Many (many) moons ago when I was in college, I used to frequent a comic shop Accrington called Twin Suns. Accrington is a pretty dull northern town to be honest, fair share of pubs and pound shops and not a lot else, so any time I was in town I used to head straight to Twins Suns. Mostly a comic and collectible shop, they had a decent collection of CCG and RPGs also. I was well into the hobby by then, there was no turning back, so I used to spend ages pouring over the shops contents. I used to drag my girlfriend with me on our college breaks showing her cool stuff (she is now my wife and luckily still just as patient with my game related ramblings).

The shop was owned by Nas, a super friendly, super helpful guy who was totally in it for the love of the cool stuff he sold. He was always up for a chat and ready to help with any advice you asked for.

Then I left college, got a job out of town and didn’t go for a long while. Few years later I moved back to Accrington and was gutted to see that Twin Suns had closed down. The last bastion of geekdom, engulfed by the dreary normality of a northern town. It wasn’t just the shop closing that was depressing, but it showed that the hobby I love was in further decline. I felt bad for Nas also who had put a lot into the shop.

Fast forward to today, still in Accrington, married, 2 awesome kids and in a position where I am trying to do my bit for geekdom with my store, blog, YouTube channel, and everything else we try and do. I took the family to a Star Wars Fan Day (which was great BTW) and was walking around the stalls, resisting the urge to spend hundreds on Star Wars toys (again), when I saw Nas on a stall. I went to say hello, and as it happens the shop had moved, not closed down. It is now known as the Bat Cave and is in Blackburn, been there for 7 years and going strong. This made me very happy, firstly Nas’s business is still doing well, but it’s also a sign that the Geek is strong where I live. Hopefully we can do something cool with Nas at the Bat Cave, maybe run some game demos if he is willing.

Check his shop out if you are in the area, and if we are ever there doing anything we will be shouting it from the roof tops.

http://www.bat-cave.co.uk/

Bit of a tangent this post, but I want to talk about computer games briefly, and why developers of today should look at gaming roots for inspiration.

You see, when computer gaming was in its infancy, gameplay was everything. The Spectrum, the BBC, all the way up to the Commodore 64 and Amiga, graphics were mostly functional. At the time they still blew us away, however developers had to hook us with gameplay rather than eye candy. In the genre of RPG, we were still coming out of text based games phase (“NORTH, NORTH, USE BUCKET ON FROG” ), so the players own imagination was left to do a lot of the work. It’s like the game gave you the starting imagery and your imagination filled the blanks.

As games became more sophisticated we were given better visuals, but the game still had to try hard to give us the gameplay and atmosphere to pull us in. The game that did this effortlessly was Dungeon Master. A game I had for the Atari ST, and a game I played for weeks. One of the first dungeon crawlers, you lead a party of 4 adventurers in first person perspective through a perilous dungeon. Full of puzzles and monsters, it tried to bring an element of realism also. You had to worry about light using oil torches and magic, you got hungry so had to eat food. I can still remember the fear, sitting in the darkness when my torch ran out and I could hear a mummy groaning in the other room, I was petrified.

For those of you who have not seen the game here is a video courtesy of thejoyofsticks:

Now, jump to today where Almost Human has created homage to that type of game, with today’s graphics, Legend of Grimrock.

It looks amazing, but virtually every gameplay element was recycled from Dungeon Master. That is not a complaint, I am very happy they did this, as they let me and others revisit a game like this with today’s technology, however I do have one observation. I have seen various Youtube overviews and reviews of the game where they mention certain gameplay aspects that they like. They talk about these aspects like they are fresh, different ideas. For example the magic system. You find scrolls with spells on, shown by a series of symbols. You (as in your actual self with your actual brain) have to remember these symbols and use them to cast spells. This spell system was in Dungeon Master all those years ago. The same with the lighting, the puzzles, all this old gameplay is there but it all feels so fresh as we have not seen it in so long.

The question is, if this gameplay is so good, why haven’t we seen it in so long? One of the reasons is computer games are now a much bigger industry. As with any mass market product, publishers think that they have to dumb down theirs games to appeal to the largest audience, this results in shallow games. The indie revolution has shown that intelligent, deep gameplay sells without the need for a publisher, who is only interested in seeing the same formulas regurgitated over and over again.

Platforms such as Steam (which removes the need for a publisher), or Kick Starter (which allows you to gain public funding and support for a product before production) mean that we are seeing more games that we want, rather than games that publishers think we want.

Any who, go and buy Legend of Grimrock, and either reminisce about the good old days or take a fresh look at a brilliant game.

And I will try not to be as grumpy next blog

Laters all

First, a confession. I am late to the Thunderstone party. I played Thunderstone at the Games Expo last year and was very impressed. It was a quick and easy game to play with plenty of depth. Since then I kept meaning to pick a copy up but it didn’t happen. There have been a couple of base sets and several expansions, however this latest base set looks to clear up a lot of rules questions and advance the rules further, so it’s ideal time to crash the Thunderstone party.

