Shadowrun Troll

Bingo the dog shaman

Miniatures

Last weekend I had some grand plans to work on a pen and ink cityscape of the Louisville skyline, and also to spend time gaming with some friends.  I also was going to work some more on a portrait someone asked me to do. The rest of my family was going to be gone, so I figured I’d have plenty of time.  Unfortunately, one of my daughters was sick over the weekend, so I stayed near her and tried to keep her happy and comfortable.  I did not want to work in another room—not because she was very ill, but because she was so annoyed and uncomfortable so much of the time, feeling tired and knowing that the weather was gorgeous and her sister was out having fun, and I didn’t want her to feel ignored.  So I stayed mostly in the room with her, and we watched a lot of her favorite shows.  But I did manage to get some pen and ink done while sitting on the couch (the city scape, which is proceeding well).

I also did something I used to do all the time, but which I’ve done very little of over the past 20 years:  painting miniatures.  I sat on the couch and painted a couple of figures.  The first is a Shadowrun troll street samurai (which I intend to use for my character in a current game, even though he looks nothing like my character, except for his size and homeliness).  The second is a halfling from a recent Reaper Minis Bones Kickstarter release that I went in on with some friends for an assortment of figures.

I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, considering that most of my paint is either between 10 and 20 years old, cheap craft store paint, or both.  In fact, I now wish I had spent just a little more time with my X-acto knife and metal files cleaning up the flash lines and cuds before I started painting.

Reaper Minis Bones Halfling

Shadowrun troll street samurai (front)

(back)

Saturday game night

I was able to get together with some friends to play Shadowrun a couple of nights ago. Here, our dedicated game master explains to us the many ways he is going to kill our characters.

Sunday night Shadowrun

I have been playing roleplaying games with the same core group of friends for 25 years. Maybe 26—I will have to double check—but I think I started with these friends in 1989.  A few old friends dropped out over the years, and a few friends joined, and there are quite a few who came in late and left again after a few months or years. There was a period of a few years when I was living in Wyoming and was not a member of the group, and there have been a few long stretches when for whatever reason we were not getting together to play with any kind of regularity.

The past decade has been a struggle because people have kids and other family obligations (not to mention some health problems, business travel, family vacations…), but I feel like things are sort of on the upswing again as kids get older and members of our gaming group are able to spare a little more time away.  It is still hard to meet more than once a month, but I have confidence that we will keep getting together.

We started playing 2^nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in ’89, then started in on Shadowrun in the mid-90s.  There have been forays into other interesting games over the years (the most significant being Earthdawn, but also a couple of short starts into Star Trek and Star Wars RPGs whose rules bases I cannot remember, and a few other short-lived games), but different versions or editions of D&D and Shadowrun have been the mainstays.

 

Here is a photo from this past Sunday night, when I was able to get together with Keith, Paul, and Aaron.  A few other of our main players could not make it, but our game proceeded nonetheless.

Certainly, the appearance of the players has changed over the years. A few of us have a lot less hair on our heads, and we generally weigh more.  The games are still pretty much the same, though.  One big difference here is that there is no Mountain Dew on the table.  We’ve mostly moved from almost exclusively drinking sodas to beer, water, coffee, and tea, depending.  Another big difference:  laptop computers and smart phones have largely taken the place of rulebooks.

The Call of Cthulhu, Part 2

We had arrived in the fishman cult room unobserved, for the monsters were absorbed in their diabolical ceremony. In a short moment, the waters of the great pool stirred, and a colossal beast arose: Something like a bipedal eel, a fish-man-demon of immense proportions, matching the golden statues of the altar. The chanting increased in volume as the beast strode from the water and sat his obscene bulk upon the golden altar. It was the fish-god’s chair.

Our stunned amazement was broken by Police Sgt. Willis, whose military rifle thundered to life. His blasts ripped the demon’s eyes apart, sending it into a frenzy. The others of our group produced weapons as well, and I pulled Willis’s pistol from his hip holster for my own use. I think I acquitted myself well, considering that I have almost no firearms experience. I killed one of the fishmen, and wounded two others. The photographer used his large photographic apparatus to blind the fishmen with flashes, and I think that had he not done so, we may have suffered greatly. As it was, we slaughtered the mutants as they closed in on us.

As we fought, the great fish demon struck the three captive girls with its tail, killing two of them. It then vanished back into the water.

After a hail of gunfire, the fishmen were dead. The one surviving girl was beside herself with fear and babbling incoherently. After a brief talk, it was agreed that the doctor and I would accompany her quickly back to the sunlit world. The rest would hurry down another tunnel, seeking the rest of the missing girls.

