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  • Dark Liquid 9:44 pm on April 2, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , characters, , writeup   

    A Penny For My Thoughts – Character Writeup 

    For some more information about A Penny For My Thoughts, refer to my previous post and the official game website.

    Sadly my wife threw away the memory triggers we came up with, so I only have the ones that were selected by each player. As I recall, each player wrote a total of 5 triggers, for a total at the start of 30 possible triggers. We didn’t really keep note of who did what when, or the guiding questions, so I’m just writing up the complete characters.

     

    Character 1
    Player: Me

    1. Recall a pleasant memory
      When I think of a championship tennis match I remember killing the #1 tennis player in England for al-Qaeda. We had chosen such an unconventional target for the simple reason that it would be broadcasted live internationally and give the world a clear message that we could get anyone, anywhere – even right up close to the Royal family itself. I’d trained for years in deep cover to get to Wimbledon and face off against the #1 player in the country and after beating him, we shook hands and I used a poison needle to inject a fast acting neuro-toxin into his palm. He died almost instantly.
      What was pleasant about it?
      I succeeded in my mission.
    2. Recall an unpleasant memory
      When I think of ring a ring of roses I remember my nephews birthday party. I remember he and my wife getting killed by counter-terrorists during a raid. I ran, stealing a taxi and driving to a safe house without trying to save them.
      What was unpleasant about it?
      My family died and I did nothing but ran away. I put the mission first and suffered crushing guilt from that moment on.
    3. Recall how you came to be here
      When I think of sea waves I remember being on a luxury cruise, looking for the reports of my exploits on television, murdering someone and starting my new life. I’d quickly left the country after the incident with my family. It was clear the authorities knew it had been me and I’d been laying low, but I’d slipped up, staying in the country for my nephews party and getting my family killed for my mistake. The cell put me on a luxury cruise where I would stop off in the Caribbean and leave ship to take on a new identity and life from a contact there. I was still charged with pride and excitement about the mission success and was being sloppy, looking for reports on the news, but surprisingly there was very little coverage which made me angry. Eventually, someone did recognise me so I had to kill them. Of course, it might just have because I was a famous tennis player, they might not have heard about the assassination, but I could take no more chances, especially after being so reckless.
      How did you lose your memory?
      I went to meet my contact at the docks, got my papers and new identity and left to meet up with the people that would smuggle me off the island we had docked at when during my run to the pick up point I slipped and hit my head.

    Do you want to remember your past? No.

     

    Character 2
    Player: Barry

    1. Recall a pleasant memory
      When I think of the sounds of screaming I remember when I went to the funfair with my best friend. We dared each other to go into the haunted house. I was planning to scare my friend whilst in the house, but something jumped out of a wardrobe in the haunted house and I ended up screaming.
      What was pleasant about it?
      I got to go to the fair with my best friend.
    2. Recall an unpleasant memory
      When I think of falling down the stairs I remember trying to escape a hospital. I was patient zero in a growing epidemic and whilst sick and delirious I fell down the stairs while trying to find my way out. As I fell I pulled over a medical cart with me and got a syringe full of an unknown substance embedded in my knee, which I accidentally injected into me whilst trying to pull it out. I managed to get out of the hospital but passed out before I could get very far.
      What was unpleasant about it?
      I was sick, delirious and in terrible pain and to make matters worse possibly injected with something dangerous.
    3. Recall how you came to be here
      When I think of scraping my knee I remember fleeing the custody of some paramedics that were taking me back to the hospital. I ran through an alley way, convinced I had to get to my best friend’s house in my feverish delirium to see her one last time before I died from either the illness or this mystery chemical I was injected with. I stole a car and drove to her house but on the way there I crashed.
      How did you lose your memory?
      As I lay in the crashed car, I realised that my friend was actually at the hospital all along and that I needed to try and get back to her because in my delirium I’d unwittingly abandoned her. The shame and pain of the accident was too much and I passed out.

    Do you want to remember your past? No.