We have already put up our Thunderstone videos showing what you get in the box (over here) and how to play the game (and over here), so we took it to the Wigan Wargames game night for a play. We played a 5 player game with all new players, at the start of the game someone asked how long the game ran for. The box says 45 mins, however our game took 3 hours to wrap up. Like I say however, 5 new players, so there were a lot of rules checking and working out strategies. The last half hour we all knew exactly what we were doing and flew through the turns, so our next game will be much quicker. There are a few things you can do to speed your turn up as well if you have a few players, you can be looking at your cards and deciding what you want to do as the other players take their turn, as most of the actions you take are not directly affected by other players actions.

Our video takes you through the rules in more detail, but the idea of the game is to build your personal deck of cards, full of heroes and weapons, then work your way through a dungeon of monster cards till you beat the Thunderstone bearer. At that point all players add together the victory point values of each monster they killed, the player with the highest points wins. Each turn you can either go to the Village and buy cards to add to your deck, or go to the Dungeon to fight monsters.

The game started well, the players picked up the base rules quickly. As with all card games, you can only fit so many rules on the card, so some of the cards needed more clarification for everyone. Some benefits were not immediately obvious, but when combined with other cards the benefits became clear.

After having played a solo game before hand there were a few tactics I wanted to try. When you are in the village buying heroes you can either buy a Regular (a basic fighter that you start the game with 6 of) or a level 1 named hero. These have special abilities and can be levelled up past the first level to level 3 to increase their power using xp points gained from killing monsters. Also Regulars can be levelled up to any level 1 hero. I tried to avoid buying any more regulars and went straight for the heroes, with the plan up level them up as soon as possible.

Quite early on we got a couple of basic rules wrong, a common problem when playing a new game for the first time. One of the starting cards is a Thunderstone Shard which give you +2 to a heroes strength. Our rookie mistake was to add that the attack strength when fighting monsters, wrong! Each hero has a strength value that determines what weapons they can use, as each weapon also has a strength rating. A hero can only use a weapon if their strength rating it equal or higher than the strength rating on the weapon card. What this meant is we were giving heroes +2 attack, but they could have been using weapons that they previously couldn’t because there were not strong enough. By the time we had worked out we were doing it wrong it was too late, so we carried on using our “house rule” for that game.

Initially we also over looked the Regular special ability. In a dungeon if he is equipped with a Polearm you can pull an additional card for the combat. Your starting deck contains Longspears, which have the Polemarm keyword, so can be used for this ability. This brings an element of chance into what could be a dry combat system, where you counted your attack value and knew before entering combat if you were going to win. The Regular card, and other cards that let you draw extra cards once in combat, allows you to take a chance and start a combat with a creature that has a higher defence value than you could beat. Then, when drawing the extra cards you are gambling on getting cards that boost your total attack value.

I greatly enjoyed trying to work out the card synergies available. The scenario we played had the Bandia’s Wisdom card in it. This gives you +1 strength to each hero, gives you 3 xp, but then takes 2 xp from you at the end of combat. On its own the card doesn’t make a lot of sense. However, when used with Whetmage in combat, this lets you level a character up during combat and put it straight in your hand. So, cast the spell, gain 3xp, level up, then fight straight away with the newly levelled character. If you don’t have the 2xp to give back at the end it doesn’t matter, so you might as well use them. As you use different card sets from the basic set each game, you will be able to see different card synergies and have to be able to work out how to use the cards together.

We all managed to enjoy curse cards at one point or another. A curse card is put into your discard pile to be drawn at a later time. This can happen a few ways, it’s usually monster effects that curse you, and sometimes give you the option to curse other players. When drawn all curse cards give -1 attack and have various ways of discarding them if you draw them into your hand. You can take a rest that turn (do nothing else and destroy the card), or you can carry out the action on the card to destroy it. These actions vary, one player had to discard 2 gold, I got one where you basically had to walk into the dungeon naked to destroy it, harsh.

Another observation we made whilst getting our heroic party ready, if you get a strong draw of monsters in the dungeon you may be in a position where nobody can defeat them with the cards they have. The options seem to be either keep trying to build your deck and get better hands, or fight the monster and lose. The reason for this is when you lose, the monster goes to the bottom of the deck and the dungeon fills up again, with possibly weaker monsters. At the time we mulled over why, if you thought you already had enough victory points, you wouldn’t just purposely lose fights to get to the Thundersotne bearer at the bottom of the deck to end the game and win it. After thinking about it, it’s too risky a manoeuvre, it would mean wasting a turn for quite a few rounds whilst other players potentially took out the lesser powered monsters that came out and claimed those victory points. Also some monster cards have unpleasent side effects or curses for losing combat, or by not beating the the monsters defence by a certain amount.

