Last night I had the pleasure of taking part in an online Labyrinth Lord game, run by James "Jim" Raggi. It was the second game in a limited session run, I was not present for the first.
I kicked the thing off on an crummy note for myself. It was scheduled to begin at 7pm Eastern time, and because I did my very simple time conversion backwards, I thought it was beginning at 8pm Central time. At 5:52 by my clock, my brain suddenly started working correctly, and I realized that I had goofed up. To make matters worse, Piper had been fussy all day, and Krissi was at her wits end. I had just begun to make supper, thinking that I'd be able to do some stuff until 8. So this was a fiasco of my own creation. I nearly bailed on the game, but with my forgiving wife's consent, I sat down and worked on getting hooked up. Yeah - a fiasco at first, I didn't even have skype installed on my PC, and even though I already had stats for my characters, I had not done the rest of the creation process, thinking that I had another two hours to do so.
Finally I got connected with Jim and the players, and after apologizing for running late, and after getting everything lined up and setup, we got going around 6:30 central time.
The game consisted of Jim running us through what I believe is an adventure that he's in the process of testing before publishing. Death Frost Doom. So I won't get into too much specifics. We played with Skype and a chatroom & dice roller via Dragonsfoot.org This seemed to work very well. I've used Skype a little bit before, and it seemed to perform flawlessly for this application. The other players were a great bunch of folks, and I need to get in touch with each of them and thank them for such a great game as well. There were five of us players, myself- playing a thief, Beecham the halfling, Seneva the dwarf, Roland the fighter, and Vander the cleric. (sorry about no link love for Roland or Vander, I don't have links).
The adventure consisted largely of exploration, we didn't have any combat, and the only dice rolling was thievery skill stuff. I loved the exploration, it was thoroughly fun and old school. The tricks were clever- difficult enough to require us to think and plan, but not so difficult that we had no chance to figure out a solution. Jim did a fantastic job, both with creating the adventure, and with running it. The players were awesome as well. Due to an odd sequence of events, there came to be a distrust and suspicion of my character, Cerran the thief. This provided for great role playing, and we all hammed it up immensely.
Sadly, I think that Jim intends for this project to be a very short arc, as in, I think that was it. While our party was not as successful as I'd have liked- the GM gave us a clue and we forgot about it, and it was a rather important clue - we all had a great time. I just feel might sorry for all of the people that live in that region of the world.
Just for the record, I'd totally do one of these again!
4 comments:
Well, I'm not sure if anyone told you about it, but there was a little coda to our adventure after you had to leave. Roland discovered that he could move the time frozen characters by himself, dragging them one at a time beyond the threshold of the graveyard so they could have a running start away from the zombies. Unfortunately, Jim ruled he only had time to move three of the four characters... guess which one he left behind in the cabin? Ahem. Anyway, we had to make CON checks to see if we could keep running (which we all barely passed), then led the living dead directly to Zeke's shack and started a forest fire after that to buy us some more time. We then planned to steal horses and supplies from the village in the night and run like hell.
So basically, yeah, that entire nation is doomed. And unless our characters were close to an ocean or Helm's Deep, I doubt we would be living much longer anyway.
Any particular reason why gaining a point of strength would cause your thief to act like he was possessed by the lord of light? Haha. Jim informed us afterwards that you were, in fact, not cursed or charmed at all. I feel bad about trying to kill you now.
ahhh, the point of strength.
Really, I was just hamming it up. After Cerran offered to have Vander try the basin and coin trick, and everyone reacted suspiciously, I had a blast playing Cerran in a way that was perfectly innocent and oblivious, but did nothing to assuage the fears of the others. His humming aloud, curiosity about the source of the music, etc. You'll recall though that he also behaved in a manner very much in line with the rest of the party, trying to secure doors, and explore passages and readily sharing the ancient tomes around. When Seneva questioned him about the '2 days/one year ago' thing, Cerran figured she was confused, and so shrugged, "Yeah, sure, whatever".
I hope that you and the other players had a great time too. I wasn't trying to derail the adventure, or to be a jerk. It seemed like a fun to throw a little role play in.
For the record, you didn't derail anything and you certainly weren't being a jerk. It was in fact AWESOME!
I swear I was racking my brain trying to figure out a way to "cure" you...before watching our Chaotic friend pull a Jack Bauer on you (his reference...ha!). I was hoping the 2-days-ago vs 2-years-ago thing would prove you to be under the influence (Beechum was the one trying to weed you out that way, BTW), but still couldn't decide what to do with you.
Too bad the alignment language thing wasn't a go, that could have been fun for Beechum and Vander to at least chat amongst themselves about it.
Then again, that probably would have just raised some more suspicion in the party: "Oh no, no those two are in on something!"
A couple times I also thought that Roland (IIRC) was slightly on Cerran's side of things...not exactly sure why, but a couple times I do recall thinking: "hmmn...is he F'd as well?"
Maybe it was when he wanted me to climb up the shaft where the plant was...dunno.
Anyway...great, great times. Thanks to Jim for creating and running it, and for you guys for being awesome players. It's all about having fun, and I most certainly did.
Oh one more thing: jerm, I didn't know that this was your blog..err that this was you.
I actually was just looking at your LL game session posts this past week, thinking as I read them about how much fun it was gonna be to play in a few days. Obviously all games/sessions/parties are different, but I love to read about others sessions, or listen to podcasts, etc of actual play, when I am not in a campaign or actively playing.
In summary, great posts on your play sessions here, and I'm glad to see that I actually sorta knew a couple of you guys already, even if it was only via your blogs.
Same for you Matthew (Sunniva the dwarf) and your blog The Dwarf and the Basilisk. I recall reading your Lost City (Moldvay's awesome B4 module) posts a while back, and totally digging them.
I first read some session notes on B4 (and X1 I think) over at Robert Fisher's blog as one of the first old-school D&D blog entries I ever read. That was one of the first few that really got me all back into this stuff, and yours wasn't too far behind. Great stuff guys!
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