     

    Character 3
    Player: Greg

    1. Recall a pleasant memory
      When I think of the smell of lavender I remember looking for my cat in my grandparents back garden. There were lavender bushes in their garden and as I searched for the cat, I came across a stranger stood over a shallow grave at the bottom of the garden.
      What was pleasant about it?
      I loved playing with my cat and hiding in all the various places in that garden.
    2. Recall an unpleasant memory
      When I think of the crunchy feeling of leaves underfoot I remember skinny dipping in the lake and the cat coming to get me. When I got out, I stepped barefoot onto the leaves covered the lake shore. I got dressed and went back to the house to find policemen there. They told me my grandmother was attacked and had been rushed to hospital.
      What was unpleasant about it?
      She later died in A&E. She lost a lot of blood.
    3. Recall how you came to be here
      When I think of a wasp sting I remember how my granddad died. We were at his shed when he got stung and he was allergic. I also got stung but didn’t have my injector with me so we only had the one shot from his injector between us. It was a choice between him or me and I chose to live. I had to call funeral services and the house didn’t feel like home any more.
      How did you lose your memory?
      The stress and guilt and grief was all too much and I just broke down under the pressure.

    Do you want to remember your past? Yes.

     

  • Dark Liquid 8:04 am on March 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    A Penny For My Thoughts 

    So, we played a game of A Penny For My Thoughts last night and I enjoyed it immensely.

    APFMT is another story-centric game from Evil Hat with a twist – you don’t play any characters, but rather a group of amnesiacs going through an experimental drug/group therapy system to regain their memories. The game plays rather like an extended group character generation session, but with an emphasis on story-telling. There are no dice, no stats: it’s a complete departure from traditional D&D style games.

    I’ll admit from the start that running the game (so much that any one person can run it, giving there is no GM, per se) was a sort of test for my group. I’ve wanted to run a Dresden Files RPG game for a while which is also very story-centric with a large focus on group decisions, shared narrative control and collaborative story-telling. Dresden Files falls in between the traditional style and this more story-focused, collaborative one. I wanted to see how my group would react to this very different style of gameplay and so ran this quick one shot game to expose them to it.

    Overall, it was a success. One of the players made up their minds almost immediately that they didn’t like it and decided to make a bit of a nuisance of themselves so we eventually suggested they leave since they weren’t enjoying themselves to save themselves getting bored as us getting distracted.

    In hindsight, I think running the game slightly differently could have made it more fun for everyone – the player who left is very much an action-focusrd hack’n'slash type of guy and if I’d used the example facts and assurances in the book, which set the premise of us all being covert operatives, it might have been more enjoyable for him than the entirely mundane setting I established (which didn’t preclude being a covert operative, but didn’t encourage it either).

    Given the lack of familiarity with the system and the fact that many of the players weren’t well practiced at improv we didn’t finish everyone’s questionnaires. However on of the players did, so I’ll quickly summerise it now.

    The first memory was a pleasant one and the memory trigger he selected was one by our unruly player: “The sound of screaming”.

    Guiding questions turned the scene into a childhood visit to a fun fair with a long time friend and the memory started with the two entering a haunted house. The first decision was about actually entering it or not and who paid. He entered the house after making the friend pay for them both and they wandered through until they reached a corner, where another decision was made. The guides made some suggestions and he chose to shout Boo! behind the friend. They both ran out of the house and the memory ended on a kiss.

    The next memory was an unpleasant one and started with the trigger of “falling down the stairs”.

    The guiding questions established a large time gap, setting this memory in adult age. The setting became a busy, overcrowded hospital and he was feeble, patient zero in some kind of epidemic.

    The next decision points resulted in him spilling chemicals everywhere as he tried to sneak out of the hospital, getting a hypodermic of an unknown substance embedded in his knee when he fell, snapping the needle and accidentally injecting himself and feeling very sick and disorientated.

    The final memory was of how he came to be it the institute where this therapy session was taking place and started with the memory trigger of a grazed knee on concrete.

    This memory continued directly on from the last, following his escape from an ambulance whilst being returned to the hospital after his last attempt. He was gong to see the friend from the childhood memory.

    Each decision led him to wander through the streets in a confused state, until he began vomiting blood when he then became desperate to see his friend before he died and stole a car to drive there. However he crashed and as he lost consciousness he remembered he’d been confused and his friend had been at the hospital all along, ill like him and now he wouldn’t see her again before he died. Then he woke up with no memories at the institute.

