GRAIL QUEST

 I mentioned in my last post that I’m in a second gaming group now. The game master is an old friend, Carlisle. He was part of our first gaming group when we first started our The Fantasy Trip adventure years ago. He got me and a couple other local gamers to join him in playing the 1980 programmed adventure GRAIL QUEST.

GRAIL QUEST was written by Guy W McLimore Jr for MetaGaming. It was the third “microquest” after Steve Jackson’s Death Test and Death Test 2. It is a programmed adventure for one to four players set in Arthurian England searching for the legendary cup of Christ.  When Grail Quest was written gamers were using Steve Jackson’s original rules. Our group is playing the updated rules and examining how these newer rules might affect the adventure. Our group is comprised of three players experienced with TFT. Carlisle is our game master, and one player is unfamiliar with the system, but learning fast. 

After two Session Zero practice games, we started. Leaving Camelot we choose a direction and travel to the next point on the map where there maybe a village or inn and villagers who may have information to pass on. As we travel we face random challenges like bandits, wolves, or wandering knights who will challenge us to single combat. Some locations have their own unique challenges like this:
 

Day 29: The party arrives at the castle of Lord Krast, who is holding a noble woman captive. From the tower the woman calls down to us to help her. The guards allow only one of the knights to enter and Sir Titus chooses to face Lord Krast. They meeting the castle courtyard. Krast says he will only release the noble woman if Titus can best him in combat. They face each other across the courtyard.

Sir Titus charges across the yard and attacks with his spear. Krast responds with a mighty blow with his sword. Now toe to toe they exchange blows. Lord Krast’s sword bites deep and Titus disengages for a moment. Sir Titus strikes again with his spear and then disengages again, but it is only to back up and charge attack again. Lord Krast though is ready and knocks Sir Titus to the ground.

3Once Sir Titus is conscious Lord Krast offers the party hospitality and allows Sir Titus to rest and heal for four days. Unfortunately as the loser, Titus must forfeit his horse and all his arms. The party pools their resources and buys back Titus’s possessions.

Day 37: After resting at the inn, the party returns to the castle. This time Sir Barnard challenges Lord Krast.

The two men run at each other and clash shields in the center of the courtyard. Lord Krast hits first with his sword while parrying Sir Barnard’s blow with his shield. The two combatants move around looking for an opening. Krast swings and misses while Barnard’s sword hits, but does little damage. Lord Krast’s sword gets under Barnard’s shield and draw blood again. 

Sensing advantage, Krast strikes and hits, but over extends himself and drops his sword. Sir Barnard hits and forces Krast back, preventing him from reclaiming his sword. Barnard swings again, but is blocked by Krast’s shield. Krast responds by slamming into Barnard with his shield. Thrown a little unbalanced, Barnard drops his sword when he attacks again. Lord Krast draws his dagger and thrusts, but cannot pierce Barnard’s armor. Barnard quickly picks up his sword. Krast desperately lunges  again with his dagger, but leaves himself open and Sir Bernard’s blade strikes true. 
 
Lord Krast drops to his knee and yields. He will release the noble woman to the knights and presents Sir Barnard with his chainmail, shield, and magic (+2) broadsword. Before they leave Krast tells the knights that his spies have found no sign of the grail in the west.

Time to catch up again.

 

Welcome back to my infrequent blog. Let me tell you about our current game. The main group is playing an adventure Joe created called Nautical Nonsense. Our motley crew of nare-do-wells are sailing between islands in a shallow sea seeking treasure and glory. We have moved up from the White Box rules to Old School Essentials, another set of rules that has come out of D&D’s old school renaissance. 

I said main group wbecause I have joined a second group of gamers lead by Carlisle C. He is starting a Fantasy Trip adventure, the Grail Quest which actually predates Steve Jackson’s TFT revival. It was written by Guy Mclimore in 1980 for the now defunct MetaGaming. Carlisle wants to run it using the current rules and explore updating the adventure.