The game finished with one clear winner (not me), however 2nd to 5th place was a closer run thing. The game took around 3 hours to play as I said before, but that was mainly due to getting used to the rules and most cards prompting the question “so what does this do?”. Next play through should be a lot quicker. Due to the way it plays you draw your next hand at the end of your turn, so as play passes around the table you can be planning your next move to save time. One thing we did find good for new players is on your turn you actually reveal your cards so everyone can see them. This makes it much easier to help new players with their cards without resorting to cryptic conversations about what cards they might have.

As with these types of games, at the end you don’t want it to finish as you have spent all game crafting your perfect deck. Although it is very satisfying going though your deck counting victory points at the end, and looking at the little army you have put together.

I liked this game a lot, and will getting a lot more play out of it. If you want to pick up a copy its available from us here.

Thanks for reading!

Our friends over at GMS Magazine have produced an unboxing video of Pathfinder Roleplaying Beginner Box. And it looks looks very very good. Take a look at the video below, then if you like the look order from us here http://www.grimtreegames.com/pathfinder-rpg-beginner-box-p-141.html

As promised the second part of our video treatment for the Thunderstone Advance game. We set the game up and show you how its played.

All of our previous videos are on our channel here, and the game is available from us here. If you have any questions head over to our forum and ask away!

Hello all. Haven’t mentioned it here previously as we post updates on all of our social media pages and have a youtube link up top, but we have a youtube channel where we unbox games and give overviews to show how they are played. Here is an unboxing we have just produced for Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin. The Game overview video is due very soon. Hope you like!

All of our previous videos are on our channel here, and the game is available from us here.

There has been a battle raging in the gaming world for quite some time. Its hard to recollect, but to my mind the instigators were Pirates vs. Ninjas. In a totally unprovoked move, Zombies entered the fray pitting them selves against both Pirates and Ninjas across many gaming platforms, quickly followed by Aliens.

Tasty Minstrel Games presents the End Game. For The Win will see these eternal enemies do battle. Pirates vs Ninjas vs Zombies vs Aliens vs….. Monkeys.

For The Win is a 2 player abstract tile based game currently on Kick Starter. I was kindly presented with a print and play copy to have a go and see what I thought. What did I think? Its full of win.

The rules are simple enough, you each have 10 tiles, 2 Pirates, 2 Ninjas, 2 Zombies, 2 Aliens and 2 Monkeys. Each tile has a cross on the back so it can be flipped over to show that is has been activated. You take turns placing and moving tiles until one player has one of all 5 tile types touching, either in a straight line or diagonally, and they have to be active (not flipped to the side showing the cross).

The game is played in rounds, with each player taking it in turns to go first for that round. In a round play passes between the 2 players until you run out of actions, you get 5 actions in a round and on your go you can spend 1 or 2. You can spend an action to:

• Add a tile, cannot be adjacent to your own (very important)
• Move a tile 1 space (face up only)
• Shove tiles 1 space (face up only)
• Use an ability (flip tile face down afterwards)
• Flip a tile face up

When you place a tile it cant be touching one of your existing tiles, so you are going to need to move those tiles around to try and get 5 of all the tile type touching. As you can see from the actions you can move them around, but its much better (and more fun) to use the tiles special abilities to get the tiles where you need them to be.

• The Zombie turns non-zombies into zombies or flips them if no Zombies left to place.
• The Pirate shoots adjacent tiles out of cannons, moving them wherever you want.
• The Ninja through the power of stealth can disappear and reappear wherever desired.
• The Alien utilizes its tractor beam to pull people next to it.
• The Monkey messes everything up and toggles all of her neighbors.

As you are shooting and pulling tiles all over the place, you have to be very careful you are not lining your opponent up for a win. In the games played so far there are a couple of roles that seem to have emerged.

The Movers

The Pirate, the Alien and the Ninja are all about getting tiles to where you need them. Pirates shoot adjacent tiles away from themselves, Aliens pull tiles towards themselves, and Ninjas move where the hell they like. Dangerous.

The Foilers

Monkeys and Zombies ruin peoples days. If there is a chain being lined up by your opponent, get a monkey over there and flip all adjacent tiles. That will annoy them. Zombies are kind of the same, interfering with adjacent tiles to foil plans.

The bit I like about this game is the combos that are possible. It means you go through your 5 available actions in the round quicker as you are using 2 actions at once, but you can pull off some awesome moves. Use the Pirate to fire a Monkey tile over the grid to flip an imminent winning chain of tiles. Use the Alien to pull a Zombie next to you to infect the opponent. There are many sneaky manoeuvres possible when combining the tiles actions.

