A Little Pathfinder

My Elven Cleric

We've been playing quite a bit of Pathfinder over the last year or so.  We started with a Rise of the Runelords adventure path, but it quickly morphed into its own thing.  We were also playing a party of all Elves, which led to a lot of 'hilarity ensuing' moments, including the time we refused to speak to anyone in anything but Elven, even though the village folk all spoke lowly common.  Good stuff, we actually wrapped up that campaign around level ten, then started a new one.  The new one is all a homebrew setting, and so cool I'll save it for it's own post.  Rock on.

Undead slaying action

Sunday Rucht Hour: The View from Dragon*Con - Gaming Edition

So, last time I talked about Dragon*Con and showed off some of the cool costumes. What about the gaming?

Well, because our gaming panel track expanded this year, I didn't get to game as much as I would have liked. Still, got in a playtest of Alpha Wolf Pack with some of the crew at Epic Games. That was very much fun. Those guys are already big fans. It was pretty neat to sit down with the president of the company, their lead level designer, one of their lead developers, and one of the founders of the Escapist website and roll some dice with them.

I also got to hang out with Darwin Bromley, one of the fathers of modern board gaming. He's largely responsible for bringing Settlers of Catan over to the United States and turning board games from monopoly into something akin to what we have now. He taught me how to play Seven Wonders, and we played a game of it. Seven Wonders was the big hit in terms of board games that year. It was like Argricola in scoring, but had a neat mechanic where you passed cards around to your left or your right. You had to pull cards to make runs or matches, but you had to pull cards so that your opponents to your left or right couldn't make runs or matches.

Jason Bulmahn, the lead Pathfinder designer, hung out with us quite a bit as well. He even taught us a few drinking games.

Jason Morningstar was there, heralding the indie spirit, and ran a fantastic panel for us where everyone got to participate in some indie game techniques through live participation. He helped run the Games on Demand tables, so if you came, you could have played in a game with Jason Morningstar. Clint and Jodi Black showed up as well (the folks who run Savage Worlds). Eloy LaSanta, one-may publishing house was present as well, being the jack of all trades.

The big coup, of course, was getting Monte Cook and Tracy and Laura Hickman. Monte was there to talk about his TSR days and to hear about his new project Numenera. Tracy Hickman ran our charity event, which was a role-playing session with the Guild. The cast of the Guild played a table top RPG with Tracy and we auctioned off one seat at that table for charity - our annual drive for Lou Geherig's disease.

Anyhow, I'll leave you with a few pictures of our panels and the Warmachine tournament which ran in the gaming basement.

Jason Morningstar, Tracy Hickman, and Laura Hickman do a panel on Storytelling through Roleplaying

It's the Legion of Everblight vs. Trollkin! Both sides were exquisitely painted. 

Great shot of some Trollkin on the move.

Two warbeasts slug it out. 

He wasn't used in the tournament, but he made for a great picture - the Trollkin Mountain King. Amazing model and paint job. 

A size comparison of that Mountain King.

An exquisitely painted Deathjack and support squad.

Infinity! Check out that awesome Infinity terrain! 

And here's the big panel! Tracy Hickman runs an RPG with the Guild playing the game! 

Friday Rucht Hour: Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition

As some of you may know, I'm currently running the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path from Paizo. I've changed the setting to Mythic Ireland, but the essentials of the AP are there. I thought I might take this opportunity to do a quick review of the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, updated for the current Pathfinder rules. What's interesting about this review is that we started playing the game in the old 3.5 AP and just now converted over. 

First of all, understand that the original Rise of the Runelords was designed for the D&D 3.5 system. It's easy to update to the Pathfinder system because most of the rules are similar or the same. At the very least, the math between the two systems works. 

A Pathfinder party is more powerful than a 3.5 D&D party. They've said this in various conversion documents. It's also obvious when you start playing the game. Fixing this is not a problem at all. You just beef up opponents' to-hit bonuses, hit points, or add more enemies to the battlefield. 

So, why covert? I bought the new complication because I was using a friend's AP splatbooks. This way, I had my own copy at last. That's the primary reason I bought it. But here's a quick review of what you get. 

