Tomb, Raided

I played through the original Tomb Raider on my Evercade and, well, I don't think I'll play through the two sequels that are bundled on the same cartridge. I'm sure I played at least one of these titles back in the day, but this time around, the whole experience just felt kind of...tedious. I constantly found myself scouring YouTube playthroughs to find some hidden switch or lever that I needed in order to move forward. At this point, I think I'll go back to some Commodore 64 classics.

Season 11 Creighton Cup

Another campaign comes to a close with the conclusion of the Creighton Cup championship series! In Game 1, the Comets held a 2-0 lead until the closing minutes when Billy McGimsie scored to give the Victorias a glimmer of hope, but the game ended 2-1 with the road team picking up a surprising win. Game 2 started off with fireworks as Marty Walsh (Victorias) and Mike Grant (Comets) traded goals in the first minute; things settled down after that, and the Vics rebounded nicely from their series-opening loss, doubling up the Comets in a 4-2 win. The road team had won the first two contests, and Game 3 would continue the trend; the Comets demolished the Vics 5-1, but it was a costly victory: left wing Frank McGee, the league's all-time leader in goals scored, suffered a season-ending injury. The series shifted back to the Comets' rink, and they were determined to win the Cup on home ice. The Vics took the lead twice, but both times the Comets answered back. With the score tied at 2, we headed to overtime! The Vics hoped to extend the series to a decisive fifth game, but Comets were relentless in their attack. Finally, dynamic young defenseman Eddie Gerard, who had been struggling throughout the postseason, blasted the puck from the blueline and beat Bowse Hutton for the Cup-clinching score. The Comets won the series 3-1, with top center Duke Keats taking home Playoff MVP honors. The Comets now have their second Creighton Cup in franchise history, and the first since way back in Season 3.

Season 11 Playoffs

Playoff time! The Thistles and the Millionaires finished fifth and sixth, respectively, so they missed out on the big dance. In the opening round, the first-place Victorias faced the fourth-place Bearcats, while the Comets and Bulldogs duked it out as second and third. 

The Vics got quite a scare in Game 1 when they surrendered a goal on the first shot and superstar blueliner Cyclone Taylor was injured and left the game shortly thereafter; however, they rallied for a 3-2 victory in overtime on a goal by captain Hobey Baker. Game 2 was a 5-0 laugher for the Vics on the road, with Taylor returning to rack up four points. The third game, back at the Vics' rink, was a tense affair that remained 1-1 into the final minute of regulation time, when Newsy Lalonde struck with a game- and series-ending goal.

In the first game of the other series, the Comets and Dogs went back and forth in a wild shootout that ended 6-4 for the hosting Comets. Riley Hern, the goalie who had lifted the Dogs into the playoffs, was so terrible in Game 1 that the Dogs opted to start Paddy Moran in Game 2. Moran performed well, but the Comets prevailed in a nailbiter 3-2 finish. In Game 3, the Dogs built a quick 2-0 lead, only for Frank McGee and Duke Keats to score on three consecutive shots (Keats got the second and third tallies). By the end of the third, the contest was knotted up at three goals apiece. Moran turned aside a number of tough shots in overtime, but Dick Irvin managed to sneak one past him late in the frame to give the Comets a win and a series sweep.

Next up: The Creighton Cup championship series between the Victorias and the Comets!

Season 11 Highlights

I've been playing through Season 11 of my Strat-O-Matic historical hockey league and although I haven't been posting updates, the regular season is now complete and I've moved on to the playoffs. Season 11 was full of fun and surprises: the defending-champion Thistles failed to reach the postseason, Bulldogs rookie Jack Adams finished seventh in the league in scoring, third-year Comets defenseman Eddie Gerard took a huge step forward (9 goals in just 16 games!), and Newsy Lalonde of the Victorias won a season-long duel over the Bearcats' Joe Malone to claim his first MVP trophy. In perhaps the coolest story of the year, hard-luck goalie Riley Hern was unemployed at the start of the season but signed with the floundering Bulldogs around the midpoint and absolutely saved their season -- his 2.22 goals-against average and .929 save percentage were both second-best in the league, and the Dogs made the playoffs largely because of Hern's netminding heroics.

Phase 2 Underway!

I finished pulling together a spreadsheet with characters, locations, factions, and other data from recent campaigns -- the ones for which I have really comprehensive records. The next phase of this project is to scour my earlier notes for similar data from the campaigns of years past. I went back to faded copies of Front Porch newsletters from the early '90s, handwritten stat blocks for NPCs, player guides printed from the old Tandy 1000 SX, and everything else I could track down. Sadly, it wasn't as much as I had hoped to find. 

Players, if you're reading this, I'd love to get your thoughts on campaigns of the past and anything that really stood out to you -- characters, themes, storylines, anything!