This game is currently on kick starter here and hopefully will get enough backers to be produced, I really hope it does. I am a big fan of small, quick games. You never know when an opportunity might present itself for a game, I carry my Zombie Dice with me at all times just in case. For the Win will probably end up replacing those. If we are lucky maybe Tasty Minstrel Games has expansions up their sleeves, more players maybe? A 4 player game would be very good (if a little head breaking). Or maybe another tile type? We all know that Cowboys and Aliens don’t get along.

Once line summary, For The Win = Epic Win. Get you copy as soon as possible!

Hello all, I took our freshly unboxed Game Of Thrones to the Wigan Wargames club before Christmas to give it a test drive. Being a club consisting of thoroughly nice people it’s always good to sit down with them as even if the game is rubbish, you are in good company. Luckily, Game of Thrones is not rubbish, it is very good. I however, I am rubbish at conquest type games. I always misjudge expand vs consolidate decisions, attack the wrong fronts and have seemingly endless bad luck with dice rolls. The last excuse I listed was not applicable for Game of Thrones however, in a normal game there is no luck factor, just cold hard tactics. So I was really screwed.

We played a 4 player game, so that eliminated a few of the factions from the game. You chose one of the Houses that feature in the books and TV show, I chose Lannister, my opponents were Stark, Baratheon and Greyjoy. The game dictates how the starting units are set up so we all set up our pieces. The Starks set up in the north, they have quite a wide expanse of land that they can expand into, however they have few castles up there to take over. Capturing castles is the objective of the game, you have 10 turns to be the one with the most castles, or the first to 7 wins the game. So, that makes life a bit harder for the Starks as they have to push right down into enemy territory for castles. The flip side to that is they have a lot of uncontested land that they can use to consolidate power. Consolidate power is one of the possible orders that you can give your troops, and the order mechanics are the real meat of the game. You have several orders available,

March: Allows you to march onto an adjacent territory and attack enemy troops if they are there.

Defend: Troops stay put but get a bonus to defence.

Support: Your troops don’t move, but can assist in any adjacent combat.

Raid: Remove an adjacent Raid, Support, or Consolidate power icon.

Consolidate Power: Gain a power token. Used to keep control of land once you have moved out of it and to bid for power.

Everyone places their order tokens face down, then everyone flips them over, then they carry out Raid orders, then March orders, then Consolidate Power orders.

So as you can see, with no one to attack or use raid orders in the beginning the Starks can build up a pool of power tokens. Power tokens are very important as they are used when bidding for power. At certain points in the game all players bid secretly to gain a position on one of the three influence tracks, more on this later. This means that even though the Starks had not a lot of castles, they were able to bid their way to power.

That’s enough about the Starks, people want to hear about the Lannisters. I was situated in the middle of the map, close to Greyjoy, and with the Baratheons a little further south. There was a number of castles here to take and it would be hotly contested.

I won’t go into the details of the rules here, we do that in the game overview video here, and that was hard enough. It’s a tricky one, as the rules when read don’t seem complicated, but the act of trying to explain them seems mammoth. I think it’s because of the way rules interact with each other, you can’t really just explain one rule and leave the rest out until it is relevent, you need to know everything before you start. However once you know the rules the game flows very quickly.

One the first turn, I thought it would be a good idea to come out fighting, so I launched an attack against the Greyjoys on my first turn. Unfortunately this made a counter attack inevitable, using a tactic I had not taken into account. Units can travel via ships without penalty and any distance. My shore based units were attacked by troops that came from a few sea spaces away, and were defeated. Losing units this early was not ideal and I started to lose my foothold. This tactic is important to remember as sea spaces surround the map. Enough ships and you can attack the other side on the map with one order. At the same time House Baratheon was amassing troops and land mass.

Here is where another mechanic came into play. You can only have as many armies as your supply track indicates. An army is any territory that has 2 or more units in, and your supply track is a track on the board that shows how may armies you can have. The more territories you control with barrel symbols, the more armies you can have. When you gain new troops, you place them on the castle that produced them, and the trigger for gaining new troops is a random card draw so you never know when it’s going to come. Based on that I as the game progressed I was reluctant to move my troops away from my castle and leave it weak, but that meant when mustering came (the term for acquiring more troops) I couldn’t place them as it would mean my army was too big on my castle.

As the game progressed the order placing phase became nerve wracking. Trying to second guess opponents and place suitable orders is one of the core game play mechanics, and also can lead to some spectacular back stabbing (Of course I will support your attack *flip* Sucker). There were are least 2 turns where myself and house Baratheon had 2 territories just placing defend orders, neither side wanting to risk combat. Myself and house Greyjoy agreed on a fragile truce whilst we dealt with Baratheon who was quickly expanding, whilst Stark was busy acquiring land and power. I lost several battles by going up against small numbers, who had a cunning support order from a larger force behind.

