Once More Without Feeling - Prog2 - Dunkin Frogs Legs

A Judge Dredd RPG session using my homebrew version of the Savage Dredd playset for Savage Worlds.

Dunkin Frogs Legs 

It's 1am on a rainy Friday night as Judges Mint and Cross observe a trickle of late night revellers returning to Thatcher Towers from the nearby Super Doopy Hyper Loopy station.  One character catches their eye as he surfs the crowd before ducking into an alley.  The Judges dismount and follow their intuition and their suspect into the darkness.

The dark alley is short and opens into a large square dominated by a wall of trash piled up at the far end.  A manhole cover partially covers a drain in the center of the square.  They investigate, but the smell is overpowering and they decide to try other avenues first.  

Pulling out their Lawgivers they scan the area with their IR sights and find a heat bloom at the bottom of the trash pile.  Further close investigation reveals a secret door leading into what looks like a short tunnel carved out of the trash.  traversing the tunnel they enter into a small room with a table and chairs looking like a kitchen.  Sitting at the table is a middle aged citizen who offers them a cup of sythi joe. 

He identifies as Bernie "Fast Fingers" Hilliard, a recidivist dunker with a long arrest record.  Bernie explains that he wasn't pick pocketing he was just acquiring lost property in advance of returning it to their grateful owners who in many cases are so grateful that they will gladly offer him a few creds as a finders fee.  He then proceeds to give the Judges a sob story about how his wife left him during his last 5 stretch in the iso-cubes and he decided to build himself this hovel in the trash rather than return to his apartment which holds too many bad memories for him.  Cross and Mint tell him that there is no excuse for lawlessness and escort him to a holding post in the street.

The radio crackles 

++DISTURBANCE AT THATCHER TOWERS PLAZA NORTH LVL 300 - MULTIPLE CASUALTIES REPORTED - PRIORITY 1 ++ 

Cross and Mint are the closest units and gun their bikes down the pedway towards the plaza.

A grim sight meets them on arrival.  Approximately 30 or so citizens with varying degrees of injuries litter the Plaza entrance.  Most suffering from critical injuries to their extremities, dismemberments and fatalities due to severe blood loss.  The Judges immediately confront the nearest citizen who they recognise as local celebrity Two Ton Tony Tubbs voraciously consuming a human leg.  A man dressed in a mime costume is crawling away from Tony leaving a bloody trail behind him.  

"Pass me another of that frog's legs they're bloomin delicious"

says Tony.  

The Judges call in the incident and request immediate Medical Support and a Resyk Meat Wagon.

Another citizen is sitting on a plaza bench gnawing off the fingers of her left hand.  When interviewed she explains that there was a flash of blue light and this fattie appeared he commanded them all to eat and then with another blue flash disappeared.  She couldn't resist and started to eat her own fingers which is most troubling because she has a successfull career as a left hand model.  She begins to cry whilst still nibbling at the bloody stumps that used to be the cornerstone of her career.

The Judges report this new information and Despatch retorts 

++PSI SQUAD INBOUND - CASE TRANSFERRED TO PSI JUDGE ELDRITCH++ 

The Judges cuff the living and give what first aid they can until the MedTeks and PSi Squad arrive.

Eldritch is visibly shaken as she emerges from an H-Wagon, her team of scanners and precogs set to work surveying the scene.  As she approaches the Judges she updates despatch.

"Eldritch on scene and confirmed, it's a Level 7 Psychic Event with trans-dimensional hallmarks alright, get me a clean up crew stat!!"

She looks at Cross and Mint's badges 

"Cross, Mint, good work boys.  I'll take it from here, this is a Level 7 Psychic Event and my team will need some space to work.  We've got a crowd gathering and I don't want them disturbing any evidence"

As she turns to consult a member of her team, Cross and Mint proceed towards the onlookers.  

    "Nothing to See here! Return to your homes!!"   

After a hard shift Cross and Mint return to the sector house.  Heading to the Booking Hall their path is blocked by a Burrito Vending Machine.  It greets the Judges in a jovial if anxious tone explaining that his name is Call Me Manuel, a vending machine stationed near Amundsen & Abba Apts and it has taken him two days to trundle here to hand himself in as a murderer!!

A cursory examination of the machine shows that a twisted and contorted corpse still resides inside the vending machine.