So far we have met online using Roll20 and created characters and refresh our memories of game play with the TFT system. Ultimately Carlisle wants to use Foundry VTT to play. He has purchased a subscription and is working to setup the TFT module for it. 

That brings us up to date. We’re still playing our main game on Monday nights. We have five gamers plus Joe, our GM. The other game has three players plus Carlisle and will meet on Tuesday or Thursday nights.  I’ll try to post more often. 

The Dark Druids

 ANOTHER INCOMPLETE POST FROM APRIL 2024

Our White box campaign continues. We have fought many battles and lost many companions. Out of the original six PCs only one remains, Vilhelm Klink, fighter and knight of Osland. Our party is much stronger now. Most of them have reached level 8.

During the past year and a half we cleared out goblin bands, took on a demon in a wizard's tower, traveled to the city of Southport and cleared the sewers of rats and were rats. We marched into the mountains to search for a famous artificer and brought back nearly 1000 pounds of a strange metal ore, Orytalcum, that produces armor and weapons of superior quality. 

Unfortunately it can only be refined in the hottest of dwarven forges. That lead us to the mines of Hadramkath which were under the control of a dracolich. We managed to kill the dracolich by destroying its phylactery which was guarded by a frost giant.

Within a month (game time) the dwarves had relit their forges and produced armor and weapons of amazing strength and quality.

But before we could deal with the dracolich we had to deal with another problem. The Witch King had amassed an army of his cauldron born united with a large band of ogres, and had surrounded the walled town of Vericonium.

I’m a fanboy, part 2

 Gaming is a big part of my life now that I retired from teaching many years ago. I played Melee and Wizard in the early 80s. Mostly I played it solo with the Death Test and Death Test 2 micro quests. I added Advanced Melee, Advance Wizard, and In The Labyrinth and every other micro quest I could find in my FLGS (friendly local game store). The times being what they were I got too busy with school, job, and family and my games gathered dust in the closet. 

Years went by and then Steve Jackson won back the rights to the games he had created. I jumped on the opportunity to be part of the Kickstarter for the Legacy edition of The Fantasy Trip. Through the internet I met two local guys who were putting together a group to play TFT. One owned my FLGS and we started playing there on Monday nights. 

I started this post months ago and have forgotten where I was going with it.

So let me catch up on what been happening. Our gaming group, which varies from 4 to 6 people, has been on the same campaign now for close to two years. We're playing using the White Box Medieval Fantasy Adventure Game rules (Old School Renaissance), an updated version of the original D&D game. Many of our characters have reached level 5-6. We've lost a few along the way. My son has bad luck with clerics in particular.

Some nights we don't have enough people to continue the adventure. When that happens we fall back on other choices, most commonly playing a quick HeroQuest. Recently though Joe (our DM) offered us the opportunity to play a one-shot of Mörk Borg. According to their website "MÖRK BORG is a pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy RPG about lost souls and fools seeking redemption, forgiveness or the last remaining riches in a bleak and dying world." The mechanics are simple enough and there is a character generator on the site so you can quickly create a character or two (or three. You'll go through them fast. My son and I had a great time playing the initial adventure, Rotblack Sludge.

I guess this page has expanded from just posts about The Fantasy Trip, a game I still love and continue collecting materials for, but now it is so much more as my gaming horizons have grown. Next post I think I'll talk about my ever growing dice collection.

Back to the Beginnings

My first exposure to table top gaming was the Avalon Hill board game Gettysburg. My mom bought it for me shortly after it came out in the sixties. She had no idea how complicated it was. I skimmed through the rules, but didn’t get far. Other than moving the chits around the map I never actually played the game.

Years later I came home from the Air Force and started hanging out with a couple of younger high school friends, Jim and Gerald. I joined them in their activities of building and launching model rockets. I think we broke every safety rule with the exception of using metal parts. We also built model ironclads using balsa wood and thin aluminum sheet armor, and then had battles where we shot at them with BB guns.