A quick note on the influence tracks at this point. At random points in the game dictated by event cards, players have to bid for power on each of the tracks. In turn players secretly bid available power tokens for The Iron Throne, The Fiefdoms, and the Kings Court. Being at the top of each track has its advantages, the Iron Throne determines turn order, the Fifdomes determines combat ties, and the Kings Court give you access to special orders. There are over advantages that we go through in the Overview video. At any one time you will probably see a benefit in one of those and bid your power for that, however when you need more you need to split your available power between them when bidding. This is when alliances and formed and broken, you want to be on the good side of powerful players, however when their influence drops, then is the time to pounce. This game is ready for some heavy backstabbing and plotting, which is awesome. The rules do state that with a few limitations, they encourage players forming deals and plotting between themselves.

We saw the influence track change wildly in our game, however House Baratheon seemed to have sway most of the time through clever bidding.

In the end though, Greyjoy came right round my territory and rushed a Baratheon castle on the last turn, giving them victory. I know I am generally pretty rubbish at Conquest games, but House Lannister needs a solid plan from turn 1 and to keep the pressure on. The Starks and Baratheons seem to have a more leisurely start, but in hindsight if I had made a rush for the castles sooner that may have won me the game.

So there you go, hopefully you get a taste of the rules and tactics possible. It’s like I said previously, it’s not a complicated game when you break down the individual parts, but the game when played has so many tactics available, its can be hard to get your head around your options to begin with. Once the game is flowing though it is all second nature. I can’t wait to play this again, the depth of the game means there is plenty of life left in it yet.

That’s it for now, hope you enjoyed the read and I will be blogging again soon.

Thanks for reading!

Hello all, I have not blogged for a while. I can put that down to a 1 month old little boy called Ethan, who demands more attention than we usually have at any given time. I really don’t mind though as he is the best things since sliced bread (and I really like sliced bread). I have a few reviews and bits I need to write up, but in the mean time I am going to post a Dungeons and Dragons 4E adventure I wrote a while ago. I did it as a contribution to the Winter is coming RPG Blog festival, which was a great sucess, so i thought I would re-post it back at home whilst I get my act together and drum up some new content. So, here we go, Winters Wrath is designed to be used for any level of character at any point in a campaign. It start as the characters enter a new town, so its a good adventure to slot into any down time your character have. Let me know what you think and what happens if you run it. Good Luck!!

Fireside stories are told next to the warmth of the flame about Winter’s Wrath. Few have survived to tell the tale of the bone chilling cold and the shapeless entities that reach from the ice.

Winter’s Wrath envelops whole towns with darkness and ice, only when it’s finished claiming the souls of all within does it wither back to reveal an empty town, all living creatures pulled into the abyss. The few that have managed to escape the Wrath are left half mad and gibbering about ice monstrosities claiming all lives in sight.

Winter’s Wrath is an adventure side track to give your campaign a winter feel any time of the year. It’s designed so you can spring it on the players during any town-based down time. As the players are relaxing the sky grows dark and blots out the sun, ice spreads over the ground and freezes all water where it stands, then creatures of ice pull themselves from the ground to lay waste to the townspeople. That is, they do until the players do something about it.

The Wrath Cometh

It would be good to set the scene up before introducing the Wrath. A good hook would be to have one of the aforementioned mad men that has seen the event from a nearby town burst into the tavern the players occupy, and blurt out the horrors he has just seen. He witnessed the sky grow black, the very air seem to freeze, and ice formed monstrosities emerged from the ground. He hid whilst the other towns folk were enveloped by the ice creatures and pulled into the earth. In time once everyone else had been taken the dark sky and ice passed, and he fled the town. This could prompt others in the tavern to declare they have heard of Winter’s Wrath, building it up as a mysterious event that claims all the souls of a town then moves on. Of course a few people in the tavern will declare them as mad and a debate will ensue.

As this conversation is happening, the sky slowly starts to grow dark. Not just night time, pitch, unholy dark (obviously much more effective if this is done during a day time setting). Once the sky goes dark, the players notice they can see their breath in the air, a thin film of ice begins to creep across the floor and over the tables, Ale freezes rock solid in their flagons. At this point panic spreads and the patrons of the tavern will flee outside, to see shifting shapes of multi limbed creatures formed from moving ice grabbing people and pulling them into the ground.

Once the tavern freezes over, the players should go outside and encounter a group of ice creatures. The screams of innocent people should prompt them to go outside, if not just have the ice creatures burst into the tavern. Either way the towns folk are being attacked and pulled into the ground around them. A group of the ice creatures focus on the players. The players see the townsfolk being attacked, put one or two of the attacked villagers close the players encounter. The players then have the option to save their own skin or help the villagers. As soon as combat starts have 2 villagers grabbed by Frozen Earth as described below, they have 5 rounds from the start of combat to rescue them by defeating the ice creatures that are pulling them down. If they rescue them they then have companions for the rest of the adventure.

