Grognards in Tenby = Grogten. Not just ten Grognards hanging out somewhere; there were actually eight of us there, top gamers and good mates. The idea came together last year, I think inspired by The One Ring Roadtrip. I must have been raving on about it to my Barbarians of Lemuria group when @davepaters suggested we do a similar thing at his place in Tenby… lovely. Plans were made, ideas formed, permission sought. Slowly it came together.

Unlike The One Ring Roadtrip with it’s single adventure over a weekend, this time we would have different games of 3-4 hours each, and because I was the regular Barbarians of Lemuria GM, I would get to sit back and play in them all. Post Grogmeet we started to firm up plans, making travel arrangements and deciding on games.

An early start on the morning of 24 January saw me leaving the leafy suburbs of Crosby and heading in a more or less direct line across Wales to Tenby. The journey was a little fraught with the main road completely closed due to a house collapsing and Google Maps having no idea how to get around it, although there was some stunning scenery. Arriving a little later than anticipated and giddy with excitement, it was great to catch up with the others: @MozleyJim, @jaje7406, @KiernanEd, @Sam0Vail, @davepaters, @OrlanthR and @carlclare. @jaje7406 had prepared a fantastic South African lunch of Boerewors which we all hungrily scoffed before getting stuck into the first game of the event.

Game 1: Star Frontiers: Aramax One (GM: @davepaters)

Despite it being a regular game back at the old Rice Lane Game Club in Liverpool I never did get the play Star Frontiers, so was incredibly excited to give this a go. As the opening game, @davepaters had bravely decided to run with 7 players using an old Imagine magazine adventure. With most game events there isn’t enough time to create your own characters, but with the luxury of a whole weekend we did just that, the old fashioned way, with lots of randomly generated stuff. My character was Chee-tar, a techie Yazirian with a penchant for hacking robots and blowing stuff up. Our band was hired by a mysterious agent to blow up a data storage facility outside of town; as it was our only route of the stinking planet we took the job.

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As you’d expect there was lots of old school gaming going on, but it was a great deal of fun and I really enjoyed the Star Frontiers system. Needless to say we were successful in our mission, perhaps doing a bit more damage than we needed to.

By the time Star Frontiers was finished we were well set up for the weekend, and so headed to a local venue for further beers and tasty grub before returning to the house to spend the remainder of the evening talking gaming nonsense with more beers and whisky. This is what life is about!

Game 2: Liminal (GM: @davepaters)

After a glorious fry up for breakfast we settled down for the first session of the day. Really, it was glorious with @MozleyJim and @jaje7406 taking on chef duties and everyone else helping out in whatever ways they could, and it set us up for a solid day of gaming. In fact, three sessions back to back. We’d cleverly organised things so that each GM got to run their game twice and players got to to play every game; so while I was sitting down with @Sam0Vail and @carlclare to play in @davepaters Liminal game, @MozleyJim, @jaje7406 and @KiernanEd were getting stuck into @OrlanthR‘s Tales from the Loop adventure.

I’d not played Liminal previously but had heard and read lots of great things about it. It’s a unique setting, a modern day UK with a hidden world of magic, fey and weirdness. Our characters were sent out to find Welland Archer, a missing researcher from the Council of Merlin who curiously was looking into a connection between Henry Tudor and Dr Dee… It turns out Henry Tudor fled to France from a house in Tenby (in fact just a couple of doors down from where we were playing the game!), and young Welland had started his research there. I don’t want to give any spoilers as I’m sure @davepaters will run the game again… but it was fantastic, full of local information and flavour, lots of trails to follow and a brilliant conclusion.

Game 3: Tales from the Loop (GM: @OrlanthR)

After a tidy lunch of local pies and pasties, myself, @Sam0Vail and @carlclare created our TftL characters. Before too long we’d put them together based on archetypes; I was Benjamin ‘Buttons’, a nerd who found solutions to everything in his pocket calculator. Turned out it was one of the adventures from the TftL rulebook, but @OrlanthR had cleverly changed the setting from somewhere in Sweden to Tenby – we were in the Pembrokeshire Loop with all the Magnatrine tech that is part of the TftL . Our adventure started with some weird stuff about birds… but in the interests of avoiding spoilers we’ll leave that there. The system was really neat; a simple dice pool resolution mechanic, and a setting very easy to get into… we were all teenagers in the 80’s so doing weird stuff like using libraries was all part of it. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about playing a 10-15 year old, but it was a lot of fun with a system designed to just make it work.