2025?!?

Wait, is it really 2025? That's a date I would have used in an '80s campaign to represent a dystopian near-future setting that was rife with corruption, power-hungry tyrants, bitter political strife...oh, wait...

Happy Halodays!

Howdy, everyone! I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season. 

The boys got some fun gaming stuff for Christmas this year, including D&D miniatures, a copy of the new 5.5 Player's Handbook for each of them, and the cool new Halo miniatures game. We also played through one of the adventures from the Cypher System Starter Set, which required a lot of deep dives into the rulebook, but it turned out pretty well. We're still a long way from starting a new campaign using this system, but at least it's another step in the right direction!

Imperial Hymn

The boys and I aren't really into Warhammer stuff these days, but this video was just flat-out awesome...

Phase 1 Underway!

I mentioned last month that I've elected to use the Cypher System for my upcoming Vanguard sci-fi campaign and, ideally, all new campaigns in the Front Porch Multiverse going forward. (Side note: Big thank-you to my good friend Matt for really diving into the Cypher System rules!) One of the advantages of this system is that it's genre-agnostic, so it can be used for fantasy, modern, cyberpunk, or whatever. With a single ruleset, it will be super-duper easy for PCs and NPCs alike to cross over from one campaign to another. 

That got me thinking that I should pull together my notes from various campaigns -- names, places, storylines, adventure summaries, and the like -- and put them all into a single spreadsheet like the enormous one I created for the Druid Cycle campaign world. I have really great documentation from campaigns of the last few years -- Dark Enigma, Doctor Who, Tales of the Ternion -- so Phase 1 of my project is just to grab all that stuff and put it into one file. That's the easy part. 

Phase 2 is to go back to the not-so-well-documented campaigns of yesteryear, such as the Cyberwars series, and comb through my remaining notes for all the relevant info I can find. (Tim W, prepare to have your brain wracked!) The goal isn't to track down every last NPC name or obscure location, but essentially to mine those disparate records for anything that might help enrich future Front Porch Multiverse campaigns. 

Phase 3? I don't even want to think about it yet, but the final step is surely to merge the sheet created in the first two phases with the existing Druid Cycle spreadsheet to create one definitive repository of campaign data.

A Stark Victory

With Matthew at a swim meet in Arizona this weekend, Amy, Nathaniel, and I kept busy with a lengthy Game of Thrones board game session that took us a pretty good chunk of the weekend to complete. Nathaniel played as House Stark, Amy was House Baratheon, and I was House Lannister. I was in the lead for much of the game, or at least tied with Nathaniel, and it all came down to the final turn, when Amy seized one of my castles, which gave Nathaniel sole position of the lead in victory points. So I guess Bran Stark ended up on the Iron Throne after all, just like in the show! How it all played out was quite different; for one thing, the standard version of the game omits those pesky Targaryens...

Dark Tomb: Bloodthorn Island

On a quiet Thanksgiving day, my nephew Daniel joined Matthew, Nathaniel, and me for the second installment of the Dark Tomb series of super-tiny cooperative fantasy boardgames. Matthew and I reprised our roles from the first campaign -- a rogue-type for him, a ranger-type for me -- while Nathaniel opted for a warrior-type instead of the spellcaster he had used in the first one, and Daniel chose a cleric-type. In this campaign, we needed to procure a ship, travel to a distant island, and defeat a powerful draconic foe. We got the ship easily enough, but things went haywire soon after we set sail, as we ended up triggering all the monsters too quickly and they came swimming in hot pursuit of our vessel. Thanks to some clever use of items and Nathaniel's character's ability to reflect damage back at foes who hit him, we managed to survive the journey to the island. That final segment started off auspiciously, but the final boss turned out be a handful. Fortunately, it moved very slowly, so we were able to scamper away and come up with a plan. Matthew and I softened it up with ranged attacks, then Nathaniel allowed himself to take a huge hit so he could reflect damage back at the dragon, and finally Daniel finished it off with a powerful harpoon gun we had assembled from items scattered across the island. What a fun way to pass the time until Thanksgiving dinner!

It's a Thing of Beauty

Really digging the Cypher System. That is all.

Dune: Prophecy

Dune: Prophecy debuts this Sunday, November 17, on HBO and Max. Here's to another amazing journey into the "Dune-iverse"!

Cypher System

Recently the boys got me thinking about running a campaign set in my Vanguard universe, a sci-fi setting that has its origins in my very early childhood and has remained with me to this day. Most of my modern-setting campaigns -- from the cyberpunk Cyberwars (early 1990s) through the superheroes of Tales of the Ternion (2022) -- are essentially prequels of the Vanguard story. 

