12 for 12 #11

Talk about a particular stand-out positive experience of playing (rather than running) an RPG in 2017. What was it? What was so good about it?

As I think I mentioned before, I can pretty much count the number of game sessions I played in during 2017 on one hand. So, there's not a lot to pick from. That said, I think the stand-out has to be a Savage Worlds dungeon crawl GMed by Shane Hensley at OwlCon last year. Shane and I have known each other for many years. In fact, he was the very first person to look at something I wrote and say, "Hey, this is great. Can I put it up on our website?" So he's my "first publisher." Despite our long association, we'd never had a chance to actually sit down and play a game, so when the chance came up at OwlCon, I jumped on it.

The game was a playtest of an adventure Shane's been working on to dispute the assertion that Savage Worlds isn't suitable for dungeon crawls. I played a warrior priestess and the adventure involved sea caves, fish men, and pirates. Apart from the general enjoyment of finally gaming with an old friend and the thrill of playing a game with its designer (always a hoot), there was one other rather memorable incident.

During a break in the game, I asked Shane to sign my copy of Savage Worlds Deluxe, and he happily did so, only to get a really distraught look on his face. He'd misspelled my name. And it's an out of print book that he doesn't even have extra copies of. He was embarrassed, I was amused (I'm used to people getting my name wrong). To make it up to me, he let me draw a magic item from his deck of stuff (one of his dungeon crawl mods to SW is a random deck of magic items, it's a pretty neat idea). As I was drawing, he casually mentioned there was one item in the deck he'd meant to leave out because it could seriously mess with the finale of the adventure, but it was too late now.

Guess what I drew?

It was basically a necklace of grenades.Little ceramic balls that explode on contact. It said to roll 1d4 for quantity. Four.

Sure enough, in the finale, they were super-useful, attacking the big bad and his wizard, and forcing them out of cover. And when my priestess found herself surrounded by said big bad and his minions, I waited for my turn, and then mimicked throwing the last two straight down at my feet.

The ensuing double explosion was noteworthy. And adventure-ending (and not just for my character). It seemed an appropriate punishment for getting my name wrong. :)