{Quest Log} There comes an age....the Dragon Age

Hey all! It's been months since I last updated and real life has been tumultuous along the way. Since my last entry, I was employed into a new job and work basically took over my life again. In the meantime, my group had stopped roleplaying but continued playing boardgames. However that soon also fell through as they seem to lose the enthusiasm for it and got busy with other commitments. After long periods without any gaming activity, I thought that it was about time that I started the urge again to roleplay as characters and roll some dice.

It was coincidentally that I was about to launch into new plans of gaming when Free RPG Day went by and some of the print offerings (which I missed because there's no store that participates in Free RPG Day here) had been put up as free PDFs by their respective publishers. So I thought that it was a good time to check for any quick-start rules of new games that we could try.

So it was there I decided to pick up Green Ronin's Dragon Age quick start rules and have browsed through it several times over the past weeks or so. What I really liked about the AGE system is because it uses an abundance of d6s, which means that it's open to new players who don't have their own set of polyhedrals.

Now I'm eager to try running it with the sample adventure attached at the back and I plan to do my prep notes and thoughts on the quickstart rules and the adventure here. Just so that readers here will have something new to read again at the Questing GM.

On the other side of things, the RPG Herald is almost 3 months old now and I barely noticed how time flies as I try to keep posting on the latest news in the RPG industry. There's been some times when it was hard to keep up, but at this point in time, I'm glad to say that I'm happy with how diversified my news items are and how much it has expanded my knowledge about the RPG industry along the way.

Although the hits are still very low, but I would encourage any gamer to check it out if they want to know on the latest news and products that are available on the market. It's definitely the news site to watch if you are into multiple RPGs rather than just being a loyal fanboy to one system.

I'd also appreciate it if you would spread the word around about the RPG Herald because it needs the hits that it can get.

In the meantime, I've already had some ideas of new features to be added in this blog for months but haven't been able to really implement them yet. Just thought that I should mentioned it so that I can remind myself to give this blog a new revival of content.

Keep reading the Questing GM on my prep for the Dragon Age Quickstart Rules

Announcing the RPG Herald

Things may seem to be going quiet on this blog but my blogging has been taking up a notch lately.

I believed that I have mentioned before that aside from maintaining this blog, as a personal journal about my gaming activities in where I live, I'm also a contributor to the Purple Pawn, which is a general gaming news site which covers boardgames, miniatures, RPGs and card games.

Since I've been mainly contributing RPG news that I come across to the site, I've been blogging more and more about RPG-related news and have got my blogging pace back again. However that meant that I have less time invested on this site, since I've been trying to keep track of RPG news (and believe me, sometimes there's so many things that can happen in the RPG world in one day).

So I've been tinkering with the idea about posting more RPG news on this blog but feeling that RPG news did not really mesh well with what I have intended to do with this blog, I thought that I should start another site, dedicated just for RPG news.

After some giving it some thought, I finally decided to create a new blog, the RPG Herald, which aims to be a one-spot supplier of RPG-related news for RPG gamers.

The site would be mainly focused on RPG news, previews of upcoming products and hopefully score some interviews with designers, developers and industry players to discuss about RPG-related issues.

At the moment, I don't know what would the launch of RPG Herald mean to this blog, but it is clear that RPG Herald would be more inclined towards informing readers while this blog would remain as a personal space to talk about my personal gaming life.

Although I don't intend to post up reviews of RPG products on the RPG Herald, to maintain some integrity on the reporting, but I am open to review those products on this blog since I would be more comfortable in expressing my biased opinions here.

To any game publishers, bloggers, podcasters etc who are reading this, I welcome you to send any press releases or information that you have about game products, contests, conventions or game news that you need a free shout-out for to me at my email.

My email address is questinggm@gmail.com.

For gamers and readers of this blog, I encourage you to check out RPG Herald. I try to cover all sorts of news regardless of system and genre, so you might read something new about what is going on in the gaming scene (perhaps near you) and would thank you for your support.

I will be planning to apply the RPG Herald into the RPG Bloggers Network in the future since the application requirement says that the blog has to be active for at least 3 months.