Reading over this new edition, I noted a lot of new artwork. They could have been lazy and recycled all of their old artwork into this new edition. They didn't. The new artwork also makes sense. Pictures or figures which just weren't that good were replaced by ones that work much better for roleplaying. For example, instead of just pictures of people's heads in some cases, there are now full-figured portraits, which is much better when you are showing what someone looks like during a roleplaying session. 

Also, and this is a big selling point, they've improved the adventures themselves. In many cases, scenes have been fleshed out to make more sense. In the very beginning, I noted that they even added a few scenes to give later scenes in the adventure more impact. For example, in the original Rise of the Runelords [SPOILERS] there is an NPC who dies in a gruesome way. In this new edition, you actually meet this NPC as well as another that you are supposed to rescue. 

Also, the information is far better organized. In the original, I had to read some of the splatbooks two or three times to tease out the true story and to catch subtleties in the text. Here, they do a much better job of explaining each chapter upfront and providing a better outline for the adventure to come. 

Now, here's a big con for the book - the book is large and hefty, so to save space there are a number of occasions in which you are referred to entries out of one of the Bestiaries. It's pretty jarring, since the original adventure path had all of the stats written out there for you. Again, I understand why they did it - the book is large and hefty on its own. More stats would have made it much bigger and unwieldy, but it definitely bares mentioning. Fortunately, most of their Bestiaries are part of their freeware, so if you need, you can print them out and have them with you ahead of time. Still, if you really want a text which has all of the stats written out for you, up front and central, you should take note. 

All right, that's all for me. Next week, I'll talk about Dragon*Con. 

Sunday Rucht Hour: The Bad Guys of Pathfinder

So, here's my post about some of the baddies we've painted for Pathfinder as well. The first chapter of the Rise of the Runelords has to do with goblins (no real spoilers here, don't worry). If you're familiar with the buzz around Pathfinder at all, you'll know that Pathfinder's take on the traditional goblin has been quite popular. First of all, there's the great Wayne Reynolds interpretation of them, which give the goblins oversized heads for an almost cartoonish look - coupled with a new increased nastiness. Goblins are now creatures that will bake babies in a pie and eat your face.

Wayne Reynold's take on goblins

It's this great balance of being comical coupled with also being cannibalistic creatures from a horror movie that make the Pathfinder goblins so unique."Hey, it would be so cute if it weren't trying to set me on fire!"

Reaper offers minis that look pretty much like the characters in the books. This meant that I had to get my hands on some gobies, since Pathfinder goblins are so cool. But this also means that if you're running an Adventure Path, you could get minis that mirror the art work of each character or creature in the module. That's pretty impressive. I'm sure someone with more money than me and more OCD than me has done just that.

So, on with the goblins!

The reason we were so jazzed about these goblins is because they looked so much like Wayne Reynold's artwork. So we divided the labor up between Nick and myself and you see the end result.

The woman in the pictures above was also a Reaper mini. She represents the main villain of the end of Chapter One. Even though Reaper made a model for that character, I went with this girl instead. I just like this model because it had the essence of the character I had in mind.  She's very much a fantasy artwork character. Check out the hilarious naked backside! 

Friday Rucht Hour: Pathfinder Crew 2

All right, here's the second half of our Pathfinder party. We have three more for our total of six. All of these were painted by Nick. 

First up is our Paladin. In the Irish setting, this character is a knight for one of the local monasteries. Technically speaking, this character is a bit anachronistic. Such knights wouldn't have existed until later, but we included it to make the setting as inclusive as possible. Plus, my players aren't taking historical notes from me. This mini is actually the Pathfinder cavalier figure, but it works for our purposes just fine. 

Here he is from the back. The cross is actually a nice touch, breaking up the monotony of the big, black field on the shield. What's best is that it can easily painted over for another setting if needed. 

Here's our Pathfinder Witch character. The male witch in the party has been the black sheep. In medieval society, there was a fine line between being a wise healer and "OMG! He's a witch!" So, the witch character must tread lightly wherever he treads. 

Now, for the piece de resistance. This is Nick's personal mini - a Pathfinder Oracle. Not what most would picture for an oracle, right? This character has the blood of giants in him, accounting for his great size and strength. As an oracle, his is mostly blind, however, accounting for his white eyes. His great size and ability for foresight makes this character an excellent parallel to the Irish hero Finn MacCool. 