At this point Judge Plisken arrives and shouts at the pair

"Get that vending machine out of my Sector House and get that body to RESYK"

The pair extricate the body of the male citizen and discover that his cred stick is still in the machine's cash slot which confirms the identity of the body as Spunge Wortle a 26 year old male citizen from Amundsen & Abba Apts.  His rap sheet shows no arrests for criminal damage or tampering and his cred stick shows sufficient balance to purchase a burrito.

The machine explains that he had a software update a coupe of days ago and when he rebooted his internal sensors detected a foreign body in his mechanism.  Without any other data his programming must assume that he has in some way killed this poor unfortunate hungry citizen.

"Would you like a burrito?"

The pair are at the end of their shift so decide to grab a lift pallet and take it down to the Motor Pool, they will deal with the mess in the morning.

 "Are you sure you wouldn't like a burrito? They're really good" 

Once More Without Feeling - Prog1 - Full Eagle Day

A Judge Dredd RPG session using my homebrew version of the Savage Dredd playset for Savage Worlds.

Prog 1 - Full Eagle Day

The final exam for a cadet is to spend a day on the streets in the company of a supervising Judge who will determine whether they are fit for service as a Judge and can be badged up to wear the Full Eagle shoulder pad.

Cadet Judges attend their first briefing in briefing room 3A.  Judge Plisken a veteran Judge and Watch Commander delivers the briefing.

"A Shipment of Boing!™ was hijacked on its way to the Sector 55 Palais De Boing in Thatcher Tower last night. be on the lookout for juves with illegal cans and a reminder that illegal boinging is a serious offence and use of deadly force to protect innocent lives is authorised. 

Reports are coming in from sector 237 that an unidentified Kaiju Mecha attack at an industrial facility manufacturing Choo2 the fuel of the future.  Facility destroyed and 273 confirmed dead and rising.  Judges being pulled from neighbouring sectors to lend a hand so expect delays if you are calling in for support  

Today is Full Eagle Day for our latest crop of Cadet Judges.  I've assigned you to Crowd control at the Zooty Slute's Suits You Two store on Melania Boulevarde, Trump Tower.  Report to Citizens Slute and Floot at 10am for the grand opening.

Night Shift reports 7 Judge fatalities last night.  We're not gonna lose the sector on my watch so be careful out there and stay frosty.  Cadets, I'll see the survivors at the end of your shift."  

The cadets and their chaperones head to the Motor Pool to pick up their rides.

On their way to Trump Tower traveling down Meg 356 they spot a red convertible (J1FF1EE) doing 59 in a 60 lane, a slow driver.  This is a clear violation of the traffic laws and warrants an intervention.  After much dialogue with Barney, the cities municipal computer, the cadets shut down 3 lanes of traffic and the vehicle is pulled over to the hard shoulder.  Under the watchful eyes of their supervisor Judges, the cadets proceed to interrogate the driver and his young female passenger.

His ID is confirmed as the owner of the vehicle Bertram J Smalls, a sales executive at Emphatically Yess,  Despite his protestations that his lawyer will "have him out in minutes", the cadets sentence him to 5 years for a catalogue of minor traffic violations and failure to comply with a Judges direct order.  His passenger is his daughter Phoebe Waller-Smalls,  who whilst still a juvenile gets a 10 minute trip to the smokatorium for illegal smoking. 

Arriving at upmarket gentleman's outfitters Zooty Slutes Suits You Two, the Judges are immediately pressed into crowd control.  When the ribbon cutting ceremony concludes there is an immediate stampede for the entrance and one citizen, Two Ton Tony Tubbs (retired championship eater and celebrity fattie), gets stuck in the doorway causing the crowd to panic that they won't be able to enter the store.  Another well meaning citizen, Mike Chimp (a tri-d action hero), is on hand to help revealing his trademark hand grenade and uttering his catchphrase "This monkey means business!".  

This causes the crowd to panic and a few bystanders get pushed onto the boulevard from the pavement.  A passing hover taxi veers across the road to avoid a collision with the jaywalkers and crashes into a holding post on the opposite side of the street killing the driver and seriously injuring its Juve passenger, nine year old Perry Tratchett, who receives a serious head injury and concussion and his mother June Tratchett suffers a broken arm.  

The cadets call in a RESYK Meat Wagon and a fire crew to remove the wrecked taxi and its driver.  The injured boy and his mother are airlifted by MedTeks to the Trump Towers Med Centre for treatment.   

--- UPDATE ---

The cadets all failed their evaluation with citations against them for failure to notice a crime in progress, inaction and hesitation, failure to kanow the law and a cavalcade of other minor demerits.

