Shadows of Eidolon - a GURPS Shadow World feature

[wrathchild]

Yeah, that is my intention also - make 'em pdf's and have them handy like that.

[wrathchild]

The battle continued on friday, and the crew had to walk through fire and poison, as snakemen became the main adversaries once they got to the rescue of the clansmen in the inner palace compound.



The battle was short but intense, with some of the PC's making hard dents in the enemy, and others making no dents at all, despite trying. But the vile, poisonspitting demon-snakemen bought it in the end. The battle then ended with a lone ninja, who'd been faking death, trying to assassinate the King of the country they're in, and the PC's becoming the heroes by shooting him in the last second.

The aftermath became one of diplomacy in which the many goals of the PC prescence - the strengthening of internal realtions between the clans of the country - a near-total succes.

Next will come the invasion proper, where the defence will be left to the natives, and the PC's will be sent into enemy country to see if they can uncover the basis of the uncanny magical strengths of the assailant nation (they sure have a lot of powerful snake-demons handy!)

MT held up well (see earlier reports on continuing woes) for the big battle, but then the tech took a serious turn downhill, and I suddenly had trouble getting ANYTHING to work, even when the machine was rebooted. The hypothesis now is that it is actually the general state of the system that is at fault, and it has gotten a "fresh start" over the weekend, with installment of a new OS (Vista), and perfomance has seen a significant improvement AFAICT. Let's see if that takes care of it.

[wrathchild]

A couple of sessions have passe since last time, and I am glad to be able to report that the machine overhaul has eliminated any problems since then. Last session only saw the use of MapTool as an overland map viewer, but the session before that featured a big map with lots of tokens and stamps, and there were no problems there.

The main map attraction from that session (a quick and dirty little thing made almost in the spur of the moment):



This is the GM view. The red circle is an invisible alarm area spell active in the camp (drawn on the hidden layer) - anyone crossing the boundary will activate many of the present enemies who are actually Zombies (made from the bodies of sacrificed soldier slaves from conuqered nations). Having this in place was a nice little touch, as the PC scout sent in suddenly had 30 or so zombies following him! And he never knew what set it off .

[trevor]

I love the scale of the maps, total freedom. Nice use of the hidden layer too !

[Benz72]

[quote="wrathchild"]
I imagine that scripting may at some point be used to create tables (GURPS use a couple of these, mainly critical tables and Fright Checks), [\quote]

just wondering... has anyone ever done this? reaction tables? fright checks? all that stuff in a macro?

[wrathchild]

NO, not as a macro, but as tables (you've seen the "setting up MT for GURPS" thread in Documentation? http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?t=2639)

These can then be called in macros.

Of course this predates some of the macro functions now available.

[wrathchild]

We have had another couple of sessions since last time. What's been interesting about that has not been the mapping pr. se (which I have not had the time to get much into - but then again they've been blundering about in the wilderness. So - generic mountain surfaces!), but rather the use of all the lovely little tools that we developed in the "Setting up MT for GURPS"-thread mentioned above. It's worked really well! A definate step up in functionality and flow for combat, and for my ability to keep everything straight. Just super. When I get those procedures wholly internalized, it will be a breeze. I urge every GURPS user to try it out.

A few more notes over at http://greatbuddah.livejournal.com/13320.html - like on the new living room F2F "projector mode" (flatscreen mode, really ) setup.

[trevor]

awesome, I love seeing these rulesets go in

[wrathchild]

Another fine little session under the belt - a big battle aganst an enemy that had had the opportunity to study and collect information about the little group, and thus hedge themselves against their favourite powers. The group was not aware of this, and it ended them up ambushed, caught in the open on a mountain, with waves of enemies coming at them with short intervals, draining their ressources and setting them up for when they would not be able to stand against the final onslaught by the big baddies.

The group has been fond of using especially missiles, and especailly missiles fired when invisible (in GURPS this is a devastating combo against the unprepared). So the enemy sported misile-deflecting spells on key leaders/spellusers, and they had the option of turning on invisibility-sight, shoud they suddenly miss someone.

They first faced a wave of missile users/meleers, who has used magical concoctions to turn into serpent men, who didn't hurt them that much, as they were full on their ressources. Then came a fearful trio of flying fire-demons who caught them a bit unawares, and they were strafed badly with great fire explosions, draining their magical power to help restore the wounded. The demons returned a few minutes later for another run, but this time the party artillery was prepared, and they "smote their ruins on the mountainside" .