Game 4: Strontium Dog (GM: @Sam0Vail)

@Sam0Vail has a copy of an old Games Workshop Strontium Dog game that never made it into publication. It’s based on the GW Judge Dredd game but in it’s current form is three ring binder folders of dot matrix paper. This time I was joined by @MozleyJim and @davepaters as we created our mutant Search and Destroy agents. Initially the random tables were throwing up some odd mutations – I had with ‘back covered in suppurating spots’ and ‘skin hangs badly in folds’. Luckily with a bit of GM fiat we rolled on different tables, and I ended up with a much more exciting animal mutation – a tiger head. Thus was born Roary, joined by Worker (@davepaters‘ ant headed mutie) and Tickles (@MozleyJim‘s cute and cuddly cat headed mutie).

We’d taken a job worth 3.2M creds to apprehend and return Harlan Brozack, a crim with a long list of offences, primarily involving the narcotic Zaap. Our adventures took us across worlds to seedy nightclubs, dodgy warehouses and more… ending with a great chase scene finale. The system held up really well, our PCs seem much more capable than the Judges from GW Judge Dredd and the action was fast moving. @Sam0Vail had really capture the flavour of Strontium Dog, we felt like dirty muties with the galaxy against us.

Game 5: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition: Slaughter in Spittlefeld (GM: @jaje7406)

Sunday gaming started with a trip to the Old World; I was playing the Rogue Albrecht Von Bakstabben and was joined by @MozleyJim as a devout Priest and @davepaters as an angry Dwarf. No spoilers for this beyond us waking up in a quarantined flop house with a mystery to solve. It’s the second time I’ve played WFRP 4e in the past month – there’s so much to like about the system and the setting, and this was a great one shot adventure.

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Game 6: Night’s Black Agents (GM: @carlclare)

After a rustic lunch of fresh bread, cheese, ham, pickle and maybe a beer or two, we swapped tables for the last time. Randomly picking our characters, I played Oliver ‘Ashcan’ Quinn, a grizzled old veteran one last job away from retirement, while @MozleyJim played Mace Hunter, an American Con Man who Ashcan didn’t fully trust. @davepaters played the French Assassin, Dr Felix Duboise, with a glorious french accent. It has been commented on Twitter that @carlclare really knows his history, and this really came across in the adventure; real depth and loads to investigate. Once again avoiding spoilers, this was a great adventure with an explosive ending. What a great way to draw the curtains on the final game of the weekend.

Fortunately the weekend was not yet over and so we whiled away the Sunday evening with a stroll around Tenby, beer and lovely grub in a local pub and chatting back at the house about games nonsense and other stuff, then we were all heading back to our respective homes on Monday.

What an amazing weekend it was, better than we could have hoped. A huge thanks to @davepaters for putting us up and putting up with us, and to everyone who was there, the fantastic GM’s and players. I don’t know if these games will be on offer at other events, but if they are I’d highly recommend playing them.

On to Grogten 2021!

There are events you look forward to – a weekend break, Christmas, your best mates wedding, and they are nice. Then there are the epic events that dominate your thoughts for months in advance, a sense of excitement growing as the occasion draws near. Grogmeet is one of those events, occupying my RPG thoughts for many months and when it arrived it didn’t disappoint.

In the run up myself and a crack group of Grog GM’s had been planning a multi-table adventure for the Friday afternoon of Grogmeet using the Mothership system for a neat space horror adventure. I’d also offered to run The Mad Queens Jewels, a homebrew adventure on the Saturday morning of Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells set in The Midderlands, an adventure that seemed to go down well at Owlbear and Wizards Staff con back in September. Then, just a few weeks before Grogmeet Dirk the Dice asked me to run a game for the Friday evening and after much consideration I put forward Escape from Skull Prison, the starter adventure for Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells. With a load of prep on my hands (apart from The Mad Queens Jewels which was pretty much boxed off), I ramped up my efforts for Grogmeet, not wanting to disappoint any of the players and deliver the best games I could.

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Last year I had to leave Grogmeet early due to an unexpected family illness and so this year I was keen to get the full experience. Unlike previous years I had to make a solo journey over the Manchester, but it gave me a chance to go over my adventure notes, then after a bit of lunch and a quick catch up with a few Grogs, we headed over the Fanboy 3 for the start of the weekend.

Last year’s Friday afternoon game, a multi-table, multi-system bar room brawl was a lot of fun with many players commenting on it being a good ice breaker. But it was just a little chaotic and didn’t go quite as planned. I was hugely relieved then to get our multi-table Mothership game off to a start; I was much more confident about this, we were using the same system and the GM’s Dirk, Sam, Steve and Rick (plus Griff who while not present due to a bout of laryngitis left an indelible stamp on the game with his contribution) did a great job in the lead up to the game. It was truly a collaborative effort with everyone bringing ideas and insights to the format and writing one of the scenes in the game.