Our most elaborate endeavor was trying to replay the naval war in the Pacific in World War II. Our mastermind, Gerald, was using the SeaPower II rules and 1:1200 waterline models made by Alnavco. To supplement our meager (and expensive) metal ships, he cut out and glued together an balsa wood fleet of everything from battleships, carriers, and cruisers all the way down to destroyers and submarines. 

Using ships in 1:1200 scale is not something you play on a table top. I've seen photos of scenarios that were played out on the floor of a gymnasium. We played in my mother's living room. With the time needed to setup, movement, measure ranges, refer to gunnery tables and recording hits and damage of multiple targets, not to mention air battles of opposing carriers, the battles would literally take days to play. Thankfully the room was not used for entertaining a bridge club and Mom was forgiving of the mess. It all ended after the US Navy (me) was soundly defeated in a battle in which all of the American carriers were sunk and the American admiral (me) threw a fit.

That didn't end our friendships. We are still close in spirit although we are separated by time and space. Gerald went on to build wind tunnel models. Jim and I both became teachers. We all have families and lives that have separated us from our youthful endeavors.

Somewhere in my attic there is a box that contains the few metal waterline models I own. Waiting for another battle.

Backstory

 

There is a lot of truth in that cartoon. I love creating backstories for my characters, but so far the back story doesn’t fit into the campaign’s storyline. 

My dwarf character is a thief. He has multiple aliases to hide his true identity. I’ve been playing fairly straightforward, just being your basic thief (who tends to roll badly when using his thief skills). 

Then something happened. I love it when a PC takes on a life of his own. Ulfgard had a traumatic experience last week. The party had taken on the task of ridding the sewers below Virconium of the rat men that inhabited it and were stealing from the town. 

As all adventurers know well, all sorts of vermin reside in sewers. Rats, giant rats, and rat men are just the tip of the iceberg. Our party had a random encounter with a giant catfish. It randomly chose to bite Ulfgard. He suffered a horrible wound and nearly was swallowed whole by the great beast. The party survived the encounter and the fish swam away, but Ulfgard’s mind was torn. 

Now in Joe’s (our GM) world, the Shattered Kingdom of Valenor, dwarves are not born of women like humans, elves, and other humanoid races. They are carved out of a rare stone and brought to life by their parent in The Sacred Ritual of the Forge God Klanggeddin. When Ulfgard was created there were flaws in his stone. He was created with a tendency to having multiple personalities. That may help explain him becoming a thief and being banished from his clan for stealing a rare family jewel. I.e he is not right in the head. 

Ulfgard’s personality fractured and his saw himself as an “Ahab” to the great white catfish’s “Moby Dick”. In this week’s session he hired a crew of dwarf pirates with guns and harpoons. Along with the rest of the party, they enter the sewer to hunt the great white beast. It was a glorious battle with Ulfgard jumping on the monster’s back and providing the killing stroke with his axe. 

That wasn’t the end of the story. His team of dwarves carried the fish from the sewers and Ulfgard invited the entire town to a gigantic fish fry. 

The Hundred Killers

 Once our party got started on our new campaign, I’ve been trying to adapt to a system that uses lots of different dice. The Fantasy Trip uses a number of six-sided dice where old school D&D uses polyhedral dice, most notable the d20. 

Joe really wanted to go all the way OSR, so our campaign is using the same map that Gary Gygax used, the map from Outdoor Survival. That game was published by Avalon Hill in 1972. 

As level 1 characters we started out in a small village that was being plagued by raiding goblins. Our quest was to explore the surrounding area and locate and destroy as many goblins as possible. 

As our story goes, we discovered that there were several different bands of goblins that seem to have been organized under the leadership of a mystery leader. Over the weeks since we started we have fought many goblins, cleaned out bandit camps and a dungeon. Once we had killed over 100 goblins we were named the Hundred Killers. 

There are three players, myself, my son and a young man named Quinn. We each have two PCs which include a paladin, a magic user, cleric, fighter, thief, and Druid.