Dungeonquest - It's a Classic!

One of my passions is the Games Workshop Bookcase format games of the 1980s.  I am gradually completing my collection and one of the games I absolutely had to have was Dungeonquest.

Dungeonquest (or should I call it Dragon Keep)

Drakborgen was designed by two Swedes Jakob Bond and Dan Glimme and licensed to a range of board game companies.  Games Workshop picked up the license for the UK and sold it as Dungeonquest.

The game is essentially a race to the center of a randomly generated maze where you grab some of the Dragon's hoard and try to get out before the dragon wakes up.  As you generate your path you will encounter variouos obstacles, dead ends, traps, monsters designed to halt your progress or rob you of valuable turns.  

There is a heavy push your luck element to the game and whilst on your way out of the dungeon you won't have to face any of the monsters you encountered getting to the dragon, your path out may have been blocked requiring you to start finding a new path and encountering new monsters and traps.

Man, is this game stacked against you.  I remember playing it once back in the 80s but I didn't remember how hard it is to win.  It's a lot of fun 

It's a component fest with lots of cards and tiles, 4 character models in really cheap hard styrene and plenty of plastic cones which were the defacto stat tracking counter of the day.  The component quality is classic Games Workshop, thin as you like cardboard that just wouldn't fly in todays boardgame market.

Replayability is high because every game will have a different collection of tiles in your path.  Yes, the choice of monsters is limited, but the ingenious combat mechanism means that the monsters react differently and your combat outcome will vary depending on the cards you and the monster play against each other.  

Art was provided by Gary Chalk (creator of the Lone Wolf books) and it is very much of its era.

Re-releases and Immitators

There have been numerous reissues of this game.  It was rereleased in Sweden as Drakborgen Legenden in 2002 and in the 2010s Fantasy Flight teamed up to reissue a few of the Games Workshop bookcase games they chose Dungeonquest alongside Fury of Dracula and Warrior Knights (probably the three best games of the series).

Drakon is another random tile laying dragon heist boardgame which Fantasy Flight re-released back in 2006 as part of their silverline game range.  A super simple game which turns it from being a race to the center to get to the dragon into a race against the other players and avoid the dragon.  I also own this and for a time it was a go-to filler game if our friday night sessions started late or ended early.  It's a quick game and is so easy to pick up for new players.

RPG Inspiration

The tile laying aspect of this game really floats my boat.  I'm a big fan of the dungeonmorphs concept and have created a bunch of my own tiles over the years and even contributed some art to a kickstarter and the davesmapper project.

It would be childs play to use the tiles to map out a random dungeon for use in any role playing game.  Much quicker than the famous Appendix A - Random Dungeon Generator found in the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) in my opinion.  I might even have a go myself one day. 

Every year at Dragons Keep Roleplay Club we host a memorial trophy in honour of members who are no longer with us.  One year, I actually went to the trouble of building a 2d cardboard version of the game but with a simplified combat system and character generation which used playing cards.

Out of The Abyss - The final Session... or is it?

Tonight sees the final session of our journey through the Underdark at Dragons Keep Roleplay Club as we play the module Out of The Abyss.

Will we continue our exploration in a future rotation.  I certainly hope so, but until that time here is a chronological list of all our sessions:

• Out of the Abyss: Part 1 - Janek's Story
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 2 - Escape from Velkynvelve
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 3 -The Darklake
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 4 -The Princess Heresy
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 5 -A Two-headed Demon Giant
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 6 -Secret Missions
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 7 - An Audience with a Dragon
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 8 -The Whorlstone Tunnels
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 9 - Weird Water
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 10 -The Grey Ghosts
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 11 -Kasra's Minions
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 12 - Bupido the Butcher
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 13 - Burn Butcher, Burn
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 14 -The Black Obelisk
  
• Out of the Abyss: Part 15 -

Session Blogging - Why I Bother Recapping my RPG Sessions

I have mentioned before that I have been the defacto session writer for our group at Dragons Keep Roleplay Club for some time now.  It takes up a good portion of my weekend but here are a few reasons why I do it.

5 Reasons Why I Write Session Reports

1. It Engages Me - Yes, that's right, if I am scribbling notes througout the game I am completely focussed on what is happening at the table.  I've been roleplaying on and off for 40 years and it's easy to become blase and become distracted by the joking, camaraderie and snacking that usually fills up at least 50% of the game.