    Some other memories were tragic or bizarre. One pleasant memory was of sinking into the oblivion of unconsciousness whilst drowning,  mine was of assassinating a tennis player at a championship match for al-Qaeda as a demonstration that they could get anywhere and reach anyone!

    We’re going to finish the session next week, and in a lucky coincidence both the person who finished their character and the player who didn’t enjoy it are absent next week, so no-one is going to cause any problems by being absent.

    On the whole, I really enjoyed playing this and look forwards to pjayibg at again as a sort of palate cleanser between longer games if not for a dedicated session. Fun stuff. Being designed as a one-shot game, it also works well for playing when key people are absent from another game or if people just want a quick break from a longer campaign of something else. Also, its a great way to create characters for stories and the writer in me definitely wants to try it on a future work.

    I’ll write up the whole game properly when its finished.

    On the whole though, highly recommended.

     

  • Dark Liquid 11:41 am on March 6, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Another belated update 

    I’ve been neglecting my poor blog again and I’m sure the hoard that is all of maybe 3 people are clamouring for an update (by which I mean, don’t care).

    So what’s been happening in darkliquid-land? Well, knowing my memory, more than I can recall, but the things that immediately come to mind are:

    • Failing my 1st driving test
    • Buying a car
    • Getting back in PHP, primarily WordPress development
    • Hacking on C++ code for a minecraft map renderer
    • Playing various indie games
    • Playing some main stream demos, and enjoying them immensely
    • Watching TV and a few films
    • Discovering new music, primarily Ugress and side-projects
    • Hacking up my laptop’s partitioning scheme

    So yeah, I failed my first driving test. It was almost a pass, but I made a really stupid mistake halfway through that killed it. I have my next one on Wednesday and I was looking forwards to it and feeling confident until yesterday, which was one of the crappiest days ever.

    Yesterday started off with a pre-test driving session to get some practice in. What was practice turned more into a demonstration to myself of everything I shouldn’t do. Simple manoeuvres took 5+ attempts, I almost got the car T-boned on a roundabout, all sorts of retarded stuff. I have no idea where my head was at, but it certainly wasn’t on driving. Even coming back and parking up, I crossed traffic without indicating, waiting or anything and I know that’s completely wrong. I felt so utterly terrible after that, there was absolutely no redeeming features of that session at all, other than surviving it, which is one step up from getting myself killed in an accident.

    Following that, I accidentally deleted about 135GB of data whilst doing something for work and needed to spend time fixing it in yet another example of epic failure.

    Since I was on a roll of self-destruction and failure I thought, hey, I already feel shit, I can’t feel any worse so rather than crawl into bed and calling the whole day off as a bad idea, lets see what else I can fuck up, lets go for the record, eh? With that in mind, I decided to resize the partitions on my laptop.

    When I’d first set it up, I’d accidentally only allocated 40GB to Win7 and 560GB to Linux. I was using maybe 8GB in my Linux partition so it seemed like a waste, considering Win7 alone without much installed except for all the C++ game development bits was already taking up 30GB. The plan was to shrink the Linux partition and then resize the windows partition to be larger and shuffle everything around. Alas, it is never quite that simple.

    Because I am an early adopter/technology masochist I’d formatted my Linux partition as btrfs, for which there is currently no partition resizing support. Also, my Linux and Win7 partitions were not next to each other, so expanding one into the other wasn’t going to happen.

    So, my plan changed to imaging my Linux partition, then deleting it, splitting it in half, with one half for Linux and another half for shared files between Linux and Win7. To image it, I used clonezilla, backing it up with partclone to an external USB harddrive. That all went well, so I was happy. I then used a gParted live CD to repartition the disk and then proceeded to go back into clonezilla to reimage the partition.

    Except it refused to do so. Clonezilla refused to allow me to image a partition backup of sda6 onto what was now sda7. Hacking around, I essentially renamed the to be called sda7 instead of sda6 and then hit another problem. Since sda6 was 560GB and sda7 was 280GB, it wouldn’t image the backup due to the size difference, even though the image was only 8GB, since it was a backup of only the used part of the partition.

