TIE

just messing with X-Wing Miniatures models and my phone's aps.

fighter escort

Wings of Glory models

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

Pfalz

My RPG group

Last Saturday

Saturday Shadowrunning

Pandemic

I got a gift certificate for an on line board game store for my birthday, and I used it to buy Spyfall and Pandemic Legacy Season 1. I had never played the base game of Pandemic, but I finally decided on Pandemic Legscy because I could play the base game with it as much as I wanted before launching into Legacy.

I messed around with it a little, playing one game solo and winning shortly after getting it, but immediately realized I had gotten a rule wrong.

Today I played a second solo game, getting the rules right, but narrowly lost (three diseases cured) due to running down the player deck.

Sheriff of Nottingham

Game of Hanabi

One of my daughters got a copy of the card game Hanabi for Easter. This situation—my children getting a game that I really like--presents a small problem for me. It's their game, but I want to play it and take it to friends' houses and treat it like my own. That's not a major problem, because I can't imagine my children telling me "no" when I ask if I can use one of their games, but it does make it look like I got them a game just so I could play with it myself. It just feels a bit awkward and would be easier if I just had my own copy, but then, it would feel silly to buy another copy when we already have the exact same thing in our family.

Anyway, I've played it a couple of time, and enjoyed it a lot. The most recent time was last weekend, when I played it with three friends. It felt awkward getting started because I was trying to simultaneously get them interested in the game, remember the rules, read the rules, and play the game for the first few minutes, but after a short period of time we all had it. And I had a lot of fun.

The most fun was seeing (and hearing) everyone working through their own internal debates on what to do on their turns, while also trying to keep from saying more than they were supposed to. It resulted in a continuous stream of incomplete sentences, along the lines of, "Well, if you have…and he has…wait, hold your cards up so I can see them…OK, but if I…and we have two clock tokens left…but then you could…no, wait, what about…so I could tell you…" I found it pretty funny.

We got a score of 18 without dropping too many accidental meta-hints, which I guess is pretty good.

 

Wings of Glory

Wings of Glory WW1 miniatures

Just messing around in GIMP

Bingo the dog shaman

Troll

Bingo the Dog Shaman

Shadowrun recap

 Shadowrun recap

We have played a few times since the last recap, so I will try to summarize briefly.

As we drove to our meet, we realized that we were being followed by an air spirit in astral space. I commanded my air spirit to go back and tangle with it. That was the last service it owed me; it beat the other air spirit in combat and, its duties fulfilled, vanished.

We met our Johnson in the Redmond Barrens, and delivered the briefcase, as well as the unconscious professor. Our mysterious, highly magical employer didn't really like the fact that we had knocked the professor unconscious, but he assensed him and was satisfied that he was healthy and unharmed. He paid us the full amount, plus a healthy bonus, and then we left.

We spent some time discussing purchases, skill advancement, and finding a group hideout. My troll shaman, Bingo, upgraded his lifestyle from Squatter to Low, got another fake identity, and an apartment at the edge of downtown Puyallup. About a month passed…

…Then we backtracked, after we realized that there was a lead that we wanted to play out. Chronologically, we regressed a few weeks, so that we were again just a couple of days after the UW run.

That one racist decker that had a lot of enemies and out of whom members of our team had extracted information? About our Mitsuhama run? Well, Kryptek had info from him about his dross. Since our team had "disappeared" that decker, we knew he wouldn't be needing his stuff any more, so we decided to roll around and take a look before someone else got to it.

His dross was at Bob's Repair Shop on the Puyallup border, a grade D district controlled by a street gang called FMoM (the MoM stands for Mothers of Metahumans, and the F stands for you-can-guess.) When we pulled up the the strip mall that housed Bob's Repair Shop, there were bikers in front, and they immediately saw Bingo on his bike (his new bike! I just bought that, too.) They reached for their weapons, so we opened up. Before they got off a shot, we hit them with a ball lightning spell and gunfire. Slider ran over one with his car. Two were killed; the remaining one was unconscious.