Nick heavily modded this figure.   The sword is a warjack sword from the Warmachine minis game. I love the holes in the sword - to make it little lighter, you know? It's colored a little differently because it's supposed to be made from goblyn metal. Nick also added the shoulder pads (from a warjack again) and the buckler to his wrist. 

All right, next time, we'll look at some of the baddies of Pathfinder.

Friday Rucht Hour: Meet the Pathfinder Crew

So, as you know, we are playing Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords in one of our regular gaming groups. And here we have some of our 6-man party. If you recall (or not) we are playing the Rise of the Runelords AP, but placing it in quasi-historical/quasi-mythological Ireland.

First up, our barbarian, Drin. As a inheritor of the Irish ristrahd he started out the game in a position of honor and expectation. He's expected to lead his sept in battle and heap glory upon his clan. My friend Nick modded the sword here and painted it up. You can see the original Reaper mini, here.

Next up is our druid, Gisamael. As a druid, he is a bit of an outsider in 10th century Ireland, which is mostly Christian at this time. Still, the old ways are respected and the Irish come to his people from time to time for aid and advice. Again, Nick modded this mini as well, but he was painted by yours truly.

The shillelagh you see in his hand used to be a spear, but Nick shortened the end and added mistletoe to make it a proper druidic badge of office. See the original model here. Note to people about this model - Nick pinned it in a number of places and I highly recommend that with this guy. His shillelagh has come loose a number of times and pinning saved me a lot of headaches.

This is one of our favorite models of the lot - our bard, Colin. This mini is just an excellent all-around adventurer. He's got a sword and his decked out with all sorts of adventuring equipment. I painted this one. As a bard, Colin isn't just some minstrel plucking a lute and being a fop. Bards in ancient Ireland occupy an honored place in society as historians. A great bard heaps honor and glory upon his clan and can represent the deeds of his sept when he goes to high court. In the legends, Irish bards could shape reality.

This guy's so awesome that it's worth checking out the back of him. He's got the back pack and elbow guard - just a lot of details and a great model. 

All right, next week, we'll look at the other three members of the Pathfinder crew. 

Friday Rucht Hour: Now with Enech!

This post I will be returning back to our Pathfinder game set in Mythic Ireland. At this point, the crew is about mid-way through the second chapter of Rise of the Runelords.

What I want to talk about here is how I'm handling some of the magic items in the game and how that interacts with the environment of Mythic Ireland.

Magic weapons! They're real!

One thing I had to clear up with my group was the idea that our game was going to be a low-magic setting. For one, if you read Irish folklore, it's not a low-magic environment. Magic abounds. Magical events happen. People do superhuman things.

And magical items actually abound.

Check out this sword, below. It's a weapon of Celtic origin, from 60 B.C. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The human form of the hilt—appearing as a geometric reduction of a classical warrior—must have been intended to enhance the power of the owner and to bear a talismanic significance.

So, there you have it - a magical sword. Items like this one and others like it were often crafted with details that were supposed to bring "luck" or "blessings in battle" to the wielder. The difference is, in societies with magical realism, a good luck charm isn't like a rabbit's foot, which we might carry with us to make us feel better. A lucky charm was considered to be the real thing.

So, right off of the bat, I intended for the campaign to feature things like this - magical items as part of everyday life. But juxtaposed with that would be the sense that even though these things were all around, they would never be treated as something mundane.

To also help with the idea of magical items, I'm putting in the idea of player characters self-enchanting items that they wield. The idea behind this is that in the hands of normal man, a bow is just a bow. But in the hands of Odysseus, a bow is a remarkable weapon capable of great feats.

So, just by picking up a weapon, a powerful warrior in my game can make a sword...a +1 sword. If he is truly worthy and capable, he might be able to make it a +1 thundering sword. Etc.

What determines the sorts of enchantments a person can put on an item? Enech. A word that means both honor and glory in ancient Ireland. A warrior was taught to constantly seek enech in his society, continually proving himself and his worth. Throughout our campaign, characters can seek out enech by accomplishing particular deeds.