    This was getting ridiculous.

    So, after looking up various issues and solutions on the internet, I discovered how to run partclone manually to force it restore the image anyway, since clonezilla didn’t offer any facility for doing so through it’s own interface. I had to cat together the 3 sections of the image backup (it had been split into 2GB chunks), pipe that through gzip and then pipe that to partclone.restore with a flag set to tell it to ignore size mismatches. It promptly, much to my shock, started imaging without asking for confirmation at all. Note to self: partclone is a dangerous tool that will trash your disk if make even the slightest mistake.

    So, now the image was on the partition, I could even mount it from the clonezilla live CD. Woohoo! But of course, I knew there would be issues. The drive layout was different which would make grub go doo-lally. The entries in the /etc/fstab wouldn’t match up, so the system wouldn’t boot even if grub would work. Before I did anything, I made sure to use the btrf tools to make sure the filesystem was aware of the new extents on the disk, by telling it to expand to the max for the partition (considering only 8GB had been imaged). That seemed happy enough and I saw no problems. I’m not even sure it was necessary, considering it seemed to get the free space calculations right even before I ran that command, but better to be sure I suppose.

    Now, on the more modern distros, your /dev is basically empty from start so it’s an arse if you want to chroot into another OS and run things like grub or anything else that needs the block device files for the disks. So, I had to bind mount the clonezilla Live CD /dev onto the mounted Linux install, then chroot, and then mount all the other filesystems, etc into that (/proc, /sys, /boot in my case). Once that was done, I edited the /etc/fstab to be correct – I would have used the drive UUIDs, but it was an arse copying stuff from the blkid command into the fstab file on the console, so I couldn’t be bothered – I can do it later from within the OS when I have a graphical environment. After that, I needed to reinstall and then update the grub config and then reboot.

    And finally, after hours and hours of messing around, it was all fixed, working and I had a nice chunk of extra space for sharing stuff between Win7 and Linux. I could boot into Linux or Win7 without any problem. That gave me a nice boost after the horribleness that had been Saturday.

    Now, in Win7, I wanted to shift some stuff to the new partition to make space. Namely Steam, especially since I’d succumbed to the special deal offer the other day and brought Red Alert 3 + Uprising for around £7 and 16GB of game data was not going to fit on the main Win7 partition. Annoyingly, Steam has no way of storing games on multiple partitions and while I could use NTFS’ native symbolic linking support to make it use the other drive, considering Win7 doesn’t expose that functionality at all and you have to use a command line tool, I didn’t trust it. Instead, I followed the instructions on the Steam site and moved the whole install to the new drive, which seemed to work perfectly.

    I also decided to tweak my Win7 install and theme it using the Maverick Ambience theme dpcdpc11 on deviant art created, so make it as little Windows-y as possible. Hit some issues with that due to the SP1 update breaking the stuff I did last time I enabled custom themes. Had to run sfc /scannow to regen the files and then go through the process again. Now it’s all looking nice. Hurray!

    Going back to the topic of games, I’ve been playing the Bulletstorm demo quite a lot. Its immensely fun, completely over-the-top and very tongue-in-cheek, satirising it’s own genre. I’m not normally an FPS fan, but Bulletstorm is everything that is right and fun about FPSes all put in one place. It’s a shame they did some stupid stuff on the PC port – it’s clear they targeted consoles first and the poor PC gamers got a little screwed by silly issues. I’ve been playing the PS3 demo mostly, but had the chance to play an echo on the PC version and it was very fun, even if I didn’t know half the controls.

    I’ve also been playing through the Dragon Age II demo on PS3 and likewise, it’s very fun and looks very pretty. The combat system feel a lot more punchier now and I found mages in particular feel a lot more powerful, in the first game they felt very weak.

    However, I doubt I’ll be buying either of them for a while, I still have several games on my list to go through and without any free time to play the games, I’m progressing through that list very slowly.

    I’ve also been playing Inside A Star-Filled Sky, a cool little indie game that revolves around the concept of infinite recursion and the act of becoming. Each level is the creature that you later become, but also, you can enter other creates, power ups, even yourself and by changing things inside them, change their abilities and attributes back on the outer level when you jump back up. It’s similar in concept to the movie Inception with it’s multiple layers. I’ve also been playing a lot of fake-scrabble on my phone via DroidWords, which seems the best of the lot in that genre and is a very polished little application, far better than the bug-laden monstrosity Words With Friends by the evil company known as Zynga.