With Kryptek's boosted data from the decker, we broke into the building, and hid the gangers and their bikes in the garage area. The surviving ganger was tied up.

We rooted around and found more pay data, lots of anti-metahuman stuff, weapons, etc. The decker's living area was on a magically warded 2nd floor. No one else was there.

Our next game session started with everyone rolling a d6. Bingo rolled a 1, and the GM informed me that I had stepped out the front door just in time to see—and be seen by—a group of FMoM gangers rolling up, ready for a fight.

And a fight we did. It turned out there was something ugly with them in astral space: someone who appeared to be a toxic shaman, with a toxic spirit. As the gun battle erupted, Canoti and Agave got to the roof just in time for the huge toxic spirit to manifest.

Guns were fired, spells were hurled, and grenades were lobbed. Canoti and Agave took out the spirit with physical weapons and managed to avoid the spirit's toxic attack. Bingo went astral and plowed into the toxic shaman, dealing some amount of damage—but I don't know how much. The shaman slugged back and gave Bingo four boxes of damage before fleeing. The six gangers were all down--dead or dying.

We dragged the gangers around the side of the building. A short time later they, as well as the captured ganger in the garage, magically dissolved into green goo, leaving behind some kind of central lump that so far none of us has wanted to touch or inspect. Ugh.

My org gang contact, Mercurial, told me that FMoM makes their headquarters in an old bowling alley. This place we are is sort of outside their territory. FMoM is a fairly new arrival; they recently plowed in with lots of weapons and took territory from two other gangs (one called The Firemen, and the other an elven gang called Tal'Sir'An, who were affiliated with The Ancients). FMoM successfully fought off an counter attack by The Ancients. Tal'Sir'An are gone, and few remaining Firemen are subservient to FMoM.

I want to clear out of Bob's Repair Shop, but apparently there is a lot of good data hidden on the servers there, and it will take a while—days?—to extract it. So now we must decide our next course of action. Do we go pure defense while we loot? Do we clear out ASAP? Should we go on offense and try to take out whoever—or whatever—is holed up in the bowling alley?

Memoir '44: Toulon

Played, but didn't play to the finish. The French had a string of really good cards, allowing them to smash through left and right flanks with the armor.

Mice & Mystics on the Living Room Floor

We're just a little ways into chapter 5; we had to stop for the evening, and left it out in the hopes of finishing it some night(s) this week.

Shadowrun game recap

Shadowrun game recap

We played last weekend, and had an exciting session.  Slider, the magician hired by Canoti to investigate the missile attack and the fire at Colson Towers, has been accepted as a member of the team, more or less.  He didn’t turn up an awful lot of answers for us yet, though.

We checked out the building at UW from which we needed to steal data on the Amulet of Suns.  We needed to penetrate a second-floor lab.

Kryptek was able to hack the UW system and tag us as permitted to been on the grounds.  Slider was to be a Wuxing magic researcher; Kryptek and I his research assistants; and Canoti and Agave his security detail. 

Early the next morning, I summoned an air spirit, and we drove to the lab building.  We entered with no real problem, and there was hardly anyone around.

Kryptek erased security footage as we passed through the halls, and we soon made it to the 2^nd floor and found the door to the lab.  This door was completely on another system; we did not have access to it, so Kryptek hacked it and got us in.  Just as we were entering, an older guy with unkempt hair approached us with a briefcase and said, “Oh thank goodness you are here!  Here’s this.” And he gave us the briefcase.  He was pretty frazzled and nervous.  We quickly found out that he was a professor.  To cut a long story short, he had something concealed in the briefcase, and we think it’s the stolen Amulet of the Suns, and he was told to expect us at that moment and give it to us.  How did he find us?  How did our Mr. Johnson know we would be there at that exact moment? How did the professor steal the amulet?  We don’t know, and are a little creeped out.

Within was a room with an actual mainframe crunching data, and lot of marker boards full of scribbles.  Kryptek decked in and found HUGE quantities of data, which filled all her available storage space and took a minute or so to download.  At the same time, some campus security cars pulled up out front, in non-emergency mode.  Right when Kryptek finished, she sent a false emergency signal from across campus, and the security cars started to roll away.