Seeing the villagers being pulled screaming in the earth is indeed maddening, and will have an effect on the most hardened hero. Make an attack (Heroric +8 vs Will, Paragon +18 vs Will, Epic +28 vs Will), on a hit the character is Dazed, save ends.

Use any group of creatures that is a suitable build and XP cost for your level of players. Use the stats for that group of monsters, however describe the creatures as shifting forms of ice. Their legs come from a main body of ice that walk it across the frozen ground, and limbs that end in blocks of ice for smashing or blades of ice for slashing. In the centre of the body is a cold black orb for an eye, never blinking. Any attacks your chosen creatures have substitute the descriptions for ice related attacks, bow attacks become launched shafts of ice, axe attacks become swinging blades of ice limbs. For example if you were to use an Orc war band for this you would build the group of monsters as you usually would spending XP and balancing the group, but describe their abilities as being ice related, e.g. Orc Sergeant’s Warriors Surge, use the same attack but describe the attack as a sharp appendage shooting from the creatures body and hitting the player, then seemingly drain life force and reform the damaged ice. Use your imagination here, the idea is to make this scalable and compatible with whatever groups of monsters you with to use. As well as the monsters usual stats add the following ability:

Frozen Earth

The creature performs a normal grab action. On its next turn instead of attacking it pulls the player into the ground. As characters are varying heights measure the depth of the pull in rounds. After 5 rounds the player is totally submerged in the earth, effectively being buried alive. Once being pulled down no push pull or slide can break the grab. Once the ice creature has been defeated or has released the grab a strength check is needed to free them, either from the affected player or by the party. The DC starts at 8 for Heroic tier, 13 for Paragon, 18 and Epic, then add +2 for every turn they are pulled further. Once submerged only another players can dig the earth to reach them, as the earth is frozen this is a difficult task and can only really be done out of combat, effectively taking any player submerged out of combat until the end of the encounter. As long as the other players don’t dawdle they have time to dig up any companions at the end of combat and pull them to safety.

Make this an easy to moderate encounter as it is relatively easy to quickly bring all the party down. This encounter should serve to make the players wary of the ice creatures.

Once these creatures are defeated the screams have subsided, the PCs realise that they are the only people left in sight, unless they managed to rescue a couple of villagers. These can be known NPCs if the players are in a familiar town, or new ones of your devising. They can give the players a bit more background on the town as described below, but should also be used to add tension. In any future combat the villagers will run to the shadows and avoid combat at all costs.

Clues in the Dark

After the attack they can explore and try to find a way out of the situation. The town is suitably eerie, being void of life and totally silent, and this should be played upon. Shadows cast on walls of creatures waiting to pounce when investigated will just be old brooms, distance cries will be heard then muffled. If the players had rescued some villagers the villagers can be used here to crank up the tension. When they pass a house which belongs to someone the surviving villager knows, the villager runs inside shouting their name. The players should panic about this and try to stop them from making massive amounts of noise. One of the villagers can have a melt down and curl up into a ball, refusing to take another step, a diplomacy check needed to move them on.

If the players try to leave town any street they walk along will be lead them back into town. If they leave one player in the middle of town and walk out they will eventually end up back in the middle of town. Streets and building seem to shift. This should make the players feel very uncomfortable and very uneasy.

Trying to determine what has happened and what to do is a skill challenge, this can be a complexity 3 with 8 successes before 3 failures, as this can be an opportunity for the players to use their ingenuity to try and work out what has happened. Any good ideas the players or yourself come up with as skill checks to determine what has happed are valid, however few suggestions are:

• When exploring the town they can enter buildings, a moderate Perception check can determine that drawers and cupboards seem to be open as though someone was looking for something. An easy Perception check at another house can see the same thing, in fact most houses they have been in. If they don’t seem to be exploring the houses have a noise come from within. It’s just something falling to the floor, but it will build tension.
  
• A moderate thievery can see that some of the houses’ locks have been tampered with from the outside to gain entrance.
  
• A hard tracking perception check can see that there seems to be a single wheeled track in the frost outside, leading to each house.
  
• A moderate Arcana check can help determine firstly that there is an air of magic behind the mysterious events. A hard check can help the player feel a pull to a central location, as though there is a source of the magic. They won’t be able to find the source just based on this roll as the sensation is too faint, however it will help in the overall skill challenge.
  
• If the players rescued villagers they can try Streetwise or Diplomacy when talking to them gain a better insight to the layout of the town.
  
• A Climb check could allow a player to climb to the top of a building to get a better view of the town and the surroundings.
  