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with the latest postings of the RPG Herald through my Twitter account if you haven't already followed me.

Once you've checked out the site, feel free to drop any comments or feedback on how you would to like to see the site improve here, and I'll see what I can do.

I like to thank you all for your support throughout these years of my blogging journey and hope that you would continue to do so for my new endeavor.

{Quest Log} Gamma World is Crazy Whacky Fun!

Last Friday, I had my first taste of Gamma World when a group mate of mine, Bryan, who bought the boxed set, decided to let us have a go at it. So me, and four others of various levels of experience with 4E would be playing as characters while the group mate who bought the game took the honours of being the ever dutiful GM (I guess you call them the Gamma-Master?).

When I arrived, the group were already in the early process of character generation but I managed to pick it up quickly due to the similarities it had with 4E. It was interesting to see that some of the other players who had only relied on the Character Builder when they started playing 4E, was having a hard time understanding the process.

I rolled an Empath Felinoid (which I named Mind Catrol) on the origins and had below average stats except for Wisdom and my origins ability scores. It was pretty nostalgic to roll random stats with 3d6 again. The whole process took us about an hour and a half, as we went through the 'eehh' and 'ahh' moments when trying to figure out how the process works.


Our gaming group for the session. That's me at the far right, in white. Bryan, our GM for the night, is the one in orange on the left.

After that an Empath Felinoid, a Seismic Giant, a Speedster Yeti, an Electrokinetic Telekinetic and an Android Cockroach were on their way to investigate the source of some robots rumbling down a hill to fire missiles at our homes before self-destructing for good measure.

It was here that me and everyone on the table knew that this game was not to be taken seriously even by chance. So we just had our fill of making quirky quotes, roleplaying our characters in the funniest way we think it would be appropriate and just went along with the weird whacky fun.

Combat encounters started easily enough outside the tower where the robots were coming from but once we got in, it showed that we weren't the toughest party except for the Giant who was taking most of the hits unscathed thanks to her Resist 5 to physical damage.



It was probably the first time that I saw the players didn't plan their strategies and tactics in-combat than while playing 4E, so we were just going with the flow of what we wanted to do and combat moved pretty fast. The game was so random, especially with the Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech cards, that we just wanted to try out what we had instead of planning to best ways to attack the enemies.

Unfortunately for our Speedster Yeti, he suffered a terrible irony where the only thing he was fastest at was dying (he also rolled the lowest initiative for all combat). But he was able to quickly generate a new character while we were still in combat and wade in a few rounds after that.

Our Speedster Yeti died the fastest in the group. At least he has fast at *something*

The session ended after the group managed to destroy a machine at an underground level underneath the tower and killed a group of crossbow wielding badgers with a couple of them having psychic fear inducing abilities which managed to knock most of us bloodied with one hit. My character, the Seismic Giant and the Speedster Yeti were dead after that encounter but we had our fill of crazy whacky fun during the game.

Overall, I like the randomness of the game as it feels like a different pace of the 4E rules. The random Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech at every encounter is the cause for all kinds of laughter we had that night and it just pushed us to go for that whacky idea in combat. In my mind, those cards alone were good motivations to roleplay in combat than I could ever achieve with D&D 4E.


This one just opened a whole can of laughs when one of us drew this.

However, I don't know if I can see myself running this in the long term, or if it was meant to be used for a long term campaign. It's a good break after all the sometimes stressful math crunching and combat tactics of the 4E system and it's definitely seems to be meant as a more humorous and lighter tone of 4E.

I will admit that I'm still pretty unclear about some of the rules after the session, other than the ones from 4E but with my character dead, I'm not sure if I really want a second dose of this. Still, it was a fun game nonetheless and some of the other players are eager to continue on with the adventure. I would recommend this if you want to have a some crazy whacky fun game night.

{Quest Log} Happy Valentines, Gamma World and Need Some Advice on Session Recordings

First of all, happy Valentine to those who are celebrating the day (hmm...it just passed a few minutes here as I'm writing this) with their loved ones. Just wanted to take this opportunity to post a little of what I've been doing on the gaming front these past weeks.