The doctor and I fled with the girl we had rescued back through the dank tunnels. We had come a long way through these menacing sewers, and the way back was sure to take at least an hour. It seemed to go on forever, and we hoped to encounter other rescuers.

Suddenly, our hopes seemed bourne out, as we spotted a flashlight ahead of us. We encountered a large man with a light and a gun, hurrying in our direction. We greeted him gladly, but he leveled his gun at us.

(Here the story ends, and Fr. Duddlesworth’s account mysteriously leaves off. How did he present this story? Was he dictating? Who knows? I kindly invite one of the other players from the night to put the ending on the tale, as I was not present. Yet I’ve heard how it ended. If no one else recaps in a few days, I’ll tack it on myself.)

The Call of Cthulhu

(Part 1) Friday evening I drove up to Dan and Amy’s in Florence for a “Call of Cthulhu” game. Dan ran the game, using the Savage Worlds game system. There were seven players, plus Dan.

I arrived with a full stomach, but that didn’t keep me from eating some of Amy’s truly fine chili and homemade bread rolls. There was also a large jar of candy corn and peanuts which, when eaten together, taste almost exactly like a Payday candy bar. Also, dark chocolate peanut M&Ms. And corn chips.

Dan passed out pre-generated characters for each of us. I took the role of Fr. Angus Duddlesworth, founder of a runaway shelter. The year was 1983. A CD player near the game table played music of the early 80s until we got tired of it.

Game synopsis, in short: I read in the paper that the teen boys who had been staying at the shelter were horribly murdered in the night, and all the girls were missing. The boys had been ripped to shreds.

I hurried down to the crime scene. The door was guarded by two officers. One of those lads was a good Catholic, and I talked my way past. He accompanied me, but soon had to run back out: Inside was unimaginable carnage. The bodies had already been taken to the coroner’s office, but the gore was everywhere. Officer McCarthy could not stomach it and went back outside to retch.

I steeled myself with prayer and tried to understand what had happened. I saw no sign of forced entry, until I noticed the basement door. I appeared as if something had forced it open from within. Had someone been locked in the basement?

I no sooner saw this than Sgt. Brian Willis arrived on the scene. He was irate that I was walking about the premises, and hurriedly showed me outside. As he questioned me, a reporter –whose name I never learned—showed up, as did a man named Dr. Connick. Sgt. Willis began to realize that his two officers, one nearly incapacitated from nausea and distress, were inadequate to secure the building.

I searched the building’s exterior and found nothing of note. By the time I was done, I found Dr. Connick and the reporter discussing the matter with a woman named Jodi, who was looking for her missing god daughter, one of the teens from my shelter. A man named Randy was there, too, as well as a teen named Jimmy, a young man who had stayed in the shelter previously and who was looking for his girlfriend Sharon.

With Sgt. Willis intent on keeping us in the dark, we retired to a nearby eatery. Dr. Connick told me that he had been at the coroner’s office, where in one of the bodies had been found a large fish scale. The reported said that there had been a history of girls missing from this area, going back fifty years, and that unidentified, eviscerated bodies sometimes wash ashore. The police, it seemed to us, were not acting quickly enough to find the missing girls.

Jodi worked out some plan to distract Sgt. Willis. She may have done something to make him hold a press conference. I’m not sure. At any rate, were were able to sneak back in the back door of the shelter.

In the basement we found that the iron sewer cover was opened. Equipped with flashlights, we began exploring. Jimmy spotted a strange trail of slime starting at the rungs we had descended, so we opted to follow that.

After quite a bit of walking down the main passage, we found rough stairs leading downward, straight through the bedrock to another series of tunnels.

There, we found a circular room with a pool in the center. I saw what I first took to be a person swimming in the water there, but it lunged from the water and attacked us. It was a horrendous fish-man, like a beast from a horror movie! Jodi killed it with a shotgun blast. I do not know who this woman is, but I’m glad she was with us.

The doctor examined the corpse. We all fervently hoped that it was a man in a rubber costume, but it was not so. It was some mutant or horrid hybrid.

As were struggled to come to terms with this awfulness, Sgt. Willis and one of his officers arrived. They had been pursuing us, and had heard the shotgun.

We explained the situation, and he told us that we must leave. However, he recognized that this was a matter beyond any with which he had dealt before, and knew that he could not force us. Jimmy, at the least, was uncontrollable in this eagerness to save his girlfriend. We continued down another tunnel, desperate to find the missing innocents.

Horror of horrors! We found a tremendous cavern in which dozens of the horrid fish-men were holding blasphemous rites with insane chants. A giant golden altar, flanked by huge fishman statues, stood next to a pool. As we watched, three of the teen girls were led to the altar.

(To be continued.)