    Since we’re on the concept of media, let me move onto music and film/tv. I recently discovered the artist Ugress, a Norwegian grungy-electronica one-man setup and I fell in love with his music. It’s absolutely divine. He has several side-projects including Nebular Spool, Ninja 9000 and Shadow of the Beat. What’s especially cool about Ugress is the way he communicates with his fans and really leverages the new digital age. He tries to get on all streaming media platforms, he offers his whole albums for free streamed listening directly on his site and offers some albums directly for download free of charge. The albums he does sell he uses a pay-what-you-want model with a minimum value (sometimes, that minimum is 0). His music and his attitude to the industry is inspiring.

    Speaking of which, when I listened to Ruins by Nebular Spool I was captivated. I was instantly catapulted into a state of intense creativity. The album seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to a story I am writing with Archi Teuthis on Protagonize called Neon Bible. I was consumed with the idea of creating a story-focused 2D platform game as a prequel to the story – filling in the blanks of the journey the Priest at the start takes to the city of Eden and covering the hard choices he has to make, telling the story of how the world the game is set in came to be the way it is and challenging the player emotionally and intellectually. I only wish I had the time and skill to create it.

    I still have yet to see most films this year. I just don’t go to the cinema. The cinema sucks, mostly because of stupid costs, other people and other things. At home I can pause the film or eat a pizza whilst watching it if I feel like it. Not so at a cinema. I also don’t have to worry about retards ruining it by talking, or if they do, I can at least tell them to shut the fuck up and rewind to hear what I missed. Also, most films haven’t really inspired me enough to go out and pay for. I still want to see Tron: Legacy even though I’m fully expecting to be disappointed but even that is still not worth seeing at the cinema.

    Two films I watched recently on the PSN were excellent though. The Other Guys, a Will Farrell film satirising typical buddy-cop action films. Hilarious, clever, deeply sarcastic. Just what I like. I highly recommend it. I also watched Red, the film about retired assassins/agents. Very funny and sweet, the action sequences were amusing in their audacity, but not over done. So many films try so hard to be cool that they don’t realising that trying so hard is what makes them decidedly uncool. Red got it all just right. A friend lent me Despicable Me and I have to say it was dull and uninspiring. I wasn’t really interested in it at all. However, maybe it’s the potential father in me, but I found Margo adorable and the film is worth watching just for her, she is awesome.

    I’ve been getting back into my C++ coding recently by working on extending mcmap, a renderer for minecraft worlds. I’ve been working on adding support for displaying signs on the map (as in the text) and struggling with the coordinate system transforms, but I’ve more or less cracked it now, so it’s on to the more taxing job of extending the renderer to blend text at various positions onto the image. I’m thinking of just not doing that at all and instead storing the text and coordinate data in a text file so you can apply the text later with your own process (which I’ll probably write a Ruby script for). I’ve also been playing with OpenZoom, an open source implementation of Microsoft’s DeepZoom system in Flash which in many ways is superior to Google’s Maps offerings, especially for the task of showing large images rather than actual maps, which suits the output of mcmap much better, since it isn’t really a map in the traditional sense.

    I’ve also been brushing up on my PHP again having been digging around in wordpress writing numerous plugins and changing some base functionality of wordpress itself to support various things and add new features for a site at work. I’m definitely not  fan of PHP or particularly of wordpress. they are both messy and ugly, but having worked with them for a while now, I’ve been fairly productive; so using wordpress as a CMS framework definitely has its advantages in terms of productivity.

