The Luminous Scroll

On Friday, I met with my good friend Gene for a small game of Battletech. While I've played in some fairly large convention games, this was only the third time I've battled against a single opponent with nothing but our wits and the rulebook to get us through. We set up a simple IntroTech two versus two meeting engagement: my Marauder MAD-3R and Stalker STLK-3F pitted against his Awesome AWS-8Q and Thunderbolt TDR-5S – 3rd Succession War stalwarts ready to throw-down on a map replete with my first deployment of my ever growing collection of HexTech terrain.

I think the map turned out great. The road section formed dangerous firelanes for the two snipers with enough cover from woods, hills and buildings to make positioning interesting.

We both opened with rapid advances. My Marauder covering the road, while the Stalker swept over onto the left flank to try to engage Gene's Thunderbolt before his Awesome could get into position to melt us down with its three PPCs. Alas, no good plan survives contact with the enemy. My attempt at indirect fire with the Marauder acting as spotter was a dismal failure, and the Marauder was unable to make much of a dent in the Thunderbolt that we'd caught by itself. With my Marauder coming off far worse than the Thunderbolt in the ensuing exchange of fire, I decided to go all out to try to inflict maximum damage before the Awesome could link up and cause us even more problems. This proved to be a costly mistake, causing the shutdown of both of my mechs in the same turn from heat and allowing both the Thunderbolt and Awesome to close on the prone mechs and hammer them with fire as they sizzled in the steaming mud.

Gene succumbed to the same frenzy of poor heat management that cost me tempo and position as he cycled through the Thunderbolt's loadout to try to score a kill. It went down hard, injuring the pilot. My cooled mechs restarted, the Marauder standing while the pilot of the Stalker failed his PSR to come crashing down again. Sensing a kill, Gene focused his mechs on my battered Marauder until the Awesome finally put a PPC into the cockpit, killing the pilot in a mech that was otherwise pummelled but fully operational.

My Stalker was able to score a second Hip crit that began a death-spiral for the Thunderbolt as it crashed down again, its pilot taking a fourth wound and blacking-out. The Stalker was in bad shape with no center torso armor left whatsoever thanks to a few PPC hits but otherwise in fighting shape. The game degenerated into a highly-tactical battle of position between the Awesome and the Stalker, as they hunted for maximum advantage between two bands of woods. As a side-show, the Stalker was able to tear chunks off the prone Thunderbolt when the Awesome declined to present a target. Slowly that Thunderbolt succumbed: losing its right torso, then one leg after the other, until engine crits finally took it out of the fight. Gene's Awesome wasn't able to score a killing blow on my compromised Stalker, while I was able to tear into his armor in multiple locations. After five hours of intense combat and a game that could easily go either way, we decided to call for a draw and grab some dinner.

All-in-all a fun game. We made some rules mistakes around LOS and cover but nothing too serious. We both felt like our heat management was pretty abysmal and cost us dearly in critical parts of the game. I think I made a major mistake in bringing the Marauder in too close to the Thunderbolt. I should have let it close on me while the Stalker caught up. That would have dragged the direct line the Awesome needed to slog across the battlefield to reach us. Lessons learned for sure.

Looking forward to playing again, probably with a lighter force and more mechs.

Today, we recorded our second episode of RPG Test Drive. I ran Mythic Bastionland as a one-shot, essentially for two hours of play-time, using Chris McDowall's Speed Shot approach. I'm thrilled to be part of this project, and working with a highly talented group of roleplayers and GMs. The group went in largely cold and had established their characters within the first fifteen minutes. I can't wait to be able to share the episode when we release it!

I had a fantastic time at KublaCon Prime this year.

Nostalgia was strong when playing Space Hulk, still one of my favorite games in a narrow category. I managed to make one extremely poor move in the second game we played, which totally collapsed my position within two turns. This game is brutally unforgiving of mistakes, especially those made by the Space Marine player. An absolute classic that I hope to see back in print someday.

On a total impulse I ran a 4-hour popup game of Mothership's The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, and I have to say I'm sold on its tri-fold format. Just enough information to allow me to run the game almost totally cold, without being too cluttered to scan in the moment. I could easily run this as an eight hour session with more (OK, any) forethought and prep. The first piece of advice I have for anyone running this for the first time is to make a plan for where all the workers are when the PCs arrive. Think in shifts. The Team Leader Sonya doesn't have a written pitch for the PCs, and I think she makes for a weak patron anyway. Much better to have an NPC disappear while the PCs are unloading their delivery and getting sign-offs.