(At some point, during all this, one of us slapped the nervous professor with a tranq patch, knocking him out.)

Canoti watched the three campus security cars start down the street, but then saw the sudden appearance of several other black cars racing past them towards the building, causing the security vehicles to swerve out of the way.  They quickly stopped in front of the lab building we were in, and black-armored commandos hopped out.

Kryptek had the data, and we were fleeing the thaumaturgical lab when we saw two silhouetted commandos drop in front of the screened windows and plant an explosive device.  We were running down the hallway towards the stairs, with Agave carrying the prof firefighter-style, and Bingo carrying the mysterious suitcase, when the lab windows blew in.

Slider cast a trid phantasm spell [an type of illusion] in the second floor hallway:  he made it look like Canoti and Agave were there, taking cover in doorways, firing down the hall at our pursuers.  As we exited to the first floor, we could hear the sound of gunfire, both illusionary and real, above us.  Kryptek triggered the maglocks on the doors as we passed to slow down pursuit.

In the lobby we encountered two campus guards exchanging gun fire with the black-armored guys outside.  We acted like the innocent civilians we were disguised as, frightened and looking for protection, and the guards bought it, telling us to duck into the security room nearby.

Kryptek went back into the Matrix and soon found local network the assault team was using.  There was an large icon over the building: Some kind of large, silent black helicopter.  Kryptek, with great skill and effort and luck, was able to get some marks on the helicopter and attack it with data spikes.  She must have hit it pretty hard, because moments later, down on the first floor, we heard the sound of screeching turbines and some loud rooftop crashes.

Somewhere, up the stairwell we descended, we heard an explosion as another locked door was breached by the commandos. 

The enemy’s network stayed up, though.  Kryptek was disappointed to note that the enemy decker must not have been on the chopper.  She went hunting, found his deck, and killed it, too.

This left the enemy network open, and Kryptek quickly got marks on it.  As Bingo cast a stun bolt spell at the nearest commando in black armor, and the guards fired out the door, Slider cast another trid phantasm to make it look like we (and the two guards) were wearing the same type of commando gear as the enemy we were facing.  Kryptek immediately put fake AROs on their network for us to make us show up in Matrix as members of their team.  Slider—whom we all know by now to have exceptional social skills—told the guards to come with us.  We fled the building, with Slider announcing on the enemy’s communications network: “Leaving ground floor with wounded!”

We ran to our two vehicles and piled in and, as we did so, heard another voice on the network say, “…But, we’re not on the ground floor!”

The commandos realized they had been duped too late, and we were able to drive away into the surrounding busy streets and vanish.

We called our Mr. Johnson, who asked us if we had “both packages.”  So, apparently, he was expecting us to have the briefcase, too.  He gave us a location in the Redmond Barrens to meet him, and we were about to arrive there when we stopped the game for the night.

Questions:  Who was the commando team?  Our best guess is a rapid response team from The Atlantean Foundation, coming after the stuff we had just stolen from them, but there could be other players involved that we don’t know about.  How did our Johnson know we would be there at that exact time, and how did he arrange for the professor to meet us there with the stolen contents of the briefcase (and we’re assuming that the briefcase contains the Amulet of Suns, but the case is shielded and the professor seemed to be very nervous about us opening it, so we don’t know.)  What is the Amulet of Suns? Is it powerful?  Is giving it to our Johnson a mistake?  Will he kill us and use the amulet to conquer the world?  Can we get more money out of him before we hand it over? Who the hell knows?

Game night with friends

Sheriff of Nottingham on the living room floor

Some old friends and their kids came over for dinner. Then we stayed up past midnight playing Sheriff of Nottingham, Telestrations, and Beyond Balderdash, with wine, tea, and lots of leftover holiday chocolate. This was, to me, a great way to be closing out the Holidays. Now begins the long slide into the back half of the school year, and the less festive portion of winter. Maybe more hanging out with friends will break up the dreariness.