Ben Jordan's page

Thanks for the ideas! After thinking it over, and reading both your posts, I've got an idea that I'm thinking will work. I'm going to have the factions directly approach the PCs at first. Only later, once they decide which faction they are working with (and perhaps made a few enemies of the others) will I re-introduce some of the NPCs back in. It should be fun to watch the roleplaying when they realize some of their friends are aligned with the 'enemy'. Since they will most likely align with the Pathfinder Society I'm going to be particularly evil when I introduce Jask back in. With the one PCs crush on him it will be real fun to see what they do.

OK, I've got one I need to figure out. We're just now entering the temple on Smuggler's Shiv. The NPCs all stayed behind at the lighthouse while the PCs are exploring the temple.

My party wound up befriending all the NPCs, though Gelik and Aeris were almost not accepted by the party (I think the fact that they all realized that each NPC gave bonuses helped). Right now, Gelik is still the butt of jokes and insults behind his back, but the PCs are very friendly towards all the NPCs.

Jask and Aeris both have amorous PCs doting on them and Ishirou is very respected by all. How will this affect the factions? If they are friendly towards all the NPCs, how can I get the 'rival' factions to seem, well...like rivals?

Other than Gelik being a Pathfinder and Sasha being a member of the Red Mantis faction (which due to low knowledge rolls they only know as a brotherhood of assassins) the PCs don't have much reason to suspect each NPC as belonging to a 'faction' yet.

My first thought is to not even involve the NPCs when they get to the mainland and just have them approached by factions with each faction belittling or trash talking about the others. That way they can chose a faction based more upon the motives behind each group rather than any sense of friendship amongst the NPCs.

I suspect they'll chose the Pathfinder faction due to one of the PCs wanting to become a member.

Any suggestions on how to run this are appreciated.

How about stuff from Serpent's Skull? I'd love to see some of that. We just started that adventure path. It's pretty hard to get good minis for representing giant crabs and sea urchins -lol

I'd love to see some Thrunefang Cannibals, Eurypterids and Dimorphodons. Those would be really helpful with the adventure.

Honestly, I'm happy to see more prepainted stuff of any kind. I love painting my own minis, but generally don't have the time or money to paint nearly often enough to populate the my games I'm running.

Hills Rise Wild is another fun game. It's a 'miniatures' game that is out of print as far as I know (unfortunately) but it came packaged with everything you need to play. The 'minis' are cardboard and the 'terrain' are a series of tiles which are laid out mostly randomly so each game tends to be a bit different to play through.

However, if you love Cthulhu stuff the premise of the game is fun! You play a group of cultists trying to break into Old Wizard Whateley's mansion (he died) to steal his copy of the Necronomicon before any of the other cult factions can get a hold of it, then bring it back to your circle of power and summon your Great Old One or Outer God. The cults consist of the Marsh Clan (Deep Ones), the DeGhoule Clan (Ghouls), the Whateley Clan, and the Cult of Ezekiel.

Of course the catch is that even if you make it back to your circle with the Necronomicon in tow is that even then your Elder God of choice can still wipe you out if he's unpleased...our first game we played was like that. It ended in a draw with nobody alive because of a botched summoning roll -lol.

A very fun game indeed! If you can find a copy I'd certainly recommend it, though it's not a very fast play game.

I checked it out at Gen Con - had a quick demo. It looks interesting, but I was a bit concerned that the game play would get stale playing solo pretty quick.

I think that the thing that would keep it from getting too stale would be building themed 'dungeons' to play against.

Also, if you had a friend or two you could even build decks for use one on one or exchange them between yourselves for solo play. I would be fun to exchange decks like that since you'd not know what your friend put into it.

Also, when expansions are released I'd assume that we'd get more adventurers, quests and of course new dungeon cards to play against as well.

So I recently purchased a semi-collectible card game called Dungeon Crawler. I have to ask if anyone else out there has seen or played this game yet? It's fairly new and doesn't have a wide distribution yet but I have heard that it was demoed at GenCon this year and I've met other folks on the Dungeon Crawler forum boards (www.dungeoncrawler.com) so I know there's a few of us out there that are enjoying this game.

Here's why I am loving this game...

For starters, the game is semi-random. You can buy a starter (which is needed to play with) and a box of boosters and get one (two?) of every card in the game - rares included. This is something that I like seeing. It gives me the incentive to pick up a booster box knowing I can get all the cards, but it also makes me still not unhappy to throw a booster or two on there as an impulse buy once in a while either since it is still a nice surprise to see what I get.

Now, here's the REAL reason I'm excited about this game. Solo play...the game can be played competitively or multiplayer as well, but not having to find an opponent is nice since sometimes finding someone to play games with can be kind of hard since a lot of my old gaming buddies have moved on or, like me, have RL responsibilities that limit play time.

Plus the game has a genuine old-school dungeon delve feel to it in my opinion. I'd recommend this game to anyone for sure!

I've only played a half-dozen games so far and I'm hooked!

So, anyone else heard about this game? Or have played it?

Paizo folks, any chance you might carry this game someday? It would be nice to throw a few boosters in whenever I place an order with you folks.