Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.
Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.
This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.
My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.
The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.
The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.
So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.
If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.
Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.
The post On Strange Wings appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday we had a patch to the game that introduced the Turkulon event and it might have impacted drop rates on these bosses. My friend Vern was trying to farm Putris and having no luck, but I joined him out there and started getting drops within no time. So I am not sure if Vern is just unlucky or if the 590 items are a bit rarer than they were previously. I just wanted to give you a heads-up as you venture forth to farm gear, that it might take longer than expected or that drop chances might go up if you are in a group. Today’s farm is pretty simple and involves the level 24 elite named Kar-El the Gate Keeper that guards the giant blue door at the outdoor portion of the Amrine Temple complex. There are only two drops available on the loot table, but they seemed to drop quicker than some of the camps but your mileage may vary.
The easiest port to get to this encounter is to go straight north from the Amrine Temple Expedition teleport and then loop along the top of the Amrine Complex and enter from the north. This will allow you to ascend to the top of the temple area where this boss spawns. I tried to come in from the Windsward side which is also doable, but it involved running around a lot until I could find a place to ascend. While you are set up there you might end up needing to clear a half dozen random ancient spawns that also appear on this top tier of the temple. The boss itself has the standard five to six-minute respawn timer, with the occasional random instant respawn behavior that most encounters seem to have.
I came out here to add a Fire Staff to my repertoire of 590 weapons for every possible type. However, there is also a pretty decent focus necklace that might be a solid pickup for healers. The necklace for me at least seemed to be more common than the Fire Staff as I got five of them to drop before getting my first staff. Again your mileage may vary because the game seems to “stick” on a single drop when farming these 590 items. You might have the opposite scenario of getting nothing but Fire Staves. Unfortunately, there seems to be nothing much else of note on the drop table other than these two items.
This farm was pretty straightforward and seemed to have better drop chances than Scratchy for example. It took me a little less than two hours to farm up both items and then move on to the next farm. I will admit though Vern gave me a bit of a heart attack yesterday making me think that after all of this work, they had done something to remove the 590 drops. While I have not verified all of the camps since the patch, I can verify that Putris and Red Claw are both still dropping so it is highly likely that everything is as well.
I still have several more of these, so I might break my own rule and post on Saturday just to churn through them and get them out the door. Again I have collected all of these into a category on the blog where you can find all of my Loot Farm guides for New World. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.
The post Windsward Outer Amrine Temple Farm appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Koda, Tam and Thalen talk about the September Game Club Title – Tales of Maj’Eyal
It is time once again for the AggroChat Game Club and during the month of September the pick fell on Ashgar.  He wanted to choose a classic rogue-like game, but wanted to try and choose one of the more accessible ones.  As a result we are playing Tales of Maj’Eyal or Tales of Middle Earth as it was originally known.  The game is an open source title that runs on the T-Engine, however I believe most of us played through on the Steam release.  What makes the game unique is that it has a number of variable difficulty settings that make it more or less rogue-like.  So join us as we delve into a fairly nostalgic trip into the re-imagined past.
This week Ashgar, Belghast, Inky Kodra, Tam and Thalen discuss the August Game Club game The Witness
This week we finally get around to discussing the August AggroChat Game Club title, The Witness. Â The game has been called a bunch of things, but the most common assessment has related it to Myst. Â We discuss why this is probably a bad comparison among other things. Â This absolutely clicked with some of our team, and others bounced super hard off of the title. Â Much discussion is had however and that was the entire point of doing a Game Club so it feels like this title was an absolute success. Â Join us as we delve into the game in a spoilery journey into The Witness.
