guarantee of survival either. Captain Martino Giannetta, of the Italian 12th company defending the trench, failed his G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. save. His health stat of 85 seemed like shoe-in to recover (albeit he'd be captured). I rolled a 99. He succumbed to his wounds to say the least.

Oh and a final note. One of the stats is Courage. Neurath has a ONE. Hence the jibe at him at the end of the report.

The Black Gem

For the past two weeks, I've been head down scrambling to put together some kind of game for our family's annual Fall Festival. Last year, I ran a brick/Lego-based zombie scenario, which was a huge hit. The only specific request for this year's game was some kind of visual element (helps keep my son involved).

I had an itch to run some b/x (Moldvay Basic/Expert) Dungeons & Dragons again and decided to combine that with bricks.

After far too much time spent pouring over one-shot modules, I decided that The Black Gem  from Catthulhu over on DriveThruRPG had the makings of something fun. However, as written, it would not work for my players, so I reorganized it into a 5-Room dungeon format (I highly recommend subscribing at RoleplayingTips for the free guide). 

Spoilers ahead! If you are a player in a campaign and your DM plans to run this, STOP NOW!

*****

The party arrives in the area of the Crying Angel fountain.

While the PCs explore and investigate, some zombies and skeletons arrive.

Drawn by the smell of apples, the party finds themselves in the Spider's Grove. (This is something I added as a connecting point between the major encounters)

Ambushed by ghouls!

A tough fight but the party prevailed! The pumpkin headed figure resulted from that cleric trying to throw a pumpkin at the ghouls and rolling a 1.

The party happens upon two zombie grave robbers. They make quick work of them.

The final boss - the eerie glow of the black gem.

The Danse Macabre!

We had to turn the lights on so we could actually play.

Overhead shot of the battle field.

The thief fired an arrow at a skeleon, missed and the gem was alerted to the party's presence. It sent forth its guardian!

Ed the Head cast invisibility on itself, and rolled past the raging melee in front of the mausoleum. There it found the black gem. Which it debated eating or knocking off the pedestal. Given Ed's lack of a stomach, knocking it off was decided upon.

With the gem destroyed, the undead dropped in their places. The party was victorious.

I set up a map similar to a node-based wargames map based on the "rooms" and added some events to occur in between the main story nodes.

Here is my map for reference:

Grey boxes are from the module, blue circles are things i added. Solid lines are actual paths in the cemetery, whereas dotted lines are "overland" amongst tombstones and copses and take 2 -3 turns to traverse.

I purposely created multiple paths through the adventure - I don't like to rail-road my players and I've seen too many 5-Room dungeons setup or run just that way, with the rooms in order. The progression across the map, left to right, is basically the 5-Room structure, but they don't have to follow that.

In the event, my players went from the In Media Res start, to the Fountain, to the Spider Grove, to the Grave Diggers, to the Ghouls, to the Danse Macabre, skipping everything else.

To give players something to hook their directional choices on, I added simple sounds (or scents in one case), will-o-wisp "torches" were from a Halloween random encounter list i found on DriveThru, and the "gate signs" are part of the adventure as written. This made for quite lively discussion each time a decision was needed and that was the entire point, to allow the players to role-play and to feel their choices mattered.

I was pretty much able to run the whole game looking just at this. Including the time it took for players to decide on a minifigure and choice of armor, it took about 3 hours start to finish.

Cliche as it is, fun was had by all. It's hard not to have fun with Legos/bricks.

One player, a role-playing veteran, commented that he was impressed my ability to consistently run successful one-shots. Unfortunately, that's kind of where my ability ends! I find campaigns with through-lines difficult to run - perhaps because I cut my teeth in episodic module play? I don't know but thankfully our family gatherings are perfect opportunities to run one-shots.