But then came the big assault. Again magically transformed elite soldiery, melee fighters and missile users, as well as a trio of powerful priests, literally crackling with the black power gained from an extensive session of bloody human sacrifice (including the sacrifice of the crew of an airship that had brought our heores to the site, an event the party had shockingly experienced through a viewing device), came at them with a vengeance.

It became one of those epic fights. The enemy soldiers paid a price advancing on our group, but they moved tactically and the melee fighters managed to drag the party just so much apart that the missile users inflicted some terrible wounds. The two secondary priests had succes with spells that stunned our heroes and left them open to strikes by the meleers - and the main leader caught one of the two primary warriors of the group in a cloud of poisonous vapour, that slowly but surely ripped his health from his body, and contributed to his fall.

One, two, three - the main fighters all fell, leaving the sniper and the party priest to stand against a lot of enemies.

But then our priest really came in to take charge. He marched upon the enemy leader.

And here was perhaps the one thing that the enemy hadn't quite calculated beforehand. The groups priest is primarily an Elemental priest, and such a person does have some advantages in the open and on a mountainside. He absorbed strength of the mountain into his body. He called up the winds around him and knoced down all who came near, batting any missile away. He cracked open the mountain beneath the feet of the enemy leader, causing him to fall in, then half-buried him under earth and rubble. The enemy leader wrestled free as our priest then tried to get one of the warriors back to working status (this failed, though), and as the snake-priest rose out of the pit he been cast into, our elementalist decided that now we had to do the old-fashioned way. Taking up his staff, he struck with the might of a Giant, shattering the snake-tail of the enemy priest, stunning him, and then in a mighty swing, our hero-priest smashed down on the feather-adorned head of his enemy, knocking him to the gound to lie still in defeat.

There was still a buch of enemies left, though, but at this point, allies bent on rescue arrived on Gryffon-back to take care of the rest and bring our heroes and the now captive enemy leader to safety.


The chaotic melee nearing the end

This story took two of our sessions to run through, with lots of battle, so MapTool was hard at work. 1.3.b50 was out, so we felt the memory leak/group movement problem, but otherwise things were just groovy and functioning smoothly. As I have said before, the GURPS v1 setup is working well for me/us.

One thing that you can see from the image above is that state markes vary in size with the token that they are on. I'm not quite sure that this is a good idea, however - I think I would rather that they were placed relative to the hex that the token occupies, and had a constant size. But that's relatively minor.

[wrathchild]

A while since last time - and it is the last time for this campaing. Final session is in, and the heroes got to go out with a bang - conquered yet not, losing the battle but winning the war, and eventually getting to live happily ever after.


Rooms under a pyramid - the scene of the last battle.


Skirmishing with demons before the big bang


The demi-gods have made their entrance


A seemingly victorious demi-god - but in the end he's thwarted and all is well, although several weeks in hospital are required.

A special thanks to Vry for his fantastic top-down tokens! (though Devin sneaks one in there as well )

Maptool have just been getting better and better for us. Looking back at it there were some points where being on the cutting edge caused some problems, but for the last half a year it's been smooth sailing with tool and framework working nicely together to ease the experience. MT is definately staying as the battlemat tool around here

[lmarkus001]

A few more notes over at http://greatbuddah.livejournal.com/13320.html - like on the new living room F2F "projector mode" (flatscreen mode, really ) setup.

How is Player vs. GM handled in that setup? Is there two separate machines running and does the GM toggle between the two using his machine or is he running two instances of MT on the same machine and has an extended desktop, or what?

I was thinking of using MapTools for the battlemat and one of the "harder" pieces seems to be finding a way the players can move their tokens on their turn (perhaps a wireless mouse would be a simple low effort solution).

[wrathchild]

In my setup I handle all thing MT - moving pieces etc.

The setting is us all sitting around the coffe table, with the TV at one end, me at the other, and the players in between. They have the TV as an image to look at and tell me what they want to do. I then move stuff around, roll for NPC's etc.

I have one machine running two instances of MT. Laptop has a dual screen setup, with the TV as the second one. The player MT is shown there.