Zephyrus of the Anemoi

A couple weekends ago, I got invited to my friend’s house to play some Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition. I haven’t had an opportunity to play real D&D since I was in high school, and so I was pretty out of practice. I’m pretty sure I used either the 2.0 or 2.5 ruleset back then, as THAC0 was still around. I only played once and while I had fun, I didn’t get to really experience the whole of the game.

Some time later, Bioware released Neverwinter Nights for the computer, and I got to experience the game again with the new d20 system that was part of the 3.0 and 3.5 ruleset. Unfortunately, a computer game just doesn’t have the same social and roleplaying aspect that sitting around a table with your friends does.

Thankfully, I got the opportunity to play with Crusher, et al. I decided to roll a Half-Elf Wizard, and he actually turned out to be pretty badass. I chose a Wizard so that I could really try some unique methods to resolving combat and other encounters. It really made the game more enjoyable to be able to work around within the rules of the game to try options other than just murdering everything that moves.

In our earliest encounter, we all fell asleep in an inn and during the night woke to find black-clad assassins fighting the city watch. After a few interesting combat maneuvers (such as one of our party leaping from the balcony to crush the assassin below), we set out on a quest to recover the kidnapped son of the local baron. During our journey, we were set upon by a band of gnolls while passing through a valley. The combat was quick and bloody, with one gnoll left alive for information. We soon discovered that the gnolls mistook us for some humans that had attacked a hideout nearby. These gnolls were part of a raiding party on their way to free their comrades.

We quickly reached the hideout and brought our new gnoll friend with us. Once inside, however, we discovered many dead bodies of human and gnoll alike. In the main room we discovered a battle between them. A battle ensued in which the party did their best to knock unconscious as many gnolls and humans as they could to attempt to get to the bottom of this mess. One of the more entertaining moments of the night happened when one player misunderstood why we were attacking the gnolls and turned on another player. In the end, it provided some excellent character development.

Unfortunately, while searching the other passages, the gnolls escaped, killed the remaining humans (it’s okay, they were evil, anyway), and fled. Soon after we discovered the advisor to the baron had kidnapped the baron’s son and charmed him. We returned to the baron’s castle, but could not convince them that anything was wrong with the baron’s son. The baron died that evening and we quickly found ourselves in prison.

Throughout the campaign, one of the players (the usual DM and a rather argumentative father of one of the other players) fought with Crusher over many of his and the party’s decisions. Mostly he was frustrated that we didn’t kill everything we met. He was quite happy to find the party had no qualms about killing guards that were under the baron’s advisor’s control.

We managed to kill the advisor, free the baron’s son and seek out an inn for the night. It was a very exciting evening and one I hope to repeat soon. I also hope to get some 4th edition rule books so that I can start my own campaign with some other friends and family members that might be interested. I’ll write more if and when I get the chance to play again.

I love board games. There are a lot of board games that I find to be incredibly fun. The games I enjoy the most are those that are based in fictional realms of fantasy and science fiction: particularly those that require the players to work together in some fashion. You may remember some time ago when I wrote about some of the games we played the last time I had a gaming day.

When I was about 10 years old, Milton Bradley released a game called HeroQuest in the US (the UK got it a year earlier). My cousin got it for Christmas, and after playing it with him, I decided I simply had to have it. Essentially, one player is a dungeon master laying out doors, monsters, furniture, traps, etc. and all other players form a band of Heroes that journey into the dungeon to accomplish some goal, slay monsters, and find treasure. A friend across the street also picked up a copy of the game, and we spent many, many hours playing through quests, building our own, and then playing through those.

I didn’t have the luxury of spending much time playing Dungeons & Dragons (I knew one group that played and spent one day playing, but we didn’t hang out much and I never got to try again), so HeroQuest was the closest I ever came to playing a tabletop role-playing game. Sure, it was more of a “dungeon crawler” than an RPG, but it still stuck with me throughout my childhood and young adult life.

Fast forward to just after college. My cousin Adam and I are sharing an apartment with Andrew (his brother) and then later Jesse (my brother). It is at the time when Jesse moves in, that I first discover Warhammer Quest. I had heard of this game before, thanks to a strong similarity between it and HeroQuest (much of the game world for HeroQuest was lifted out of Warhammer’s fantasy world and simplified for young gamers). Thankfully, Adam picked up a copy off eBay one day and we all got a chance to try it out.

The big plus to Warhammer Quest was the ability to randomly generate dungeons, eliminating the need for a player to be “the bad guy”. After a handful of games, however, it became obvious that in order for us to play a game quickly, we’d all have to either read the rather large instruction books cover to cover, or play several games with someone that had until we felt comfortable not looking something up every 30 seconds. The game went into a closet and began to collect dust.

I was at Adam’s house a couple months ago, picking up some stuff for my newborn baby, when I found my old HeroQuest figurines in his closet (I had been searching for them for 6 months or more). And sitting there, untouched for the last couple years, was Warhammer Quest. Adam took it down and told me that if I’d actually play it, I could take it with me. Nerd joy exploded in my heart.