2. It Helps the GM - Most sessions begin with a recap of what happened in the previous week.  I have witnessed several instances of the GM logging onto the last session and skimming through their own game and pulling out the salient points.  It helps their worldbuilding consistency as there's always a reference to NPCs we have interacted with (especially those created on the fly).  It helps them to remember the important details of who said what and to whom.  

When I am the GM the session report is formed from my game notes and I get the players to read the report before we start the next session.  That way I don't have to do as much of a recap to the previous session and we start playing faster.

3. It Helps Players - Real-life happens and it is a more common occurence as we get older that we have to forgoe our game night to deal with other priorities.  Having a session blog helps missing players to pick up where they left and still feel like a valued member of the group.

4. Player Engagement - Players like to read about their exploits every week.  I know of at least one player in our group who loves to see their quotes in print.  They know that they can always send me an update or an amendment if they want to highlight something or heaven forbid if I got it wrong

5. Free Content for my Blog - A selfish reason, I know, but it hardly makes me a monster.  I love the fact that I have weeks worth of sessions on my blog which I reminisce about in my dotage.  I've also published session reports on RPGGeek, so if you are a member send me a gamebuddy request.

Why Don't You? 

It's surprisingly easy, why don't you have a go yourself, you just might like it.  If you are already blogging your sessions, stick a link in the comments below as I would love to share them with my readers.

The Scribe, by George Cattermole - Art UK

One Year On - Dragons Keep Roleplay Club

It's 2022 and the COVID-19 debacle rages on.  One of the casualties of the Coronavirus pandemic was my old club.  The pandemic was a catalyst for division and greatly reduced attendance as fear and panic spread across the membership, it ceased to function in any meaningful way.

Pulling the Plug

This club had been founded on the principles of democracy, every member having an equal say in how the club was run.  Unfortunately this led to internal politics when most members just wanted to turn up, play games and have fun.  Running that club became a constant battle of personalities, skullduggery and in-fighting.  The pandemic was a cover story for usurpers to spread rumour, lies and deceit in private channels in order to facilitate a popular uprising.  

Unfortunately, the patient was considered to be unsaveable and the tough decision to pull the plug had to be made.  This enabled the membership to ultimately make their own decisions about how they wanted to roleplay going forward.  The club was dead, long live the new club.

Sacrifice

Running a club is a thankless task and I have played my small part in helping to run numerous roleplaying clubs over the last 30 years.  The problems are diverse but mainly revolve around organising games so that everyone has something to play.  Clubs evolve organically, expanding and retreating as the winds of fortune blow and the real-life priorities of members compete for their valuable time and energy.

It takes a certain amount of sacrifice to run a club and a management team that can commit to doing what the club needs rather than what they need as a player or a games master for the good of the group.

I have learned a hard lesson in that a club is not a democracy.  Democracy empowers people with a voice and a platform upon which to speak their opinions.  However, without effective rules, governance and constitutional principles it can easily turn to Anarchy.  For a club to thrive it has to have strong leadership and direction, it has to have doers and not talkers, because ideas are ten a penny and talk is cheap.  A thriving club is one where everyone is engaged and they want to come to enjoy themselve and not to talk about politics or how they could run things better if only they had a chance.

Green Shoots of Recovery 

January of 2021 saw the birth of a new club, Dragons Keep Roleplay Club, founded by a small group of 6 people with the core principle of "being excellent to each other" and fostering engagement.    The management team run things for the benefit of members and the members only duty is to make sure that they and their fellow players are engaged and enjoying themselves.
 

One Year Later

I am happy to say that we have exploded in size and the membership has swelled to  around 25 members and every one of them turning up every Friday night.  We have gone from an online only existence, playing our first games during lockdown via Zoom and Roll20 to being once again an IRL club with 5 different games on offer.

We hosted our first Games Day and Christmas Party which was very well attended by members and a huge amount of games were played, turkey consumed and sprouts scowled at.  

 

 

We have produced a stable funding platform to guarantee our future.  We now have a merch store so that members can digitally pay their subs and help to fund the club through their purchases, a website which punches well above it's weight, a management team who understands what the members want and actively make that happen.

 

I am proud to say that we have created a space where people can put their work-a-day worries aside and for 4 hours escape to worlds of wonder safe in the knowledge that the people around them have their best intentions at heart. 

However, the most important thing is that this club is full of excellent people who are the most engaged bunch of players and gamesmasters that I have ever had the pleasure to call my friends.  Here is a toast to the future and the roads we will journey together.

Fellow Dragons... Live long and prosper.