Here are some examples:

• Rallying a group of people +3
• An act of exceptional bravery +1 to 5
• An act of exceptional cleverness +1 to 5
• Making a sacred oath +1 to 5
• Offering to take up a difficult quest for a noble or king +3 or +5
• Avenging the murder of a kinsman +5
• An exceptional performance before a noble audience +5
• Becoming renowned with a particular weapon +5
• Defeating an opponent in a duel +5
• Proving oneself as a good Christian +5
• Warrior class +5
• Acting as an intercessor with the Sidhe +10
• Bard, Barbarian, or Ranger class +10
• Becoming renowned as a good advisor +10

Here are some ways to lose enech as well:

• Breaking a sacred oath -30
• Angering the Sidhe -30
• Long-term tampering with dark powers -20
• Breaking one’s word -20
• Kin-slaying -20
• Arcane caster -10
• Associating with blasphemers -10
• Caught in a lie -10
• Failing in a quest -10
• Getting cursed -10
• Kinless -10
• Leading a profligate lifestyle -10
• Proving unable to fulfill a sacred oath -10
• Twisting the meaning of an oath -10

As characters progress in the campaign, they will have (and have had) opportunities to enhance their enech. As they do, they gain the ability to bestow items they pick up with magical power. Of course, as soon as these items leave their possession, they are no longer empowered.

Here are some examples of 30 point gifts.

• Make one weapon +1
• Make one weapon keen
• Make your water skin produce a potion of cure light wounds 3/day
• Luck - you can re-roll 1 skill check a day
• Blessing - you gain +1 Hero Points per level

Additional gifts can be gained for more points at 50 and 70 points. Each time a character gains a level, he can redistribute his enech gifts if he wishes.

Anyhow, this little addition has really worked for us. I hope you all can use this for your own games!

Friday Rucht Hour: A Gift from the Emerald Isle

Hello and happy Almost St. Patrick's Day!

For this holiday, I'm going to share my world guide that I wrote up for the Mythic Ireland setting. Find it here. For the campaign, I created some folders containing all of the house rules and setting information the players would need. I made sure that the material was short enough that the setting information fit on two pages, while the rules information fit on four.

The rules information, then, formed the folder that contained the players' character sheets and world guides. It's been very handy for them to bring their sheets back and forth from each session.

You'll note the rounded corners of the world guide and character sheets? Easily done with a corner cutter that you get from a scrapbooking supply store. Just by doing someone as small as cutting the corners of a character sheet, you give the materials you hand out that tiny bit of legitimacy. It makes the material feel more official.

World Guide - it fits on one page, front and back

Character Sheet

The house rules make a sleeve for the world guide and character sheet

Anyhow, I don't expect everyone to download the entire world guide, so I'll post an excerpt here.

Player Characters and Their Roles

Barbarians

In this setting, barbarians are either Viking berzerkers, trained secret rage techniques or are possessors of the riastradh – the Irish warp-frenzy. Either way, such individuals are viewed much like the Navy SEALs or special forces are looked upon today. They are seen as highly trained, highly skilled warriors with mysterious abilities.

Bards

Bards are not just minstrel or entertainers; they are honored keepers of lore and history. They occupy positions of political, cultural, and magical power. The mightiest bards are said to shape reality with their words. Being a bard in this setting will mean carrying a great deal of political responsibility and representing your clan with honor. You are seen as a keeper of knowledge and an authority figure.

Clerics

While monks and priest abound in this setting, only a few can cast spells. Those that do are known to be blessed and are sought after for their healing powers. They are seen as truly gifted individuals – walking and talking miracles. For many, you will be seen as their last hope for their sick loved ones. You will be seen as a mystical savior. Other clerics are actually scholars. These folk are not so much religious as they are learned men who are in tune with creation and its workings. Such men are seen more as scientists than religious leaders, and derive their powers through study and mediation.

Druid

Mythic Ireland is home to the druid. Druids are exclusively Pagan. While they live reclusively, they are sought out by all as advisers, sometime allies, and intercessors with the Sidhe. Being a Druid will mean that you viewed with a mix of awe and fear. You will be sought for your ability to interact with the Invisible World.

Fighters

The culture of Mythic Ireland is a warrior culture. Fighters are lauded with honor and respect. Being a fighter in this setting will mean that people will look up to you and pay homage to you, showing your deference. Most importantly, you are a prime representative of your clan. At the same time, you will be expected to be unfalteringly loyal to your chieftain.