    I’ve not been roleplaying much recently. The game our GM is running has ceased to hold any interest for me. I’m not interested in the other players characters, the story (or lack thereof), the settings or the seemingly meaningless jumps from one pointless job to another. Nothing in it seems gripping or interesting or has any meaning to the characters. I’m not even sure why the characters are doing what they are doing, there doesn’t seem to be any clear motivation to the game at all and that’s why I’ve bailed out of it. I think I’m becoming a bit of an Evil Hat fan boy. Their roleplaying games always seem very focused around characters stories, are strongly character-driven, thematic and designed specifically to create group stories. The Fate system as applied in their Dresden files game is fantastic in the way it does group setting and character generation and I hope to run a quick game of A Penny For My Thoughts to get the others to put their toes in the water in regards to that style of collaborative play. I’m bored with the traditional hack’n'slash GM/Player separation – maybe it’s the writer in me, but I want to tell a story, through the medium of a game, not play a game set to a story. The others all come from this more traditional roleplaying background, so it will be interesting to see how they react.

    Well, that’s it for now. Maybe it’ll be another 3 months before I update!

     

    • eric_the_girl 6:32 pm on March 6, 2011 Permalink

      To be honest, I’m on my third driving test and have resorted to taking a Kalms tablet before driving lessons to see if it helps… I had the Potts woman as my examiner last time and couldn’t hack it in the air of disapproval.

      Good luck, though! I have my next one on the 16th….

      (Plus, they say that you are a better driver if you pass second time than first…)

  • Dark Liquid 6:33 am on August 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Albrecht, , , WFRP   

    Roleplaying is Awesome 

    The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game I’m playing in is nuts. My character, Albrecht, started off as a lowly thug before slowly progressing into the career of an interrogator and from there into the careers of a physician.

    During his life he’s made dodgy deals, been tortured and hideously scarred as a result, caught disfiguring diseases and survived, tortured people, plotted and carried out revenge and more recently got into quite an adventure indeed.

    The party was sent to assassinate someone in the Chaos Dwarf empire and on the way we were confronted by a slaving band. Before they could get close enough to see us properly we decided to fake being a slave band, with me playing the role of slaver and putting the rest of the group in chains (bar two, who would be my guards). Anyway, meeting with the slavers, they had a much larger group and so afraid we’d all get captured (assuming no honour amongst slavers) I sold the chained up party members into slavery for a tidy profit and got myself a ride to the city. The plan was to steal them back or buy them back later at the city where it was arguably safer, at least when it came to being grabbed and forced into slavery.

    Anyway, what happened next was that it became clear I’d been ripped off selling my friends and I had no chance of buying them back with my meagre sums of cash. So, gambling time!

    Through gambling, first in a bar with dice games, and later at the gladatorial arena, I managed to amass 27 million gold pieces! With that seed fund, I started looking into hiring some assassins to do our mission for us, after all this was a city of evil people and I expected assassins and assassinations were common place. Eventually, through setting up various meetups, dead drops and other indirect communications channels, I managed to get a clan of assassins to work for me on retainer. However, as proof I was serious, they wanted me to kill someone – another party member, one of my ‘guards’ that had been sticking his nose into fights that didn’t concern him and had consequently killed some guys from the clan. They’d tried to kill him themselves but so far failed. So, I found someone that looked similar, had him killed and roughed up enough so it’d be hard to say the differences weren’t from injuries and sent his head to the assassins. Not pleasant, I know, but I assumed everyone in thus city was a bastard slaver or warmonger or evil in some way so I had no qualms about it. Anyway, we still needed to make the party member disappear, so being a trained surgeon and physician, I did some face surgery. After some botched attempts that nearly left him insane, he ended up looking different, if a little messed up.

    Now, during my gambling I’d made friends with a hobgoblin that had a lot of money and seemed well connected. I’d heard some of my friends were sold to the gladatorial arena and through this hobgoblin learnt they were going face ogres and likely die. Using charm and gambling prowess, I convinced him to enter into a plan with me to deliberately leak info that the ogre were the next challengers (in order to manipulate the odds at the bookies) and to get some poisoned weapons over to the slaves. That way we could place a bet with huge odds against with a good chance at winning and making a tasty profit.