A Wizard did it

If they succeed in the above skill challenge they are lead right to the cause of the Winter’s Wrath. The wheel tracks lead to an old storage / barn house that stands empty, apart from a large open trapdoor and a wheel barrow full of miscellaneous goodies, loot plundered from people’s houses around town. The trap door leads to a large dug out cellar with steps down. If the players are cautious at this point they can attempt to sneak down. In the cellar is a balding crooked man, muttering to himself. His robes are filthy and worn, and his features are worn and wrinkled. He looks very very old. He is gathering up some belongings. In the centre of the cellar is a 4 foot staff planted into the ground standing upright. The golden shaft leads up to a large shining sapphire which is glowing brightly. Sparks of blue and white ice leap out from the jewel and skitter across the floor.

If they fail the above skill challenge the old man sees the players as he is wheeling his wheel barrow of loot into the barn as they walk around the streets outside. As both parties see each other there is enough distance and surprise for the old man to run into the barn, into the cellar and close the trapdoor. The scenario plays out the same as below, however they now have a trapdoor that needs to be broken open before they can get to him and he will still summon ice creatures next to the players whilst he is in the safety of the cellar.

The staff is the cause of Winter’s Wrath, and the old man has been using it a long long time to clear towns of their valuables then move on, to do to the same again.

If the players manage to talk to him he is called Gilbert, however he does not want to talk to them and seems horrified that is cunning plot has been foiled after so many years. For stats use an appropriate human of the same level of the PCs, that will only be for HP and defences, he will not try to actively attack himself. Once the players see Gilbert they have options. He is in no state to fight, so when confronted by the players he will quickly hold out his hand and clench his fist, he is wearing a golden ring with a glowing sapphire embedded in it. He mutters a magic phrase and summons more ice creatures to do his bidding. The ice creatures pull themselves from the ground between the old man and the players as a form of protection. If there were rescued villagers at this point they will avoid combat to hide in the shadows, and as the ice creatures are protecting Gilbert they will not actively attack them.

For the ice creatures use the same abilities as before, only this time, as soon as one is destroyed, the old man summons more to take the place of any fallen creatures when it is his turn as his standard actions (he can summon as many as need to replace them in one standard action). Use any monster soldier stats of the same level of the players and summon one creature for each player. The ring also has protective qualities, whatever stats you are using for Gilbert, add +10 to his defenses for Heroic tier, +15 for Paragon and +20 for Epic. Any attempt to attack him is met by a shower of blue ice as the attack it hits a protective field projected by the ring. If the players manage to perform a grab on the Gilbert (at his normal AC) one of them can try and take his ring off. If they do this the ice creatures stop in their tracks. They slowly turn to Gilbert and advance. He screams at them to stop, declaring himself their master, but to no avail. They advance, envelop him and pull him into the earth.

Alternatively they can just kill him by getting hits past his defensive ring, at which point the ice creatures melt away. Once the staff is pulled from the ground Winter’s Wrath fades from the town and all returns to normal.

However, if all the players are grabbed and are being pulled into the earth at the same time Gilbert sees the opportunity to flee. He grabs the staff and runs for the exit, when he does this the effects of Winter’s Wrath fade and the players are freed from the ice creatures, but the process is slow enough for the Gilbert to flee with his loot, leaving the PCs with nothing.

Wrapping up

There are quite a few ways this can end, and this leads to different potential further adventures.

Depending on how dark your campaign is, even if the players retrieve the staff the villagers can remain in the earth and the town a turn into a ghost town. If they failed to rescue any villagers they now stand alone, probably the last people to be seen leaving the village. This could lead to the law enforcement hunting them down and getting them to explain what happened.

Or on the other hand the villagers can all be regurgitated back to the surface safe and sound, the soul that now handles the staff a kinder one than the last if they retrieved the staff. They will be hailed as heroes and rewarded handsomely.

The loot in the wheelbarrow can go back to the town if the town’s people are brought back, if not that can be the encounter loot. The staff and ring have value, but without knowing the arcane methods the players cannot use it to summon and control Winter’s Wrath or use the ring for protection. However if they spend the time to find the right help they may be able to use their powers again, to what ends would depend on your players own imagination.

The staff and ring were actually stolen from a very powerful wizard long ago by Gibert when he was a young boy. The wracked body and etched face of Gilbert is not just due to old age, it is the constant fear of the wizard finally catching him and exacting his revenge. Unearthly Servants of the wizard were always tracking Gilbert on is travels, constantly searching for their masters artifacts. Now the players have them they will be unaware of this, it’s only a matter of time before the wizard’s underlings try to take them back. Will the players try to bargain a way out and hand over the items, or keep the chase going and flee with them?

Whether this ends with the players defeating Gilbert, freeing the villagers and gaining loot, or empty handed with all the towns’ people dead, I hope you enjoy Winter’s Wrath.