Other character classes, like the Ranger, Wizard, Witch, and Oracle were also included. In fact, the only one we really left out was the Cavalier. The point was - I wanted to truly play a Pathfinder game, not a heavily modified and house-ruled one. So I went through each class and thought about where the class fit in the Mythic Irish setting. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most did actually fit.

All for now.

Friday Rucht Hour: Mythic Ireland

So, Modules
For a long while now, a friend of mine, Nick, has been pushing to play a Pathfinder Adventure Path. With all of the traction they’ve gotten, it’s not surprising.

And for a long while, I resisted running an Adventure Path, namely because the idea of running module, let alone a series of modules didn’t appeal to me...at first.

But then, I remembered my days playing Living Greyhawk and how much fun they were. I recalled how fun running something prepared can be. It allows the GM to really prep for each moment of the game, making sure it will be the best than it can be. In terms of minis and terrain, you can literally plan months in advance for those, giving you time and space to get some really gorgeous tables together.

Rise of the Runelords
So, after looking over some of Paizo’s Adventure Paths, I settled on Rise of the Runelords. What drew me to it was that it wasn’t just a D&D adventure, but it also had horror elements to it.


Also, I noticed that a lot of monsters and encounters in the Rise of the Runelords, if you nudged them a little this way or a little that way, could be Celtic in origin. Undead are obviously not Celtic. But goblins definitely are. Ogres are. Giants are.

Goblins in the Pathfinder system can be nasty.

So, I decided to move the adventure path over to Mythic Ireland.

The Fun of a Mythic Setting
Probably the most fun thing about a mythic setting like mythological Ireland, for me, is what makes the Conan stories so fun for me after all of these years. A question was asked the writers of the Conan RPG if the Hyborian setting was a low-magic or high-magic world. The answer was that it was both.

What they said was, and I paraphrase, that the world of Conan was steeped in magic. Wizards abound. Magic produces wondrous effects. But despite these grand powers being thrown about, the magic of the Conan stories is never treated as commonplace.

That, to me, is interesting and intriguing. It’s always cool to play in a world where magic is mysterious and unknowable. What is more intriguing is to play in a world where magic abounds...but is still mysterious. We dealt with that when we were putting Witch Hunter: The Invisible World together.

The reason these sorts of settings are fun for me is that they introduce an interesting tension. On the one hand, you have a society where magic part of everyday life. On the other, you have this deep, superstitious fear of it.

This was also one of the hardest concepts to get across to my players, because as soon as we were rooted in something quasi-historical, the thought was that it was going to be a low-magic game, but that’s not what I was looking for. Particularly if I wanted to run Rise of the Runelords.

The Rigors of Gaming in a Quasi-Historical Setting

So, that brings me to my next topic - historical gaming. I've done quite a bit of historical gaming. Both strictly historical (Boot Hill), quasi-historical (Vampire: The Dark Ages, Masque of the Red Death, Witch Hunter), and fantastic-historical (Deadlands).

When you decide to use history as a launching point of a game, you have to decide on how "accurate" and "historical" you want to be. Your adherence can range from the very strict to just winging it with what you know off of the top of your head.

There's no right or wrong here, just your preference as game master. The real challenge, then, is bringing your players up to speed with the degree of your historical strictness. Obviously, if you want to be fairly strict in your historical facts, then you need to be prepared to dump a lot of information on your players but do it without boring them with dry facts.

I personally like to do this by giving everyone a baseline level of information, and then as the game progresses, continue to add information as we go. In this way, the players can discover the tropes of the setting as they encounter them.