    It worked and at 3000-1 and a 1 million hold bet, I came away with 3 billion gold. Cha-ching! I also bumped into another party member at the arena and so got to talking with her owner. Eventually we made a business deal for me to acquire slaves (I’d used some trepanning I’d done previously on a dwarvish party member as evidence of my Dwarf pacification techniques, dwarfs being highly prized slaves) and got myself a massive ship and crew for a 10 million gold investment. I also offered to buy the slave back from him, using the story I’d need obedient empire stock, as I could hardly show up in the empire with a bunch of dark elves on my crew and so would need a fake crew for show whilst in port. Unfortunately, he wasn’t her owner, only her master, and so I had to go to the owner to buy her back. To make it seem legitimate I bought all the empire slaves they guy had (he only had two) and as luck would have it, the other slave turned out to be a spy sent by the same people who sent us. Turned out that the people we were sent to kill were some of the most powerful people in the world and we had no chance – basically we’d been sent to die – deliberately – our boss being an agent for dark powers previously unbeknownst to us. He also let it be known that there was a hit out on all of us and that my gambling buddy was their boss so all my assassination plans were in ruins. Luckily their retainer hadn’t been paid yet for this month! Anyway, with new slaves in tow, I decided it was time to leave before we got killed.

    I’d previously set up a deal to fund development of new battle mechs in exchange for the arena’s prized fighters (my friends that beat the ogres) but with my new timetable I couldn’t wait. I sent one if my guards to bribe/buy the slaves with 200 million gold and another with the same amount to buy assorted slaves and weaponry. In the meantime, I went to the bank, emptied my accounts and spent 500 million on buying warehouses full of weapons at the docks and as many orc slaves for dock hands as possible.

    Everything went smoothly and so I had the guard with slaves separate out the humans and bring them plus some weapons to the ship whilst leaving the 20 thousand goblin and orc slaves left over to be free at the opposite side of the city (and in charge if some wagons that just happened to be full of weapons). We just made it to the ship as the assassin clan came after us. I told my dock hands they were free and could help themselves to the warehouses and so the assassins were trapped between two armed riots of about 30-50 thousand slaves each. Quite the distraction to escape with. So everyone was saved, I saved 5000 human slaves and also made 1.8 billion gold. Also got a very, very fine ship (though I’ll need to replace the crew, though I’m sure my party plus 5000 freed slaves with access to weaponry can manage that).

    All of this achieved with planning, manipulation, lying, gambling, murder and other business dealings with evil people – and I’m one of the good guys!

    It’s stuff like this which is why roleplay games are awesome.

     

    • jade 10:29 pm on August 14, 2010 Permalink

      sounds really exiting and fun, is it a computer game your refuring to or live roleplaying with the gang?

    • Dark Liquid 2:07 am on August 15, 2010 Permalink

      This would be proper pen and paper stuff.

    • Dark Liquid 8:03 pm on September 6, 2010 Permalink

      Glad you found it interesting. Thanks for pointing out the typos, I’ll get onto fixing those. The adventure is still ongoing, the game-breaking amount of money being used for founding a village at first with the aims of carving out my own little empire :)

    • Zotis 8:59 pm on September 6, 2010 Permalink

      Stumbled across this when randomly google searching resource material for a web browser based role playing game.

      It was actually quite an interesting read :)

      You should proof read it though to filter out a few simple typos. Anyway, sounds like you had quite the adventure. Just thought I’d drop a comment, keep up the good work.

    • Zotis 2:05 am on September 9, 2010 Permalink

      Sounds like fun. Warhammer is great. Never really got into it much but I did have alot of fun painting some Ice Warriors of Valhalla, Russian WWII style.

    • Dark Liquid 7:57 am on September 9, 2010 Permalink

      Yeah, I’m not into the wargaming side of it at all but the roleplay (which is a distinct, separate product) is very enjoyable and uses d% for all roles. It’s incredibly lethal, which is why i live in constant surprise my character has survived this long. That’s all part of the fun though :)

    • Zotis 5:08 pm on September 10, 2010 Permalink

      I do play some DnD, and sometimes use Warhammer Fantasy figures, but I didn’t know Warhammer had a roleplay product. I also love Mechwarrior/Battletech. Though I have the sourcebook I never actually got the chance to play it table top.

    • Dark Liquid 5:59 am on September 12, 2010 Permalink

      Yeah, we’re playing the 2nd edition of the roleplay released by fantasy flight games. Its a great little system, though career progression can get a little confusing if you don’t track the right stuff.

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