Ye Olde Inn

by **cornixt** » October 9th, 2018, 11:41 am

The quest didn't go as planned. It was basically HQ but with a bit of roleplaying added over the top. Six characters: warrior (barbarian), wizard (two simple spells), rogue (dwarf-like), ranger (bow), cleric (wizard with undead spells), bard (charming rp abilities). Cut down the body point values since there are so many players, and hopefully the injured would stay near the back towards the end of the quest to allow other players to kill stuff. Each room had something useful for a different player to add to their sheet. Each player had a sheet that told them exactly what they could do each turn and I gave a brief description of how combat worked. Seems that I should have done the same for movement.

In the days before the quest, my wife thought it was too short (supposed to be an hour), so stuck a load of roleplaying to the start before they even enter the dungeon. She wanted to be the games master, so I kept out of it and there was nowhere to sit at the table so I sat in earshot in another room. We had a host of props and dress-up clothes that some players wore. One child was late arriving, so we'd already lost 30 minutes of playing time, but she still played out the extra stuff that she had added. Then she screwed up the rules when they were moving through the dungeon - saying that players couldn't move over the top of other players. This lead to a traffic jam as there simply wasn't room for half of the players to get into the room before the monsters were killed. Then the same healing potion was used three times (small decorative bottle filled with fruit smoothie, got refilled a couple of times, thanks for the suggestion of this). I kept out of it for as long as I could but I was cringing inside. They were three rooms deep and we were already 15 minutes over, so I sent my wife to prepare the cake and took over as GM. I made the movement rules clear, and everyone piled into the final boss room (skipping the build-up rooms completely since we were out of time). The players decided to avoid the big boss and took out the spider minions first, leaving the spider queen to wound at will until they were all gone. The warrior got a lucky attack and the wizard's spell finished off the spider queen much faster than anticipated, leaving the rogue to open the chest and had to be convinced not to take all of the treasure for themselves. Cake was served (it was decorated as a Beholder) in a different room and everyone forgot about the quest.

Lessons learnt: The more children there are, the less chance they will all shut up so you can talk to them. They will never be quiet if you just wait, and the noise never stops. Six players with fewer body points just means that random chance is likely to kill them off. 10-year-olds have no idea how delicate miniatures are (glad they were all single-piece plastics). No one ever wants to be a bard. Kids are likely to lie about their character abilities if they think you don't know what is written on their character sheet. My wife's impersonation of a west country English accent varies between Jamaican and Pakistani when she is stressed - but no one noticed.

I was to clean up my hobby room a little bit. There were still two unopened boxes from my move in... erm... 2013? 2011 I think. Supposedly they contained only books. As I have a Kindle now, I set out to throw them all in the bin.
Now. Under the first layer of books, there was a space crusade box. And under that, there was a Heroquest box. :shock:

Now I have three times Mentors screen. Somehow I have only two times the gameboard. But in one of those boxes there was yet another copy of Wizards of Morcar! :mrgreen:

Now that struck my hobby nerve and I searched all my belongings for heroquest skeletons and Ogres, to paint them.

Sixteen skeletons are nearly finished. Once I finished an Ogre, I found out that my acrylic colors just slide off that old layer of enamel paint. Yes. I found that out AFTER I had that first layer applied. My layer slid off that Ogre.

The rest of the day I used an electric toothbrush, a file, a knife, soap and water to get that annoying thirty year old layer of enamel paint off the Ogres. The knife worked best. Finished today morning.
Now I have a st of Ogres to paint.

Well. If you read until here then you have probably nothing to do eh?