Some of the interesting things that I had to get through to my players:

• The Perception of Magic: It was very interesting to try to get my players to grasp the concept of a world where magic, science, superstition and religion all occupied the same space. For most people in this time period, for example, most people don't see much of a difference between a cleric and a wizard.
• The Fey, the Fey, the Fey: I really tried to hammer home the importance of the Faerie in Irish Folklore and the prominence they had in everyday life. From the time you woke up, to the time you went to bed, there were hundreds of little rituals that people in historical Ireland observed due to their belief in the fair folk. For example, in some parts, they kept their beds away from windows, so as not to get grabbed by a hag. When a farmer harvested his field, he kept one stalk standing so that the dryad that lived in the field would have a place to stay. Cutting down the last stalk in a field would mean killing the fey or making him move on, threatening a poor harvest in the next year.
• Bards: Interestingly enough, a lot of people were caught up in the D&D perception of the bard, which is as a sort of foppish, perhaps even decadent character. However, in this setting, bards hold a position of honor and are part of a king's court.
• The Ancient Church: Christianity in the 10th century was very different from how it is practiced today. However, it was difficult to hammer home how different this faith was from how it is practiced in the modern day.

Other Cultures, Other Times

For me, part of the fun of a historical setting is to explore older customs and the idiosyncrasies of the time period. For example, gaming in the Victorian Era is fun because of their adherence to rank, custom, etiquette and procedure. By playing with these tropes in mind, it helps transport you away to a different world, because you are being asked to act differently, think differently, and see the world differently.

That's one of the allures of playing in Medieval Ireland. More on that later.

Friday Rucht Hour: Design Fun

So, Pathfinder

As everyone knows, Pathfinder took the gaming world by storm two years ago and hasn't relented since. Last year, according to some distribution sources, it was outselling Dungeons & Dragons. Something like that hasn't happened since the days of Vampire: The Masquerade.

Part of the fun of Pathfinder, in my opinion, is to look and see what the folks over at Paizo have done with the d20 system, or as some people call it - 3.5 D&D.

Many people call Pathfinder 3.75 Edition, essentially describing it as an upgrade of the 3.5 D&D system. In my mind, it is much more than that. The Pathfinder system is like getting a copy of someone's massive house-rulings of 3.5 D&D and browsing through them. And not just anyone's house-rules. Like, professional designer's house-rules.

The game certainly resembles the D&D 3.5 system at its core, but there have been lots of changes. Every class got tinkered with. Numerous spells were also changed. The grappling, bullrush, tripping, and disarming rules were changed.

And one effect of all of this tinkering has been a sort of unspoken invitation for us, the gamers, to come play in the playground and put up our own jungle gyms.

This is a different mentality of the culture that was set up by D&D 3.0 and 3.5. Even though those two editions never said you couldn't house-rule anything, there was a subconscious idea in the larger gamer community that you had to stick to the rules-as-written. Of course, I speak in broad terms, here. There were plenty of individual GMs who house-ruled their own games.

But that brings me to some of my latest endeavor - my own Pathfinder tinkerings. Recently, I adapted Pathfinder to fit the setting of Mythic Ireland, as well as a modern setting.

Mik's been most interested in that, so I'll start by talking about that and give an example of how Pathfinder invites tinkering.

Our Plant Druid

We had a player who wanted to play an exclusively plant-type druid. One that could, you know, summon plants. Make them grow. Have them attack. Kind of like Marvel's Plantman.

Like this? Hmm. Maybe not.

But the problem was that the druid, as is, is not built that way. The class is a summoner class. It's built to spam the enemy with lots of creatures and then druids can turn into creatures themselves. The guy is supposed to be a creature class.

Looking at the druid alternates in the Advanced Player's Guide, however, gave us a lot of ideas and showed us the Pathfinder teams design concepts.

For one, all of the classes have certain abilities that belong only to them. For example, if you look at all of the class variants, you'll see that only the Barbarian gets Rage. Only the Cleric gets Channel Positive Energy. And only the Druid gets Wild Shape. So, that gave us a framework from which to start.

For example, one of the players suggested trading out the Druid summoning ability for the Cleric's Channel Positive energy ability. While that sounded good on paper, I ruled that the CPE was something that was the distinct province of the Cleric. As I looked over their Druid class variants, I saw that a lot of the druids traded out the ability to spontaneously cast summoning spells for the ability to spontaneously cast Domain spells. So, we did that. Instead of begin able to summon lots of monsters, our Plant Druid can spontaneously cast Plant Domain spells. So, at 1st level, he can cast Entangle whenever he wishes - which makes him really "feel" like Plant Druid. At 3rd level, he can cast Barkskin whenever he wishes. Again, it helps make him feel like a Plant Druid.