And so it was, that on Saturday, November 7th, I invited my cousins over to play. The plan was to have a complete Saturday doing nothing but having some “nerd fun”. In the end, Andrew, Alex, Rachel (Alex’s sister), and Bri (Alex’s girlfriend) arrived for some Warhammering.

I chose, as always, to play the Elf. Andrew picked up the trusty old Barbarian, Rachel snagged the Dwarf, and Bri took up the Wizard. Since we had five players, Alex chose to play one of the add-on characters that Games Workshop released after the game was available: the Warrior Priest.

The first dungeon went fine, and fairly quickly even though three players had never even touched a Games Workshop game before. We each got to learn a little about how best to work together and the newbies got a good feel for their characters. The second dungeon, however…

We came to a t-junction in the dungeon early on and chose the wrong path. Of course, by the time we discovered it was the wrong path, we had encountered a fair number of murderous beings. Although the Warrior Priest was able to heal (Bri, unfortunately, drew only Resurrection for her healing spell as the Wizard, making it difficult to assist much), his Blessings were erratic at best, and did not restore health at a quick pace.

Thus, when my Elf was down to a mere 1 Wound remaining before death, my companions decided to simply walk off without me, leaving me several steps behind and unable to catch up to the healer. This actually turned out to be slightly advantageous. I say slightly, because in Warhammer Quest, when an Unexpected Event occurs and monsters are placed on the board, they are placed in the room with the Heroes. However, if one or more Heroes are in separate rooms, then they are randomly placed into one of the rooms.

I was quite thankful then, when the room they were to be placed into was not my room. That was, until I discovered that the enemies we would be facing were Goblin Archers. Thanks to a number of fortuitous dice rolls, I was able to remain standing until the villainous creatures were thrust out of this world and into the next (mostly via the application of pointy objects to their vital organs, though once or twice via blunt objects to the same and/or magic lightning to their everythings). I rejoined my compatriots, received my healing, and promptly smacked the Warrior Priest upside the head.

I mean, my character did that. Not me. I’m not my character.

Please don’t tell my therapist I said that.

And so we journeyed onward, found the chamber of evil bad things, murdered them all, and everyone went home mostly happy. Alex even remarked, during the course of the last dungeon, “Can we do this more often?” I’d say that counts as a win. I can’t wait until the next time we get together when I will be playing as an Elf Ranger, one of the add-on characters. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Got a chance for a Guy’s Gaming Day this weekend, because my wife is awesome and loves me. Starting shortly after noon, my cousin Andrew, friend Jeff, and I all sat down to play Shadows Over Camelot.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing this game before, I highly recommend it. There have been a number of great board games that pit players not against each other, but against the game itself: Warhammer Quest, Lord of the Rings, and The Omega Virus. However, what makes Shadows Over Camelot unique is the potential that one of the players may be a traitor, secretly trying to undermine the various quests that the knights set out to achieve. Worse, once accused, the traitor loses some abilities and gains others, making the timing of his accusation a delicate proposition. Worse, since there may be no traitor at all, mere mistrust of one another can make some quests more difficult to defeat.

The game was exciting. Andrew turned out to be a traitor and Jeff and I barely won the game from him. It was an incredible first-time play. Jeff told me that the gameplay ideas in Shadows Over Camelot had been taken to the next level in the Battlestar Galactica board game. I’m looking forward to picking it up soon.

The second game that we played was Pandemic, a game about a global outbreak of four different diseases and the research team fighting to stop them. The game is brilliant in its design, due to the fact that the Epidemic card can cause all cities that have already been infected get placed back on the top of the deck to become infected again. This can lead to outbreaks that spread diseases quickly. Worse, the 9th outbreak ends the game, as does the depletion of the deck. This keeps the game a desperate race to keep the diseases under control long enough to find the cures. It gets hectic as the number of outbreaks climb and the cards in the deck dwindle.

My brother-in-law, David, joined us for this game. We played two rounds. The first one was a Beginner-level game (which places four Epidemic cards in the deck) and we were slaughtered. Absolutely devestated. All four Epidemic cards came up in the first half of the deck. Gonoherpesyphillaids wiped out all of Asia and North America in minutes. It was an excellent learning experience and made the second round much easier.

In the second round, we got extremely lucky. We raised the difficulty by adding a fifth Epidemic card, but they were so well spaced that we were able to prevent outbreaks. With only two cards left in the deck, Jeff cured the final disease and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Later that evening, we played several rounds of Munchkin: Impossible (one of the 7 billion variations of the card game Munchkin, this one with a spy theme) sans Jeff. We were up until 3 am playing and had a blast.

Jeff and Andrew have been known to play lots of board games, so I knew they’d have a good time. But David is generally uneasy to try the various games we like to play. The fact that he enjoyed them as much as he did made me feel optimistic that he might play with us again in the future.

If you have any interest in checking out these games for yourself, I’ve linked to them on Amazon above (where available), but you can find much more info at BoardGameGeek, as well.