Gaming
My first one-shot session of the year went well, although the player we had it for didn't manage to have his last game before he upped from town and moved to the capital for work. I wish him all the best, though we will miss him.

The one-shot ended up being a two-shot session since the first two encounters took a little longer than expected. So we saved the climatic last encounter which lasted for the whole of the second session. It was a blast, but had no much to mention about, except for that it showed how rusty I have been with GMing.

I regretted not taking photos of the session, so I could show you guys our gaming group and remember the great moments we had during the session. Recording my gaming sessions has been something on my mind for a while. I do know there are sites that do live-stream or keeping voice recordings of their games but I wonder if anyone here who has done this before would be willing to share their experience, and what equipment do you use for recording your session?

This week, my gaming group invited me over for a game of Gamma World during the weekend. I'll admit that I'm not as hyped for this 'boardgame-RPG hybrid' (at least from what I've heard) but am willing to try it none the less. Any tips anyone would like to share while playing this game?

Silver Marches Wiki
Progress of my Silver Marches wiki is going slowly but steady, I'm already starting to get into the city entries. Once I'm done with that, I still have the regional history, organizations and NPCs to deal with. But overall, things are going well at the moment.

Blogging
Only in the second month of the year and I'm already not being able to keep to my new year resolutions. But I haven't been completely absent for the past weeks in the bloggersphere, it's just that I've restarted seriously contributing RPG-related news to the Purple Pawn, so my posts were mostly there than here.

I'm still playing with an idea of putting up my notes for the one-shot I did if I sorted them properly, would anyone like to see them?

{Quest Log} New Year Resolutions for 2011

2010 has generally been a year where my gaming has taken a big hit. New job, new life, new priorities means that gaming has been taking a real backseat for the past year, as you can tell with this blog going really quiet compared to in the past.

It's hard to imagine sometimes that this blog has been around for more than 2 years and looking back at some of the old posts, it does show how the quality and quantity over the years has been a dead drop.

While I won't say that these resolutions that I have in mind for this year are the sure things that I want to keep due to real-life circumstances, I think this post should be a good reminder of what I plan to do with my gaming life for this year.

Game More
Since I started my new job, I've only had a handful of sessions last year. This is due to scheduling conflicts with my day offs with my player's (I work during the weekends).

But things are looking slightly brighter at the end of the year as work is starting to stabilize and it's easier to plan ahead for gaming sessions. So, this year, I plan to run or play in a gaming session at least once a more, if not on a weekly basis.

So far, my Eberron one-shot is coming out really well and I should be running it soon sometimes during January 2011, which makes me excited. Probably would do a post about how it goes.

Finish My Silver Marches Wiki
Progress on this has been slower than I like. I admit that procrastination is among the faults of why it is still undone. At this point, I'm almost done with the wilderness aspect of the wiki and am making headway into databasing the cities of the region.

I hope to get it done as soon as possible within this year, so that I can run a 'Western Marches' style sandbox campaign with it that will sustain my gaming life for a very long time to come.

Blog More
I've told myself many a times that I would get this blog back up to speed to whatever glory days it had, if any.

Unfortunately, my detachment from 4E has been so long that I've gone completely out of touch and have little interest to support whatever WoTC does with the IP.

While I claim many a times that Pathfinder is my new love, I have yet to really take a deep crack into the rules system and decipher them.

At the moment, I'm forseeing that this blog will be filled with more personal posts about my games and session preps than actual 'real' content for gamers to share. My plan is to increase my frequency back to a weekly, if not twice monthly basis.

I'm still open to do reviews but I doubt that I'm really the right person, with the right experience to say anything reliable. I've also been playing around with an idea of including more RPG news into this blog but I think it would be more appropriate if it was in another blog. What do you think?


That's all really, these gaming goals/resolutions are simple and intentionally abstract since they do collide with my personal and real-life resolutions.

I don't need overly complicated ones like learn and play a new rules system, a new genre or introducing the game to new players when I know full well I can't maintain or achieve those goals.

Maybe those will come later when real life circumstances permit. Do feel free to share what are your gaming resolutions this year and how you plan to go about them.

Happy New Year and keep on rolling those dices!