We also changed his Wild Shape ability. We didn't take it away, because the Pathfinder guys consider that to be the Druid's core ability - like Channeling Positive Energy for the Cleric. So we altered it a little. Not wanting to be an animal guy, I ruled that he could turn into different kinds of elementals at 4th level instead. That allowed him not be quite as animal-y. Normally, a druid gets that at 6th level. So, our Plant Druid will be able to turn into animals at 6th level instead. And when he does, he will be considered to be at -2 levels when determining what kinds of animals he can Wild Shape into. He gets to turn into Plant creatures still at 8th level.

So, just by changing two things on the Druid, we made the class into a Plant Druid. To recap, that's spontaneously casting Plant Domain spells instead of Summoning spells. Tweaking Wild Shape. That's it!

That's a bit more like it.

Welcome to Friday Rucht Hour

Hello all!

You'll notice that this is not your regularly scheduled blog post. But do not worry. We are in control and all of that.

This is Rucht Lilavivat, sometime game designer and director of Game Programming at Dragon*Con. But most importantly, I'm Mik's long-time friend. We have gamed together, had libations together, and even done the blood-brother thing. Yeah, I'm kidding about the last part.

Mik and I have collaborated for a while now and he's graciously allowed me to use this space for some of my blog-type ramblings. How did this happen? I blogged most of my Rogue Trader campaign some time ago, but unfortunately had to leave it hanging due to time considerations. I've recently started up a Pathfinder game and Mik asked me to blog it. But nowadays, I definitely don't have the time for that, unfortunately.

Still, Mik is a persistent man and it's just plain hard to say no to him. So while I won't be starting up my own blog, I'll be posting a few things on Fridays concerning my Pathfinder game and some mini/modeling that I'm working on as well. That will continue for a little while until my content runs out and then I'll take my leave from the blog.

After some consideration, we've decided to call this little addition Friday Rucht Hour. (My first name is pronounced "Rush" despite the spelling. The T's silent.)

My next "real" post will be next Friday and then every Friday from there on out until my content reaches its logical conclusion. Thanks again to Mik for letting me into his house and put up some decorations!

This and That

It's almost like I can kick back and let LEGO Thursdays do all the work for me! Unlike the break-neck end of the gaming year of 2010, the end of 2011 has a steady pulse, albeit a weak one.

There's still signs of life at Mik's Minis, not that *you* would know it though. I'm happy to report the game room is coming along quite well. When you're shouldering all of the work pretty much by yourself, not outsourcing it to a contractor, it's both slow going and not exactly professional. It might have something to do with the fact that production has been entirely to the tune of Miller Lite and Black Sabbath. Other than the slow going part I gotta say it looks pretty darn good. New paint, new carpet, the works. Now I need to start cramming it full again with gaming stuff!


I mentioned back during Thanksgiving that I was thankful for Skyrim. That still holds, but it's a double-edged sword you know? It's the type of game designed for a player like me from the ground up, but that means I can happily get lost in the tiniest morass of minutia for hours and hours and hours. Hours that should be put to finishing the game room!


I plopped a cover image of the Pathfinder RPG up top for a reason. It's no secret that Pathfinder is gaining momentum around many roleplaying tables as we speak so we jumped in just this evening. We played a very short introductory adventure with pre-generated characters, but it felt great. After looking through the core rulebook and the Inner Sea sourcebook I can say this is something I personally would like to visit again. As you can see, we've already made the adventuring party out of LEGO figs, so we're ready for more.

In other RPG news, we have a couple of sessions building a world for another campaign. We used the Microscope rules and had quite a ball with them. There is an excellent corkboard mockup of all of our work that can be found here. It was an easy process to get to know, and the world we made has a lot of promise, plus it spans such a gap chronologically there are many options in style and potential gameplay. FATE is a system we keep coming back too, and this future campaign, The Tainted Earth, is no different. We're kind of throwing convention out the window, so anything goes, such as my kilt-wearing Yeti bounty hunter armed with a necromantic energy rifle! Sculpt that one Eli!


I'm still posting leftover and prematurely hatched material to the Mik's Minis sister twitter account for those interested; cygnus46 is the username. Still just photos, still 95% gaming related, and still no text, just the way I plan to keep it.

Until next time!