My third run of Within the Charnel of Dreams was a solid success, at least by my estimation. Running Ypsilon 14 the night before left me confidently fluent in the rules, and previous tweaks had streamlined the game substantially. Without spoilers, all three groups I've run this for have executed mostly similar plans to survive the worsening situation in the prison complex. Unlike in prior runs, this group really didn't rage against the dying of the light, instead roleplaying their descent into self-serving compliance with storytelling finesse. The grotesque additions I made to the madhouse that is the berthed freighter really delivered, as this group avoided many other parts of the complex where other groups had discovered meaningful information. The group was gracious enough to give me some useful suggestions for further tuning. I'm not sure I'll run it again at a con next year, but I will aim to publish the scenario... maybe in that neat tri-fold format if I can make it work.

As a total palette cleanser from the gnawing death-spiral horror of my game, I dove headlong into a DCC After Dark session – Blood for the Serpent King to be exact. The whole group knew exactly why they were there, and our Judge delivered all the gonzo, pulpy old-school goodness we could want: from Ziggurats, belligerent Serpent-Men and larceny-gone-wrong related consequences. I am seriously contemplating running Crypt of the Devil Lich with Jon Wilson's crew next year.

Over the last few years, my goal at tabletop cons has been to try at least one new thing each time. I mostly failed this year, but last year that one new thing was the scavenge and skirmish miniatures game Zona Alfa. I met Tim dePertuis last year, who introduced me to not only the game but the inspirational source material: the novel Roadside Picnic and Andrei Tarkovsky's mesmerizing adaptation – Stalker (which is now one of my absolute favorite movies of all time). This year I had the privilege to play again at Tim's stunning Zona Alfa table, complete with buildings glowing from the inside with insidious witches brew, and the forgotten corpses of unlucky flatniks. My three-man crew managed to mostly avoid the lure of vodka caches and racked up a respectable score in loot from anomalies and other mission objectives. My fellow players were new to the game, and I think we all shared in the enjoyment of gamers discovering something new and awesome together.

My good friend Matt Steele was running multiple seminars over the weekend on how to GM. I stopped by his round-table discussion on DM 101. We discussed problems ranging from dealing with the needs of younger players around emotionally sensitive subjects like character death, setting up your first group, and how to move beyond rote mechanical cycles of listening at doors, checking for traps, etc., to breathe atmosphere and energy in basic dungeoneering games. I'm somewhat inspired to run a seminar on how to describe action in RPGs to build drama and player-engagement, while relaying the most important information at the right time.

All-in-all it was a good con for me. I was able to connect with friends and reconnect with most of my pre-pandemic DCC group from Fremont Game Kastle for some much needed reunion time. The absence in our party is a void that can never be filled.

This coming weekend, I'm excited to be running Mythic Bastionland for a recorded playtest project I'm tackling with good friends, the brainchild of the aforementioned Matt Steele. More on that once we start to release our videos.

As an extra bonus to close out the weekend, I was able to watch the newly released trailer for the next Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries DLC – Chaos Reign. PGI really pulled off a coup here. I'll have a lot more to say about this in a future post. Information is ammunition.

I'll be running a Mothership 1e game called Within the Charnel of Dreams at Kublacon Prime 2026. Rules-light Mothership mechanically leans into roll-your-own sci-fi horror themes with deadly combat that encourages flight over fight, and a well-wrought panic mechanism that pushes the PCs further down the death-spiral through a cascade of poor life choices – if you like that sort of thing. My game draws on influences from the cassette-futurism of Outland, remixed with a little of Michael Mann's Tangerine Dream scored and smoke-machine drenched horror-war-flick The Keep. Without giving away too much, there's some in-your-face H.R. Giger inspired aesthetics if (or rather when) things go suitably wrong.

I debuted this game to friends at the Dead of Winter Horror Invitational last December, and also ran it at Dundracon earlier this year for a great group that really leaned into the genre. I intend to publish this scenario (and several other convention one-shots I've run over the years) under a Creative Commons license on this site in the future.

Stop by and say hello if you're at Kubla.