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Dirk started the ball rolling with the introductory blurb, bringing to life the cigar smoking Sergeant Apone who unsurprisingly was a native of Brooklyn. Quickly the players moved to their tables (drawn randomly) and we quickly started the simultaneous adventures. Mothership is great for ramping up character stress levels so when they panic bad things can happen. The scenes were all designed to pile on stress and get to panic points quickly and it was no surprise to find characters freaking out, curling up in catatonic ball or dieing due to a heart attack (quite a common occurence it seems). My players – Ian, Norman, Rob and Simon – were a great group, getting stuck into the spirit of the game, with Simon as the Corporate Jerk in the last scene taking the last escape pod and leaving the others to perish. Part of the set up was that each table had to detonate a nuclear core before reaching the escape pods – if three of the five were activated then the resulting explosion would be enough to close the rift that threatened the universe. Honestly I had expected all five of the tables to activate nuclear self destruct, but at least two of them didn’t, self serving, cowardly bastards…

I was a little nervous about running Solar Blades & Cosmic Spells as the system was fairly new to me (although quite light and easy to run) and I wasn’t entirely sure about the adventure. However, a trial run the weekend before had given me some valuable feedback that I brought into this session. I had six experienced players – Dirk, Adam, Andy, Mark, Blythy and Simon – at the table and they quickly took to their characters, a ragtag bunch of cons on Skull Prison, a private facility where the prisoners may or may not be guilty. When a power shortage released the mag-locks on their doors, they took the opportunity to attempt an escape, quickly subduing Slitface and his gang, but nearly coming unstuck against the Black Bats – some quick thinking navigated that problem and the rest of the prison, until they reached the final encounter against the prison commander. A desperate firefight seemed to be going against them until the smart character in the group (played by Mark) activated the self destruct sequence (‘the Mothership gambit’ as Dirk called it), and with a minute to go they raced for one of the ships and managed to fly out as the prison exploded behind them.

Saturday morning was my last session running a game – this time it was Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells. I was feeling good about this adventure as it was a homebrew that I knew really well. As I’d come to expect, I once more had a great group of players – Steve, Martin, Malcolm and Chris – who really engaged with the setting and wasted no time planning their escape from the Leaningtown Spa with the Queen’s jewels. Once again there was some really creative play and exciting combat and despite a few hiccups this group did the job as well.

Grogmeet GM’s get the first pick of games for sessions for the slots they are not running, and I no hesitation in picking Steve’s Middle Earth Role Playing game. Like many Grogs this game has a special place in our hearts as it was often our first gaming experience in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It was with some excitement that I sat down for the Saturday afternoon session. This was an adventure that Steve had written set in the dark days of the War of the Ring after Osgiliath had fallen and the hordes of Mordor flooded across the Pelennor fields. Our mission as a band of rangers stranded in Osgiliath was to return to the Minas Tirith and join fellow Gondorians in defence of the White Tree. I won’t give any spoilers but will say that it was an excellent adventure. MERP showed it’s age, but it worked amazingly well with Steve handling much of the crunch for us – when I think of the complexity of combat and the tracking of effects on our characters, I shudder to think how a GM would keep a grip on that for all of the NPC’s and monsters that could be encountered.

Sunday morning is the interview slot where Dirk the Dice chats to an RPG luminary and this year it was Paul Fricker, author of Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and one of the authors of The Two Headed Serpent adventure for Pulp Cthulhu. Dirk follows the format of his show, engaging his audience throughout (all together now “Where’s me dice bag?”); it was like watching a master craftsman at work aided by the tools of his trade – the ridiculous homemade shrine to the actor Caroline Munroe and of course the GM screen so he could make hidden roles to randomise questions for Paul. Good job we all had decent imaginations… Paul was a great guest, going right from the early days of his gaming life (agricultural simulation board games anyone?) to working with the luminaries of Chaosium on their Call of Cthulhu game. I’m playing The Two Headed Serpent for Pulp Cthulhu at the moment so it was great to get some spoiler free insights.

And with that Grogmeet itself was over. Some folks had to leave for long journeys home so there were many fond farewells, but for myself and a few others the gaming was to continue as Newt Newport of D101 Games had arranged a Go Play Manchester event to follow straight on from Grogmeet. I’ve been to Go Play Manchester before so knew it would be a great event and was looking forward to playing in Blythy’s Troika adventure The Cage of Sermit. I’ve not played in Blythy’s games before and was particularly looking forward to it and to playing Troika, a game that sits on my shelf but has not yet made it to my table. We were an odd group of adventurers (and players one could observe!) tasked with rescuing an imprisoned wizard from a desert prison to save a dying world. Troika delivered admirably with light, fast moving rules as did Blythy, giving us a colourful, exciting adventure full of crazy characters and strange locations.