I've been looking around for an appropriate game system for this campaign, and gave the Alien RPG serious consideration, along with some d20-based systems. The boys, Nathaniel in particular, have broken the TinyD6 system (damn their incredible math skills!), so I needed something a bit more robust. I landed on Monte Cook's Cypher System, and now I'm kicking myself that I didn't find it sooner. This would have been the perfect system for all non-fantasy campaigns in my Front Porch multiverse. We could have used it for Tales of the Ternion, Doctor Who, Dark Enigma, and so many others. Well, better late than never! The Cypher System is now the official game engine of the multiverse.

Legacy of Kain

At long last, my Legacy of Kain Collection for Evercade is on its way. I've never played any games from this acclaimed vampire series, so I can't wait to sink my teeth into them!

Waiting Game

I've been waiting patiently (well, not really) for my latest Evercade fix: Tomb Raider Collection 1 and the Legacy of Kain Collection. In the meantime, I've been catching up on some Warhammer painting projects and planning lots of encounters and subplots for the current Druid Cycle storyline. After years (decades) of campaigns focused on supervillain-type foes, it feels fresh and exciting to be building toward a very different kind of crisis: World War Druid Cycle!

Empire of the Ghouls

As a kind of farewell to "classic" Fifth Edition, I've been playing through Empire of the Ghouls (from Kobold Press) over the past few months and just finished it up last weekend. I used a solo character (beastmaster ranger) and a sidekick (prodigy spellcaster) who were slightly over-level to make up for the fact that there were only two characters (and a faithful animal companion!) in the party. I really had a blast! Empire is a full-fledged campaign, and a first-rate one at that. Highly recommended!

DC Season 3 Championship

Riverton Racers (3rd place) vs. Troya Nova Paladins (4th place)

The Racers hosted their franchise's first home-field playoff game at the Circus in the Bankside district of Riverton. (Tim W's wizard Cathbad helped secure the funding for that facility many years ago -- I hope he found time in his busy adventuring schedule to catch the most important sporting event ever held in that arena!) It wasn't a battle of the league's best teams, perhaps, but a battle of the league's hottest teams. The match certainly did not disappoint. Vico scored on the game's first shot, and the Racers played with the lead for nearly 60 minutes. Midway through the second half, Apollonius scored to tie the game, but Gratian's inexcusable red card put the Paladins down a man heading into extra time. Who would emerge as the hero? Well, it wouldn't be the Racers' franchise savior, Vico, because he reverted to the kind of goonery that got him run out of Prospect and was hit with a red card of his own. Both teams played ten aside, therefore, as the game moved into the second half of extra time. With the minutes slipping away toward a dreaded decision by penalty kicks, Racers forward Mattias tallied the first playoff goal of his career. At the final whistle, it was 2-1 for the Racers, and the league's two-time cellar dwellers had claimed the Thaler Cup in Season 3!

Fort Allegheny

We haven't had much of an opportunity in recent months to play our zombie apocalypse campaign, Dark Enigma, but I was at least able to set up the next location: a remote government facility where the heroes are hoping to find some answers. Everything looks...intact, but what horrors lurk within?

DC Season 3 Playoffs

Semifinal 1: Prifddinas Golden Dragons (1st place) vs. Troya Nova Paladins (4th place)

The Dragons were flying high coming into this game, with the league's best goal differential (+14), offense (2.36 goals per game), and defense (1.36 goals against per game) as they sought to defend their Season 2 Thaler Cup championship. The Paladins, meanwhile, had slipped all the way to fourth place primarily because of their defense (1.93 goals against per game, vs. last season's 1.30). Perhaps it was memories of their epic extra-time victory over the Dragons in the Season 1 championship game, but something certainly brought out the best in the Paladins, who played a nearly flawless match and cruised to a 3-1 victory on the road. Superstar forward Belisarius went a long way toward expunging his reputation as a playoff choker by scoring his first two career postseason goals. The only downside for the faithful of Mithras was that key midfielder Theophilus picked up two yellow cards and thus will have to sit out the championship game.

Semifinal 2: Troya Nova Imperials (2nd place) vs. Riverton Racers (3rd place)

The Imperials were runners-up for the Cup last year and just completed their best-ever regular season. Their offense was barely league-average, but they won a lot of close, low-scoring games thanks in part to a stellar 1.43 goals-against per game, which was tied for second in the league with their first-round opponent, the Racers. It was Riverton's solid offense (2.21 goals per game), however, that allowed them to leap over the Paladins and the Prospect Pioneers in the final regular-season game and claim a playoff spot for the first time in franchise history. This game started off quietly with a scoreless first half, but the teams combined for four goals in a wild second frame. Early in extra time, Racers midfielder Haelmoren scored from long range to make it 3-2, and the side from Riverton managed to kill the clock and secure their place in the Thaler Cup championship.