Hello again, we got Elder Sign in the store recently and decided to do the usual unboxing and gameplay videos as we usually do. We arranged to send a review copy off to GMS magazine, but before we did I had a few solo games to see how it played.

Fantasy flight + Cthulhu = guaranteed awesome. I think I am right in saying that is the assumption. I would also say that is the correct assumption with Elder Sign.

It is a dice based game so there is a fair amount of abstracted play, even for such a heavily themed game. The game is set in museum filled with ancient artefacts, most of them based in the Cthulhu mythos and wanting to devour the world. The main card are the Adventure cards, Ancient One cards, and the Investigator cards. You first pick an Ancient One to go up against, either at random or pick one. Each one has different abilities that may effect the game. You then choose Investigator cards, these again have different abilities that you can use through the game, some Investigator will work better with others. Then deal six adventure cards face up, these represent the starting tasks the Investigators must over come. There is then the museum entrance card where the players start.

The basic goal of the game is the players must gather elder sign tokens, the amount they need is different for each Ancient One and is shown on the Ancient One card. They gather these by completing Adventure cards. They need to do this before the doom track on the Ancient Ones card fills up. Once it does the bad guy is released and the players need to defeat it or lose the game.

To complete an Adventure card you simply move your token to it then gather the dice. Each task on the card is a line of symbols, you must roll the dice and match the symbols to complete the task. Keep doing that to complete all tasks and you beat the card.

Sounds easy, but there are limitations on the dice. Firstly there are only 6 green dice you roll. There are a yellow and red dice that roll better, but they can only be used if you have a card that plays them. You roll all 6 dice and try to match symbols on the dice to a task on the Adventure Card. Say you need to roll a skull symbol to beat a task, if you beat it you put the dice that came up a skull symbol to one side and roll again to try to beat other tasks on the card, this time only with 5. To make it worse if you fail a roll you can roll again but with one less dice, you can do that until you have no dice and fail the card. There are ways to manipulate the dice, you can save a dice roll by placing it on a character token at your location, there are spell cards that can save dice rolls to be used in a later task, more on this later.

Each adventure card has rewards and penalties, rewards can item cards the give you more dice, clue tokens to give you a reroll on a dice, ally cards, the all important elder signs, and Other World cards. These are very similar to adventure cards however they usually give lots of elder signs on completion so you should hunt these out.

Penalties can be loss of health and sanity from the Investigators, doom track markers, and monster tokens. Monster work by adding another task to existing adventure cards making them harder to complete.

Any adventure card you defeat you keep and can spend their trophy points at the museum entrance for helpful goodies, such as more health or item cards.

On top of all that you have a clock tracker. It starts at 12 and moves a quarter round after each players turn. Every time it hits 12 again you pull a mythos card, which contains more unpleasantness in the form on monsters, doom track markers and other nasty things.

That’s the system in a rough nutshell, but is it good? I liked it, I played it solo which works really well as it’s very quick to setup and play. You can use it as a heavily themed version of solitaire on a rainy day. The rules are simple and quick, yet you have to use every trick at your disposal to win the game.

The artwork is amazing, as could be expected from Fantasy Flight Games. Some has been reused from Arkham Horror, but allot is original.

One piece of advice would be to always bear your items and clues tokens in mind and use all your resources when possible. If you wait and your Investigator dies you can always start again as it lets you come back as another character as long as the Ancient One isn’t active, however you lose all your cards and clue tokens. Death can be quick and unexpected, so live for the moment and use those advantages.

Another tactic to bear in mind is to anticipate midnight. The mythos card in play has an effect that happens at midnight, other cards can have midnight actions. If you bear those actions in mind you can limit the damage. For example there is a mythos card which adds a doom counter is you don’t have any unique items. If the clock is at 6 you have 2 turns to get an item to stop that effect.

You can play Elder sign solo, but even if you do it’s a good idea to control more than one investigator. One of the reasons for this is assisting. If another investigator is in your space you can save a dice result on their token after a failed roll, as you can do with your token. This is a very handy feature of more than 1 investigator, allowing you to keep rolled dice to help with the next roll of the task. There is a draw back however, if the card is failed any investigators assisting lose sanity or stamina.

Another drawback with focusing and assisting is when you hold a dice back it locks it for the remainder of the turn. So if you lock it on a result you think you will need, then you don’t, you are a dice down as you can’t reroll it.

Another tip that you will quickly discover, once monsters start appearing on cards there maybe cards you cannot complete with your standard 6 dice, so you need to use your items on those. Like I said, don’t be afraid to use them.

Lastly, you have to be lucky with dice rolls. I am notoriously unlucky, so some of my roll were quite frustrating, that’s the gods mocking my dice rolling however, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem with the game.

I liked this game a lot, good quick little game on your own or with mates. With a copious amount of Cthulhu.

Until next time

Mark