There is another element to Grogmeet that I’ve not yet touched on, and that is the amazing sense of camaraderie, generosity and good spirit. I spent quite a bit of time eating and boozing with the other Grogs, catching up on life and gaming – that is nearly as much a part of Grogmeet as the gaming. And so to all you Grogs (most of whom I’ll game with one way or another before next Grogmeet), cheers to you all, here’s to Grogmeet 2020!

You know you have those weekends, the special ones, the ones you look forward to for weeks or even months in advance. Maybe it’s to celebrate a big life event, a break away with the family, or a gaming weekend (especially gaming weekends!). Whether it’s a one day con or a whole weekend like UK Games Expo or Grogmeet, when it’s first booked and many months away it’s given an occasional thought… maybe you have to write an adventure or do some other preparation. But as the event looms closer it occupies a much bigger slice of your waking thoughts, and then when it arrives it’s just like Christmas.

I’ve just had one of those weekends, and I would suggest it is the best gaming weekend I have had ever, certainly it’s right there at the top.

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Wrapped up in a bundle of great company, gaming talk, hearty food, plentiful beer, fine whisky and a roaring fire, the focus of the weekend was Cubicle 7’s Tolkien epic, The One Ring. We all owned the game, but none of us had played it much (as far as I know only me and @OrlanthR at DevaCon last year), and so we wanted to set that straight. Tolkien whizzkid, top GM and all around nice guy @kinnygraham was keen to run the game and so in preparation we created characters in advance online. Our fellowship was formed of two Dwarves, the noble Vidar Stonesong of the Blue Mountains (@OrlanthR), his companion, the wayward Hanar of the Grey Mountains (@Lintillaz), a Dunedain Human Ranger, Iorlas (@oilpainting71), and my character, the optimistic, inappropriately adventurous and naive hobbit, Brogo Burrows. I have met and gamed with @kinnygraham, @OrlanthR and @Lintillaz at events before and we often play online so I knew I’d get along with those chaps, and it was great to have @oilpainting71 along as well – it’s always a pleasure meeting new gamers and we all got on like a house on fire.

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Our adventure started on the Friday afternoon and took us through to midday on the Sunday. I reckon we had somewhere in the region of 16 hours solid gaming; a sufficient amount of time to give The One Ring a great play through and explore the area around Bree. Our company was thrown together on the road heading east and settled down in the comfortable surroundings of the Prancing Pony. All was peaceful until young Thomas Heatherton ran in with tales of a monstrous white skinned creature in the graveyard… the rest was pure Tolkien inspired adventure with some true epic moments.

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In the preceding weeks I had read a fair amount of the rules. There are a few fiddly bits, but the one method of resolution (a d12 feat dice and a varied number of d6 skill dice to beat a target number, usually 14) means you always know what to roll. It didn’t take too long before you get into the swing of things. The One Ring has subsystems that capture the feel of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; travel plays a big part as does the ever present threat of Shadow, overcome through Hope. Each time the dice are rolled all players are keeping an eye on the d12 feat dice for the Gandalf rune (cheer!) or the Eye of Sauron (groan); the former gives an automatic success while the latter is worth zero and makes it much harder to be successful. The Gandalf rune and Eye of Sauron are reversed for evil creatures – their evil overlord powers their actions, while the light of Gandalf deters them. And if a roll is successful, a 6 on any d6 gives a great success and a second 6 gives an extraordinary success; on the funky The One Ring Dice each 6 is marked with a t symbol which is a Tengwar rune. Even dice rolling felt flavourful and thematic.

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Highlights of the weekend included some fantastic props such as a hand-drawn map of the area around Bree; the paper had been treated (dunked in tea, burned and marinated over a cigar) to make it look old and dry. The first mystery of the map were the dwarfish runes which we translated (through a combination of @OrlanthR‘s Middle Earth knowledge and the internet) , but then our delight only grew as we discovered the secret of smoke runes! Utter genius. A big fight with a Troll allowed us to test the combat system and explore tactical options; it really felt like an epic combat.

I was just a little sad when the weekend was over, but we had such a fantastic time. Huge thanks to our GM @kinnygraham for running such an amazing game and putting in so much prep, to @OrlanthR for arranging the whole thing, adventuring companions @Lintillaz and @oilpainting71 for being excellent fellows, and of course to @theGROGNARDfile without whom we wouldn’t know each other. Hope we can do it again soon.

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